Disputatio XLVI: De Possibilitate ut Medio inter Necessarium et Contingens

On Possibility as the Ontological Mean between Necessity and Contingency

Quaeritur

Utrum possibilitas sit conditio ontologica intelligibilitatis ipsius, qua ens vel sit per se intelligibile et necessarium, vel sit intelligibile per aliud et contingens; et utrum sine tali possibilitate neque necessitas neque contingentia intelligi possint.

Whether possibility is the ontological condition of intelligibility itself, by virtue of which a being is either intelligible in itself and necessary, or intelligible through another and contingent; and whether without such possibility neither necessity nor contingency can be intelligible at all.

Thesis

Possibility is not a logical operator nor a deficient mode of being, but the ontological openness of intelligibility itself. Necessity names being whose intelligible ground is wholly internal to itself.
Contingency names being whose intelligible ground lies in another and is received as gift. Possibility is that by virtue of which intelligibility can be either self-grounding or gift-grounded at all.
In God, necessity and possibility coincide without tension; in creatures, possibility appears as the condition of contingent reception.

Locus Classicus

Quia apud Deum omnia possibilia sunt. — Matthaeus 19:26
“For with God all things are possible.”

Δύναμις ἐστὶν ἀρχὴ μεταβολῆς ἐν ἄλλῳ ἢ καθ᾽ ἕτερον. — Aristotle, Metaphysica Θ, 1046a10
“Power is the principle of change in another, or in the same insofar as it is other.”

Omne possibile habet veritatem in Deo sicut in primo possibili. — Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q.14, a.9 ad 3
“Every possible has its truth in God as in the first possibility.”

Explicatio

Intelligibility here names not epistemic accessibility nor semantic coherence, but the ontological ground by virtue of which a being is what it is and is determinately intelligible as such. Necessity and contingency are often introduced as opposed modal statuses: what cannot be otherwise versus what might have been otherwise. Such descriptions are formally correct but ontologically superficial. They describe how propositions behave under modal operators, not what must be true of being itself for such distinctions to be meaningful.

This disputation proceeds at a deeper level. It asks how necessity and contingency are grounded in intelligibility.

A being is necessary insofar as the intelligibility of what it is is wholly internal to itself. Such a being does not depend upon another either for its being or for its being intelligible as what it is. Its act of being is self-identical and self-grounding. Necessity, so understood, is not brute inevitability but ontological sufficiency of intelligibility.

A being is contingent not because it is incomplete or only partially actual, but because the intelligibility of what it is does not reside wholly within itself. A contingent being is fully actual. What it lacks is not being, but self-grounding intelligibility. Its intelligible ground lies in another. Contingency therefore names not deficiency but donation. To be contingent is to be intelligible as gift.

Necessity and contingency thus differ not by degree of actuality but by the location of their intelligible ground. One is intelligible per se; the other per aliud.

Yet this distinction itself presupposes a deeper condition. For intelligibility to be either self-grounded or gift-grounded, intelligibility must not be closed upon itself. There must be something by virtue of which intelligibility is open to grounding without being exhausted by any particular grounding. This condition is what we name possibility.

Possibility here is not unrealized potential, nor a lack awaiting fulfillment, nor a merely logical consistency condition. It is not a shadowy intermediate realm between nothing and being. Nor is it identical with Aristotelian potentiality understood as ordered toward act as its completion. Rather, possibility names the ontological openness of intelligibility itself: the fact that intelligibility, even when fully actual, is not exhausted by self-identity alone.

In necessary being, this openness is not indeterminacy. It is the non-exhaustive character of actuality itself. Necessary being is wholly intelligible in itself, yet its intelligibility does not close upon itself in sterile self-containment. It includes within itself the condition for intelligibility beyond itself without requiring such intelligibility to be realized. In this sense, necessity and possibility coincide in God, not because God is incomplete, but because divine actuality is not consumptive of intelligibility.

In contingent beings, this same ontological openness appears under the form of reception. What in God is self-grounded openness appears in creatures as dependence. The contingent does not generate its own intelligibility; it receives it. Yet such reception would be unintelligible unless intelligibility were already open to donation. Contingency therefore presupposes real possibility.

Possibility is thus not a third ontological category alongside necessity and contingency. It is the condition under which intelligibility can be either self-grounded or gift-grounded at all. It is prior not temporally, but intelligibly. Without it, necessity would collapse into closed self-identity and contingency into brute facticity.

Bridging Clarification

This account must be distinguished from both modal logic and classical potentiality. Modal systems presuppose a domain of intelligibility within which necessity and possibility can be formally tracked. They do not explain the ontological openness that makes such tracking meaningful. Likewise, potentiality conceived as a lack ordered toward completion cannot account for creation, freedom, or grace without collapsing contingency into hidden necessity.

The possibility articulated here is neither a formal operator nor an incomplete state of being. It is intelligibility considered precisely as non-exhaustive and non-algorithmic: real, grounded, and open to otherness without compulsion.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Possibility pertains only to cognition, not to being itself. It names the agreement of concepts with conditions of experience and cannot ground necessity or contingency ontologically.

Ob. II. If God is necessary, then all that proceeds from God proceeds necessarily. Possibility therefore names only ignorance of necessity.

Ob. III. Human existence is defined by projected possibility. Possibility is grounded in freedom, not in divine intelligibility.

Ob. IV. If all possibilities are real, then contingency dissolves into a plurality of equally actual worlds.

Responsiones

Ad I. Epistemic possibility presupposes ontological intelligibility. Conditions of experience are intelligible only because intelligibility is real prior to cognition.

Ad II. Divine necessity is not coercive but communicative. To deny real possibility is to deny creation.

Ad III. Existential projection presupposes an ontological horizon of intelligibility not generated by the subject.

Ad IV. Possibilities are real as intelligible grounds in God, not as parallel actualities.

Nota

The ontology of possibility articulated here is the condition for judgment itself. Rules do not determine their own applicability, and formal systems do not certify their own adequacy. Judgment requires intelligibility that is open without being subjective.

Possibility is therefore the ontological correlate of teleo-space: the real, non-algorithmic openness by which standards can be articulated, rules assessed, and forms evaluated as successful or unsuccessful. Without such possibility, intelligibility would either be mechanized or subjectivized.

Possibility is thus not optional. It is the condition under which intelligibility can ground normativity without coercion and freedom without arbitrariness.

Determinatio

1. Possibility is the ontological condition of intelligibility itself.
2. Necessity names intelligibility wholly grounded in itself.
3. Contingency names intelligibility grounded in another and received as gift.
4. Possibility is that by virtue of which intelligibility can be either self-grounding or gift-grounding at all.
5. It is non-algorithmic, non-coercive, and real.
6. Therefore, possibility is the ontological mean between necessity and contingency, not as a third thing, but as the condition under which both are intelligible.

Theologically, this possibility corresponds to the Logos as the ground of intelligibility in which all things are intelligible before they are actual.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLVII

If intelligibility is open without compulsion, then gift is possible without necessity and freedom without arbitrariness. What metaphysics discerns as ontological possibility, theology encounters as grace.

For if grace proceeds from the necessary goodness of God, yet is received as undeserved and contingent, then grace must be grounded in that openness of intelligibility by which necessity gives without compelling and contingency receives without claim.

Thus we proceed to ask whether grace, though rooted in divine necessity, manifests itself as a contingent gift—ut amor necessarius Dei contingenter salvet.

Disputatio XLV: De Bello inter Necessarium et Contingens in Ratione Finita

On the Conflict Between the Necessary and the Contingent in Finite Reason

Quaeritur

Utrum in ratione finita oriatur verum bellum inter necessarium et contingens, ita ut ipsa mens humana, participans quidem rationem divinam sed limitata in tempore et potentia, neque ordinem necessitatis neque veritatem contingentiae plene conciliare possit; et utrum haec pugna sit defectus cognitionis aut potius signum participationis creaturae in divina sapientia, quae in se unam facit necessitatem et libertatem.

Whether within finite reason there arises a true conflict between the necessary and the contingent—such that the human mind, participating in divine reason yet limited in time and power, can fully reconcile neither the order of necessity nor the truth of contingency—and whether this struggle is a defect of knowledge or rather the sign of the creature’s participation in divine wisdom, in which necessity and freedom are one.

Thesis

Finite reason stands at war within itself. It is drawn upward toward necessity—the demand that all things have sufficient reason—and outward toward contingency: the recognition that the world could have been otherwise. These two poles define reason’s created condition: necessity as the mark of its participation in divine intelligibility, contingency as the sign of its existence within temporal becoming. The conflict between them is not accidental but constitutive; it reveals that reason is a mirror of divine unity seen through the prism of finitude. Only participation in divine reason can reconcile this struggle, for in God necessity and freedom coincide as one act of infinite love.

Locus classicus

Aristoteles, Metaphysica XII.7 (1072b):

Ἔστιν ἄρα τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ἀΐδιον καὶ οὐσία καὶ ἐνέργεια.
"There is therefore something which moves without being moved, being eternal, substance, and actuality." 

Necessity here grounds all motion and explanation, yet Aristotle leaves contingency as the realm of the changeable.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.14, a.13:

Deus cognoscit contingentia ut contingentia, et tamen infallibiliter.
"God knows contingents as contingents, yet infallibly."

Aquinas thus binds the necessity of divine knowledge with the contingency of creaturely events.

G. W. Leibniz, Monadologie §31:

Le présent est gros de l’avenir; le futur peut être lu dans le passé.
"The present is pregnant with the future; the future may be read in the past." 

Leibniz unites necessity and contingency by grounding both in divine reason’s selection among possibles.

Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (A536/B564):

Die Antinomie der Freiheit und der Naturnotwendigkeit ist der Schlüssel zur ganzen Dialektik der reinen Vernunft.
"The antinomy of freedom and natural necessity is the key to the entire dialectic of pure reason." 

Finite reason must affirm both necessity and freedom, though it cannot conceptually reconcile them.

Paulus Apostolus, Epistola ad Romanos 11:33:

Ὦ βάθος πλούτου καὶ σοφίας καὶ γνώσεως Θεοῦ· ὡς ἀνεξερεύνητα τὰ κρίματα αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀνεξιχνίαστοι αἱ ὁδοὶ αὐτοῦ.
"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!" 

Here Scripture gathers the philosophical tension into doxology: the irreconcilable in reason is peace in God.

Explicatio

The Principle of Sufficient Reason demands that nothing exist without ground. Yet our lived and empirical world continually presents us with events that appear ungrounded—acts of freedom, emergence, chance, and history. The human intellect thus finds itself divided: it cannot deny contingency without denying experience, nor affirm it without weakening reason’s own axiom.

This division is not an epistemic defect but a metaphysical condition. The creaturely intellect, as ratio finita, participates in eternal reason while operating within time. Its demand for necessity mirrors the divine order of wisdom; its experience of contingency mirrors the divine act of freedom. Their conflict is the creature’s mode of imaging the divine simplicity.

Philosophically, the battle has appeared as determinism versus freedom, logic versus history, metaphysics versus phenomenology. Spinoza’s monistic necessity, Hume’s skeptical contingency, and Kant’s transcendental antinomy each represent one side of reason turning against the other. Theologically, the conflict mirrors the drama of creation: God’s will is necessary in its goodness but free in its expression; the world, therefore, bears both the mark of rational necessity and the gift of contingent grace.

From a model-theoretic perspective, this conflict corresponds to the difference between syntactic necessity—the closure of reason within its own laws—and semantic openness—the reference of those laws to realities beyond themselves. Finite reason, like a theory without a complete model, cannot guarantee within itself the harmony of necessity and freedom. It points beyond itself to divine intellect as the infinite model that alone reconciles law and event, order and surprise, necessity and grace.

Objectiones

Ob. I. If necessity and contingency conflict in reason, reason ceases to be the image of God, for divine wisdom is pure harmony, not opposition.

Ob. II. The war of reason dissolves the certainty of knowledge. Science depends on necessity; freedom introduces indeterminacy and undermines causality.

Ob. III. In God all things are necessary. To admit contingency as real is to multiply being unnecessarily and to posit irrationality in creation.

Ob. IV. If divine simplicity is reflected analogically in reason, conflict cannot belong to its essence but only to sin or ignorance.

Ob. V. Freedom and necessity are mutually exclusive modes; to unite them is to destroy both. Freedom requires absence of constraint; necessity implies total determination.

Responsiones

Ad I. Reason’s conflict is not an imperfection but a sign of participation. The image of divine unity cannot be mirrored as unity within limitation; it must appear as tension. The created intellect is peace refracted through time.

Ad II. Scientific necessity and existential contingency belong to different orders. Within the order of nature, necessity prevails; within the order of personhood and grace, contingency testifies to divine freedom. Their apparent discord arises only when the orders are confused.

Ad III. Contingency is not absence of reason but expression of rational plenitude. God’s necessity includes contingency as the free manifestation of His wisdom. Creation’s freedom is the outward face of divine necessity, not its negation.

Ad IV. Sin and ignorance distort but do not create the conflict. Even in an unfallen world, reason would still know both the fixed wisdom of God and the open mystery of His will. The cross, not sin, is its deepest image: the union of divine necessity and contingent suffering.

Ad V. Freedom and necessity are contraries only within finite categories. In God they coincide: necessity is freedom fully realized, freedom is necessity made gracious. Their distinction arises when divine simplicity is viewed from within time.

Nota

The human intellect is suspended between necessity and freedom as between heaven and earth. It is drawn to explain all things by law yet confronted daily by the contingency of event, love, and decision. This tension is not to be overcome but understood as the very structure of participation. The Logos grounds necessity; the Spirit breathes contingency; together they make finite reason a theater of divine wisdom.

In Christ, this war reaches its peace: the eternal necessity of divine being enters the most contingent of all moments—the suffering of a particular man. There necessity becomes merciful and contingency redemptive. Thus, the bellum inter necessarium et contingens is resolved only in the cruciform logic of the Word made flesh, where infinite reason inhabits finite circumstance.

Determinatio

1. The conflict between necessity and contingency belongs intrinsically to finite reason and is the mark of its dependence on a higher unity.

2. Necessity reflects participation in divine wisdom; contingency reflects participation in divine freedom. Both are analogical to the single act of God.

3. Human reason cannot reconcile the two dialectically but only through participation in divine reason, where wisdom and will are one.

4. The cross is the metaphysical symbol of this reconciliation: the necessary will of love embracing contingent suffering, revealing that the ultimate law of reason is grace.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLVI: De Possibilitate ut Medio inter Necessarium et Contingens

The battle between necessity and contingency cannot end within finite reason, for each side speaks a truth it cannot deny. Necessity grounds intelligibility; contingency preserves freedom. Yet their reconciliation demands a third term, one that holds both without confusion or separation. That term is possibility.

Possibility is the quiet field in which this war becomes intelligible. It is neither necessity itself nor mere contingency, but the horizon within which both arise. For something can be contingent only if it is possible, and it can be necessary only if its possibility is immutable. Possibility thus mediates between the fixity of being and the openness of becoming. It is the form of divine generosity within reason—the locus where wisdom and will meet.

In the divine intellect, all things are possible before they are actual. God wills not arbitrary freedom but the necessary possibility of all that could exist in Him. The world’s contingency, therefore, rests upon the eternal stability of possibility within God’s reason. Finite reason, when it perceives this, finds the first light of reconciliation: the necessity of the possible unites the freedom of the actual.

The next disputation will therefore inquire De Possibilitate ut Medio inter Necessarium et Contingens. It will show that possibility is not a neutral category of modality but a theological reality: the mirror of divine potency and wisdom, and the foundation of all rational hope. For what is possible in God is already real in truth, and what becomes actual in creation is the contingent expression of that necessary possibility.

Disputatio XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae

On the Necessary Ground of Contingency

Quaeritur

Utrum contingentia creaturarum fundetur non in carentia rationis aut necessitatis, sed in participatione ipsius necessarii; ita ut libertas et contingens non sint privationes intelligibilitatis, sed modi amoris divini in ordine creato.

Whether the contingency of creatures is grounded not in the absence of reason or necessity, but in participation in the necessary itself; such that freedom and contingency are not privations of intelligibility, but modes of divine love in the created order.

Thesis

Contingency does not stand opposed to necessity but proceeds from it as participation. The divine necessity, identical with the fullness of reason and goodness, freely communicates itself in finite forms. Thus, contingency arises not from the lack of sufficient reason, but from the plenitude of it: creation is the contingent manifestation of necessary wisdom. The Spirit of Understanding sustains this relation, making the finite capable of the infinite without collapse so that necessity remains divine, and intelligibly grounded contingency, becomes the mark of love’s generosity.

Locus Classicus

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3:

Deus necessario vult se, sed non necessario vult alia a se.
“God necessarily wills Himself, but not necessarily the things other than Himself.”

Leibniz, Théodicée, §173:

La liberté divine consiste dans le choix du meilleur, déterminé par la raison même de son excellence.
“Divine freedom consists in the choice of the best, determined by the reason of its own excellence.”

Spinoza, Ethica I, prop. 33:

Res nulla contingens est.
(“Nothing is contingent.”)

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics (2009):

God could have created differently, or not at all; there is no reason why He did one rather than another.

Explicatio

The metaphysical relation between necessity and contingency defines the very structure of creation. For Aquinas, God is necessary per essentiam—His existence and goodness are identical—but His creative act is free, for it is not a product of external compulsion, but of the internal sufficiency of love.  For Leibniz, divine freedom is rational: God wills what is best because His intellect and will are one.  For Spinoza, however, necessity consumes contingency: whatever exists follows from the nature of God as a geometrical consequence.

Modernity inherited this trilemma: either determinism without freedom (Spinoza), freedom without reason (voluntarism, van Inwagen), or a reconciliation through participation (Aquinas, Leibniz at his best, and theological realism).

True contingency presupposes a necessary foundation, a will whose necessity is that of wisdom and goodness, not of constraint. To be contingent is to exist from another as from reason and cause, yet without coercion. The creature’s being is thus dependent but not necessitated; it is finite but intelligible.

This insight preserves both divine aseity and created freedom. The world’s contingency expresses not divine arbitrariness but divine generosity; it expresses the self-diffusion of the necessary Good into what might not have been, but which now participates in being and intelligibility through love.

Theologically, the Spiritus Intelligentiae mediates this relation. The Spirit holds together necessity and contingency, preserving intelligibility without determinism, and freedom without absurdity. Thus, what philosophy sought to separate, theology reunites in pneumatological causality: the freedom of God as the overflowing of His necessity.

 Objectiones

Ob. I. Spinoza holds that whatever exists follows necessarily from the divine nature. To posit contingency in God’s act is to posit imperfection. A truly infinite being cannot do otherwise than He does.

Ob. II. We learn from Inwagen that if every act of creation has a sufficient reason, then God could not have refrained from creating that world. The only way to preserve freedom is to allow that God’s creative decision has no determining reason.

Ob. III. Hume argues that contingency and necessity are subjective projections. The claim that the world must have a reason for its structure is a habit of thought, not a feature of being.

Ob. IV. Modern existentialism claims that to ground contingency in necessity is to destroy human freedom. Existence precedes essence. Thus, human contingency is absolute, not participatory.

Ob. V. Theological voluntarism holds that if God must act according to reason, then divine will is not free but constrained by intellect. Freedom must be pure voluntas indifferentiae.

Responsiones

Ad I. Spinoza confuses divine necessity with logical necessity. God’s essence is necessary, but His creative act is free precisely because His necessity is personal and rational, not mechanical. The necessity of the Good overflows without coercion, as light diffuses from its source.

Ad II. Freedom does not require absence of reason but coincidence of reason and will. God’s will is not an arbitrary event but the act of infinite intelligibility. To say God acts without reason is to reduce divine action to caprice.

Ad III. Hume’s empiricism dissolves ontology into psychology. Contingency is not a mere epistemic condition but a mode of being dependent on divine act. The regularity of the world reveals rational foundation, not habitual illusion.

Ad IV. Existentialism mistakes dependence for oppression. To exist contingently from God is not to be determined externally but to be upheld by love. The creature’s freedom is participation in divine rational vitality, not its negation.

Ad V. Voluntarism severs freedom from truth and thereby destroys both. The divine will is not arbitrary because it is identical with divine reason. The highest freedom is not indifference but the unhindered expression of perfect wisdom.

Nota

The paradox of contingency and necessity dissolves only when necessity is conceived not as constraint but as plenitude. The divine will is not forced to create; it creates because it is perfect. Contingency thus becomes the temporal image of divine superabundance: a world that might not have been, yet whose existence reflects eternal reason.

The PSR therefore remains valid within contingency, though in a transposed register. Every contingent effect has its reason, not because it is logically deduced, but because it participates in the intelligibility of divine love. The Spirit holds these together: the necessary as the truth of being, the contingent as its radiance.

Determinatio

1. Necessity and contingency are not opposites but correlative modes: the latter presupposes the former as its ground.

2. Divine necessity is identical with goodness and wisdom; it does not compel but overflows.

3. Created contingency arises from divine necessity as gift, not as exception.

4. Freedom is not irrational spontaneity but participation in rational self-giving.

5. The Spirit mediates necessity and contingency, rendering creation intelligible yet free.

6. Thus, the true ratio sufficientis contingentiae is ordo amoris: the love that necessarily gives and contingently adorns.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino

If contingency rests upon necessary wisdom, then divine freedom must be conceived not as arbitrary choice but as the rational plenitude of love. God’s liberty is neither mechanical nor indifferent but the infinite self-expression of the good.

We must therefore examine how divine necessity and divine freedom coexist without contradiction, how it is that God, who necessarily wills Himself, freely wills creation, and how this act preserves both intelligibility and grace.

Accordingly, we proceed to Disputationem XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino, in which it will be asked whether divine freedom is grounded in rational plenitude rather than in indeterminate will, and whether creation itself, in all its contingency, is the manifestation of wisdom that cannot but love.

Disputatio XLII: De Principio Sufficientis Rationis et Participatione Intellectus

On the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Participation of Intellect

Quaeritur

Utrum principium sufficientis rationis sit lex logica universalis tantum, an etiam signum participationis intellectus creati in ratione divina; et utrum negatio huius principii, ut apud van Inwagen et metaphysicos analyticos recentiores, tollat ipsam intelligibilitatem creationis.

Whether the Principle of Sufficient Reason is merely a universal logical law, or also a sign of the created intellect’s participation in divine reason; and whether the denial of this principle, as in Van Inwagen and other contemporary analytic metaphysicians, abolishes the intelligibility of creation itself.

Thesis

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is not a mere regulative maxim of thought but a metaphysical expression of the intellect’s participation in divine intelligibility. In its strong sense, it is the formal imprint of the divine Logos within reason itself for it claims that nothing exists without a reason in God’s wisdom. To deny the PSR is not to defend freedom, but to sunder the bond between intellect and being. The Spirit of Understanding (Spiritus Intelligentiae) is the living mediation through which the created mind, in seeking reasons, reflects the inexhaustible rational plenitude of its Creator.

Locus Classicus

G. W. Leibniz, Monadologie, §§31–32 (1714):

Aucun fait ne saurait être vrai ou existant, aucune énonciation véritable, sans qu’il y ait une raison suffisante pourquoi il en soit ainsi et non pas autrement.
“No fact can be real or existing, no statement true, unless there is a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise.”

Spinoza, Ethica, I, prop. 11, schol.:

Deus sive Natura ex sola necessitate suae naturae existit et agit.
“God, or Nature, exists and acts solely from the necessity of His own nature.”)

Peter van Inwagen, “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God” (1988):

Not every truth has an explanation. Some things just are, and that is the end of the matter.

Explicatio

The principium sufficientis rationis has traversed the entire history of metaphysics as both a law of thought and as an ontological postulate. In its strong form (Leibnizian–Spinozist), it affirms that for every fact or existent, there must be a reason why it is so and not otherwise, a reason ultimately grounded in divine necessity. In its weak form (Empiricist–Kantian), it is restricted to the domain of possible experience and accordingly becomes a principle of explanation, not of being. In its moderate form (Aquinas, Wolff, contemporary metaphysical realism), it expresses the participation of created reason in the divine Logos, without collapsing contingency into necessity.

The denial of the PSR, exemplified by van Inwagen’s defense of “brute facts,” aims to preserve freedom and divine sovereignty by positing the inexplicable as metaphysically possible. Yet such denial undermines the very conditions of intelligibility, for if something is without reason, thought itself loses its foundation. A world containing “brute facts” is one in which the Logos is silent.

Theologically, the PSR expresses the Spirit’s inner witness to divine intelligibility in the act of understanding. The finite mind, in seeking sufficient reasons, manifests its participatio in ratione divina. To reason at all is already to echo the divine act of creation, in which being and meaning coincide.

Thus, the PSR is not merely a formal rule of inference but a metaphysical participation in God’s own self-understanding. Its strength is not coercive but luminous because the created intellect cannot but seek the reason of things, being formed as it is in the image of divine understanding.

Objectiones

Ob. I. The modern empiricism of David Hume and the contemporary naturalists argue that the PSR exceeds empirical warrant. Regularities can be observed, but “reason why” is an anthropomorphic projection; causality is habit, not necessity.

Ob. II. Kant held that the PSR is a principle of the Verstand, valid only within the realm of possible experience. Applied beyond phenomena, it yields antinomies. Hence, it is regulative, not constitutive.

Ob. III. Van Inwagen and other analytic metaphysicians contend that not every truth has an explanation. Some facts are “brute,” including free choices and the existence of God. Requiring a reason for everything annihilates freedom and reduces reality to mechanism.

Ob. IV. Sartre and Camus view the absence of sufficient reason as the condition of human freedom. The world is absurd, and meaning is not discovered but created by the self.

Ob. V. Certain theological voluntarists hold that God’s will is ultimate reason. To require a reason for the divine will is to subordinate God to rational necessity. Divine freedom transcends reason.

Responsiones

Ad I. Empiricism confuses the order of discovery with the order of being. That some reasons are hidden does not imply that none exist. The PSR concerns the intelligible ground of reality, not the limits of observation. Hume’s skepticism dissolves not causality but confidence in reason itself.

Ad II. Kant rightly confines the PSR within the phenomenal for critical purposes, but his very act of limitation presupposes its universality. To deny constitutive status to the PSR is already to presuppose that reality conforms to rational form, and this is an implicit metaphysical affirmation.

Ad III. The appeal to “brute facts” is a confession of explanatory despair, not a defense of freedom. Freedom is intelligible only as participation in the divine act of rational self-determination. A choice without reason is not free but arbitrary, and arbitrariness is impotence, not liberty.

Ad IV. Existentialist revolt against reason mistakes alienation for authenticity. The absurd arises not from being but from the will’s refusal to inhabit intelligibility. To assert meaning against the void is still to affirm the PSR implicitly; it is to claim the will to reason in spite of chaos.

Ad V. Divine will is not irrational but supremely rational, identical with divine wisdom. To require no reason beyond God is not to deny the PSR but to fulfill it: Deus est ratio sui. The PSR terminates not in logical deduction but in the subsistent Reason that is God Himself.

Nota

The principium sufficientis rationis stands at the heart of metaphysical realism. In its deepest sense, it is not a law imposed upon being but the trace of divine rationality within it. As the mind seeks sufficient reasons, it participates in the infinite coherence of the Logos. The PSR thus binds ontology and epistemology within the act of the Spirit: it is the metaphysical form of the intellect’s communion with God.

Modern denials of the PSR -- whether they be empiricist, analytic, or existentialist -- arise from the fragmentation of reason’s participation in the divine. The task of theology is therefore not to reconstruct the PSR as an abstract axiom, but to recognize it as a participation in the eternal Reason by which all things are and are known.

Determinatio

1. The PSR may be distinguished in three senses:

   • Strong (Leibnizian–Spinozist): Every fact has a sufficient reason, grounded in divine necessity.

   • Moderate (Thomistic–Classical Realist): Every contingent being has a reason for its existence in God, but not all reasons are necessitating.

   • Weak (Kantian–Empiricist): The PSR is only a principle of empirical order, regulative for experience.

2. Theology adopts the moderate form: participation without collapse. Contingency is thus preserved, but reason remains grounded in divine wisdom.

3. The PSR is therefore not merely a rule of logic (ratio cognoscendi), but an ontological participation (ratio essendi) in the divine act of understanding.

4. To deny the PSR is to deny that being is intelligible; and to deny intelligibility is to deny the Logos.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae

The preceding disputation has established that the Principium Sufficientis Rationis is not a mere law of inference but a participation of finite reason in the divine Logos. It thus binds the act of thinking to the act of being and reveals in the search for “why” the trace of eternal Wisdom itself.

Yet the moment the PSR is affirmed ontologically, a tension arises:
If every being has a sufficient reason, is there room for contingency? Must all that is be necessary, as Spinoza contended, or can the contingent subsist within the sphere of intelligibility without dissolving into determinism?

The theological task is to interpret contingency not as absence of reason but as mode of reason, as a form of divine intelligibility expressed as finite freedom. For in creation, necessity does not abolish contingency but gives it foundation; and the contingent, rightly understood, is not the irrational remainder of the divine but the radiant overflow of divine plenitude.

We therefore advance to Disputationem XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae, in which it will be asked whether contingency is grounded not in the negation of necessity but in its participation, so that the freedom of creatures is the temporal and finite reflection of divine rational love.

Disputatio XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis

On Phenomenology and the Appearance of Being

Quaeritur

Utrum phaenomenologia, in doctrina sua de apparitione entis, patefaciat aditum ad veritatem ontologicam et theologicam, an potius concludat ens intra ambitum immanentiae conscientiae.

Whether phenomenology, in its doctrine of the appearance of being, opens a path to ontological and theological truth, or rather confines being within the immanent sphere of consciousness.

Thesis

The appearing of beings is not merely a psychological event or a representation before consciousness, but the ontological act through which being manifests itself. In the horizon of phenomenology rightly understood, the act of manifestation already presupposes participation in a transcendent Logos: the divine reason through which beings appear as intelligible.

Locus Classicus

“Was uns zunächst und zumeist begegnet, ist das Seiende im Ganzen.” — Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit §29.
(“What first and most of all encounters us is beings as a whole.”)

This sentence marks the turning point from phenomenology as method to phenomenology as ontology: the recognition that appearance is not a derivative mental state but the disclosure of beings themselves within the openness of Being.

Explicatio

Phenomenology arose as a protest against both empiricism and speculative idealism. Husserl’s cry to return “zu den Sachen selbst” called philosophy back from abstraction to the immediacy of what shows itself. In this return, being was no longer treated as a hidden substrate behind appearances, but as that which becomes manifest in appearing. As Heidegger explained in Section VII of Sein und Zeit, it is that which shows itself as itself. 

The key structure of this manifestation is intentionality, the directedness of consciousness toward its object. Yet intentionality itself presupposes the prior possibility that something may appear at all. Since this givenness is not created by the subject but received, the act of consciousness is receptive before it is constructive.

Thus, phenomenology, in its most radical sense, reveals that appearing is not a mere event within the subject but a participation in a more original disclosure of being. Every horizon of experience already implies the transcendence of what appears beyond it. The horizon of the world points to an infinite openness which no act of consciousness can totalize.

Theologically interpreted, this openness intimates the divine Logos, the principle of manifestation that both grounds and exceeds all finite givenness. In the shining of the phenomenon, theology perceives a trace of the Word through whom all things appear and by whom they are sustained in intelligibility.

Obiectiones

Ob I. Transcendental idealism holds that phenomenology, by its very method, brackets metaphysical commitments. But to posit a divine Logos as the source of appearing violates the neutrality of the phenomenological reduction and collapses philosophy into theology.

Ob II. Naturalistic empiricism claims that appearance is merely a function of perceptual mechanisms. The world “appears” only because the brain interprets sensory inputs, and thus there is no ontological act of showing, only causal processes.

Ob III. Confessional theology declares that revelation is not equivalent to appearance. God discloses Himself through Word and Spirit, not through the natural horizon of phenomenality. To identify divine revelation with appearing is to naturalize grace.

Ob IV. Existentialist atheism supposes that the horizon of appearance is bounded by finitude and death. Phenomenology uncovers not divine transcendence but the absence of God, the silence Nichts that defines human existence.

Responsiones

Ad 1. The phenomenological epoché suspends metaphysical assertions within the act of reflection, but it does not deny their ontological ground. To recognize that appearance implies givenness is not to violate the reduction, but to unfold its presupposition that what appears gives itself. The question of the giver is intrinsic to phenomenology’s logic and opens naturally toward theology.

Ad 2. The causal explanation of perception presupposes the very appearing it seeks to explain. Neural correlates describe how phenomena are processed, not how being becomes manifest. Empiricism can analyze conditions of sensation, but not the ontological event of manifestation itself.

Ad 3. While revelation exceeds phenomenology, it does not exclude it. Appearing is the analogical condition under which revelation becomes thinkable. Because the same Logos who speaks in Scripture also grounds the intelligibility of all phenomena, phenomenology, properly ordered, is a vestibule to theology.

Ad 4. The disclosure of finitude is itself an intimation of transcendence. The awareness of limit presupposes orientation toward the unlimited. Even the horizon of death testifies to the Being that grants all horizons, whose givenness endures beyond negation.

Nota

Phenomenology reopens the ontological question under the sign of appearing. Its most fruitful contribution to theology lies in showing that the world is not a closed system of object, but rather it is a field of manifestation. To appear is already to participate in a revealing act. By interpreting phenomenology in the light of faith, theology recognizes that this revealing act is not anonymous but personal. It is the act of the Word who “was made flesh and dwelt among us.”

In this sense, phenomenology becomes a philosophical propaedeutic to theology. It purifies the gaze so that the appearing of beings may again be seen as the trace of divine self-showing. While it neither proves God nor replaces revelation, it nonetheless restores the world to its capacity for epiphany.

Determinatio

Phenomenology, when pursued to its limits, discloses an ontology of manifestation that opens naturally toward the theology of the Word. The act of appearing (phainein) is not grounded in the subject’s synthesis but in the Logos that gathers being into visibility. Every phenomenon is thus a finite participation in divine intelligibility, an echo of the eternal self-showing of God. To behold the appearing of beings is, implicitly, to behold the shining of the Creator through them.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLII

Having discerned in phenomenology that appearing is not a closed immanence of consciousness but an ontological event of manifestation, we must now ask after the ground of this intelligibility itself. For if beings appear as intelligible, and if this appearing is not constituted by the subject, then reason must inquire into what renders appearance intelligible rather than opaque, meaningful rather than arbitrary.

Phenomenology shows that beings appear; it does not yet explain why there is intelligibility rather than mere givenness, nor why the intellect is proportioned to receive meaning rather than chaos. The question of manifestation thus presses beyond phenomenality toward its rational foundation.

This leads necessarily to the Principle of Sufficient Reason. If appearing is not accidental, if intelligibility is not brute fact, then there must be a sufficient ground why beings are manifest as they are, and why intellect is capable of receiving them as meaningful. The very possibility of phenomenological disclosure presupposes a participation of finite reason in a deeper order of rationality.

Therefore we proceed to Disputatio XLII: De Principio Sufficientis Rationis et Participatione Intellectus, wherein it shall be examined whether the principle that nothing is without reason expresses not merely a logical demand of thought, but the ontological participation of the human intellect in the Logos, the divine reason in whom all beings have both their ground and their intelligibility.

Disputatio XXXII: De Ratione Quaerente et Spiritu Intelligentiae

On the Questioning Reason and the Spirit of Understanding

Quaeritur

Utrum ratio humana, in eo quod naturaliter quaerit sufficientem causam et universale intellectum, agat ex se ipsā, an vero haec inquisitio sit signum participationis Spiritus Intelligentiae, qui est ipsa actio intelligibilitatis divinae in creatura.

It is asked whether human reason, in its natural drive toward sufficient reason and universal intelligibility, acts from itself, or whether this very questioning is the sign of participation in the Spirit of Understanding—the divine act of intelligibility present within the creature.

Thesis

The finite intellect does not generate its own light but participates in the divine Light that enables understanding. Reason’s perpetual inquiry into causes and grounds, its ratio quaerens, is not autonomous curiosity, but it is instead the trace of the Spirit’s presence in the intellect. The desire for sufficient reason is itself evidence of participation in infinite reason (ratio infinita). Thus, Spiritus Intelligentiae is both the condition and the telos of all rational inquiry: every genuine question already presupposes the divine horizon that alone can answer it. Accordingly, by Spiritus Intelligentiae we mean not a psychological impulse nor an abstract principle, but the Holy Spirit as appropriated to intelligibility—the personal act by which divine understanding is participated in the finite intellect.

Locus Classicus

“In lumine tuo videbimus lumen.” — Psalm 36:9
(“In thy light shall we see light.”)

Augustine interprets this as meaning that all human understanding occurs within the illumination of divine intellect: “Quod intelligimus, in ipsa luce intelligimus quae est Deus.” (De Trinitate XII.15). 

Aquinas further develops this insight:“Lux intellectualis quae in nobis est nihil aliud est quam participatio lucis divinae.” (ST I.79.4). 

Hence, reason’s light is participatory, not self-originating; the Spirit of understanding is the act whereby finite intellect becomes luminous to itself and to the world.

Explicatio

The human mind is naturally a ratio quaerens; it is a being drawn toward the intelligible. It seeks not only facts but their sufficient reasons, not only order but the ground of order. Leibniz gave this drive formal expression in the principium rationis sufficientis: nothing exists without a reason why it is so and not otherwise.

Yet the principle, when pursued consistently, transcends the finite. This is so because every finite reason refers to another, and the chain cannot complete itself except in a necessary and infinite act of reason. Thus, the principle of sufficient reason functions as an analogia mentis: the finite intellect mirrors within itself the structure of the infinite intellect in which all reasons are one. What Leibniz articulates metaphysically, Kant restrains critically, and Gödel formalizes logically—but none abolish the intellect’s orientation toward the unconditioned; they merely show that it cannot be satisfied from within finitude.

Kant sought to delimit this movement within the bounds of possible experience, identifying the desire for total explanation with the transcendental illusion of reason. But theology reinterprets this “illusion” as the trace of the Spirit, the sign that finite reason is oriented by nature toward the infinite. Gödel showed that no consistent system can prove its own completeness. Gödel does not reveal the infinite itself, of course, but he reveals the impossibility of closure within finitude. Theology names what logic can only leave open: the finite intellect cannot rest in its own light but must open itself to the greater light in which all truths cohere.

Therefore, the unending search of reason is not futility but vocation; it is a created participation in the Spirit of understanding. The Spirit is the lumen superius that draws thought beyond itself toward the fullness of intelligibility: the Infinite in which the true and the real coincide.

Obiectiones

Obj. I. Empiricism claims that reason’s questions arise from sensory experience; they are inductive extensions of perception, not signs of divine participation. Inquiry proceeds from curiosity, not grace.

Obj. II. Kantians argue that the drive toward sufficient reason is a regulative principle, useful for coherence but not constitutive of reality. It expresses the form of human reason, not any participation in a transcendent intellect.

Obj. III. Naturalism supposes that intellectual curiosity is an evolutionary advantage; the search for explanation enhances survival. Thus, no divine Spirit need be invoked to explain it.

Obj. IV. Existentialism asserts that the questioning drive signifies the absence of meaning, not its presence. It testifies to human finitude and anxiety, not to participation in divine reason.

Obj. V. Mysticism holds that to ascribe reason’s restlessness to the Spirit is to confuse knowledge with faith. The Spirit speaks in silence, not in reasoning; rational inquiry distracts from contemplation.

Responsiones

Ad I. Empiricism mistakes the occasion for the cause. While inquiry begins with experience, its form transcends experience; the very demand for universal explanation cannot be derived from particular sensations. It testifies to a light within the intellect that orders appearances toward being.

Ad II. Kant rightly names the demand for totality “regulative,” yet this very regulation presupposes an orientation toward the unconditioned. Theological reason reads this not as illusion but as vocation: the Spirit inclines the intellect toward its true completion in divine understanding.

Ad III. Natural explanation may describe the mechanism by which curiosity functions, but not why the cosmos is intelligible at all. The explanatory success of science itself presupposes that reality is structured according to reason, a structure theology identifies with the spiritus intelligentiae.

Ad IV. Existential anxiety is indeed the shadow of transcendence. The question persists because the answer is real. The question persists not because meaning is absent, but because it is excessive: finitude cannot contain what addresses it. Anxiety is not the proof of nothingness but the affective form of transcendence resisted. The void that drives thought forward is the echo of the infinite within the finite; it is the Spirit’s hidden prompting toward the ground of being.

Ad V. Contemplation and reason are not opposites but stages of the same participation. The Spirit who grants silence also animates inquiry; the one light illumines both mind and heart. Rational questioning, rightly ordered, is a form of praise.

Nota

The restlessness of reason is not an imperfection of intellect but its created likeness to the infinite intelligibility of God. Accordingly, the principle of sufficient reason is not a human invention but a vestige of the Spirit’s own act of understanding within the finite mind. Reason asks because it has already been addressed. Every question presupposes the divine Word that calls it into thought.

Hence, the structure of inquiry is itself participatory. The ratio quaerens is the Spirit reflecting upon itself within the creature, not by identity but by created participation, according to the measure of finite intellect.To reason is already to echo the divine dialogue in which knowing and being coincide. The mind’s drive toward completion—what Kant called "the transcendental subreption" and what Gödel formalized as incompleteness—is, theologically, the trace of the Spirit’s self-communication. In every genuine act of understanding, the finite intellect becomes translucent to the Infinite Light that grounds it.

Thus, questioning is not the negation of faith but its rational form; the open system of inquiry mirrors the openness of creation to its Creator. Reason’s incompleteness is grace made epistemic. This incompleteness is a formal sign that the Spirit of Understanding continues to speak within the human mind, drawing thought beyond itself toward the Truth that both conceives and fulfills it.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Human reason, as ratio quaerens, bears within itself an impulse toward sufficient explanation that cannot be satisfied within finitude.

2. This impulse is not self-generated but arises from the participation of the intellect in the divine light, in the Spiritus Intelligentiae who is both source and goal of all understanding.

3. The principle of sufficient reason is therefore a formal echo of the Spirit’s creative intelligibility: every reason points beyond itself to the infinite Reason that grounds all.

4. Finite systems, like finite intellects, remain incomplete; their very openness to completion reveals their participation in the infinite.

5. The restlessness of reason is thus not a defect but a sign of grace. It is the intellectus in via seeking its home in Intellectus aeternus.

Hence we conclude: Ratio quaerens est Spiritus seipsum desiderans.
The questioning reason is the Spirit desiring itself.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXXIII

Having seen that every inquiry of reason presupposes the infinite act of understanding that grounds it, we turn now to the formal structure of that dependence. If every finite order is incomplete, what is the nature of the infinite truthmaker in which it finds completion? This question leads directly to the next disputation: XXXIII: De Systemate Incompleto et Veritatis Factore Infinito. Here the logical insight of Gödel becomes a theological axiom. The finite requires the infinite not only to be known, but to be true.