Thesis
The intentional relation between words and world is not a matter of convention but it is participatory: Linguistic meaning exists because the Spirit, who grounds all intelligibility, constitutes a real relation between sign and signified, language and being.
Explicatio
“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.”
— Psalm 33:6
Language and being are not externally related. As the earlier disputations have shown, the world itself is already linguistic in structure: a divine utterance sustained by the Spirit’s causality. Accordingly, human language does not impose meaning upon mute matter, but it rather participates in the meaning already spoken by God.
Philosophically, intentionality describes the directedness of consciousness; linguistically, it describes the directedness of words toward their referents. The two are parallel but not identical, for thought is of things, while words are about things. Yet in both cases, the relation of “aboutness” must be grounded in a prior act that unites sign and reality.
If all human intentionality participates in divine knowing, then linguistic intentionality must also participate in divine speech. The Spirit, who causes the world to be intelligible, also causes language to refer. The theological relation between sign (signum) and thing signified (res significata) is causal. Language bears truth because it exists within the same act of communication that constitutes the world.
In formal terms, linguistic intentionality links two domains:
the linguistic domain of expressions, predicates, and syntactic forms, and
the ontological domain of things, relations, and properties. A model assigns elements of the ontological domain to the linguistic one, establishing the mapping by which sentences acquire truth-values. But this mapping presupposes more than human convention; it presupposes that things are already meaningful and that signs can be genuinely of them. Theology interprets this presupposition as the Spirit’s constitutive mediation—the act by which the divine Word bridges language and being.
Objectiones
Obiectio I. Meaning arises from social convention and pragmatic use, not metaphysical causation. Accordingly, to ground linguistic reference in the Spirit is to mistake a human practice for a divine act.
Obiectio II. If divine causality secures reference, linguistic plurality and semantic variation become inexplicable, for there could be only one divine language.
Obiectio III. To attribute intentionality to language risks reifying words as entities capable of relation, and confusing logical structure with metaphysical existence.
Obiectio IV. The claim that language participates in divine communication threatens to dissolve the distinction between revelation and ordinary discourse making all language sacred.
Responsiones
Ad I. Convention and use describe how language functions among human speakers; they do not explain why meaning is possible. Theology seeks that deeper ground. The Spirit’s causality is not a supplement to social practice but its ontological condition—without it, linguistic conventions could not succeed in referring to real things.
Ad II. Divine causality does not eliminate linguistic diversity but enables it. The Spirit constitutes the possibility of multiple human symbol systems, each grounded in the same rational order of being. The unity lies not in vocabulary but in the underlying intentional structure that all languages share.
Ad III. Language is not an entity but a system of acts and relations. Its intentionality is derivative of the speakers’ participation in divine meaning. To say that language participates in divine speech is to say that the communicative acts of rational creatures are sustained by the same Spirit who constitutes all intelligibility.
Ad IV. Ordinary language participates analogically, not univocally, in divine communication. The Word through whom all language has its possibility becomes fully manifest only in revelation. Yet every true word is trace and anticipation of that Word. The sacred and the ordinary are thus distinguished by degree of disclosure, not by kind of being.
Nota
This account of linguistic intentionality unites the classical semantics of signification with the metaphysical realism of theology. In scholastic tradition, a sign signifies by establishing a real relation to what it denotes. Nominalism reduced this relation to mental association; modern linguistic theory to social convention. Theological realism restores its ontological depth: signification is a participated causality, the Spirit’s act whereby words enter the field of truth.
This has implications for both philosophy of language and theological method. Philosophically, it reinterprets reference not as correspondence between two independent domains but as the event of communion between word and world. Theologically, it means that divine revelation does not use language instrumentally but creates it internally. Human speech is not a neutral medium awaiting divine use; it is itself one of God’s creatures, ordered from the beginning for the possibility of revelation.
Hence, the very possibility of theology depends on linguistic intentionality. To speak of God presupposes that words can stand in real relation to divine being. That relation is secured by the same Spirit who unites all being to the Word.
Determinatio
From the foregoing it is determined that:
Linguistic intentionality is the relation by which words are of or about things, grounded not in convention but in divine causality.
The Spirit, who constitutes intelligibility, is the primary cause of this relation; human speakers are instrumental causes participating in that act.
The mapping between language and reality—formalized as modeling—presupposes this ontological ground.
Meaning is thus both semantic and sacramental: words bear reality because they share in the act of divine signification.
The plurality of languages manifests the fecundity of divine communication, not its absence.
Revelation perfects linguistic intentionality by making God the direct referent of speech, without mediation by empirical extension alone.
Theological realism therefore entails semiotic realism: signs are not arbitrary but rooted in being.
Therefore, the intentional relation between words and world is a mode of participation in divine reason. To speak truly is to share in the Spirit’s act of reference—to inhabit the very intentional bridge that unites the Word, the world, and the Church’s language of faith.
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