Divine simplicity: Glossary

Divine SimplicitySource, Freedom, and Communion

Actuality: What genuinely obtains: a being exists, a power is exercised, a relation holds, or an event occurs. Actuality is a starting point for inquiry. Calling something actual does not yet explain its cause, kind, independence, or goodness.
Active power: The capacity to produce an effect or exercise an operation. Distinguish it from passive potency, which concerns receiving an actuality. A power directed toward optional effects need not mark an intrinsic imperfection in its possessor.
Aloneness challenge: A difficulty concerning divine knowledge across possible situations, including a situation without creatures. If God is intrinsically invariant, what explains knowledge of the different actual truths? Rejecting temporal learning does not by itself answer this question.
Analogy: Truthful attribution with a disciplined difference of mode. A divine name can express positive content while excluding a creaturely manner of possession. Analogy requires a warrant for attribution; it is not an exemption from meaningful claims or logical scrutiny.
Aseity: Divine independence of a more basic source of actuality or existence. It does not make every divine Person unbegotten. Personal origin within the Trinity and created dependence on God are distinct questions.
Attribute simplicity: The claim that God's essential perfections belong to one undivided divine actuality rather than completing a subject through independently supplied perfecting constituents. Differences of meaning remain significant.
Beatific vision: The immediate vision of God granted through divine elevation. Its object is God himself rather than merely a created representation. Finite participation in that vision need not become exhaustive comprehension of the infinite God.
Being first: The priority, in inquiry, of what is actual over its finite recognition. An object need not wait to be known in order to be real. This does not independently establish the whole metaphysics of an ultimate source.
Common realization: Several compatible determinations belonging to one concrete actuality. The possibility of common realization blocks an inference from multiple meanings to multiple constituents; the actual unity of particular perfections requires its own argument.
Communion: A good of genuinely distinct persons in shared life, knowledge, and love. Dependence or a common cause does not automatically establish it. Supernatural communion requires the specific gifts and warrants of Christian revelation and grace.
Constitution: What makes up or internally actualizes a reality. It differs from productive causation: the carpenter causes a table without being its timber. Arguments from constitution to dependence must state the role of the proposed constituents.
Contingency: The possibility that something actual could have failed to be, or could have been otherwise. Metaphysical contingency needs a warrant for genuine alternatives. It is not established merely by uncertainty, unpredictability, or the absence of perceived necessity.
Dependence: A specified explanatory reliance in a specified respect. Sustaining causality, constitution, grounding, personal origin, and cognitive actualization are not automatically the same relation. Dependence in one respect need not imply dependence in every respect.
Determination: Being this or being thus. A determinate reality need not have been made determinate by an external source. Neither does every real determination count as a separately actualizing component.
Disclosure: The truthful making-present or making-known of a reality under a determinate aspect. Distinguish objective expression from warranted cognitive uptake. Something can be expressed without being recognized, and can appear without being known.
Divine simplicity: God's freedom from constitutive composition and receptive actualization incompatible with absolute sourcehood. The six accomplishments examine this claim in respect of actuality, unity, constitution, common measure, existence, and essential perfection.
Efficacy: The successful realization of an intended effect. Infallible execution does not by itself establish that the intention was necessarily selected. Blind production and intelligently authored action can also differ despite a similar outcome.
Essence and existence: Essence concerns what a reality is; existence concerns its being actual. Different concepts do not alone establish a real recipient and actualizer. The divine identity claim must be defended through the relevant account of existential actuality.
Explanation: An account of why something obtains through a stated relation and direction. Explanation does not automatically mean necessitation. Reasons, causes, constituents, truthmakers, and evidence can explain different features of a situation.
Fulfillment: The realization of a good appropriate to a subject. Some limits are defects; others constitute a finite good. Fulfillment can include dependence, embodied history, assistance, and communion while preserving created identity.
Genus: A common kind under which members are determined through further principles. God's transcendence of a constitutive genus does not mean that a shared concept is itself an ontological cause or a real standard above God.
Grace: God's gratuitous gift elevating creatures to participation in divine life. Ordinary created existence is already dependent on God, but that dependence does not by itself entail supernatural elevation or the immediate vision of God.
Hypostatic union: The union of complete divine and human natures in the one divine Person of the Son. It is neither a mixture of natures nor ordinary participation intensified, and it does not introduce an additional human person alongside the Son.
Intrinsic actuality: What concerns a reality in itself, as distinguished from a complete fact involving its relations to others. The distinction requires explanation in difficult cases; it cannot classify a disputed intention as harmless by definition.
Intrinsic invariance: The proposed sameness of God's intrinsic actuality across alternative created histories. It is stronger than noncomposition or absence of temporal change. Its application to contingent intentional action is a substantive philosophical commitment.
Manifestation: A reality's being expressed or made present through a mode of disclosure. The finite manner of a manifestation does not automatically describe the intrinsic manner of its source. Recognition and divine attribution require further warrant.
Measure: The determinate mode in which an actuality is possessed or disclosed. Measure need not mean numerical quantity. A finite participant's mode can be positively constitutive of its good without exhausting the source's perfection.
Modal collapse: The loss of genuine contingency when every created actuality follows necessarily from necessary divine actuality. Blocking one modal inference does not independently supply a positive account of voluntary authorship.
Nature and Person: Nature concerns what a reality is and the operations belonging to it. Person concerns the subsisting subject. In God, the nature is numerically undivided and the Persons are really distinct. In Christ, two natures belong to one Person.
Nonreceptive knowledge: Knowledge that does not arise through acquired cognitive actualization by an external object. A positive account must still explain truthful awareness of what is actually the case, not merely the rejection of creaturely learning.
Participation: Real, dependent possession of received actuality or perfection according to the participant's mode. Reception and real possession form its core. Expression, agency, finality, and supernatural communion require additional warrants.
Personal origin: The eternal relations distinguishing Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Generation and procession are not the production of lesser divine beings, temporal acquisition of deity, or creaturely actualization from potency.
Plenitude: Positive fullness of perfection. Unreceived plenitude concerns the divine possession of warranted perfections without completion by something more basic. The word does not allow negative exclusions alone to demonstrate every positive attribute.
Privation: The absence of a good appropriate to a subject. It differs from a constitutive finite condition and from an adverse occasion for a good response. Explaining evil as privation does not make suffering unreal or morally negligible.
Productive knowledge: Knowing an effect through warranted awareness of an actual efficacious intention. It requires awareness of the actual exercise and adequate disclosure of its effect. Its extension to free secondary acts needs further argument.
Pure perfection: A positive perfection whose content does not intrinsically require deficiency or a finite receptive mode. Its identification requires case-specific argument. Causing a finite good does not warrant transferring every feature of its complete description into God.
Reception: A creature's obtaining actuality or perfection from a source. What is received can be truly possessed. Reception does not mean a piece of the source is transferred, and it does not automatically establish the recipient's free exercise.
Secondary causality: A creature's genuine productive role under God's universal sustaining causality. An account must establish the creature's own efficacy and authorship. Merely allowing two causal descriptions does not refute occasionalism.
Source: That from which actuality proceeds in a stated explanatory respect. Absolute universal sourcehood requires arguments about underivation, scope, and uniqueness. It must not be placed unnoticed inside the initial definition.
Subsisting relation: A theological and metaphysical account of divine personal distinction in which the relation is not an accident added to a prior individual. Real opposition of origin distinguishes the Persons without partitioning the divine nature.
The All: The project's name for the simple source's plenitude as universally communicable and finally consummative. It means neither a totality composed of God and creatures nor the disappearance of created persons into divine substance.
Theophany: Divine manifestation through a creaturely mode, where its divine attribution is warranted. It does not automatically imply exhaustive vision of the divine essence or a specifically authenticated divine message in every meaningful event.
Truthmaking and cognitive actualization: The conditions that make a proposition true differ from what supplies a knower's cognitive actuality. A contingent creature can be required for the truth of a statement without that fact alone showing that the creature informs God.
Underived sourcehood: Explanatory ultimacy in which nothing more basic supplies the source's actuality. Its consequences for unity, existence, and perfection require the relevant bridges. It is not identical with every positive divine attribute.
Warrant: The grounds licensing a belief or inference, with their scope. Conceptual clarification, metaphysical argument, historical testimony, empirical evidence, and revelation warrant different kinds of conclusions.