Disputatio XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis

On Humean Regularities

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum leges naturae sint tantum descriptiones constantium eventuum in mundo, an vere exprimant necessarias rationes essendi quae exigunt causam extra ipsam seriem eventuum.

It is asked whether the laws of nature are merely descriptions of the constant conjunctions of events in the world, or whether they express necessary relations of being that require a cause beyond the series of events themselves.

Thesis

The Humean account of natural law as mere regularity confuses description with necessity and drains law from having real ontological force. If laws are nothing but patterns within phenomena, then the world lacks any genuine principle of order. Accordingly, to recover necessity, the finite must once again refer beyond itself to an infinite ground in which the possibility of law is constituted.

Locus Classicus

“He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”
— Matthew 5:45

The constancy of divine action in nature, understood here as fidelitas Dei, was read by Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 147.18) and Aquinas (ST I.103.8) as evidence that natural regularities are not self-existent but proceed from a sustaining cause. Luther, in his lectures on Genesis, described the continuance of natural order as the “mask of God” (Larva Dei), behind which divine agency preserves creation. Thus, constancy itself is a sign of dependence, not autonomy.

Explicatio

The Humean conception of law arose in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), where David Hume denied that we ever perceive necessary connection between events. From this epistemic premise, he concluded that laws of nature are nothing more than uniform patterns of experience: a "constant conjunction" of similar events leading the mind to expect one after the other. On this view, necessity is not in things but in thought; it is a “habit of imagination.”

In the twentieth century, David Lewis sought to preserve Hume’s metaphysics while providing a systematic account of laws. In A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance (1980) and Philosophical Papers, vol. II (1986), Lewis articulated the Best-System Analysis (BSA) in which laws are the generalizations that occur given the axioms of the simplest and strongest deductive system that best summarizes all particular facts: the “Humean mosaic” of local matters of fact. A law, then, is whatever appears in the optimal balance between simplicity and strength in describing the total history of the world.

The appeal of this position is its ontological economy: no mysterious necessities, only patterns; no governing principles, only description.
Yet its cost is high: it leaves the world without internal order or modal depth. The regularity of events may be observed, but the reason for that regularity is left unspoken. On Humeanism, the universe is a sequence without syntax, a film of contiguous frames in which connection is projected by the mind. In such a world, the word law is metaphor; nothing obliges events to recur, and the distinction between possible and impossible collapses into mere fact and non-fact.

Theologically, this view is untenable. It denies both creation’s intelligibility and divine fidelity. To call law a mental convenience is to deny that the world speaks truthfully of its Maker. Reason, however, testifies otherwise, for the constancy of nature presupposes an underlying act of being that makes regularity possible.

Obiectiones

Ob I. Already in 1748 David Hume had argued that all necessity arises from habit. We never perceive any power or connection in nature. Therefore, what we call a law is only an observed uniformity in experience.

Ob II. In 1980 David Lewis claimed that to treat laws as abstract necessities adds ontological baggage. The world is a mosaic of local facts. The “Best System” captures their pattern without positing mysterious connections.

Ob III. Empiricists say that science requires only prediction, not metaphysical grounding. Whether laws “exist” beyond description is irrelevant to the success of physics.

Ob IV. According to nominalism, the notion of an infinite truthmaker is incoherent. Necessity is linguistic convenience; to speak of grounding is to confuse semantics with ontology.

Ob V. Liberal theology avers that reading divine causality into natural regularity is to return to pre-critical metaphysics. Lawfulness may express God’s reliability metaphorically, but it requires no metaphysical participation.

Responsiones

Ad I. Observation alone yields correlation, not connection. If necessity were merely mental habit, then any sequence could become law through repetition, which contradicts both experience and reason. Our recognition of constant conjunction presupposes that reality itself is structured for recurrence.

Ad II. The Best-System Analysis transforms the ontological into the epistemic. It tells us what generalizations we find simplest, not why the world is ordered so as to be summarized. The balance of simplicity and strength explains convenience, not causation.

Ad III. Science as practice may ignore metaphysical foundations, but the intelligibility of science presupposes them. If the universe were pure contingency, induction itself would be unjustified. The success of empirical prediction depends upon a real order antecedent to observation.

Ad IV. To reduce necessity to language is self-refuting, for the reduction itself claims necessity. Semantic regularity cannot explain ontological stability. Laws must be more than linguistic; they must participate in a structure of being.

Ad V. The metaphysical reading of divine causality is not regression but completion. Scripture’s description of the world’s constancy as divine faithfulness grounds natural order in personal being. To deny participation is to make the creation silent about its Creator.

Nota 

This disputation confronts the decisive modern rupture in the understanding of law and causality. Whereas the preceding disputations discerned in natural order the reflection of divine reason and the imprint of legibus primitivis, modern empiricism, epitomized by Hume, denies that any necessity or intrinsic connection binds events together. According to this view, so-called “laws of nature” are but habits of observation—regular successions that the mind projects as necessity out of custom. The world thus loses its inner ratio; causality becomes expectation, and order a fiction of the perceiving subject.

In this disputation we examine the implications of this Humean reduction. Can theology accept a cosmos governed only by constant conjunction without undermining the very possibility of providence, creation, and divine intelligibility? If natural law is but descriptive regularity, how can the world be a medium of revelation or a site of divine action? The question touches not only metaphysics but also epistemology, for in the collapse of necessity the mind itself loses participation in the rational structure of being.

Therefore Disputatio XXV tests the theological coherence of the modern naturalist paradigm. It contrasts the participatory order of lex aeterna and legibus primitivis with the secularized uniformity of Humean regularity, seeking to determine whether a purely empirical account of law can sustain the intelligibility of creation or whether it inevitably dissolves the Logos into the contingencies of perception. In this way, it prepares the path toward the retrieval of a richer metaphysical realism in Disputatione XXVI: De Immanentia Universali et Necessitate.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. The Humean and Lewisian accounts evacuate natural law of real necessity. By reducing law to description, they destroy the very distinction between order and coincidence.

2. Regularity theory fails the coordination test. It cannot explain why distinct patterns harmonize across domains,why electromagnetism and gravitation, time and entropy, compose one coherent cosmos.

3. Reason’s demand for sufficient cause (PSR) re-emerges. If law is mere pattern, PSR is violated, and intelligibility perishes.The mind’s refusal to accept brute regularity is itself evidence of participation in an Infinite intelligibility.

4. The finite order requires a ground that is both necessary and self-explanatory. Such a ground cannot lie within the Humean mosaic; it must transcend it while remaining immanent as its condition.

5. Hence, the constancy of nature is participatory: the world’s regularities exist not ex se but per participationem in the Infinite act of being. What the theologian calls divine providence, the philosopher names the unconditioned truthmaker of order.

Therefore, the Humean view of law as regularity fails both scientifically and metaphysically. While it can describe, it cannot explain; while it can record, it cannot ground. Thus, the world is not a mosaic of inert facts but a living participation in the Logos, in whom all order holds together.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXVI

In the preceding disputation it was shown that the Humean conception of law as mere regularity severs the bond between mind and world, dissolving necessity into habit and rendering the cosmos unintelligible from within. The world thus appears as a theater of sequences without reasons—an ordered surface lacking interior logos. Against this view, theology must ask whether there remains a deeper mode of necessity, one not imposed from without nor abstracted by thought, but immanent in things themselves as their participation in divine reason.

This question turns our attention from the empirical pattern to the metaphysical structure that makes such pattern possible. If order is real, it must inhere in being as such; universals must be operative within the concrete, not floating above it. How, then, are these universalia immanentia to be conceived? Are they divine ideas within things, the ontological forms of their participation in the Logos, or the very conditions of their acting and being acted upon?

Therefore we advance to Disputationem XXVI: De Universalibus Immanentibus et Necessitatione, in which we shall inquire how necessity arises from within the order of being itself, how universals dwell in the particular as formative presence, and how through this immanent structure the world remains transparent to the intelligibility of God.

Disputatio XXIV: De Legibus Primitivis

On Primitive Laws

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum leges naturae possint esse facta prima et inexplicata intra ordinem finitum, an vero talis primitivismus sit contradictorius intentioni rationis, quae exigit ut ipsa necessitas habeat causam suam.

It is asked whether the laws of nature can be primitive and unexplained facts within the finite order, or whether such primitivism contradicts reason’s own demand that necessity itself must have a cause.

Thesis

Law primitivism fails as an account of the laws of nature because it secures its necessity only by denying its own explanation. To treat the deepest, most intelligible features of reality as the least explicable is to invert the order of reason. If the finite claims to ground its own lawfulness, it asserts a self-sufficiency it cannot justify. Accordingly, the necessity of the finite’s own laws implies dependence upon an infinite truthmaker.

Locus Classicus

“By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible… and in him all things hold together.”
— Colossians 1:16–17

Aquinas comments on this passage: “Ordo naturae participatio est legis aeternae” (ST I.91.2 ad 3). Augustine had earlier taught that “lex temporalis a lege aeterna derivatur” (De Libero Arbitrio I.6). The tradition thus affirms that the order and necessity observed within creation participate in the eternal act of divine reason. Against this background, primitivism, which asserts that the finite holds together of itself, appears as a metaphysical contradiction within Christian and classical realism alike.

Explicatio

Law primitivism, as developed by Tim Maudlin in The Metaphysics Within Physics (Oxford University Press, 2007) and later refined in Philosophy of Physics: Laws, Explanation, and Symmetry (Princeton University Press, 2019), holds that the fundamental laws of nature are ontologically primitive; they are basic facts of the world that govern what is physically possible. As such, they are neither reducible to regularities among events nor analyzable in terms of universals or dispositions.

Central to Maudlin’s view is the notion of modal governance. According to this doctrine, laws are not descriptive generalizations but governing realities that determine the modal structure of the universe, that is, they determine the domain of what can and cannot occur. The laws of nature are “facts of governance,” possessing intrinsic modal authority; they make things behave lawfully, rather than merely record how they behave.

The philosophical motive behind this position is clear. Humean accounts reduce necessity to description; Maudlin restores it as an objective feature of reality. Unfortunately, by making the laws themselves fundamental, primitivism converts what should be explained into the ultimate explainer. The very intelligibility of the cosmos—its coherence, uniformity, and mathematical precision—becomes that about which reason is forbidden further to inquire. The result is a paradoxical ontology in which the finite behaves as if it were self-sufficient and necessary

Maudlin’s “governing facts” thus occupy an ambiguous status: they are finite in existence but infinite in function. They are everywhere present, universally binding, and unconditioned by what they govern. Primitivism thereby yields what may be called functional theism without God: the cosmos as self-grounded lawgiver. 

Philosophically, this position is unstable. If laws are grounded, they are not primitive; if ungrounded, their modal authority is arbitrary. To recognize necessity but deny its cause is to paralyze reason at the point of its deepest activity.

Obiectiones

Ob I. According to Maudlin, every chain of explanation must terminate somewhere. Laws are where it properly ends, for they make explanation possible. To ask for a ground of law is to misunderstand law’s ontological role as modal governor.

Ob II. Empirical realism holds that seeking a metaphysical ground for laws exceeds the limits of science and contributes nothing to explanation or prediction.

Ob III. Necessitarian naturalism opines that necessity is simply a feature of the finite. If the world exhibits regularity, that regularity is ultimate. Therefore, to postulate an Infinite truthmaker is gratuitous metaphysics.

Ob IV. Antifoundationalists argue that every worldview ends in some ungrounded posit: the theist in God, the naturalist in law. To stop with God rather than law merely renames the brute.

Ob V. Theological minimalism asserts that Scripture itself portrays the world as ordered by fixed ordinances: “He set them in their courses.” Hence, the lawful structure of nature may rightly be regarded as primitive, though originally created.

Responsiones

Ad I. Explanation must terminate, but not in the arbitrary. A proper terminus is self-explanatory, not self-assertive. To stop at finite laws is to call contingent necessity ultimate. Modal governance, if real, cannot itself be without a governor; an ungrounded modal authority is a sovereignty without legitimacy.

Ad II. Science is methodologically modest but metaphysically neutral. Its refusal to ask “why these laws?” does not license the claim that no answer exists. Philosophy begins where empirical explanation ends.

Ad III. The finite cannot generate its own necessity. Coordination among laws, constants, and symmetries presupposes a unity transcending each. To make the contingent itself the source of the necessary is to conflate participation with origin.

Ad IV. The Infinite is not a renamed brute fact. A brute fact is contingent yet unexplained, while the infinite is necessary per se. Appeal to the Infinite transforms unintelligibility into intelligibility, grounding rather than relocating the unexplained.

Ad V. The “courses” of creation imply stability of operation, not independence of being. Biblical lawfulness manifests divine fidelity, not divine withdrawal. Autonomy of process does not entail autonomy of existence.

Nota

The present disputation turns from the visible order of nature to the hidden foundations of order itself. Having established that the laws of nature manifest divine intelligibility, we now inquire into those deeper determinations of being by which such lawfulness becomes possible. For before the empirical and the measurable, there must be that which gives measure, the primordial laws (legibus primitivis) through which the world receives form, regularity, and stability.

These primitive laws are not secondary generalizations abstracted by reason, but the interior articulations of the Logos within creation. They express the first participation of the finite in divine reason, the silent grammar by which being becomes intelligible. In them the ontological and the logical meet: they are at once the metaphysical structure of the world and the semantic condition of its knowability.

Thus this disputation seeks to recover a pre-modern sense of law, not as an external decree imposed upon matter, but as an intrinsic mode of divine order, an eternal ratio in which creaturely reality is constituted. In doing so, it prepares for the next inquiry, where this participatory vision will be set in contrast to the empirical reduction of law to mere regularity in Disputatione XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Law primitivism secures modal governance by fiat; it asserts necessity without explaining it. It halts reason precisely where reason most demands sufficiency.

2. The finite cannot serve as its own lawgiver. A world of contingent things and relations cannot contain the source of its universal necessity. “Necessary facts” arising contingently are self-contradictory.

3. The appeal to an infinite ground is therefore a philosophical, not merely theological, conclusion. The rational structure of the finite world points beyond itself to an unconditioned truthmaker, to an infinite act by which self-explanatory being confers order and modal unity upon the finite.

4. In this light, participatory ontology emerges as reason’s completion. If the infinite grounds the finite’s necessity, every law, structure, and regularity exists per participationem in that infinite act. Law is the trace of participation, and modal governance is the finite expression of the Infinite’s continuous act of holding-together.

5. The statement in ipso omnia constant thus names not a pious mystery but a metaphysical necessity. Theology and philosophy converge: what theology calls Word and Spirit, philosophy recognizes as the infinite cause through which all finite law receives its being and coherence.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXV

In the preceding disputation it was proposed that beneath the empirical laws discerned by science lie legibus primitivis, the primordial determinations of intelligibility that make any ordered cosmos possible. These were not conceived as mere abstractions from observed events but as ontological articulations of divine wisdom: the interior syntax of creation itself. Law, in this view, is not imposed upon matter from without but proceeds from the very being of the world as participated in the eternal Logos.

Yet such an account stands in marked contrast to a dominant modern alternative. Since the Enlightenment, many have denied any intrinsic ground of law, holding instead that what we call “laws of nature” are only descriptions of habitual regularities, patterns of succession abstracted by the mind from experience. In this Humean interpretation, necessity is dissolved into custom, and causality becomes a projection of expectation rather than a feature of reality.

Therefore we advance to Disputationem XXV: De Regularitatibus Humeanis, in which it shall be examined whether law can be reduced to mere regularity, whether necessity has any place within a purely empirical framework, and how the theological conception of Logos-grounded order confronts the skeptical naturalism of modern thought.

Disputatio XXIII: De Fundamento Legum Naturae

On the Ground of the Laws of Nature

Quaeritur

Quaeritur utrum mundus finitus per se possit rationem reddere regularitatum quae in ipso obtinent, an vero requirat veritatis factorem infinitum qui earum necessitatem et convenientiam inter proprietates constituat.

It is asked whether the finite world can of itself give an account of the regularities that obtain within it, or whether it requires an infinite truthmaker that constitutes both their necessity and their coordination among properties.

Thesis

No finite reason can adequately explain the necessity of natural law without recourse to an unconditioned truthmaker. Every attempt to ground lawfulness within the finite order ends either in brute fact, in mere description, or in regress. The necessity and coordination of the finite therefore presuppose an infinite ground.

Locus Classicus

“He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things… for in him we live and move and have our being.”
— Acts 17:25, 28

Patristic commentators from Athanasius (Contra Gentes 41) to Augustine (De Trinitate I.6) read Paul’s words as denying that creatures possess in themselves either being or order. Aquinas echoed this interpretation (ST I.105.5): “Since the being of a creature depends upon the Creator’s influx, so too does its operation and order.” Thus the tradition rejects any claim that the finite law of things is self-grounding.

Explicatio

Since the rise of modern science, the regularities of nature have been taken as the paradigm of intelligibility. The deductive–nomological model of explanation sought to show how particular happenings follow from general laws, much as the medieval astronomer derived eclipses from celestial mechanics. Yet this model silently presupposes the existence and stability of those laws; it uses them without explaining why they obtain.

Microphysical explanation was meant to improve upon this by tracing macro-level regularities to the behavior of elementary particles. But it soon became clear that the very behavior of these particles -- obeying field equations, conservation laws, and symmetry constraints -- rests again upon ultimate regularities that are themselves unexplained.

Accordingly, the philosophical task is to ask what truthmaker accounts for the existence and necessity of these basic laws. Must we accept them as primitive features of the finite, or do they point beyond the finite to an infinite ground making possible their order and coordination?

The following trilemma arises:

1. Primitivism holds that laws are ultimate facts of the finite world, self-standing and unexplained.

2. Descriptivism claims that laws are linguistic or mathematical summaries of what happens, containing no real necessity.

3. Those allowing an Infinite Ground argue that laws possess genuine necessity only if their order is constituted by an unconditioned truthmaker that grounds their coordination.

The first halts inquiry; the second dissolves necessity; only the third preserves both intelligibility and modality.

Objectiones

Objectio I: The empiricist claims that science does not seek metaphysical grounds but predictive success. To demand a truthmaker beyond empirical law is to mistake the limits of scientific explanation for a deficiency in reality itself.

Objectio II.  Primitivists like Maudlin declare that laws are fundamental ontological features. To ask “why these laws?” is a category mistake. Explanation ends rightly where necessity begins.

Objectio III.  Humeans like David Lewis say that there are no governing laws over and above the mosaic of events. Laws merely describe the best systematization of what occurs. Necessity is a manner of speaking, not a metaphysical tie.

Objectio IV.  Immanent realists like David Armstrong argue that immanent universals and their relations of necessitation suffice. The finite already contains within itself the structures that make lawfulness intelligible. No appeal to an infinite ground is required.

Objectio V. Kant and transcendental philosophy generally hold that necessity belongs to the conditions of human cognition, not to things in themselves. To seek a truthmaker beyond the phenomenal order is to step outside the bounds of reason.

Responsiones

Ad 1. Predictive adequacy is not metaphysical sufficiency. Scientific method may stop at empirical laws, but reason does not. To confuse epistemic limits with ontological closure is to mistake what we cannot measure for what cannot be.

Ad 2. To call a law “primitive” is to give it the status of a brute fact, and this is an admission that it is unexplained. Primitivism therefore secures necessity only by halting explanation, treating the finite as self-grounding without warrant.

Ad 3. The best-system analysis reduces necessity to description. But description, however elegant, cannot make a law necessary. It says how the world behaves, not why it must. Humeanism thus exchanges being for grammar.

Ad 4. Relations among finite universals can explain why certain properties co-occur, but not why these universals and these relations exist. The “necessitation” relation itself either regresses or becomes primitive. The coordination of all such relations across the cosmos still calls for a higher unity.

Ad 5. Transcendental necessity explains how we must think the world, not how the world is. If the phenomenal order is intelligible only through the assumption of stable laws, then reason itself points beyond phenomena to that which makes stability possible.

Determinatio

The search for the ground of natural law thus faces a decisive choice.

If we remain within the finite, explanation ends either in brute fact (primitivism) or in empty description (Humeanism). If we turn inward to the structures of the finite (immanent realism), we face regress or unexplained selection. The explanatory trilemma of bruteness, vacuity, or transcendence is therefore unavoidable.

From this it follows that the finite cannot be complete unto itself. The very intelligibility of law points toward an unconditioned truthmaker—an Infinite ground that confers necessity and coordinates the manifold of the finite. The appeal to such an Infinite is not a theological excess but the only philosophically adequate completion of explanation.

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. Every finite explanation of natural law fails by terminating in one of three defects:
     (a) brute necessity (primitivism),
     (b) vacuous description (Humean regularity), or
     (c) infinite regress (immanent relationalism).

2. The finite as finite is composite, coordinated, and contingent; it cannot be the source of its own necessity.

3. The unity of laws and their coherence across domains demand a ground that is simple, self-explanatory, and unconditioned — an Infinite truthmaker.

4. This conclusion is not a theological intrusion but a philosophical necessity. Reason itself, in seeking sufficient cause, transcends the finite and implicitly participates in the Infinite.

Therefore the order of nature is not self-grounding but participatory: its necessity and coordination are signs of dependence upon an Infinite act in which the finite both is and is held together.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXIV

In the preceding disputation it was argued that the laws of nature cannot be understood merely as empirical generalizations or statistical regularities. Their very intelligibility presupposes a Logos that orders being from within, a divine rationality that grounds the harmony between mind and world. The cosmos, thus conceived, is not a closed system of mechanism but a structured participation in the intelligible act of God.

Yet if the visible laws of nature manifest such divine order, they must themselves rest upon something more primordial. What is the origin of lawfulness as such? Do the regularities of the cosmos emerge from deeper ontological principles—legibus primitivis—that articulate the very possibility of order? And if so, are these primitive laws expressions of divine wisdom antecedent to physical manifestation, the traces of the eternal Logos within the ground of being itself?

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXIV: De Legibus Primitivis, in which we shall inquire into the foundational strata of law beneath empirical nature: the primordial conditions through which order, form, and causality first become possible, and by which the world stands as a coherent revelation of the Creator’s rational act.

Disputatio XXII: De Confrontatione Linguarum: Theologia et Saecularitas Sermonis

On the Confrontation of Languages: Theology and the Secular Word

Quaeritur

Utrum inter linguam theologicam, quae in Verbo et Spiritu fundatur, et sermones saeculares, qui autonomiam suam vindicant, oriatur verus conflictus; et utrum theologia possit adhuc praedicare veritatem in mundo, ubi scientia, ars, et cultura sibi munus veritatis usurpaverunt.

Whether there arises a genuine conflict between theological language, grounded in the Word and the Spirit, and the secular discourses that claim their own autonomy; and whether theology can still proclaim truth in a world where science, art, and culture have each usurped for themselves the office of truth.

Thesis

The theological word, because it participates in divine truth, does not compete with secular reason but interprets its conditions. The Spirit who makes theology possible also animates all authentic acts of meaning without thereby rendering them theological. Hence, theology’s speech does not withdraw from modern languages but judges and fulfills them: it discloses that every search for truth is already a response to divine communication.

Locus classicus

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” — John 1:4–5

The verse identifies the universality of divine illumination: every act of understanding presupposes the light of the Logos. Secular discourse, even in its apparent autonomy, speaks within that light and cannot escape it. The confrontation between theology and modernity is therefore not external opposition but internal forgetfulness.

Explicatio

After the Disputationes on Word and Spirit, theology now faces its cultural horizon. Modernity has multiplied languages of truth—scientific, aesthetic, political, technological—each claiming autonomy. Yet all presuppose intelligibility, value, and communicability—conditions that theology interprets as participation in the Logos.

Theological discourse (L_t) encounters secular discourse (L_s) not as rival systems but as divergent appropriations of a shared intelligible order. Formally, we may express this as two distinct interpretive relations to the same divine ground (L_∞):

$$L_t<msub><mi>R</mi><mi>\pi </mi></msub>L_{\mathrm{\infty }}, L_s<msub><mi>R</mi><mi>\delta </mi></msub>L_{\mathrm{\infty }}$$

Lt​Rπ​L∞​, Ls​Rδ​L∞, ​where R_π denotes participation through grace (Spirit-mediated correspondence) and R_δ denotes derivative dependence (natural reason’s participation in the Logos).

The difference is not in the object (the divine ground of meaning) but in the mode of participation.

Theology thus does not flee from modernity’s languages; it uncovers their hidden metaphysics, their reliance upon borrowed light. Where secular language treats meaning as construct, theology confesses meaning as gift.

Objectiones

Obiectio I. Scientific Naturalists like Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins claim that science explains the world without recourse to divine speech. Theology’s claim to interpret meaning is obsolete; language about God adds nothing to predictive or explanatory power. The “light of the Logos” is a poetic metaphor for natural intelligibility, not its cause.

Obiectio II. Philosophical Postmodernists like Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty hold that all claims to meta-language or transcendence are expressions of power. Theology’s assertion that secular reason “borrows light” masks its own will to authority. There is no divine ground of meaning—only historical formations of discourse. The Logos is another name for the dominant narrative of Western metaphysics.

Obiectio III. Voices like Paul Tillich and Don Cupitt argue that to preserve credibility, theology must translate its symbols into existential or cultural meanings. The language of revelation should yield to human experience and creativity. To claim that secular reason still depends on divine light is nostalgic; theology must learn from, not correct, secular wisdom.

Obiectio IV. John Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy claim that secular reason is not merely derivative but inherently nihilistic and must therefore be rejected, not engaged. The Church should withdraw into its own grammar, its own nova lingua, abandoning dialogue with modernity. Engagement risks corruption of the sacred by the profane.

Responsiones

Ad I. Scientific explanation presupposes an ordered reality and a rational subject capable of truth, conditions that science cannot itself generate. Theology does not compete with explanation but discloses its ground: intelligibility itself as participation in the Logos. The Spirit’s presence in the act of reason makes knowledge possible; to call this “poetic” is to confuse causality with metaphor. The light of the Logos is the ontological precondition for all epistemic light.

Ad II. Postmodern suspicion rightly unmasks language’s entanglement with power, but theology interprets this entanglement as the distortion of participation. The Spirit, not the will to power, is the true condition of meaning. Deconstruction reveals the instability of all autonomous discourse; theology explains it: when speech forgets its source, it fragments. The Logos is not a regime of power but the gift of communicability that enables critique itself.

Ad III. Liberal translation preserves relevance at the cost of reality. Symbols derive their power from the truths they signify, not from subjective resonance. The nova lingua theologiae is indeed open to culture, but as illumination, not adaptation. The Spirit interprets human experience by orienting it toward divine meaning; theology learns from culture only by discerning in it the traces of grace.

Ad IV. Radical Orthodoxy rightly insists that theology is not founded upon secular reason, but withdrawal denies providence. The same Spirit who consecrates the Church animates the world’s search for truth. The task is not isolation but interpretation—to read secular languages as estranged offspring of the divine Word. The nova lingua must not retreat but translate, not by compromise but by conversion: making alien speech once more transparent to grace.

Nota

The confrontation between theology and secular discourse is not warfare but translation. Every language of modernity—scientific, political, artistic—bears within it a theological remainder: a hunger for meaning. The nova lingua theologiae speaks into this multiplicity not as rival ideology but as the meta-language of communion, interpreting all speech as longing for the Word.

The Spirit’s illumination is thus catholic: it extends beyond the Church’s grammar to all truthful speech, wherever reason still remembers the light.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. The confrontation between theology and secular discourse is internal to meaning itself; secular reason unknowingly depends upon the divine Logos for its intelligibility.

2. Theology’s new language does not abolish secular languages but reveals their participatory structure and reorders them toward truth.

3. Scientific and cultural autonomy describe functional independence, not ontological self-sufficiency; their intelligibility remains Spirit-given.

4. Postmodern critique and liberal accommodation each err: the first by forgetting transcendence, the second by dissolving it.

5. Theology’s task in the contemporary horizon is interpretive and missionary—to translate the world’s fragmented languages back into participation in the eternal Word.

Thus the nova lingua theologiae stands not beside but within the world’s discourse, interpreting it to itself, until every language confesses once more that “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”

Transitus ad Disputationem XXIII

In the preceding disputation it was considered how the language of theology stands amid the many tongues of the age—philosophical, scientific, and political—and how, within that contest of discourses, it preserves its own mode of truth. We found that theology cannot simply translate itself into the idioms of secularity without losing its substance; yet neither can it ignore those idioms, for they articulate the world into which the divine Word has entered. Theological speech must therefore discern, within the multiplicity of languages, those structures of intelligibility through which creation itself remains open to divine address.

This discernment now presses a new question. If theology speaks within a world already patterned by scientific and rational forms of understanding, what is the foundation of those forms themselves? Are the so-called “laws of nature” merely human generalizations abstracted from experience, or do they possess a deeper ontological ground that makes the cosmos intelligible to both science and theology alike? And if such a foundation exists, does it derive from the same Logos who orders all things and sustains them in being?

Therefore we advance to Disputationem XXIII: De Fundamento Legum Naturae, in which it shall be examined whether the laws of nature arise from contingent regularity or from the divine reason imprinted in creation, and how this grounding of law reveals the world as both intelligible to reason and transparent to the creative Word.

Disputatio XXI: De Meta-Lingua Theologiae: De Communicatione Verbi et Spiritus

On the Meta-Language of Theology: On the Communication of Word and Spirit

Quaeritur

Utrum nova lingua theologiae sit ille modus loquendi, in quo sermo humanus, assumptus a Verbo et animatus a Spiritu, fit instrumentum divinae communicationis; et utrum haec lingua non substituat linguas humanas, sed eas transformet, ut participent in ipsa veritate quae loquitur—ita ut in ea infinitum non tantum se revelet sed loquatur, et finitum non tantum audiat sed respondeat.

Whether the new language of theology is that mode of speech in which human words, assumed by the Word and animated by the Spirit, become instruments of divine self-communication; and whether this language does not replace human languages but transforms them, so that they participate in the very truth that speaks—in which the infinite not only reveals itself but speaks, and the finite not only hears but answers.

Thesis

The nova lingua theologiae arises where divine Word and human speech coincide under the causality of the Spirit. It is new because its being and meaning are renewed from within by divine presence. Theology thus speaks truly only as it becomes the language of divine communication itself: the eternal Word articulated in finite discourse, the infinite made audible in the finite.

Locus classicus

“We speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.” — 1 Corinthians 2:13

Here Paul identifies a linguistic transfiguration: words remain human, yet their origin and order are divine. The Spirit teaches, and through this teaching, human speech becomes the medium of divine wisdom: a new language of theology.

Explicatio

The nova lingua theologiae is the linguistic form of participation.
In philosophy, language is typically conceived as a human system of symbols; in theology, language is the place where divine and human communicability meet. The Word (Logos) is not only the content of revelation but its grammar; the Spirit is the causality that makes human utterance bear truth.

Thus, theological language is double in form but single in act:

• Human as finite sign and historical utterance.

• Divine as bearer of infinite meaning.

Let L∞ denote the eternal Word, the infinite language of divine self-communication. Let Lₜ denote finite theological discourse, the language of faith and confession. Finally, let Auth(Lₜ) denote the authorization of Lₜ by the Spirit.

Then:

Theological truth obtains only if Auth(Lₜ) → (Lₜ participat L∞ per Spiritum); that is, finite discourse is true not by inclusion within the divine Word but by real participation in it, as the Spirit makes human language proportionate to divine meaning.

The nova lingua is therefore neither an abstract meta-language nor a private religious dialect. It is the site where human speech becomes transparent to divine reality, where felicity (Spirit-given authorization) and truth (correspondence with divine being) coincide.

Objectiones

Obiectio I. Kantian Transcendentalism claims that human cognition is confined to phenomena structured by the categories of understanding. Accordingly, theology can express moral faith but not divine causation in thought or speech. To claim that language participates in divine Word and Spirit mistakes moral symbolism for metaphysical participation, violating the autonomy of reason and the limits of possible experience.

Obiectio II. Barth and Brunner held that revelation is the wholly other act of God, not a linguistic system accessible to humanity. Theology may bear witness to revelation but is not itself revelation’s continuation. To speak of a new language of theology that shares in divine communication is to blur the infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creature, turning revelation into religious expression.

Obiectio III. Wittgenstein claims that meaning arises from the use of language within a form of life (Lebensform). The felicity of theological discourse is determined by ecclesial grammar, not metaphysical causation. To posit the Spirit as the cause of meaning introduces a category mistake: causation belongs to nature, not to language. The Spirit’s “authorization” adds nothing beyond communal propriety.

Obiectio IV. Hegelian Idealism claims that the Spirit realizes itself in the dialectical unfolding of human consciousness. Accordingly, theology is not a distinct divine act but the self-expression of the Absolute within finite reason. The nova lingua theologiae is thus unnecessary because human discourse already manifests divine Spirit in its self-development. To posit transcendent causality in theology regresses to pre-critical metaphysics.

Obiectio V. George Lindbeck and Kathryn Tanner both hold that theology’s truth is intralinguistic, that it is a coherent discourse within the Church’s rule of faith. Divine causation is thus a superfluous hypothesis. To claim that the Spirit determines what counts as true speech reintroduces metaphysical realism under the guise of pneumatology. The “new language” of theology should be understood as communal practice, not ontological participation.

Responsiones

Ad I. Kant’s limits define the autonomy of reason, not the transcendence of God. Revelation does not violate the categories of thought but constitutes their ground. The Spirit does not add a second cause to cognition but founds its capacity for meaning. Thus, the nova lingua arises precisely where reason is fulfilled by grace; the Spirit elevates the finite intellect to participation without abolishing its structure. Theological discourse thus becomes rational in a higher sense. a rationality transfigured by participation.

Ad II. Barth rightly insists on divine freedom, yet divine freedom includes the liberty to dwell within human language. The nova lingua does not erase the Creator–creature distinction but actualizes it: God’s Word remains transcendent even while speaking immanently. The Spirit’s presence ensures that theology is not revelation itself but its living continuation, for the Word still speaks in the Church’s speech.

Ad III. Wittgenstein’s insight that meaning arises from use is incomplete. The ecclesial Lebensform exists because the Spirit sustains it. The grammar of faith is not self-originating; it is founded in divine authorization. The Spirit’s causality is not physical but constitutive; it makes the correspondence between sign and referent possible. Without the Spirit, theology reduces to linguistic anthropology; with the Spirit, grammar becomes sacrament: the finite sign that mediates infinite truth.

Ad IV. Hegel’s dialectic rightly perceives the relation between thought and being but confuses participation with identity. The divine Word does not evolve into human consciousness; it speaks through it. The Spirit is not the world’s self-realization but God’s personal presence within the finite. The nova lingua therefore represents not the self-consciousness of reason but the descent of divine communication. Communion arises not by dialectical necessity but by grace.

Ad V. Post-liberal theology correctly locates truth within the Church’s language but cannot explain why that language bears truth at all. Felicity requires truth conditions that obtain beyond grammar, and this occurs through the Spirit’s causality. While the Word guarantees referential content, the Spirit vouchsafes participation. Thus, theology’s “new language” is not another dialect but the transformation of language itself into the site of divine truth.

Nota

To speak of the nova lingua theologiae is to confess that all true theology is God’s own discourse in the mode of the finite. The Holy Spirit determines inclusion within T (the formal language of theology) and mediates the causal link between felicity and truth. The Word provides the ontological content of that truth; the Spirit provides its efficacious form.

Hence:

FT + TC = Veritas Theologica, where FT (felicity conditions) ensure internal coherence and authorization, and TC (truth conditions) denote the real divine states of affairs modeled ontologically by T.

The Spirit, as both formal and causal principle, unites these two in a single act of divine communication.

Determinatio

From the foregoing it is determined that:

1. The nova lingua theologiae is the linguistic manifestation of the act of Word and Spirit: the infinite Word speaking through finite words.

2. The Spirit’s causality is non-competitive and constitutive; it authorizes human speech to bear divine truth.

3. The Word’s eternity is the meta-language within which all finite theological languages (Lₙ) are interpreted and fulfilled.

4. Theological truth arises when felicity (Spirit-given authorization) is linked to truth through modeling.

5. The nova lingua theologiae is incarnational: the infinite speaks within the finite, and the finite becomes transparent to the infinite.

In this union, theology ceases to be speech about God and becomes God’s own speech through the creature, language redeemed into truth, and truth made audible as the living Word.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXII

The preceding disputation disclosed that the meta-language of theology is not a neutral system above divine speech, but the living communicatio between the Word and the Spirit, the eternal dialogue through which divine truth both descends into and gathers up finite discourse. Within this communication, the human theologian speaks only insofar as the Spirit appropriates human language into the self-expression of the divine Word. Theology is thus dialogical in its very essence: it exists as participation in an ongoing conversation between God and the world.

Yet every divine conversation meets a worldly reply. The Word that enters human speech inevitably encounters other languages—philosophical, scientific, political, and poetic—each claiming its own authority over meaning. How does theology, as the speech of the Spirit, engage these rival discourses without losing its distinctive mode of truth? Can the language of faith coexist, translate, or contend with the languages of secularity, or must it reclaim a logic of its own, irreducible to the grammar of the age?

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXII: De Confrontatione Linguarum: Theologia et Saecularitas Sermonis, wherein it shall be examined how the sacred and secular orders of speech meet and resist one another, how theology maintains its truth within the pluralism of tongues, and how the Spirit sustains the integrity of divine discourse amid the babel of the world.