Prooemium ad Partem II
De Lingua et Modeling Theologico
In the first part of these Disputationes, the inquiry was directed toward being: toward participation, causality, and the ontological conditions under which creatures exist and are ordered toward God. That inquiry established that intelligibility is not accidental to reality, nor imposed upon it by cognition, but belongs to the structure of being itself as grounded in the Logos.
The present part turns not away from ontology, but toward its articulation. Theology does not merely contemplate what is; it must speak. Yet speech is not a secondary operation added to being. Language is itself a mode of participation. If reality is ordered toward intelligibility, then language is the creaturely form in which that intelligibility may be received, borne, and confessed.
This turn therefore concerns neither linguistics as a technical discipline nor language as a social artifact. It concerns the ontological conditions under which language can mean at all, the structure of intentionality by which speech is about something, and the way finite discourse may inhabit an intelligible order that precedes it.
Accordingly, this part proceeds in three movements. First, it examines language and intentionality as grounded in objective intelligibility rather than in consciousness or convention. Second, it considers theological modeling as the disciplined articulation of meaning within that intelligible order. Third, it reflects upon the limits of modeling, not as failures of language, but as disclosures of transcendence.
Throughout, language will be treated not as expressive projection but as responsive participation. Theology speaks truly not because it masters its object, but because it is drawn into alignment with an intelligibility that precedes and exceeds all speech.
Nota Methodologica Generalis: De Limitatione Phenomenologiae
In these Disputationes, a strict distinction is maintained between ontological intelligibility and phenomenological disclosure.
Ontological intelligibility denotes the objective order of meaning by which beings are what they are and by which truth is possible at all. This intelligibility is grounded in the Logos and exists apart from human awareness, perception, language, or historical horizon. It is not constituted by acts of consciousness, nor does it depend upon conditions of manifestation.
Phenomenological accounts of disclosure, horizon, appearing, or worldhood concern the manner in which beings are encountered or understood by finite subjects. Such analyses may illuminate the structure of experience, but they do not ground intelligibility itself. Accordingly, phenomenological categories are not employed here to explicate the ontological conditions of meaning.
For this reason, distinctions such as being and beings, horizon and appearance, disclosure and withdrawal, though significant within phenomenological inquiry, are not used analogically to describe teleo-spaces or the Logos-grounded order of intelligibility. To do so would risk conflating the conditions of experience with the conditions of being.
Phenomenology may therefore appear in these disputations only diagnostically or critically, never as a positive source of metaphysical grounding. The task of these disputations is not to describe how meaning appears, but to inquire into what must be the case for meaning to exist at all.
On Language and Intentionality
Quaeritur
Utrum lingua humana intelligibilis sit non ex conscientia vel conventione humana, sed ex participatione in Logos, qui est intelligibilitas obiectiva rerum; et utrum intentionalitas sermonis non sit motus psychologicus, sed directio ontologica intra spatium teleologicum, quo significatio ipsa possibilis est.
Whether human language is intelligible not from human awareness or convention, but from participation in the Logos, who is the objective intelligibility of things; and whether intentionality in speech is not a psychological movement, but an ontological directedness within a teleological space in which signification itself is possible.
Thesis
Language does not generate meaning. It presupposes intelligibility.
The intentionality of speech is not grounded in consciousness, perception, or linguistic practice, but in participation in the Logos as the objective order of meaning. Human language is intelligible because it inhabits teleo-spaces of significance that precede all acts of speaking, thinking, or hearing. Intentionality is thus ontological before it is linguistic, and linguistic before it is psychological.
Locus Classicus
“In ipso vita erat, et vita erat lux hominum.”
John 1:4
Life is not added to intelligibility, nor intelligibility to life. The Logos is both the light by which things are intelligible and the ground in which meaning abides. Language participates in this light only because it is already there.
Explicatio
The modern account of language commonly begins from the subject. Words are treated as expressions of mental states, intentions as acts of consciousness, and meaning as a function of use, convention, or pragmatic success. Such accounts may describe how language functions within a community, but they cannot explain why language can mean at all. The present disputation proceeds otherwise.
Language is intelligible only because reality is intelligible. Meaning does not arise when a subject intends an object; intention itself is possible only because being is already ordered toward intelligibility. This order is not linguistic. It is not psychological. It is ontological.
Intentionality, properly understood, is not an inner aim or mental direction. It is the structure by which something can be about something. Such aboutness cannot be manufactured by signs, nor imposed by convention. It presupposes a space of possible significance in which reference, truth, and understanding may occur. This space is what has been named a teleo-space.
Teleo-spaces are not purposes imposed upon language. They are fields of intelligibility that draw language into meaningful articulation. They do not determine what must be said, but they make saying possible. They are not products of linguistic practice, but conditions of it.
Human language, therefore, does not create meaning but responds to it. Words are formed within a prior order of significance that precedes speech and exceeds it. To speak is to inhabit that order, however imperfectly.
The Logos is the objective ground of this order. The Logos is not a word among words, nor a concept among concepts, but the intelligibility in virtue of which anything can be meaningful at all. Language participates in the Logos not by resemblance, but by dependence. It means because reality is already ordered toward meaning.
Intentionality in speech is thus not subjective projection but ontological alignment. When speech intends truth, it does not impose sense upon the world but conforms itself to an intelligibility that precedes it. Falsehood arises not from the absence of the Logos, but from resistance to it.
The Spirit’s role is not to inject meaning into language from without, but to align finite speech with the intelligible order already given. The Spirit authorizes speech by restoring it to its proper orientation toward truth. In this way, language becomes capable of theological meaning not by elevation beyond creatureliness, but by faithful inhabitation of the teleo-spaces of intelligibility grounded in the Logos.
Objectiones
Ob I. If intelligibility exists apart from human awareness and language, then language becomes superfluous. Meaning would exist whether or not anyone speaks.
Ob II. If intentionality is ontological rather than psychological, then human responsibility for meaning is undermined. Speech would merely echo a prior order.
Ob III. To ground language in the Logos collapses the distinction between theology and philosophy, making linguistic theory dependent upon theological claims.
Responsiones
Ad I. Language is not superfluous but responsive. Meaning precedes speech, but speech is the mode by which meaning becomes communicable. The prior existence of intelligibility does not negate language; it grounds it.
Ad II. Ontological grounding does not eliminate responsibility. Participation is not compulsion. Human speech may conform to intelligibility or resist it. Responsibility arises precisely because meaning is given and not invented.
Ad III. The Logos is not introduced as a theological hypothesis but as the necessary name for objective intelligibility itself. Theology does not annex language theory; language theory, when pursued to its ground, opens onto theology.
Nota
This disputation corrects a fundamental error of modern linguistic thought: the assumption that meaning originates in the subject. Meaning originates in reality’s intelligible order.
Language is possible because the world is already ordered toward sense. Intentionality is possible because intelligibility precedes intention. The Logos is therefore not the conclusion of linguistic analysis but its presupposition.
Theological language does not differ from other language by possessing a special syntax or vocabulary, but by explicitly acknowledging the source of intelligibility in which all language already participates.
Determinatio
It is determined that:
- Language presupposes intelligibility and does not generate it.
- Intentionality is ontological before it is psychological.
- Teleo-spaces of meaning precede linguistic practice.
- The Logos is the objective ground of intelligibility.
- The Spirit aligns finite speech with this ground without abolishing its finitude.
Transitus ad Disputationem XVII
If language does not originate meaning but responds to an intelligible order that precedes it, then theological discourse cannot be understood as mere description or representation. It must instead be understood as modeling: the disciplined construction of forms that allow intelligibility to appear without being exhausted.
This raises the decisive question of truth in theology. If language inhabits teleo-spaces rather than generating meaning, by what criterion are theological models true? Is truth correspondence, participation, manifestation, or something else?
We therefore proceed to Disputatio XVII: De Modeling et Veritate Theologica, in which the nature of theological truth is examined in light of the Logos as the ground of intelligibility and the Spirit as the author of faithful speech.
