About this project

The project and its author

Divine Simplicity and Participation is a Catholic philosophical inquiry by Robert Moses Dryer. Its central concern is how God can be unreceived plenitude while creatures genuinely receive being, exercise powers, disclose truth, and find fulfillment in communion.

I approach these questions through actuality, explanatory dependence, intelligent agency, manifestation, and appropriate good. The aim is to explain their connections without allowing one to replace the others. The simplicity of the source and the reality of the creature belong to the same inquiry, but neither is secured by vocabulary alone.

The project receives Christian revelation as revelation. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Son's human life, supernatural grace, resurrection, and beatific vision enter with their proper theological warrants. Philosophical inquiry clarifies the relevant distinctions and tests accounts of their intelligibility. It does not claim to manufacture those mysteries from a neutral formal scheme.

Its distinctive proposals concern perfection without reception, received possession, measured manifestation, and communion that perfects rather than absorbs. Historical arguments are engaged where they illuminate a precise problem. Their authority and their explanatory usefulness remain distinguishable.

The twenty-five questions form a connected work. Each can be entered on its own, and each points to the further questions on which its answer depends. The Method page explains the common discipline. The Sources page identifies the texts that support the doctrinal and philosophical discussion.