Disputatio V: On Divine Causality and Theological Speech

Thesis 

The Spirit’s authorization of theological speech is a mode of divine causality through which human language participates in the being of divine truth, that is, in the realization of optimal felicity.

Explicatio

Having established that theology’s internal truth means optimal felicity—the Spirit’s perfect authorization of language—it remains to ask how such felicity is ontologically possible. If the Spirit enables human speech to bear divine meaning, this enabling must be causal in the metaphysical sense.

Theology therefore confesses that the Spirit’s act is not a permissive condition but a constitutive cause:

• The Spirit does not merely allow human language to speak of God;

• The Spirit causes theological language to exist as divine–human communication, establishing its being in esse.

In classical terms, the Spirit acts as primary cause (causa principalis), while human speakers act as instrumental or secondary causes (causae instrumentales). The human act is genuinely causal yet wholly dependent; it has the mode of being proper to an instrument animated by a principal cause.

Hence, theological speech is neither autonomous nor mechanical—it is personal causality, in which divine and human agency coincide without confusion. The Spirit’s act of authorization is the ontological event that makes theological felicity real.

Objectiones

1. Obiectio I: To treat the Spirit’s authorization as causality risks reifying divine action into metaphysical mechanism, undermining divine freedom.

2. Obiectio II: If human language participates causally in divine truth, the Creator–creature distinction seems blurred. Theological acts might appear quasi-divine.

3. Obiectio III: The claim that causality requires metaphysical in esse grounding is unnecessary; physicalist accounts explain efficacy via regularity and law without positing being.

4. Obiectio IV: If internal truth means only optimal felicity, why speak of causality at all? Would it not suffice to say that the Spirit’s presence simply “accompanies” theological speech?

Responsiones

1. Ad I: Divine causality is not mechanistic but intentional and personal. The Spirit acts freely to enable finite language to participate in divine meaning. Causality here names not an external push but an interior enabling, whereby the finite act subsists within the divine act of truth. Freedom and causality coincide: God freely constitutes what He causes.

2. Ad II: Participation in divine causality does not erase distinction but presupposes it. The creature’s act remains finite; it derives its being from God but does not absorb God. As the sun enlightens without becoming the lighted object, so the Spirit grants efficacy without identity. This is the qualified dualism of Creator and creature: union without confusion, participation without parity.

3. Ad III: Physicalist regularities describe, but do not explain, causal efficacy. The very intelligibility of “cause” presupposes an ontological in esse fact—a grounding that makes efficacy possible. Theology makes explicit what physics leaves implicit: that every finite cause is dependent on a deeper metaphysical cause that constitutes its being. The Spirit provides this grounding in theology’s domain.

4. Ad IV: To speak merely of accompaniment would reduce divine authorization to moral presence, not ontological act. The Spirit’s authorization is causal because it makes felicitous speech to be what it is—a real participation in divine communication. Without causality, felicity would be performative appearance without ontological substance.

Nota

The doctrine of divine causality clarifies the ontological depth of what we earlier called internal truth (optimal felicity). Within T, when a believer utters a word of faith, the Spirit’s causality confers on that utterance real participation in divine being. The felicity of speech is not a surface success but an event of constitutive causation—a metaphysical relation in which divine and human agency are united as principal and instrumental cause.

In Aquinas’s idiom: the Spirit causes theological acts as a musician causes music through an instrument—the sound truly comes from the instrument, yet its being-as-music derives from the musician’s act.
So too, the believer’s speech truly belongs to the human speaker, yet its theological being derives from the Spirit’s enabling causality.

Hence, theology’s realism is preserved: language in T is not arbitrary symbol but a causal mediation of divine truth, participating in the very being it confesses.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that the felicity of theological discourse possesses ontological grounding in divine causality.

This entails that:

1. The Spirit is the primary cause of theological language, conferring upon human speech its being as truth-bearing utterance.

2. Human speakers act as instrumental causes, whose words participate in divine communication by the Spirit’s constitutive power.

3. Internal truth (optimal felicity) thus has a causal basis: it is not simply the correctness of usage but the Spirit’s act of causing meaning to exist.

4. Metaphysical in esse grounding is necessary for this efficacy; without it, theological speech would revert to convention or metaphor.

Accordingly, the Spirit’s causality is both the ontological condition of felicity and the metaphysical foundation of theological realism. Through this doctrine, theology avoids reduction to mere pragmatics and secures its status as a genuine mode of divine–human action.

To speak truly within T—that is, to achieve optimal felicity—is to act within the divine act itself. The Spirit’s causality is therefore the ground of theology’s being and the cause of its truth.