On Divine Intention and the Identity of God’s Acts
Quaeritur
Utrum intentiones divinae sint ipsi actus divini secundum rationem essendi, an potius principia actuum; et quomodo unitas intentionis et actus in ipso Logō constituatur sine confusione personarum vel collapsu distinctionum operum.
Whether divine intentions are themselves divine acts in their ground of being, or whether they should be understood as principles preceding divine acts; and how the unity of intention and act is constituted in the Logos without confusing the persons or collapsing the distinctions among divine operations.
Thesis
Divine intention is not a condition that precedes action, nor a preparatory state within God. Intention in God is itself a divine act. To distinguish the two, even conceptually, would introduce sequence or internal differentiation into the divine life and thereby undermine divine simplicity.
Divine intention and divine act are therefore identical in being but distinguished in their formal orientation: one names God’s act as it is understood in relation to God’s inner life, the other names that same act as it is directed toward creatures. This unity is constituted in the Logos, in whom all divine action is intelligible, and it is donated to creatures by the Spirit, who grants participation in the concrete act that God is performing.
Thus, the identity of intention and act is neither a collapse into unipersonalism nor a fragmentation of God’s work. It is the form of divine agency itself.
Locus Classicus
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Isaiah 55:11
לֹא־יָשׁוּב אֵלַי רֵיקָם
“My word shall not return to me empty.”
Here intention (my word) and act (it accomplishes) are indivisible. The divine Word is the performing.
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John 1:3
καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν
“Without Him nothing came to be.”
The Logos is not merely the instrument of intention but its operative identity.
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Maximus Confessor, Ambigua 7
ἡ θεία πρόθεσις ἔργον ἐστίν.
“The divine intention is an act.”
Maximus explicitly identifies intention and act, distinguishing them only by their tropos of manifestation.
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Luther, WA 40 I, 360
Deus operatur, dum loquitur.
“God acts in speaking.”
In God, intention (speaking) and operation (acting) are metaphysically identical.
Explicatio
1. Why created intention does not illuminate divine intention
In creaturely agency, intention precedes action. A human being entertains possibilities, evaluates alternatives, forms a plan, and then carries it out. Intention and action are therefore distinguishable stages within a temporal process, and each stage has psychological and deliberative elements appropriate to finite agents.
None of this applies to God. To speak of a divine “intention” that is not already identical with divine action introduces a conceptual gap into God’s life. Such a gap implies sequence, potentiality, or unrealized form—all of which are incompatible with divine simplicity. Any model that treats intention as a prior state that makes action possible inadvertently imposes creaturely categories on God. It mistakes the internal life of the Trinity for a process analogous to human deliberation. This obscures the nature of divine action rather than clarifying it.
Thus, in theology we must reject accounts of intention that retain even a faint shadow of psychological or modal priority. They cannot describe a God who is pure act.
2. Intention as formal act in the Logos
If intention cannot stand before action, the alternative is not to remove the concept but to understand it correctly. Divine intention is the act-form of God’s own acting. When we speak of God’s intending, we speak of the internal form of an act as it exists in the Logos.
Because the Logos is the constitutive ground of divine intelligibility, every divine act has its determinate form in the Logos. That form is not something separate from the act itself; it is the act in its intelligible structure. Thus “intention” names the act as it exists in the Logos, and “action” names that same form as it is directed toward creatures. These are two relational orientations of the same divine reality, not two stages or components.
This distinction is not an embellishment but a necessity: it allows us to explain how divine acts are both one in God and manifold toward creatures without collapsing either level into the other.
3. How the Spirit donates the unity of intention and act
The Spirit’s work makes this unity available to creatures. The Spirit does not donate a general divine favor or a generic presence. Rather, the Spirit donates the specific act that God is performing—God’s forgiving, consoling, sanctifying, or indwelling here and now.
Because the Spirit’s donation is always of a concrete and particular act, the divine intention behind that act must itself be concretely and particularly formed. The Spirit cannot give what is not already determinate in God. This specificity presupposes a hyperintensional divine life in which acts are distinguishable by their internal form, even when their effects coincide.
Thus, divine intention and divine act remain united in God but are given to creatures according to the Spirit’s donation of the act-form appropriate to them in that moment.
4. The Trinity and the identity of intentions
It may seem that identifying intention with act risks eliminating Trinitarian distinctions. But the opposite is the case: it protects them. If we treat intention as a pre-act located in the Father, action as the execution of the Son, and application as the work of the Spirit, we create a sequence of roles that mirrors creaturely agency. Classical theology rejects this.
What we must say is this: the same divine act-form exists in the one God, but it is known and given according to the personal modes of Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father’s willing is the Son’s acting is the Spirit’s donating—one act, fully divine, yet personally differentiated.
Thus, the unity of intention and act is theologically indispensable. Without it, the divine life becomes a chain of tasks distributed among persons; with it, we preserve both unity of being and distinction of persons.
Objectiones
Ob I. If intention and act are identical, then distinctions of divine willing become unintelligible.
Ob II. If intention is act, the Trinity collapses into a single operational subject.
Ob III. Classical Thomism teaches that God’s will is simple; therefore all intentions are one, and their individuation is a creaturely projection.
Ob IV. If intention is hyperintensional, this is merely linguistic, not metaphysical.
Ob V. Postliberal theology denies that divine intention bears metaphysical significance beyond ecclesial grammar.
Responsiones
Ad I. Distinctions remain at the level of the rationes formales of act—hyperintensional forms in the Logos—not at the level of temporal sequencing.
Ad II. The act-form is one, but the personal modes of intending/acting/donating remain irreducibly distinct. Unity does not imply unipersonality.
Ad III. Simplicity entails non-composition, not indistinction. The Fathers (Athanasius, Basil, Gregory) maintained simplicity while affirming real distinctions of operation.
Ad IV. Hyperintensionality is a metaphysical precision: it describes the identity of divine action, not the finesse of creaturely language.
Ad V. Grammar without metaphysical anchor collapses into self-reference. Divine intention grounds the community’s speech, not vice versa.
Nota
The theological implications follow directly. A God whose intentions are not identical with His acts would be a God who deliberates, evaluates, and chooses between unrealized options. This would make God’s inner life resemble that of creatures rather than the self-sufficient life of Father, Son, and Spirit.
By identifying intention and act, we preserve the immediacy of divine agency and the personal character of God’s deeds toward creatures. It is also what allows the Spirit to donate not abstractions but living realities: forgiveness, consolation, new life, and the presence of Christ.
The unity of intention and act is therefore not a speculative refinement. It is the metaphysical condition for understanding God as the one who acts personally and decisively for us.
Determinatio
We therefore determine:
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Divine intention is not a precursor to action but the act itself in its intelligible form.
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This act-form is constituted in the Logos, who is the principle of divine intelligibility.
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The Spirit donates this act-form concretely, making it present to creatures.
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The unity of intention and act preserves divine simplicity while allowing real distinctions of divine operation.
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Theological truth depends on this unity, for Λ ⊨* Tₜ presupposes a determinate divine act that grounds a determinate theological statement.
Transitus ad Disputationem LVI
Having established that divine intention is itself a divine act and that its unity with action is constituted in the Logos and donated by the Spirit, we now turn to the deeper question of intelligibility itself. If every divine act is intelligible because it has its form in the Logos, then the Logos is not merely the site of intelligibility but its very condition.
Thus we proceed to Disputatio LVI: De Formā Logi Ut Principio Intelligibilitatis, where we consider how the Logos grounds the possibility of knowing anything of God’s action at all.
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Quaestiones Analyticae Post Determinationem
Q1. You often speak of a difference in ratio while the essendi remains constant. But this immediately reminds many readers of the Scotist distinctio formalis, which has a long and uneven history, and which many analytic philosophers regard as incoherent. Some even collapse it into a mere distinction of ratio and essendi. What do you say to those of us who find the formal distinction itself problematic?
Responsio.
The concern is understandable, because whenever one distinguishes ratio from essendi there is a temptation to hear Scotus in the background, as if I were claiming that one and the same entity contains quasi-formal “aspects” that are neither purely conceptual nor fully real. That is not what I am doing. My position requires something far more modest, something that belongs firmly within the broader scholastic tradition and that does not depend on the apparatus of Scotist formalities.
The distinctio formalis of Scotus is a bold metaphysical thesis. It asserts a mode of distinction that is intrinsic to the thing itself yet short of a real distinction. This “middle category” has always been difficult to defend. Many philosophers suspect that it introduces an ontological complexity that cannot be stably articulated.
My usage does not require this. What I need is simply the claim that one and the same entity can be intelligible under more than one valid conceptual ratio without thereby being divided in its being. This is the classical distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re. It allows the intellect to approach the same reality in different conceptual postures without implying multiple formal components in the object.
Thus when I distinguish two rationes in relation to a single essendi, I am not claiming that God or creature possesses internal formal partitions. I am claiming that the intellect legitimately encounters the same reality under different questions of understanding. These distinct conceptual angles track genuine features of the real, yet they do not require positing any intrinsic multiplicity in the thing considered.
The distinction is therefore epistemic in function, though not arbitrary. It is grounded in the richness of the object’s intelligibility, not in any internal composition. One can investigate divine transcendence and divine immanence as distinct rationes without thereby asserting two formalities within God. The distinction belongs to the mode of our apprehension, not to the internal structure of the divine being.
In brief: I do not employ the Scotist distinctio formalis. I employ the more modest and broadly accepted distinction of ratio with a single essendi, understood as a conceptual distinction that has grounding in reality but does not posit ontological division. This is sufficient to sustain the metaphysical and theological work of the disputation without incurring the liabilities of Scotist formalism.
Q2. If the distinction you use is only a distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re, how does this avoid collapsing into a purely conceptual distinction? In other words, what secures the ‘fundamentum in re’ so that the distinction of ratio tracks something real and is not merely a projection of the intellect?
Responsio.
The question is important because the distinction of ratio can become fragile if it lacks a real anchor. A purely conceptual distinction would indeed be insufficient for theological work, since it would reduce our differentiations to categories imposed by the mind rather than disclosures of something in the object.
The key point is that a distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re requires two elements. First, the intellect must adopt different conceptual postures toward the same being. Second, the being must be such that these conceptual postures correspond to real modes of intelligibility latent in the object itself.
This means that the distinction has an epistemic form but an ontological grounding. We do not posit internal parts or formal components within the entity. We say instead that the entity lends itself to more than one valid conceptual entry point. The richness is in the object, not in our mental constructions. The different rationes arise because the reality under consideration is capable of being understood under diverse questions.
A simple example from classical theology illustrates the point. When we consider God under the ratio of simplicity, the intellect is attending to God’s unity. When we consider God under the ratio of goodness, the intellect is attending to God’s communicative plenitude. These are distinct conceptual approaches, but they correspond to actual features of the divine being. They do not fracture the divine essence; they articulate the multiple lines along which that essence is intelligible.
Thus, the distinction of ratio is neither arbitrary nor merely verbal. It is constrained by what the object is. The fundamentum in re is the object’s intelligible plenitude. The intellect does not impose distinctions. It recognizes those aspects of intelligibility that belong naturally to the object.
In this way, the distinction functions as a disciplined conceptual tool anchored in being, not a free floating mental projection.
Nota Finalis
The two analytic questions taken together protect the metaphysical grammar of this disputation from misunderstanding. They show that the distinction I employ neither falls into Scotist formalism nor collapses into mere conceptualism. It is a distinction of ratio grounded in the object, allowing one being to be the subject of multiple lines of intelligible approach without implying internal composition. This is the structure upon which the later disputationes rely when treating divine action, participation, and the intelligibility of God’s self revelation.
