Disputatio XI: De Creatione et Intellegibilitate Mundi

On the Creation and Intelligibility of the World

Quaeritur

Utrum mundus, qui per Verbum Dei creatus est, in se contineat rationem et ordinem intelligibilem non ut proprietatem naturalem aut autonomum logon, sed ut participationem ipsius rationis divinae per quam omnia facta sunt; et utrum Spiritus Sanctus sit causa per quam haec participatio in mundo manet viva et cognoscibilis.

Whether the world, created through the Word of God, contains within itself reason and intelligible order not as a natural property or autonomous logos, but as participation in the very divine reason through which all things were made; and whether the Holy Spirit is the cause by which this participation in the world remains living and knowable.

Thesis

Creation is intelligible because it proceeds from the divine Word. The order of reason in the world reflects the eternal Logos by which it was created and in which it is sustained. The Spirit preserves this intelligibility as the ongoing mediation between divine wisdom and creaturely understanding.

Locus classicus

“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host.” — Psalm 33:6

This verse reveals that creation is not a brute event but an act of speech: God’s Word gives being; His Spirit gives life and understanding. The world, therefore, bears a rational and linguistic structure because it originates in divine utterance.

Explicatio

In previous disputations, revelation and knowledge were shown to occur as acts of divine self-communication. Creation is the cosmic expression of that same principle. To create “by the Word” is to bring forth being through meaning.

The intelligibility of the world (intelligibilitas mundi) is not an afterthought but the imprint of divine reason (ratio divina) within creation itself. The divine Logos does not merely impose order externally; He is the internal ground of all order. Hence, the world is not a mute mechanism but a spoke reality—a creation articulated in the very act of divine utterance.

To express this symbolically (and then immediately explain):

• Let C(x) mean “x is a creature,” and L(x) mean “x participates in the Logos.”

• The theological claim ∀x (C(x) → L(x)) can be read: “For every creature x, to be created is to participate in the Logos.”

• This does not mean that creatures possess divinity, but that their very structure reflects divine rationality.

• The world’s coherence, its capacity to be known, is therefore the sign of its origin in divine speech.

The Spirit (Spiritus Sanctus), proceeding from the Father through the Word, maintains this participation dynamically.
The Spirit is not merely a past cause of order but the ongoing agent of intelligibility: He makes the world not only ordered but understandable. Thus, creation’s rational form is continually animated by pneumatological presence.

Objectiones

Obiectio I. Autonomous Rationalism holds that if the world’s intelligibility depends upon divine participation, then human reason is heteronomous. Science and philosophy must be autonomous to retain credibility. To posit that intelligibility is “borrowed” from divine Logos is to undermine the independence of human knowledge and reduce rational inquiry to theology.

Obiectio II. To claim that the Logos is the inner rationality of creation risks a pantheistic collapse of the Creator and creature into one order of being. If all order, ratio, and structure in the world are divine, then the world itself becomes divine in substance. The distinction between participation and identity vanishes, and theology slides toward pantheism.

Obiectio III. The natural world exhibits randomness, entropy, and moral indifference (empirical chaos). Disease, suffering, and death pervade the biological order. If creation truly participates in the divine Logos, these features appear inexplicable or scandalous. The presence of irrationality and evil in nature seems to contradict the claim that the world is inherently intelligible.

Obiectio IV. According to scientific naturalism, science explains intelligibility through natural law and mathematical regularity without invoking divine speech. The assumption of an underlying Logos is unnecessary. Order arises from self-organizing processes, symmetry breaking, and evolution. To ascribe intelligibility to divine participation is to import metaphysics where empirical explanation suffices.

Obiectio V. Postmodern hermeneutic skepticism claims that language and reason are historically contingent human constructs. To say that the world itself is “linguistic” or “spoken” is a metaphor, not an ontology. Meaning is produced by interpreters, not embedded in being. The idea of the cosmos as divine utterance confuses human interpretation with the structure of reality itself.

Responsiones

Ad I. Autonomy in reason does not mean isolation from its source. Human rationality is genuine precisely because it participates in the divine Logos. The dependence of intelligibility on God is not servitude but vocation: reason becomes most itself when illumined by its origin. The sciences retain autonomy in their proper domain, but their very capacity for intelligibility is derivative—a finite echo of the Word through whom all things were made. Participation in the Logos grounds freedom, it does not annul it.

Ad II. Participation does not imply identity but communion across an ontological distinction. The Logos is present in creation as cause, not as substance. The world’s order reflects divine wisdom without exhausting or containing it. To speak of creation as “worded” does not mean that it is the Word, but that its being bears the trace of the Word’s utterance. The infinite remains transcendent even while immanent in the finite. Thus, the doctrine of participation preserves both dependence and distinction.

Ad III. Chaos and disorder mark creation’s finitude, not its absence of divine order. The Logos grants intelligibility even to imperfection: finitude includes the potential for failure, limitation, and conflict. Yet these apparent irrationalities become meaningful within the teleological horizon of providence. The cross remains the archetype: what appears as negation of order is, in divine wisdom, the means of a higher reconciliation. Creation’s intelligibility, therefore, is not the denial of mystery but the assurance that mystery itself is ordered to meaning.

Ad IV. Scientific explanation presupposes the intelligibility it cannot generate. The discovery of order through empirical method already assumes that the world is rationally structured and consistent—a condition theology explains as participation in the divine Logos. Natural law, symmetry, and mathematics are not self-originating; they are the formal vestiges of divine reason. Theology does not compete with science but interprets the precondition of its success. The Logos is the ground of intelligibility that science explores but cannot explain.

Ad V. Postmodern skepticism rightly observes that human language mediates all understanding, but it errs in treating meaning as purely subjective. The world is intelligible because it is spoken—not by humans first, but by the divine Word. The analogy between creation and language is not metaphorical but metaphysical: both are acts of signification. The Spirit mediates this relation by translating divine speech into created order and human comprehension. Thus, while interpretation is human, meaning is divine. The cosmos is not a text we invent but a text we inhabit.

Nota

The doctrine of creation through the Word entails a profound theological epistemology. The human capacity to know the world is itself a participation in the divine act of speech. To understand is to retrace, in thought, the creative grammar by which God called things into being.

Thus, the sciences—when rightly ordered—are not profane but theological activities: they read the grammar of creation written by the Logos. This is why the world is intelligible at all: its being is linguistic before it is material. Every true discovery is a translation of the Word’s creative logic into human comprehension.

The Spirit’s role is central. Without the Spirit, intelligibility would decay into abstraction. The Spirit causes the correspondence between human reason and divine reason—the very possibility that meaning in the world can meet meaning in the mind. We might say that the Spirit is the hermeneutical bond of creation: the one who makes the world readable and reason receptive.

Therefore, creation’s intelligibility is neither self-explanatory nor imposed from outside.It is an ongoing relation of divine communication: the Logos speaks, the Spirit interprets, the creature understands.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Creation is not a silent fact but a spoken act: esse arises from dicere.

2. The intelligibility of the world derives from its participation in the divine Logos, not from autonomous rational structure.

3. The Spirit preserves and animates this intelligibility, making the world perpetually communicative to human reason.

4. Human knowledge of creation is itself participatory—an act of re-speaking what God has already said in being.

5. The doctrine of creation and intelligibility thus completes the movement begun in revelation: the world is revelation extended into matter, speech made visible, and intelligibility the trace of God’s continuing Word.

Transitus ad Disputationem XII: De Providentia et Continuatione Causalitatis Divinae

Creation has shown itself to be the first intelligible: the world is ordered because it issues from the divine Wisdom who is the Word.
Yet the intelligibility of origin demands the constancy of continuance.
For if God’s creative act were only initial, the coherence of beings would lapse the moment they came to be. To create intelligibly is also to preserve, for the Word who calls things forth must likewise hold them in being.

Hence the question now arises: How does the divine act continue within creation without dividing itself from transcendence? Is providence but foresight, or the very presence of causality itself in all that acts? Does the creature persist by its own power, or by the ceaseless motion of the divine will that works in all things?

Therefore we advance to Disputatio XII: De Providentia et Continuatione Causalitatis Divinae, and ask how the same Word who spoke creation into being also sustains it through every moment of its existence, and how divine causality operates within the order of secondary causes without abolishing their reality or freedom.

Disputatio X: De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei

On Revelation and Knowledge of God

Quaeritur

Utrum revelatio sit actus ipsius Dei se manifestantis, non per deductionem rationis sed per communicationem Spiritus; et utrum cognitio Dei oriatur non ex speculatione humana sed ex participatione in Verbo revelato, ita ut hic actus cognoscendi simul sit passio et donum, quo Deus cognoscitur in ipso actu quo se revelat.

Whether revelation is the very act of God’s self-manifestation, not the product of rational deduction but the communication of the Spirit; and whether knowledge of God arises not from human speculation but from participation in the revealed Word, such that this act of knowing is at once reception and gift—God being known in the very act by which He reveals Himself.

Thesis

True knowledge of God (cognitio Dei) occurs only within revelation. Revelation is not the transmission of information about God but the divine act in which God gives Himself to be known. Hence, theology is not reflection upon an object but participation in a subject—the divine Word who both reveals and knows Himself.

Locus Classicus

Ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ὁ εἰπών· Ἐκ σκότους φῶς λάμψει, ὃς ἔλαμψεν ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις ἡμῶν πρὸς φωτισμὸν τῆς γνώσεως τῆς δόξης τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐν προσώπῳ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ. 

“For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” — 2 Corinthians 4:6

Paul here links revelation and cognition in a single act: the God who once created light now re-creates understanding. Knowledge of God is not attained but illumined—an inward illumination that mirrors the original fiat lux. In revelation, God remains the subject; human knowing is His radiance in us.

Ἄγνωστος μὲν ὁ Θεὸς κατ’ οὐσίαν, γνωστὸς δὲ κατὰ τὰς ἐνέργειας αὐτοῦ. 

“God is unknowable in essence, yet knowable in His energies.” — Gregorios Palamas, Triades I.3.21

Palamas captures the paradox of all theology: the divine nature transcends comprehension, yet through His self-manifesting operations (energeiai), God truly makes Himself known. Revelation is thus both concealment and disclosure—the finite intellect participates in the divine light without exhausting its source. The knowledge of God is a participation in His self-communication, not an inspection of His essence.

“Die Offenbarung ist das Geschehen, in dem Gott sich selbst mitteilt. 

“Revelation is the event in which God communicates Himself.” — Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1, §4

For Barth, revelation is not primarily the transmission of information but the self-giving of God. The content and act of revelation coincide: to know God is to encounter Him in His self-utterance. This event occurs supremely in Jesus Christ—the Word of God spoken in history and received in faith through the Spirit.

From Paul through Palamas to Barth, a coherent theology of revelation emerges. Revelation is not human ascent but divine descent: the light shines, the energies manifest, the Word communicates Himself. Knowledge of God (cognitio Dei) is therefore participatory and receptive—an act in which the finite intellect is illumined by the infinite, enabled to know truly though never comprehensively. Revelation and cognition are thus one movement from God to creature: God making Himself known, and the creature knowing in that making.

Explicatio

Revelation and cognition in theology are not parallel processes but one act viewed from two sides. When God reveals, He does not merely disclose propositions; He grants participation in His own self-understanding.

In the natural order of knowing, the subject apprehends an object. In revelation, the human knower is taken up into the act of divine self-knowledge. This is why revelation cannot be grasped through detached speculation. To know God is to be drawn into God’s own interpretive act—the Son’s eternal vision of the Father made present by the Spirit.

We may express this structurally (and then explain it):

• Let R represent revelation, the act of divine self-disclosure.

• Let K_h represent human knowledge of God, and K_d divine self-knowledge.
  The theological relation K_h ← R → K_d means: human knowing of God arises from and participates in divine knowing through revelation. The arrows indicate that revelation is the mediating act linking the two, not a neutral transmission.

Thus, the nova lingua theologiae (developed in Disputatio IX) is the very medium of revelation’s occurrence. God speaks in human words, and in those words He both gives Himself and illumines human understanding. This is why theology’s language must be both faithful to its divine source and humble in its human form—it carries the mystery of divine cognition within finite utterance.

Objectiones

Ob I. According to an empiricist epistemology, knowing God by revelation is impossible, because genuine knowledge requires sensory data or empirical verification. Since God is invisible and transcendent, a claim to divine revelation or cognition cannot meet the criteria of knowledge. Hence theology’s claim to knowledge of God is at best symbolic or metaphorical, not genuine cognition.

Ob II. If God is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly loving, then one would expect full clarity in divine revelation, so that human beings would know God unmistakably. Yet human experience is marked by ambiguity, dispute over revelation, and even ignorance of God’s being. Therefore the claim that God reveals Himself such that human cognition genuinely knows Him is doubtful.

Ob III. On the model of Karl Barth, revelation is not an object-of-knowledge but a divine event that confronts the human subject. One cannot therefore speak of “cognition of God” in the standard sense (as knowing a thing) when it comes to God. Theology must witness this event, not claim propositional knowledge. Thus the doctrine of cognition of God seems to import human epistemic categories into theology illegitimately.

Ob IV. Drawing on the apophatic tradition, one holds that God’s essence is utterly transcendent and beyond human concepts. Any attempt to speak of cognition of God risks projecting finite categories onto the infinite. Revelation may indicate God’s presence, but cognition of God qua God remains impossible. Theology must affirm unknowing rather than knowing.

Ob V. According to post-modern constructivist theology, our concepts of God are culturally, linguistically and historically conditioned. “Revelation” and “knowledge of God” are thus human constructions, not transcendent disclosures. To speak of cognition of God presumes universality of epistemic access which overlooks the diversity of human situatedness.

Responsiones

Ad I. While it is true that empirical knowledge depends on sensory input and verification, knowledge of God by revelation belongs to a different epistemic order, that of divine self-communication. God does not become an object among others but enters human cognition through the act of the Spirit. Thus revelation is not mere metaphor but the grounding of the cognitive relation: God authorises the knowing by revealing Himself. Human cognition remains finite and mediated, yet genuinely knows God insofar as it participates in the divine self-communication.

Ad II. The hiddenness of God and the ambiguity of human reception are real. Yet they do not negate that God reveals Himself; rather they indicate the finitude of human cognition and the mystery of divine freedom. Revelation is genuine, but its reception always occurs within historical, cultural, and existential constraints. Theology acknowledges the partiality of our knowledge (cf. “we see in a mirror dimly”) while affirming that cognition of God is possible because God discloses Himself. The fact that human cognition is limited does not show that cognition is impossible—instead it shows that the mode of cognition is participatory and mediated, not autonomous.

Ad III. Barth rightly emphasises revelation as event rather than object; theology is witness. Yet recognising revelation as event does not preclude cognition of God. The divine event triggers the cognitive relation: God speaks, human hearing occurs, understanding responds. Theology’s cognition of God is therefore event-grounded and relational rather than purely conceptual. The “object” known is not a thing outside but the living God who reveals. Thus knowledge of God remains propositional in one sense (we can speak truly of God) but always contextualised in the revelatory act.

Ad IV. The apophatic tradition protects the transcendence of God, but must be balanced with the cataphatic: God reveals Himself in ways we can know. The doctrine of cognition of God must affirm that while God’s essence remains ineffable, He reveals Himself truly in His acts and Word. Revelation does not exhaust God’s being but gives genuine knowledge of Him as He wills to be known. Theology holds that human cognition knows God analogically: we do not fully capture His essence, yet we know Him truly given His self-disclosure.

Ad V. Constructivism draws attention to the mediation of language and culture in theology—but revelation critiques and transcends those mediations. Knowing God by revelation means that human frameworks are not the origin of theology’s truth but the occasion for divine self-communication. Theology remains culturally embodied, yet its claim to knowledge is not simply human-constructed—it rests on God’s act of revealing. Therefore cognition of God is not eliminated by cultural mediation; instead it is enabled by the Spirit working within human contexts.

Nota

Revelation (revelatio) and knowledge (cognitio) form a single circle of divine communication. God reveals in order to be known, and He is known only in the revealing. This mutuality is the structure of the Trinitarian economy: the Father reveals through the Son; the Spirit causes that revelation to be received as knowledge within believers.

In the economy of faith, the Word that reveals becomes also the form of human knowing. Hence the ancient formula, fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”), describes not curiosity but participation: faith already contains understanding implicitly because it shares in the divine act of self-knowing.

If we recall earlier symbolic language, Tₙ, the “new language of theology,” is the linguistic body of revelation. Within this language, every true statement about God is a double movement:

• from God to man (revelation, grace descending), and

• from man to God (understanding, faith ascending).
  These two movements coincide in the Spirit, the living bridge of knowledge.

Thus, theology is not about God as distant object but about God in actu loquendi et cognoscendi—in the very act of speaking and knowing Himself within us.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Revelation is God’s own self-disclosure, not information about God but the communication of God Himself.

2. Knowledge of God (cognitio Dei) arises within this act of revelation as participation in divine self-knowing.

3. The Spirit mediates this communion, enabling the human mind to know God by sharing analogically in God’s own knowledge of Himself.

4. The nova lingua theologiae is the linguistic form of revelation—finite words rendered luminous by divine presence.

5. Therefore, theology’s cognitive act is not speculative but participatory: to know God is to dwell within the Word that both reveals and knows.

Transitus ad Disputationem XI: De Creatione et Intellegibilitate Mundi

In the tenth disputation, revelation was examined as the divine act of self-manifestation, wherein God is known not through speculative deduction but through participation in His self-communication. There we saw that knowledge of God arises when the human intellect, illumined by the Spirit, receives the Word as both the object and the principle of its own understanding. The divine act of revelation thus fulfills the very aim of cognition: to know reality as it is known by God Himself.

Yet if revelation discloses the nature of divine knowing, it also implies something about the nature of the world that is known. For the Word who reveals is the same Word through whom all things were made. Revelation, therefore, is not an intrusion into an otherwise mute cosmos but the unveiling of a world already constituted as meaningful. The divine self-disclosure presupposes a creation capable of bearing and conveying the intelligibility of God.

Hence theology must now turn from the epistemic to the ontological, from the act of knowing God to the structure of the world that makes such knowing possible. If the Word speaks, creation must be linguistic; if the Spirit illuminates, creation must be intelligible. The universe is not a collection of inert facts but a woven order of signification, a living discourse of divine wisdom in which reason and being coincide.

The question thus arises: is the intelligibility of the world a natural property of matter, or a participation in divine reason? Does the order discerned by science arise from within the world itself, or from the eternal Logos who grounds its rationality? The answer bears decisive weight for theology, for only if creation is intelligible through participation in divine wisdom can revelation and knowledge retain their unity with being.

We therefore advance to Disputationem XI: De Creatione et Intellegibilitate Mundi, wherein it will be asked how the world, created through the Word of God, possesses within itself an intelligible order; whether this intelligibility is autonomous or participatory; and how the Holy Spirit sustains this living communion between divine reason and the created cosmos, so that the world remains not merely existent, but knowable, meaningful, and good.

Disputatio IX: De Nova Lingua Theologiae

On the New Language of Theology

Quaeritur

Utrum nova lingua theologiae orta sit ex ipsa Incarnatione Verbi, qua Deus intravit humanam loquelam et eam in se assumpsit; et utrum haec lingua, Spiritu Sancto sustentata, sit finita forma veritatis infinitae, in qua sermo humanus efficitur instrumentum divinae communicationis.

Whether the new language of theology arises from the Incarnation of the Word itself, in which God entered human speech and assumed it into Himself; and whether this language, sustained by the Holy Spirit, is the finite form of infinite truth in which human discourse becomes the instrument of divine communication.

Thesis

Theology speaks in a nova lingua, a new language born from the Incarnation and animated by the Holy Spirit. This language is finite in form yet infinite in meaning, because divine truth now dwells within human words. The nova lingua is therefore the linguistic expression of the Incarnation itself: the Word made flesh becomes the Word made speech.

Locus Classicus

 

Καὶ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν, καὶ ἐθεασάμεθα τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, δόξαν ὡς μονογενοῦς παρὰ Πατρός, πλήρης χάριτος καὶ ἀληθείας.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” — John 1:14

 The Evangelist here unites ontology and logos in a single mystery: the Logos that was “in the beginning with God” becomes flesh, entering the order of signification itself. The Incarnation is not only the assumption of human substance but of human speech: divine meaning takes up finite grammar. Through this descent, language is consecrated as the very site where God’s truth may dwell—fleshly words becoming the transparent vehicles of eternal grace.

“Quod non est assumptum, non est sanatum; quod autem unitum est Deo, salvetur.”

“What is not assumed is not healed; but whatever is united to God is saved.” — Gregorius Nazianzenus, Epistula 101, ad Cledonium

Gregory’s principle, though uttered in Christological controversy, extends naturally to language: if the Word truly assumes human nature, He also assumes the full expressive capacity of that nature—its speech, its reasoning, its communicative power. The healing of humanity includes the healing of its words. Language, once fractured by sin into dispersion and ambiguity, is gathered anew in the unity of the Incarnate Logos.

 

“Le Verbe incarné est la Parole humaine par excellence; il rétablit le sens là où le langage s’était vidé de vérité.”

“The Incarnate Word is the supreme human word; He restores meaning where language had been emptied of truth.” — Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’arche de la parole (1998)

Chrétien, speaking as a phenomenologist of revelation, sees in the Word made flesh the renewal of speech itself. The divine Logos does not abolish human discourse but redeems it from interior decay, giving words once again the power to reveal rather than conceal being. Every genuinely theological utterance participates in this restoration—it is a fragment of redeemed language, resonant with the Word that speaks in and through it.

From John through Gregory to Chrétien, a single theological trajectory unfolds: the Incarnation is an event of language. The eternal Word enters not only the history of flesh but the history of words, sanctifying human discourse as a vessel of divine presence. In Christ, being and meaning coincide—the reality of God is spoken into the syntax of creation. Thus the nova lingua theologiae, the new language of theology, is not a human invention but a participation in the Incarnate Logos Himself: language reborn through grace to bear the truth of God in the grammar of the world.

Explicatio

Theology’s language is not simply inherited from the old world but is reborn through the Word made flesh. In the old grammar of reason, contradiction signified error; in the new grammar of faith, contradiction becomes revelation. The nova lingua is thus a theological grammar where God is known sub contrario, under the sign of what appears its opposite.

Luther called this transformation a “new grammar” (nova grammatica), for one must learn to say that God is hidden in weakness, that death is life, that the cross is glory. This is not mere rhetoric but a new logic of being. In the nova lingua, the syntax of heaven passes into the phonemes of earth.

Formally, we can describe the change in this way: Let Tₒ denote the old language (the grammar of nature and reason) and Tₙ the new language (the grammar of faith). The transition Tₒ → Tₙ represents the Spirit’s act of translating finite speech into a vessel of divine meaning. This arrow does not mark replacement but transfiguration: what was merely human becomes theophanic through grace.

The nova lingua therefore bears within itself an inherent tension; it is simultaneously grammatical and miraculous. It possesses rules of form and order (syntax) yet overflows them through divine content (semantics). New wineskin is needed to hold new wine. To speak theologically is to live within this paradox of incarnation: finite speech filled with infinite truth.

Objectiones

Ob I. If theology requires a nova lingua, it implies that ordinary human language is inadequate to speak of God, making revelation unintelligible to natural reason.

Ob II. A “new grammar” seems to introduce irrationality into theology, reducing faith to paradox and contradiction.

Ob III. If God assumes human language, divine truth becomes bound to history and culture, losing universality.

Responsiones

Ad I. Ordinary language is not destroyed but assumed. The nova lingua transforms the old. The Incarnation does not render reason obsolete; it fulfills it, giving speech a deeper telos. The words of faith remain human, but their authorization comes from the Spirit, not from philosophical sufficiency.

Ad II. The new grammar is not irrational but hyper-rational. It is an order of meaning higher than human logic can generate. Paradox is not nonsense; it is sanctified tension, revealing the finite’s openness to the infinite. The “contradictions” of faith are signs that reason has touched mystery.

Ad III. The Word’s entry into history does not limit truth but universalizes it. By assuming particular speech, God redeems all speech. The universality of the gospel is secured precisely in its historical concreteness: the eternal speaks within the temporal.

Nota

The nova lingua of theology is not merely new vocabulary but new being-in-speech. It marks the union of divine causality and human language. To speak in this language is already to participate in God’s self-communication.

Its structure mirrors the Incarnation:

• Finite form: human grammar, word order, syntax.

• Infinite content: divine meaning, given by the Spirit.

• Mediating act: the Spirit’s authorization (felicity) that makes the finite capable of bearing the infinite.

Thus, each true theological statement is a microcosm of the Word made flesh. The finite (word) does not contain the infinite (God), yet it truly conveys it, because the Spirit joins them without confusion or separation.

The nova lingua does not function as a metalanguage standing above the old order of speech but as a new object language born within it. Through the Spirit, the old grammar of reason is inverted into the new grammar of faith. What was formerly sign of absence becomes sign of presence; what once denoted defeat now names victory. The nova lingua thus transforms rather than transcends the old: it is human speech re-created in the form of divine contradiction.

This linguistic participation is not accidental to theology; it is its very essence. Theology exists only because divine communication has entered human speech.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. The nova lingua of theology arises from the Incarnation, where divine meaning assumes human form.

2. This new language is finite in grammar yet infinite in signification, sustained by the Spirit’s act of authorization.

3. The grammar of faith (Tₙ) both fulfills and transfigures the grammar of reason (Tₒ), producing a linguistic structure in which opposites become sites of revelation.

4. The Spirit functions as the mediating cause of this transformation, making theological language both truthful and efficacious.

5. Theology’s nova lingua is thus the ongoing miracle of Pentecost—the continual creation of meaning whereby human words, caught up in grace, speak the infinite Word.

Transitus ad Disputationem X: De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei

The new language of theology has shown that divine speech does not merely signify but brings forth what it declares. In it, words are not passive instruments of representation but active vehicles of communication; they are the finite forms through which infinite meaning becomes manifest. The verbum theologicum thus participates in the performative power of the Verbum divinum: it both reveals and effects, both declares and gives.

Yet this new mode of divine speech raises a deeper question concerning its reception. If the Word speaks through human language, how does the human intellect hear? If divine utterance is creative and efficacious, how does it become understanding in the one to whom it is spoken? The problem of theological language thus opens into the mystery of revelation and knowledge. The act that communicates truth must also illumine the mind that receives it, for revelation without cognition would be a light shining in darkness without being apprehended.

The Incarnate Word, who assumes human speech, also assumes the conditions of human knowing. Revelation, therefore, is not an external testimony appended to reason but the transformation of reason itself through participation in divine light. The same Spirit who causes right speech about God now causes right knowledge of God: the one who animates the tongue also illumines the intellect. In revelation, the utterance that creates understanding becomes the very act of divine self-communication, and knowledge becomes the creature’s participation in that self-manifesting act.

We therefore advance to Disputationem X: De Revelatione et Cognitione Dei, wherein it will be asked whether revelation imparts knowledge by external testimony or by internal participation; how the finite intellect, addressed by the infinite Word, can truly know the One who speaks; and whether divine self-disclosure is received as a message among others or as the very event by which human understanding is gathered into the eternal knowing of God.

Disputatio VIII: De Manifestatione Eschatologica Veritatis et Summarium

On the Eschatological Manifestation of Truth

Quaeritur

Utrum veritas theologica in hoc saeculo sit tantum participata et sub signo fidei, sed in consummatione saeculorum manifestetur in gloria; et utrum haec manifestatio eschatologica veritatis sit plena revelatio eius quod nunc in Spiritu dicitur et creditur, ubi verbum et res, fides et visio, felicitas et veritas perfecte coincident.

Whether theological truth in this age is only participatory and veiled under the sign of faith, but in the consummation of the ages will be revealed in glory; and whether this eschatological manifestation of truth is the full unveiling of what is now spoken and believed in the Spirit, wherein word and reality, faith and vision, felicity and truth perfectly coincide.

Thesis

Theology’s present truth is partial and anticipatory, grounded in faith’s participation in divine speech. Its consummation will occur eschatologically, when what is now felicitous and true in faith becomes manifest in glory. The eschaton is not the abolition of theology but its fulfillment, the moment when the grammar of faith becomes the language of sight.

Locus classicus

ἄρτι γὰρ βλέπομεν δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον· ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12

In this brief yet profound verse, Paul articulates the whole tension of the pilgrim intellect: knowledge in via and knowledge in patria. The first is mediated, refracted, and partial—δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι—as if the divine light reached us through the veiled surface of creaturely signs. The second is immediate, unveiled, and total: the intellect seeing God as He is, because known through being known by Him. The movement from mirror to face, from enigma to vision, marks not a change in the object of truth but the transformation of the knower through glory.

“Ultima et perfecta beatitudo non potest esse nisi in visione divinae essentiae.”

“Ultimate and perfect beatitude can consist only in the vision of the divine essence.” — Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–II, q.3, a.8

For Aquinas, Paul’s “face to face” vision is the terminus of all intellectual desire. Faith and reason both tend toward that consummation in which the intellect no longer participates in divine truth by likeness or analogy, but beholds the divine essence itself through an act infused by grace. This is not the annihilation of participation but its perfection—the finite intellect sustained by God to see God in God’s own light.

“Die Schau Gottes ist die Erfüllung der Theologie, die endgültige Selbsttransparenz des Glaubens.”

“The vision of God is the fulfillment of theology—the final self-transparency of faith.” — Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik III (1987)

Balthasar reinterprets the Pauline contrast through the lens of theological aesthetics: faith is already participation in divine light, but glory is its full manifestation. The same form that once appeared in veiled splendor under the cross will be seen openly in its radiance. Eschatological knowing does not replace faith’s truth but unveils its inner luminosity.

From Paul through Aquinas to Balthasar, the same arc of vision extends: the knowledge of faith and the knowledge of glory are not two different truths but two modes of one participation. Faith apprehends God in mystery, through signs and mediation; glory apprehends Him in presence, through union and illumination. The eschatological promise is therefore epistemological and ontological at once: the finite intellect is perfected not by transcending participation but by its consummation—when the mirror gives way to the face, and the one known in part becomes the light in which all knowing is complete.

Explicatio

Every theological statement in this life belongs to the order of faith. It is true, but its truth is mediated through language, symbol, and participation. The felicity of theological utterance (FT) secures right speaking; modeling links it to reality (TC); participation extends it into being. Yet all these remain partial reflections of the divine Word, awaiting fulfillment.

To put it in the language we have developed:

In the present, FT + Modeling = TC, but in the eschaton, FT = TC, for the act of speaking and the reality spoken will be one.

In the age of faith, truth requires mediation in language, symbols, sacraments. In the age of glory, mediation is not abolished but transfigured: it becomes immediate transparency to divine life. The “truth conditions” of theology (what must be real for theology’s words to be true) are themselves finally realized in unveiled communion.

Thus the eschatological manifestation of truth is not a new truth but the manifestation of what faith has always confessed. The finite will not become infinite, but will participate in infinite clarity.

In this sense, theologia eschatologica is not speculation about the end but the horizon toward which all theology tends: the point where the felicity of speech becomes the felicity of being.

Objectiones

Obiectio I. If truth will one day be seen rather than believed, theology will cease; there will be no more faith or discourse.

Obiectio II. If the eschaton reveals all, then current theological statements are provisional and unreliable.

Obiectio III. To speak of “manifestation” suggests a temporal unfolding; but God’s truth is eternal and unchanging.

Responsiones

Ad I. Theology will not cease but be transformed. The form of faith (trust in the unseen) will give way to the form of vision (love’s direct knowledge), yet the content of theology will be consummated, not abolished. The language of faith becomes praise; its discourse becomes doxology. Theology’s end is liturgical, not silent.

Ad II. Present theology is reliable because it is already true in participation. What changes is not its truth but its mode of access. The eschaton adds nothing new in content, only the perfection of immediacy. The mirror is replaced by face-to-face vision, not by contradiction.

Ad III. God’s truth is eternal; what changes is our reception of it. Manifestation belongs to creatures, not to God. In the eschaton, the eternal truth will shine without obscurity within the redeemed order. Time is not destroyed but gathered into divine light.

Nota

The eschatological manifestation of truth fulfills the entire logic of theology’s movement.

• In T, we speak under grace.

• In modeling, we interpret language within being.

• In participation, we live that being in God.

• In the eschaton, we see what we have lived and spoken.

Thus, theology’s formal order—grammar, felicity, truth, causality, participation—finds its telos in manifestation (manifestatio).

This manifestation is not the dissolution of mediation but its perfection. The sacraments will no longer signify but will be what they signified. The church’s language will no longer interpret but will be identical with praise. The believer will no longer speak about God but in God.

If we wish to describe this symbolically (and then explain it immediately), we could say:

Tₑ → V, where Tₑ represents theology in the age of faith and V represents the vision of God in glory. The arrow “→” marks not replacement but transfiguration: the Spirit’s act of transforming mediated participation into direct presence.

Hence, theology’s end is not silence but song; not knowledge replaced, but knowledge perfected in communion.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Theological truth in the present age is real yet participatory, grounded in faith’s participation in divine speech.

2. The eschatological manifestation of truth is the unveiling of that same truth in glory, when mediation gives way to immediacy.

3. The felicity of theological speech and the truth of divine being converge perfectly in the eschaton; faith becomes sight, confession becomes communion.

4. The Spirit, who now mediates participation through grace, will then reveal it in glory; the same divine causality remains, but its mode changes from hidden to manifest.

5. Theology’s telos is doxological: in the eschatological manifestation of truth, theology becomes the eternal praise of God, the verbum that has finally become vision.

Transitus ad Disputationem IX: De Nova Lingua Theologiae

In the eighth disputation, it was shown that theological truth, though now hidden under the sign of faith, will be fully manifest in glory, that the participation of the finite in divine truth will find its consummation when word and reality, faith and vision, felicity and truth perfectly coincide. There theology attained its eschatological horizon: the eternal disclosure of that which is now known only through the Spirit.

Yet even within time, the eternal has entered history. The same Word through whom all things were made has taken on human speech, so that divine truth, once hidden, might begin to be spoken within the limits of creaturely language. The eschatological light that awaits us at the end of time has already broken into the world in the form of language transfigured by incarnation.

Thus theology, while it points toward the consummation of truth, also arises from its historical advent. The verbum incarnatum is not only the object of theology but its condition of possibility. Human words, assumed by the Word and animated by the Spirit, become instruments of divine self-communication. In this nova lingua theologiae, the infinite speaks in the finite, and the finite answers within the act of divine speech itself.

We therefore advance to Disputationem IX: De Nova Lingua Theologiae, in which it will be asked how the Incarnation of the Word gives rise to a new language of theology, to how it is that divine truth, entering human words, transforms them from mere signs into participations in the eternal speaking of God.

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Summarium Ordinis Theologiae

Ordo theologiae est ascensus Spiritus a verbo ad esse, a fide ad visionem. Sicut Deus in Verbo suo mundum creavit et in Spiritu vivificavit, ita in eodem Spiritu sermo fidelis formatur, veritas constituitur, et gloria manifestatur.

The order of theology is the ascent of the Spirit from word to being, from faith to vision. As God created the world by His Word and enlivened it by His Spirit, so in that same Spirit faithful speech is formed, truth established, and glory revealed.

1. The Grammar of Faith (Disputatio I)

Theology begins as a language (T), a Spirit-given grammar that orders Christian confession. Before theology can be true, it must be speakable rightly. The Spirit grants the Church a rule-governed discourse whose coherence—its felicity—is the precondition of meaning. Here theology learns to speak bene dicere before it dares to prove.

2. The Modeling of Faith (Disputatio II)

What is rightly spoken must then be interpreted within the order of being. To model T is to relate its expressions to divine reality. Thus, the language of faith becomes truth-bearing when it is inserted into a model of what exists under God’s causality.Theology moves from grammar to ontology: the Word that orders speech also orders being.

3. The Spirit and the Boundary of Speech (Disputatio III)

The Holy Spirit defines the frontier between what may and may not be said. He is both the form and the breath of theological discourse, distinguishing felicitous speech (T_in) from unfit speech (T_out). This boundary of felicity is grace itself: the mark that language, though finite, lives by divine authorization.

4. The Twofold Truth of Theology (Disputatio IV)

Theology’s truth is double in aspect:

• internal truth — the coherence of speech in the Spirit (felicitas),

• external truth — the adequacy of that speech in being (veritas).
  

• These are not two truths but two dimensions of the same divine act: the Word that speaks and the Word that is. Their unity is Christ, who is both meaning and reality.

5. The Relation of Felicity and Truth (Disputatio V)

Felicity and truth are thus distinct but inseparable. Felicity is the Spirit’s formal causality in language; truth is the same Spirit’s fulfillment in being. The felicitous word awaits its eschatological verification: what is spoken rightly in faith will be made fully true in glory. Hence, theology’s discourse is a living anticipation of divine causality.

6. Divine Causality and Theological Speech (Disputatio VI)

The Spirit who authorizes theology’s language also causes it. Divine causality is not merely efficient but communicative: the God who causes being also causes speech. Every true theological utterance participates in the same causality by which God creates. Theology therefore becomes theophysical language—an act of participation in God’s self-speaking.

7. Participation and the Ontology of Theosis (Disputatio VII)

In theosis, divine causality attains its ontological depth. The creature does not merely imitate God but participates in His perfections by grace. Each divine property (D_G) has its participated correlate (D) in the believer; this relation, mediated by the Spirit, constitutes the new being of the redeemed. Participation thus unites linguistic felicity and ontological transformation in one movement of grace.

8. The Eschatological Manifestation of Truth (Disputatio VIII)

The final perfection of theology occurs when faith becomes sight. The felicity of speech (FT) and the truth of being (TC) converge in eschatological manifestation. Theology’s mediation gives way to immediacy; its confession becomes communion. In the end, theology is not abolished but transfigured—the Word that once spoke of God becomes the song of those who see Him.

Nota

The eight disputationes together trace theology’s full formal movement:

Aspect	Mode	Principal Agent	Fulfillment
Grammar	Language formed in the Spirit	Spirit as giver of form	Right speech (felicity)
Semantics	Interpretation within being	Spirit as mediator	Truth-bearing modeling
Authorization	Boundary of discourse	Spirit as discerner	Inclusion within T_in
Truth	Internal and external adequacy	Spirit as unifier	Unity of word and being
Causality	Divine communication	Spirit as cause	Speech made efficacious
Participation	Ontological sharing	Spirit as transformer	Theosis
Manifestation	Eschatological unveiling	Spirit as revealer	Vision of God (visio Dei)

Through these stages, theology passes from the syntax of faith to the ontology of glory. It begins as the grammar of divine discourse and ends as the manifestation of divine life.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Theology, as scientia Spiritus, proceeds in ordered stages from speech to being, from felicity to truth, from faith to glory.

2. This order is not temporal but logical and participatory: each stage presupposes and deepens the last.

3. The Spirit is the single causal agent across the entire ordo—the one who gives language, grounds truth, causes participation, and manifests glory.

4. Theological reason is therefore doxological: its beginning, progress, and end are all in the praise of God.

5. In the eschatological manifestation of truth, theology reaches its own perfection: the Word spoken truly in faith becomes the Word beheld eternally in light.