Words that open the inquiry
A companion to both projects: what a term means, what it does not imply, and where to see it at work.
Find a word, see the distinction it makes, and follow it into an argument. These working definitions serve both Participation and Robert Dryer; a definition explains a term without proving the claims made with it.
Read this glossary on ParticipationDownload the Word glossaryPlain text / MarkdownDefinitions (JSON)
No matching terms. Try fewer words, an alternative spelling, or clear the search to browse every definition.
Names and variants: Inference to the best explanation.
Reasoning that prefers an explanation because it accounts for the evidence or relevant features better than serious rivals. Unlike a deductive refutation, it need not show every alternative contradictory. Its force depends on the actual comparison, including explanatory scope and cost. Merely calling an account simpler or more illuminating does not establish that superiority.
A family of metaphysical accounts treating reality as fundamentally intelligible within, or as the expression of, an ultimate spiritual or mental whole. Some identify finite realities with that absolute’s own development; the label does not require every such theory to do so identically. The project must examine constitutive identity, dependence, and divine completion rather than claim that its terminology alone refutes idealism.
Names and variants: act/potency.
Act concerns an actuality possessed or exercised; potency concerns a real capacity for actuality. Passive potency is a capacity to receive actualization, whereas active power is a capacity to act or produce. The distinction analyzes change and dependence, but its application to a particular divine or created claim requires an argument.
Keep distinct: Active power is not simply passive incompleteness. A possibility is not automatically an intrinsic passive potency, and a different description does not by itself identify a distinct actualizer.
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.
A particular divine help enabling or prompting a response toward salvation, such as conversion, trust, or an act of charity. “Actual” contrasts these helps connected with acts and occasions with the stable gift called sanctifying grace. It does not mean that sanctifying grace is less real.
Keep distinct: Divine assistance does not replace the human person as the subject who understands, wills, and acts.
What genuinely is or obtains, rather than what is merely possible or imagined. A person lives, an event occurs, and a relation holds in different ways; calling each actual does not make each a substance. In the formal model, actuality is represented through real possession of a specified content, not proved simply by using an existence symbol.
A subject's own exercise of power in producing or directing an act. Intelligent agency includes acting for apprehended reasons. Free agency requires an account of authored control; where alternative outcomes are claimed, their genuine possibility needs further warrant. Dependence on a source does not itself establish intelligent selection or eliminate a creature's own causal contribution.
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.
Names and variants: Analogy of being.
Analogy of being: created reality can truly resemble and disclose God while differing in its mode of being. In Przywara’s use, likeness remains within an ever-greater Creator–creature dissimilarity. The expression names a family of philosophical and theological accounts, not a single agreed formula. Its positive attributions still require arguments connecting finite expression with the source disclosed.
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.
Names and variants: Negative theology; via negativa.
The disciplined denial of inadequate creaturely modes when speaking of God. After a positive attribution is independently warranted, apophatic qualification excludes such limitations as bodily organs, learning, or acquired perfection from the divine mode. It protects transcendence without cancelling the claim that God truly knows, is good, or acts.
Keep distinct: Negation must refine an intelligible affirmation rather than reduce God to a blank about which nothing can be said.
Names and variants: Sacred Tradition.
The Church’s living transmission of the apostolic faith, inseparable from Scripture within one received deposit of faith. This technical usage differs from every inherited custom or every opinion of a historical theologian. A philosophical synthesis may draw on the tradition’s arguments without each borrowed proposal acquiring the authority of apostolic teaching.
Keep distinct: Tradition in this sense is not every inherited custom, preference, or past institutional practice.
Attributing a perfection or outward divine work especially to one Person because of an intelligible fittingness: for example, wisdom to the Son or sanctification to the Spirit. The perfection or power remains common to the one God. Such language can illuminate personal relations without distributing divine faculties.
Keep distinct: An appropriation is different from a proper personal property or the Son’s uniquely personal Incarnation.
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.
Mary’s being taken up, body and soul, into heavenly glory: a singular gift through Christ and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians. Her fulfillment is received, created, and wholly dependent on her Son. Catholic theology receives this doctrine on ecclesial warrant.
Keep distinct: Mary’s Assumption is not her becoming divine by nature, nor a second independent source of resurrection.
This study’s analytical name for affirming that God can give real goods beyond visible Catholic communion while denying that God confirms contradictory teachings. The asymmetry concerns the proposed relation to fullness in Christ, not permission to use easier evidential standards for Catholic cases. Whether a particular external claim is genuine still requires investigation.
Names and variants: Scope of attestation; scope of vindication.
The precise extent of what an event warrants us in treating God as having confirmed. A sign connected with a saint’s intercession does not thereby confirm every opinion the saint held. This narrower scope must be argued from the event and circumstances; it cannot be expanded merely because a wider religious conclusion would be useful.
The claim that divine wisdom, power, and goodness are genuinely true of God, not merely human naming conventions. This leaves open whether their truth requires distinct intrinsic properties, formalities, or one concrete realization. The project affirms objectively different positive contents without treating each as an additional thing. Denying parts therefore does not require denying real perfection.
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.
Names and variants: Vision of God.
The blessed’s immediate knowledge of God himself, granted through supernatural elevation. God is the final object rather than a created representation standing in his place. The finite knower remains created and dependent; immediate access does not mean exhaustive comprehension or equality with divine self-knowledge.
Keep distinct: The promise is revealed, not derived merely from the possibility of knowledge or the infinity of its object.
Ecclesial authorization of public veneration of a deceased person as blessed, ordinarily within a delimited setting, distinguished from canonization’s universal scope. A Servant of God is someone whose cause has begun, not someone thereby already canonized. The evidentiary and procedural requirements have a history; Lambertini’s account should not be treated as the complete current rulebook.
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.
Names and variants: Indispensable bridge.
The premise licensing a move from one established claim to a stronger or different claim. Causation does not by itself establish likeness; received power does not by itself establish free agency. A bridge must be stated and defended in the relevant respect. Giving the move an attractive name or a formal symbol supplies no missing warrant.
A fact held to obtain without a deeper explanation in the relevant respect. Brute does not itself mean random, unstable, or logically contradictory: a rival may posit a necessarily existing brute whole. Rejecting that stopping point requires an explanatory principle. The project’s demand for an underived source must therefore defend why the proposed brute fact leaves its question unanswered.
The Church’s solemn recognition that a person is among the saints and may be publicly venerated throughout the Church. The inquiry distinguishes the person’s life or martyrdom, reports of miracles, and their attribution. Canonization does not canonize every opinion the person held, nor make every associated historical reconstruction an independently defined doctrine.
The requirement that a proposed cause be sufficient in the relevant respect for the effect attributed to it. This does not mean that every cause resembles its effect or possesses the effect’s perfection in the same way. Inferring intrinsic understanding or goodness in a universal source requires a stronger, separately defended principle about source-perfection.
Keep distinct: In Participation, Q names a stronger proposal: independently warranted positive content in derivative effects is possessed by the ultimate source under a source-appropriate mode. Mere power to produce it does not establish that possession. The adequacy of a cause and the source's possession of a perfection therefore need distinct arguments.
Investigation of whether candidate created causes adequately explain an event. In healing cases this requires a secure diagnosis, treatment history, timing, completeness, and durable recovery, including bodily and psychological alternatives. Excluding some explanations is a negative result; attributing an event positively to God requires further argument rather than an inference from ignorance.
Names and variants: Precontainment.
The claim that perfections realized in effects are present in their source in a causally adequate and source-appropriate way before or apart from their created realization. It does not picture little creatures or separate Forms stored inside God. A source's power to produce an effect and its actual possession of corresponding positive content remain distinguishable claims requiring an adequacy argument.
A gift of the Holy Spirit ordered to the good and building up of the Church. Some are extraordinary, but dramatic gifts are not the measure of holiness and do not outrank charity or sanctifying grace. Their reported authenticity, proper use, and fruits require discernment rather than acceptance on the strength of spectacle alone.
The theological virtue by which a person loves God above all and loves the neighbor for God’s sake. Enabled by grace, it becomes real created acts of patience, service, fidelity, justice, and love. The word therefore names a transformed capacity and way of living, not only financial generosity.
Keep distinct: Charity’s supernatural source does not replace the person who loves or excuse neglect of concrete human needs.
Christ’s unique work of reconciling humanity with God, grounded in his identity as the divine Son truly made human and in his saving life, death, and resurrection. Other persons can serve this work through dependent intercession and created acts without becoming additional independent sources of salvation.
Keep distinct: “Mediation” more generally can mean any created means of communication; not every such means has Christ’s unique saving role.
The theological study of Jesus Christ’s identity and saving life: the eternal Son made human, one Person in complete divine and human natures. Christological interpretation reads a claim within that revealed confession and its historical testimony. It is not an independent natural demonstration of the Incarnation, nor merely a general theory of manifestation applied to an inspiring human example.
A content-bearing cognitive state through which an object or situation is presented to a knower. The divine proposals dispute whether world-specific knowledge requires distinct intrinsic representations received or realized in God. Truthful cognitive access still needs explanation if acquired representations are denied. The beatific vision also distinguishes an enabling created condition from a representation substituted for God as its object.
A common natural kind under which members are constituted as kinds of the same general reality, completed by differentiating principles. The project's no-genus argument depends on this substantive account of constitution. Merely sharing a logical predicate or an intelligible concept of being is weaker. Scotist univocity of a concept therefore cannot simply be dismissed as divine membership in a natural genus.
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.
Names and variants: Communicatio idiomatum.
The rule that what belongs to either of Christ’s natures can be truly said of the one Person, with the relevant mode specified. Thus God the Son suffered in the flesh. The subject is divine; the capacity for suffering belongs to his humanity. The Latin expression is communicatio idiomatum.
Keep distinct: Predicating something of the Person does not transfer a property of his humanity into the divine nature.
Shared life through knowledge and love among genuinely distinct persons. More than resemblance, proximity, or causal dependence, communion requires the other to remain someone who can be known and loved. General metaphysics can clarify this non-absorptive structure; Christian revelation supplies the promised communion with God and its supernatural end. The recipient's fulfillment supplies no missing completion in God.
A reality’s being made up of genuinely distinct intrinsic constituents. Metaphysical constituents need not be spatial pieces or capable of separation. Several descriptions do not by themselves establish composition. To argue that composition conflicts with absolute sourcehood, one must explain what the constituents contribute and why that contribution conditions the whole’s actuality.
In this theological use, knowing something as fully as it is knowable. It means more than having a genuine understanding or seeing an object immediately. A finite creature can know God truly, and by grace immediately, without its act exhausting the infinite fullness of the God known.
Keep distinct: The measure of the knowing act belongs to the recipient; it does not divide or limit its object.
God’s continuing preservation of creatures in existence. Creation is not treated as a past start after which beings become independent. Conservation concerns their present dependence for being; identifying a particular event as miraculous requires an additional argument about the effect’s relation to created powers.
Keep distinct: Sustaining existence does not by itself explain a particular action, its moral character, or its fulfillment.
What makes up or internally contributes to a whole's actuality, as timber does to a table. A proper constituent is less than the whole it helps constitute. Composition concerns such constitutive plurality. Whether every proposed internal distinction has this role, and whether the whole depends on its constituents, require further arguments rather than following from the word distinct.
Keep distinct: An external producer need not be a constituent of its product. Constitutive dependence is also different from merely having several true descriptions.
Finite conditions can help make a good the particular good it is: melody needs succession, and fidelity needs a history. These differ from defects that obstruct a good and from adverse occasions to which a good response is made. Removing distortion improves a melody; abolishing succession abolishes that melody. Likewise, courage's goodness does not justify creating danger or suffering.
Names and variants: Consubstantial; homoousios.
Being of the same substance or nature. Father, Son, and Spirit possess the one numerically undivided divine nature; their unity is not merely membership in a shared class. Christ is also consubstantial with us in humanity: he shares our human nature, without implying that all humans are numerically one being. The respect matters.
Keep distinct: The term does not imply that divine Persons are interchangeable, or that humans share one numerically undivided instance of humanity.
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.
An explanation of why this outcome or action occurs rather than a specified alternative. Reasons can explain why a gift is worthwhile without ranking it above an equally worthwhile gift. The project allows authored selection to finish such an explanation without a further prior differentiator. A rival can dispute that stopping point; calling it rational does not settle the dispute.
The classical claim that actuality, considered as positive perfection, is good in that respect. It does not mean every event, intention, or effective exercise is morally good. Cruelty uses real capacities while directing them against appropriate goods. Establishing ontological goodness and evaluating the whole moral act therefore involve different questions; efficacy alone supplies no moral endorsement.
A person’s genuine response to divine initiative and help. Even preparation for grace is already assisted, yet the person truly assents, wills, and acts. Cooperation therefore names neither an independent human contribution that earns the first gift nor a passive appearance behind which God alone acts.
Keep distinct: Catholic schools dispute how efficacious grace, resistance, and freedom are related; this definition does not settle that dispute.
Evidence that counts against a claim or its proposed explanation. A serious inquiry states what could put pressure on its view and examines rival cases by comparable standards. Catholic theology predicts no contradictory genuine divine testimony; that prediction must not become a rule that inconvenient reports are dismissed without investigating their facts, causes, and meaning.
An interpretation or coherent proposed situation in which the stated premises hold but the proposed conclusion fails. A deletion test removes a premise to see what rival then survives. Such tests expose dependence of an argument on its bridges. A merely described scenario need not be metaphysically possible, so formal consistency and substantive coherence must still be assessed.
Names and variants: Ex nihilo; creation from nothing.
Creation without a pre-existing material out of which God makes the world. Nothing names no material cause, not a mysterious substance that becomes creation. God gives creatures their whole created existence without using divine substance as their material. This concerns ontological dependence; by itself it does not establish a temporal first instant of the universe.
Names and variants: Defeasibility.
A conclusion rationally warranted by the current evidence but open to revision if relevant new evidence or a stronger explanation appears. Defeasible does not mean arbitrary or merely subjective. Historical and causal inferences often have this character; their strength depends on the quality and independence of the evidence supporting them.
Here, a model in which God originates the world but its subsequent actuality does not require God’s present sustaining causality. This contrasts with conservation and participation as the project defends them. Denying present sustenance is stronger than saying that ordinary events have created causes. Historical positions called deist vary, so the specific causal claim matters more than the label.
A deletion test removes a proposed premise and asks which explanations are lost. An independence countermodel satisfies the remaining formal assumptions while denying that premise or its target conclusion. Such a model demonstrates a logical limitation relative to the specified interpretation; it does not automatically establish a philosophically coherent rival in every respect. Programmed dependency explorers track listed arguments, not every possible proof.
Support produced when different lines of evidence point toward the same explanation, while accounting for their dependence on shared sources or assumptions. Repeating one datum in several forms adds little. The study proposes a cumulative Catholic argument, but its success requires comparative assessment of actual evidence, not simply assembling a coherent narrative.
Names and variants: Depositum fidei.
The revealed truth entrusted to the Church through the apostolic witness and transmitted in Scripture and Tradition. Catholic doctrinal development seeks fuller understanding of this gift rather than replacement by a new revelation. A later miraculous sign can draw attention to what is received without adding an independent article of faith.
Keep distinct: Development can clarify what is received; it cannot authorize a new revelation contradicting the apostolic faith.
How a reality is specifically so: this patient is awake, this intention concerns helping someone, or this act produces this effect. Determination is not necessarily an event of being determined by something else. The project asks separately what makes a description true, whether its subject receives that actuality, and whether an actual choice could have differed.
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.
Names and variants: Divine constituent complexism.
As used in this inquiry, the view that God includes genuinely distinct intrinsic realities as proper metaphysical parts. These need not be spatial or separable. A proper part is distinct from the whole of which it is a part. Differing divine names, formal distinctions, and real Trinitarian personal distinctions do not by themselves establish such parthood. Whole-priority complexism adds that God grounds the parts rather than being grounded by them. See Question 04 for the philosophical assessment and the separate Catholic doctrinal boundary.
Names and variants: Concurrence; concurrent causality.
God’s causally sustaining involvement in a creature’s own action. The creature genuinely exercises its received power; divine action does not become a second finite force competing for the same task. Accounts of precisely how this works differ among Catholic schools. Naming concurrence does not settle every question about freedom or responsibility.
Keep distinct: An account still needs to show the creature’s actual causal contribution; dependence alone does not refute occasionalism.
God’s infallible knowledge of what creatures do, including acts future from our temporal standpoint. If God knows that an act occurs, it occurs; this does not immediately entail that the act is metaphysically necessary. Explaining determinate knowledge without receptive dependence or lost freedom requires further argument.
Keep distinct: The necessity of the consequence is not automatically the necessity of the consequent.
God’s gracious presence and communion in a person, especially described as the gift of the Holy Spirit. The divine giver is uncreated, while the recipient’s renewed dispositions and acts are created. This presence is more than an encouraging description, but it does not make God a component inside the soul.
Keep distinct: Presence is not spatial containment, and the creature’s renewal does not produce a new divine state.
The sending of a divine Person into created history, especially the Son’s Incarnation and the Spirit’s gift to the Church. A mission reveals an eternal personal origin and brings a new created relation. It does not mean that God travels from one place to another or acquires a missing divine perfection.
Keep distinct: A proper mission distinguishes the Person sent without dividing the common divine operation.
God’s allowing an event or moral wrong without thereby approving, commanding, or causing its disorder as such. Sustaining a person’s powers is different from intending their misuse. Calling evil permitted identifies a distinction; it leaves the serious question why nonprevention is consistent with goodness.
Keep distinct: A later good does not by itself justify this evil, its severity, or the harm to its victims.
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.
Names and variants: Divine attestation.
God’s confirmation of a determinate truth, person, or mission through an act intelligibly directed to that purpose. Establishing that God caused an extraordinary benefit does not automatically establish such confirmation. The event’s intended object and circumstances must support the further inference; testimony extends only to what is actually attested.
Names and variants: Divine truthfulness.
God’s truthfulness and freedom from deception or error. Catholic theology uses this to deny that genuine divine testimony can certify falsehood. Human judgments that an event happened, came from God, or had a particular meaning remain distinguishable from God’s testimony itself; invoking veracity does not make an investigator’s interpretation infallible.
Names and variants: Development of doctrine.
An intelligible unfolding that preserves a doctrine’s type and governing commitments while clarifying its implications. The project uses Newman’s tests analogically when assessing a philosophical synthesis. Compatibility of borrowed principles must still be shown; a contradiction is not harmonized by naming it development, and a fruitful private synthesis does not thereby become defined Catholic doctrine.
Keep distinct: Continuity must be argued; calling a change “development” cannot harmonize genuine contradiction.
Confirmation of a determinate teaching or proclamation, as distinct from confirmation of the speaker’s moral character. The argument must show why the event is directed toward that teaching. Even a genuine confirmation of one proposition does not automatically validate every other belief, office, or community associated with its speaker.
A truth of divine revelation proposed by the Church as definitively to be believed. Dogma provides a binding doctrinal boundary within Catholic theology. Its status differs from that of a particular philosophical explanation: a school’s model may be revisable even when the doctrine it seeks to explain is not.
Keep distinct: Doctrinal authority does not turn a theological premise into a premise-neutral philosophical demonstration.
The theological study of the Church: its identity, communion, worship, ministry, authority, and mission. An ecclesiological claim asks how an event or teaching relates to that shared life. A genuine good or miracle outside visible Catholic communion does not automatically vindicate every institution associated with it; transferring evidence to an authority claim requires its own warrant.
Names and variants: Divine economy; salvific economy.
The ordered course of God’s saving action in creation and history, centered on Christ’s death and resurrection, the Paschal mystery. Economy here means an ordered plan and its enactment, not finance. Its Trinitarian missions and sacramental life concern God’s communication to creatures without making creation necessary to complete God.
Keep distinct: The historical ordering of divine gifts must be distinguished from God’s eternal inner life.
Success in bringing about an intended or causally specified effect. Intending, having power, and actually succeeding are different achievements. Infallible efficacy means that a given divine creative intention cannot fail in its execution. It does not by itself show that God must have that intention, that the intention is known, or that a creature's harmful intention is God's intention.
The attribution of a perfection to God in a higher manner than its finite reception. Understanding, for example, is affirmed while ignorance and learning are excluded. This must preserve positive content rather than substitute an unspecified higher something. The warrant that a perfection belongs intrinsically to the source remains separate from qualifying its creaturely mode.
Names and variants: Epectasis.
A Greek term for continual reaching or stretching forward, especially associated with Gregory of Nyssa’s account of desire and growth toward the inexhaustible God. It helps articulate fulfillment without exhausting its source. Its particular application to the blessed must be argued alongside Catholic teaching on definitive beatitude.
Keep distinct: Divine infinity alone does not establish a specific mechanism of endless change, frustration, or incomplete happiness.
Using the conclusion to supply the warrant for the very premises offered to establish it. For example, identifying holiness solely from a miracle and authenticating the miracle solely from that holiness would not provide independent confirmation. Mutually reinforcing evidence need not be viciously circular when each strand also has a warranted basis of its own.
Inquiry into knowledge, evidence, justification, and the limits of warranted belief. An epistemic question asks what entitles someone to a claim; an ontological question asks what is real. A fact may obtain without being known, while persuasive appearances may mislead. The project therefore distinguishes what makes a proposition true from what warrants a person’s assent.
Theological inquiry into final fulfillment: resurrection, judgment, renewed creation, and communion with God. Calling a healing an eschatological sign means it anticipates that promised restoration without already accomplishing its fullness. Temporary bodily recovery is therefore neither the complete Christian hope nor a measure of the unhealed person’s worth or faith.
Keep distinct: Created fulfillment is not divine completion, absorption into God, or the automatic survival of every present arrangement.
Names and variants: esse.
Essence answers what something is; existence concerns its actually being. Distinguishing these concepts does not by itself prove that a creature contains really distinct metaphysical principles. In an account where essence receives existential actuality, an absolutely underived source cannot receive existence in that way. The simplicity conclusion therefore depends on the defended ontology of reception.
In the Palamite account, God’s incommunicable essence is distinguished from uncreated divine energies through which God is really communicated and participated. Energies are not created substitutes or detached divine pieces. The distinction’s relation to simplicity is disputed and cannot be settled by counting every real distinction as a part. The project treats it as a historical account requiring comparison.
Names and variants: Generation of the Son.
The Son’s personal origin from the Father within the one divine life. It involves no time before the Son, no actualization of a potentially divine recipient, and no division into greater and lesser deity. Paternity and filiation name the opposed relations of Father and Son. They differ from a creature’s reception of existence as another substance.
Keep distinct: Paternity names the Father's begetting; filiation names the Son's being begotten. This eternal personal distinction is neither a division of the divine essence nor created participation or acquisition of deity.
Names and variants: Divine eternity.
In the classical account used here, divine life without successive acquisition from moment to moment. It differs from a life lasting for infinitely many temporal moments. Timeless causality can concern genuinely temporal effects; their mode need not reproduce their source’s. How eternal knowledge reaches contingent events is an additional explanatory problem, not something solved by drawing history on one diagram.
Names and variants: Independence of evidence.
The extent to which one item of evidence supplies support beyond what another already supplies. Several reports copied from one source are not several independent confirmations. Independence can be partial rather than all-or-nothing; a cumulative argument must track shared witnesses, traditions, assumptions, and underlying events to avoid overstating its strength.
Latin for by the work performed: sacramental efficacy comes from Christ acting through the sacrament he instituted, not from the minister’s personal holiness or a spectacular experience. This does not mean magical automatic benefit regardless of valid celebration or the recipient’s disposition; the fruit received also involves the recipient’s openness.
Keep distinct: Objective efficacy differs from automatic spiritual maturity or a mechanical power independent of God.
Names and variants: Exemplar causality; divine ideas; exemplarity.
An account of how created forms and possibilities are intelligible through their relation to divine knowledge as exemplar. Divine ideas are not independent Forms that instruct God from outside. Their content must also be distinguished from the free production of creatures: knowing an intelligible possibility is not yet choosing it, or making it actual.
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.
The demand that an account of dependent actuality not leave all possession of that actuality wholly derivative. In the source argument, an endless chain of borrowers would not supply an ultimate explanation merely by having more borrowers. Whether reality requires that kind of completion is a substantive philosophical premise; it is not a definition of explanation.
Knowledge is factive: if someone knows that a claim is true, the claim is true. Confidence or sincerity can be mistaken and is therefore insufficient. Factivity states a truth condition of knowledge; it does not itself explain cognitive access, the cause of the fact known, or whether the knower’s awareness necessitates the event.
The personal assent and entrusting of oneself to God who reveals, enabled by grace. Its ground is the truthfulness and authority of God, rather than only the strength of a private philosophical proof. Evidence and credible testimony can support its reasonableness without reducing faith to an inference from a surprising event or making one metaphysical school its prerequisite.
Keep distinct: Faith is neither a deduction from miracles alone nor permission to disregard evidence, interpretation, or moral responsibility.
Latin for “let it be,” used for Mary’s assent to God’s promise at the Annunciation. It names an intelligible and free created response enabled by grace. Mary receives a vocation and actively consents; she neither originates salvation independently nor acts as an inert instrument without personal agency.
Keep distinct: Grace’s initiative and the recipient’s real response answer different questions about the same consent.
An approach that divorces faith from the rational grounds needed to recognize or assess its claim to truth. The miracle study rejects this while also refusing to reduce faith to natural demonstration of every mystery. Credibility evidence and trust in God’s revealing authority perform different but connected tasks.
Names and variants: Final causation; final causality; teleology.
The directedness of a power or action toward an end, understood as a good or completion of the relevant subject. An intended end differs from every eventual result, and a real good differs from bare efficacy or pleasure. Dependence alone does not establish finality; the account must identify the appropriate end and explain its normative or causal role.
The disciplined assessment of evidence for a particular historical claim, rather than a general argument that miracles are possible. Here it includes testimony, records, medicine, alternative causes, and warranted attribution. Forensic evokes a court’s scrutiny; the study uses the label analytically, without equating an ecclesial ruling with an infallible reconstruction of every fact.
In Scotist usage, a distinction between intelligible aspects that have a basis in the thing before our thinking, without being separate things. Whether particular formalities introduce composition or dependence is disputed. Elsewhere, a difference of formal content may mean only different explanatory meanings; that broader usage must not automatically import the whole Scotist theory.
The ultimate reason for believing a revealed truth: the authority of God who reveals and cannot deceive. Credibility evidence helps identify that revelation; grace enables the act of faith. The distinction rejects both belief without rational grounds and the assumption that faith consists solely in independently proving each revealed mystery.
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.
The creature’s final transformation and fulfillment in communion with God, including the resurrection of the body. Glory in this setting concerns perfected participation in divine life, not celebrity or an increase in God’s own perfection. A temporary healing can anticipate this fulfillment while remaining different from its definitive realization.
God’s freely given favor and help, bringing creatures into a communion they cannot claim or achieve by their natural powers. Catholic theology distinguishes the uncreated divine giver, especially the Holy Spirit, from created transformation and acts in the recipient. God’s gift becomes a person’s genuine renewed life.
Keep distinct: Dependence on God for ordinary existence is not already identical with sanctifying grace.
Names and variants: Metaphysical grounding; ontological grounding.
An explanatory relation often expressed by saying that one fact obtains in virtue of another. It ordinarily concerns metaphysical priority rather than an earlier event producing a later one. The project distinguishes grounding from causation, constitution, evidence, and truthmaking. Claims about its direction, necessity, or ultimate termination need arguments rather than a shared arrow.
Confirmation concerning a person’s holiness or communion with God. Hagiological means concerning saints or sanctity. This is distinct from confirming a doctrine: a sign concerning someone’s intercession does not make that person’s every judgment correct. Nor does involvement in a miracle by itself establish the holiness of everyone involved.
In Catholic teaching, definitive separation from communion with God, involving judgment and a responsible refusal of grace. Its eternity is affirmed, while God predestines no one to it and the Church prays that none be lost. The doctrine does not authorize declaring the fate of particular individuals.
Keep distinct: “Separation” does not mean that a creature becomes independent of God’s sustaining causality or ceases to exist.
The disciplined interpretation of texts, signs, and events through their language, genre, history, and relevant context. Calling Christ’s Resurrection the hermeneutical center of Christian miracle theology means that other signs are read within that revealed saving pattern. It does not authorize inserting any desired meaning into an ambiguous event or widening its attestation beyond the evidence.
A sustained and exceptional practice of the Christian virtues, expressed in the person’s actual life rather than inferred merely from striking religious phenomena. In causes of saints, its investigation is distinct from assessing an alleged miracle. Heroic describes the depth and constancy of virtue, not a requirement of spectacular public achievement.
The basic standing in virtue of which a human person is owed respect and care, rather than having to earn protection by current intelligence, independence, or usefulness. This is a substantive ethical commitment, doctrinally grounded here in creation in God's image and vocation to communion. Metaphysical dependence alone does not prove it, and equal dignity does not imply equal abilities or identical duties.
The union of complete divine and human natures in the one eternal Person of the Son. “Hypostasis” here means the concrete personal subject. Christ’s humanity is genuinely human and personally his; it is neither a costume nor a second human person cooperating with a divine partner.
Keep distinct: Grace unites created persons to God without making them additional incarnations of the Son.
Names and variants: Immaculate conception of Mary.
The Catholic doctrine that Mary, from the first moment of her conception, was preserved from original sin by a singular grace in view of Christ’s saving merits. It concerns her own beginning, not Jesus’ virginal conception. Her holiness remains a gift of redemption received from Christ.
Keep distinct: Mary’s privilege does not make her uncreated, independent of redemption, or another source of salvation.
Freedom from material constitution or material limitation in the respect at issue. In the classical account considered here, immaterial possession of intelligible form helps explain knowing without becoming the known object materially. Being immaterial and actually understanding are still distinguishable claims: their connection requires a theory of cognition, not merely the denial of a body.
The absence of intrinsic change in God: no transition from ignorance to knowledge or deficient to completed perfection. This differs from intrinsic invariance across alternative possible creations. An intention could be eternally unchanged in each possible history yet intrinsically different between histories. Changes in creatures and relations to them therefore require careful interpretation without being dismissed as unreal.
The divine nature does not undergo suffering, injury, or passive alteration; God's love is neither completed nor diminished by creatures. This does not mean indifference. In the Incarnation the eternal Son truly suffers through his human nature: the subject who suffers and the nature according to which he suffers must be distinguished.
Keep distinct: Christ's real human suffering does not make the divine nature mortal or receptive. Impassibility is also distinct from a psychological inability to care.
Latin for in the particular individual case. In Lambertini’s argument, a miracle offered to support someone’s cause must be attributable to that person’s intercession with sufficient specificity. An event may be extraordinary or even miraculous while remaining too ambiguously connected to a particular candidate to serve the proposed evidential purpose.
What makes something this individual rather than merely an instance of a describable kind, and what distinguishes it from another. Matter, distinct recipients, relations, and primitive identity are different proposed accounts. The argument for one universal source must show why its own account of individuation excludes several underived sources; numerical plurality alone is not a contradiction.
Names and variants: Common divine operation.
The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit act toward creation through the one undivided divine power. Creation and salvation are not assembled from three independent contributions. A common divine action can nevertheless have a proper personal terminus: the Trinity causes the Incarnation, while only the Son becomes incarnate.
Keep distinct: Common causation does not make every divine Person the personal subject of Christ’s humanity.
Latin for unusual or unaccustomed. In the miracle discussion, the important contrast is not mere statistical rarity but an effect or manner of acting beyond the relevant natural power. A rare event can be natural, while an often-repeated effect could remain miraculous if the requisite causal excess were established.
Names and variants: Instrumental causation.
An agent or thing contributes to an effect through the activity of a principal agent. Catholic miracle theology uses this to explain creaturely mediation without granting creatures autonomous divine power. Whether a particular mediation is physical instrumentality or intercessory causality is a further question, not settled simply by using the word instrument.
Names and variants: Intentional directedness.
The directedness of thought, desire, or action toward an understood object or content. An intention concerns what an agent undertakes, rather than everything that happens through the action. A produced outcome does not retrospectively supply its own intended meaning. The divine account must explain actual, source-originated direction while distinguishing intended goods from merely permitted effects.
Prayer offered for another. Saintly intercession means asking someone united to Christ to pray, with God remaining the giver of the requested good. In older accounts, moral causality names this action through petition rather than an independently healing physical power. A request can help identify a sign’s meaning without proving that the request caused a miracle.
Keep distinct: Intercession depends on Christ’s unique mediation and differs from the adoration owed to God alone.
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.
An intrinsic feature concerns what a reality is or how it is in itself; an extrinsic attribution concerns it through a relation to something else. Different accounts disagree over the precise boundary. Calling a divine action 'relational' therefore opens a question about its real basis; it does not already explain its intentional determination.
Keep distinct: An extrinsic attribution need not be fictional. A complete relational fact can be real without adding an intrinsic constituent to each relatum.
The additional claim that the source's intrinsic actuality is identical across the different possible created outcomes under consideration. This is stronger than having no proper parts or never changing in time. A noncomposite source with different intrinsic intentions in different possible worlds is the rival. The project treats invariance as a disputed modal bridge, not a definition of simplicity.
God’s gracious forgiveness of sins and interior renewal of a person, bringing reconciliation and a new life of faith, hope, and love. Catholic theology treats it as more than a favorable description of an unchanged subject. Divine initiative precedes and enables the person’s genuine response.
Keep distinct: Justification differs from a feeling of reassurance or a claim to earn the initial gift independently of grace.
The Church’s public worship as the action of Christ and his body, offered to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Scripture, material signs, bodily acts, ordered ministry, and the assembly’s response belong to this common worship. The mystery celebrated is received rather than produced by communal enthusiasm.
Keep distinct: Private devotions such as the Rosary can prepare for and extend liturgy without replacing the sacraments.
Names and variants: Logoi; rationes.
Greek logoi and Latin rationes can mean intelligible reasons, principles, or accounts. In the relevant Christian uses, they explain determinate creaturely intelligibility through the divine source rather than through detached Forms. Their meanings vary by author. Maximus's logoi in the Logos must not be equated without argument with Augustine's divine ideas or treated as parts making up God.
The Church’s authoritative teaching office, which serves and authentically interprets the received word of God. It does not originate revelation or stand above it. Its doctrinal authority differs from a philosopher’s explanatory success. Discernment of incompatible claims therefore does not turn every permissible Catholic metaphysical theory into official teaching.
Keep distinct: Definitive doctrine, ordinary authoritative teaching, discipline, and a theologian’s proposal must be distinguished.
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.
Bearing witness to Christ through suffering death for the faith. In Catholic causes of saints, a claim of martyrdom requires investigation of the circumstances and religious motive; violent death alone does not establish it. The miracle study keeps this assessment distinct from a later extraordinary event alleged to attest the person’s sanctity.
Names and variants: Measure; finite mode.
The way and capacity according to which a subject possesses a perfection. Seeing humanly and possessing divine knowledge need not be two quantities on one physical scale. In the formal model an ordering records bounded or unbounded actuality in a stated respect. A receiver's finite mode concerns that receiver; an independent argument is needed to limit the source.
A judgment that the available medical evidence and accepted explanations do not adequately account for a recovery. It is stronger than a witness’s surprise but remains distinct from establishing that no created cause could account for it. Diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, permanence, and the limits of current knowledge all affect its evidential force.
Names and variants: Strict miracle; miracle simpliciter.
In the classical account used here, an extraordinary effect produced by God beyond the proportionate powers of the whole created order. The definition concerns causality, not rarity or surprise. Whether a reported event meets it requires historical, scientific, metaphysical, and theological investigation; present inexplicability alone does not establish it.
Keep distinct: A miraculous event is not automatically divine confirmation of every belief associated with its setting.
In the Thomistic account, the creature’s dependence is a real relation in the creature, while God’s being Creator adds no corresponding relational accident to God. The divine relation is called a relation of reason grounded in the real effect. This does not make divine causing imaginary. That classification requires its relational ontology; asymmetric dependence alone does not establish it.
A loss of genuine contingency when necessary divine reality is taken to entail each particular created outcome necessarily. An infallible intention's necessarily succeeding does not establish that having that intention is necessary. The difficult question concerns which creative intention occurs and why. Distinguishing those steps blocks one inference to collapse; a complete theory still needs a defended account of free specification.
Different ways God or Christ is present: as sustaining Creator, by grace, through Christ’s humanity, and sacramentally. These name different relations or kinds of union, not quantities of divinity. A miracle can make divine action manifest where God already sustains a creature; it does not mean God has newly occupied previously godless space.
A family of Catholic accounts associated with Luis de Molina, using God’s middle knowledge of what free creatures would do in possible circumstances to explain providence without eliminating freedom. Middle knowledge is understood as logically prior to God’s decree to create, not as information God learns in time.
Keep distinct: This is a disputed theological model; Catholic doctrine affirms providence and responsibility without requiring every reader to accept Molinism.
The Father’s personal position as origin without personal origin in Trinitarian life. This differs from the divine nature’s aseity, equally possessed by Son and Spirit. Within Catholic teaching, the Son receives from the Father all that belongs to his eternal relation to the Spirit. Monarchy therefore introduces neither inferior deity nor two independent sources of the Spirit.
Names and variants: Motiva credibilitatis.
Rational grounds for recognizing a purported revelation as credible, such as signs, prophecy, and historical testimony. They concern the reasonableness of recognizing God’s witness; they do not turn every mystery into a conclusion independently demonstrable from natural premises. Catholic theology distinguishes these grounds from faith’s ultimate reason: the authority of God revealing.
Keep distinct: Evidence for credibility does not make revealed mysteries intrinsically demonstrable or compel a free act of faith.
In its strict theological sense, what exceeds the proportionate powers and natural claim of created nature, especially participation by grace in God's own life. Natural goods and powers remain genuinely real and good. A created spirit's extraordinary natural ability can exceed human ability without thereby being supernatural in this strict sense.
Keep distinct: Supernatural is broader than visibly miraculous. Sacramental grace need not produce a detectable anomaly; preternatural names unusual effects within created spiritual powers.
The organized powers, activities, and regularities belonging to created things. Within this project, nature genuinely operates while depending on God for existence and action. Calling an effect natural therefore does not mean God is absent; calling it extraordinary does not by itself show that created powers are inadequate.
Nature concerns what a reality is and the powers appropriate to it; person concerns the concrete who whose life and acts these are. This distinction does not make a human nature a second agent behind a human person. Its theological applications require further commitments: three divine Persons are not three instances of a species, and Christ's two natures are not two personal subjects.
Names and variants: Necessary emanationism.
Production of an effect that follows necessarily from its source, without a genuine alternative in which that production does not occur. It is a countermodel to inferring free creation from fullness or inexhaustibility: an unlimited source could necessarily produce a limited effect. The project does not classify every historical use of procession or diffusion of goodness as necessary emanation.
A connection such that the stated explanatory basis cannot obtain without the result. Explanation and necessitation are not interchangeable. If a basis is necessary and necessarily entails this world, the world is necessary too. A reply to modal collapse must challenge a genuine premise or interpretation of that inference; renaming the connection does not break it.
Names and variants: Conditional necessity; necessity of the consequence.
A result can be unfailing given a specified condition without that condition being unavoidable. Given an efficacious intention to create this world, the world exists; it does not follow that God must select that intention. Absolute necessity concerns what cannot be otherwise without that optional supposition. The argument must still establish whether the supposed intention really is optional.
Names and variants: Preservative miracle.
Lambertini’s category for extraordinary preservation: an effect that would otherwise be well expected does not occur, such as destruction by fire. Negative means a prevented outcome, not a harmful miracle. Mere survival proves little unless the causal circumstances establish why the ordinary effect should have occurred and why adequate created explanations fail.
Names and variants: inexhaustibility.
A finite reception fails to match an unlimited source in the relevant perfection or capacity for actuality. The respect matters: unlimited actuality does not automatically prove every other infinity. Non-exhaustion does not make every finite proposition false or vague, and it does not establish that the effect could have failed to exist. A necessary finite emanation remains a countermodel.
Names and variants: Non-rivalrous causality; noncompetitive causation.
Causal explanations can concern different respects rather than divide a fixed share of activity between competing producers. God's sustaining a created power need not displace the creature's exercise of it. This compatibility does not supply a complete concurrence theory, prove every claimed secondary cause, or make manipulation by a finite agent harmless.
Names and variants: Non-partition; participation without partition.
Communication in which a recipient's actuality is neither a portion of the source's substance nor an ingredient completing the source. This project derives the exclusions from additional source and constitution premises; they are not hidden inside participation. Showing that the source has no proper parts also differs from showing that it is no creature's constituent.
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.
Being one and the same reality, rather than two realities that resemble each other. Numerical identity is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Counting one divine nature and three divine Persons requires a substantive account of essential predication and personal distinction; changing the stated respect cannot make contradictory numerical identities true.
Keep distinct: Identity differs from qualitative similarity and from predication. 'The Father is God' cannot simply be treated as an unrestricted identity with a fourth individual named God while also maintaining all the usual identity claims.
The view that creatures do not genuinely produce effects: what we call their action instead provides the occasion for God’s action. This contrasts with real secondary causality. Merely allowing two descriptions of an event does not defeat occasionalism; the alternative must show how a created power contributes productively while remaining dependent on its divine source.
Relying on another for being or actuality in a specified respect, rather than merely needing information about it or following it in time. A claim of dependence is incomplete until that respect and direction are stated. Dependence for a power does not itself deny the recipient's possession of the power or establish that someone else performs its exercise.
Names and variants: Ontology; metaphysics.
Ontology asks what exists and what kinds of reality and relations there are. Metaphysics also asks about their unity, dependence, possibility, and fundamental explanation. Calling a claim ontological concerns what is real; calling it epistemic concerns knowing or warrant. Neither vocabulary establishes a particular answer merely by classifying the question.
A scholastic distinction between God’s action within the providential order actually established and consideration of what divine power could do apart from that ordering. Neither means a power to make contradictions true. Lambertini limits his canonical argument to the present providence; this historical qualification should not be inflated into a claim to have settled every abstract modal question.
Keep distinct: Potentia ordinaria considers divine power under God's freely established order; potentia absoluta considers what is possible to divine power apart from that ordering. These are not two faculties, and neither licenses contradictions.
In Catholic teaching, the inherited deprivation of original holiness and justice resulting from humanity’s first sin. Those born into it contract a wounded condition rather than personally committing that ancestral act. Christ’s grace heals and renews; Mary’s preservation from this condition is called her Immaculate Conception.
Keep distinct: An inherited condition is not an infant’s personal moral fault, and created finitude itself is not sin.
A varied family of claims that the world is in God while God exceeds it. Some make creatures constituents of divine reality; others use the language for divine presence without that conclusion. The project rejects constituent or completion accounts while requiring each proposal’s actual commitments to be stated. The label alone establishes neither identity with Catholic participation nor a single refutable thesis.
An account that identifies God and the world, or treats finite realities as modes of the one divine substance rather than genuinely other created beings. The project distinguishes these versions instead of assuming one argument refutes all of them. Universal causal dependence and intimate presence do not by themselves imply identity of substance.
Real, dependent possession of actuality or perfection according to the recipient's mode. The creature genuinely lives or understands rather than being an appearance of its source. Likeness, manifestation, the participant's own exercise, and fulfillment can extend this relation, but each needs its own bridge. Participation is therefore a connection across the project's analytical tools, not a word that proves all their conclusions.
Catholic teaching distinguishes the judgment of each person at death from the final judgment revealing the truth of human lives and history in its shared and cosmic dimensions. Judgment includes justice and truthful disclosure, not only a change of feeling. Its object includes responsibility toward God and neighbor.
Keep distinct: Future reconciliation does not make past wrongs good or victims expendable means to a desirable ending.
Christ’s saving passion, death, resurrection, and glorification, understood as one connected accomplishment. “Paschal” refers to Passover. The Christian claim joins real events, divine action, and saving meaning; metaphysical compatibility alone cannot establish that the events occurred or identify their theological significance.
Keep distinct: The resurrection transforms the same humanity that was crucified; it does not replace Jesus with another individual.
Names and variants: Receptive potency; passive potentiality.
A capacity to receive an actuality not yet possessed in the relevant respect. Learning actualizes a learner’s capacity for knowledge. This differs from active power, the ability to produce an effect. A fully possessed productive power can remain unexercised without thereby being an incomplete actuality awaiting the effect to perfect its possessor.
Names and variants: Per modum habitus; per modum actus.
Latin contrasts between possessing a stable disposition and acting in a particular exercise. Lambertini uses them to deny that an ordinary creature owns miraculous omnipotence as a permanent faculty. Any miraculous instrumentality depends on God’s particular action; it is not a reservoir a saint or agent can command independently.
Names and variants: Circumincession; mutual indwelling.
The mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: each is wholly in the others because the divine life remains undivided. The Greek term helps articulate communion without separation or personal interchangeability. It concerns the revealed divine Persons, rather than the fusion of three independently existing divine substances.
Keep distinct: “In” does not mean spatial containment, blending, or the absorption of one Person into another.
An appearing that exceeds the observer’s ready concepts or capacity to master what is given. In the discussion of Marion, this opens room for continuing interpretation rather than reducing reality to what a recipient can control. It describes a way of appearing, not an automatic identification of its source.
Keep distinct: Intensity or excess does not establish divine causation, historical occurrence, or doctrinal truth.
Inquiry into how something appears or is given in experience, before its causal and theological explanation is settled. Wonder can reveal the gap between encountering an effect and knowing its cause. An overwhelming experience does not by itself establish divine origin or endorsement. The project therefore distinguishes the manner of appearing from causal attribution, truth, and evidential warrant.
In the rival-ontology test, an account in which intelligible Forms exist independently of finite instances. Modern Platonism can instead concern causally inactive abstract objects; those positions are not interchangeable. The participation account does not require detached Forms to explain creaturely perfection. Showing that they are unnecessary for one explanation differs from demonstrating that no abstract entities exist.
Positive fullness of actuality and perfection without completion by something more basic or by created manifestation. Plenitude is not an inventory of added attributes and not an indeterminate blank. Which positive perfections belong to God requires independent argument; excluding parts cannot manufacture wisdom or goodness. Nor does fullness alone establish that communication is free rather than necessary.
Possibility concerns what could genuinely be; necessity concerns what could not fail to be; contingency concerns what is actual but could have been otherwise. Possible worlds label complete alternatives rather than places or times in God. A consistent description is not automatically metaphysically possible, and temporal change is not the same as an alternative to the actual outcome.
Names and variants: Counterfactuals.
A possible world is a way reality could have been, used here without assuming a separate existing universe. A counterfactual asks what would be true under a specified contrary supposition. Such comparisons distinguish change through time from differences across alternatives. Describing an imagined alternative consistently does not alone establish its metaphysical possibility.
Names and variants: Practical self-awareness.
An agent’s awareness of what the agent is undertaking through the exercise itself, rather than only by observing its outcome. Finite practical awareness can be mistaken. The proposal extends this structure to perfectly intelligent divine action, where no actual undertaking is hidden from its author. Whether that awareness needs world-specific intrinsic variation remains a separate metaphysical question.
God’s eternal purpose to bring persons to salvation through grace, a purpose Catholic teaching holds together with real human response and responsibility. Theological schools differ about how this purpose relates to foreknowledge, grace’s efficacy, and resistance. God predestines no one to hell.
Keep distinct: The doctrine is not permission to infer an individual’s destiny from present success, suffering, or private speculation.
Saying something of a subject, such as that the Father is divine. Predicating a nature or perfection is not automatically asserting numerical identity between two names. Yet a predicate true of three subjects does not alone establish one undivided divine nature. The account must explain both what the statement means and the reality making it true.
Beyond familiar human or bodily capacities while remaining within the powers of created nature. In traditional Catholic discussions, angelic or demonic agency can be considered under this heading. The category distinguishes extraordinary created agency from divine miracle; it does not supply evidence that any particular puzzling event was caused by a spirit.
A notion or distinction treated as not reduced to other terms within the proposed explanatory system. Primitive does not mean chronologically first in learning, self-evident, or immune to criticism. A richer definition can conceal several commitments in one word, so the project tests information lost by reduction rather than counting words and declaring a uniquely smallest metaphysics.
The agent principally producing an effect, distinguished from an instrument through which it acts. In a strict miracle God is the principal cause because the effect exceeds created power. A saint’s prayer or a relic’s involvement does not give that creature an independently possessed share of divine omnipotence.
A reported later disclosure that may call people to live more fully by the revelation given in Christ. It cannot correct or complete that definitive revelation. Evaluating an apparition, an accompanying cure, and a proposed message requires distinct judgments; approval of one feature need not authenticate every interpretation or historical detail.
The absence of a good or order that ought to belong to a subject, such as impaired sight in an eye. Mere non-possession is not enough: a stone's not seeing is not blindness. The account of evil as privation must identify the missing fitting good and responsibility for the disorder; saying lack alone neither explains suffering nor makes the harm unreal.
A pattern in which effects originate from a source, remain dependent upon it, and attain fulfillment in relation to it. In participation metaphysics these are explanatory orders, not necessarily a temporal journey away from and back into God. Whether procession is free or necessary requires a modal argument. Creaturely return must also be distinguished from the revealed eternal processions of divine Persons.
In Trinitarian theology, procession broadly names an eternal personal origin; generation names the Son's origin, while spiration concerns the Spirit. Catholic teaching confesses the Spirit from Father and Son as one principle, preserving the Father as first origin. These relations are not temporal production or the making of lesser divine beings.
Keep distinct: The Trinitarian sense differs from creatureward procession and return in participation metaphysics. The Filioque is the Latin 'and the Son'; its formulation and the Greek accounts of origin need careful theological and ecumenical interpretation.
Names and variants: Efficient causation; productive causality.
Bringing about or maintaining an actuality in another: treatment can produce recovery, and a cause may sustain an effect now. The project distinguishes this productive relation from being a constituent of the effect. It also states separately the bridge from causing an effect to that effect's ontological dependence, rather than hiding the bridge inside its notation.
Knowledge of an effect through warranted awareness of the intelligent action that produces it, rather than learning from the finished effect. The proposal requires awareness of the actual intention, adequate disclosure of its result, and epistemic warrant. Knowing a power or all possible plans is insufficient. Its scope does not automatically include every independent secondary intention or establish complete divine omniscience.
An ecclesiastical official charged with scrutinizing a cause of sainthood and raising evidential or procedural difficulties. Lambertini’s experience in this role informs his caution. The promoter is distinct from the postulator, who advances the cause and its evidence; neither role makes the desired conclusion true by advocating for it.
A cause’s capacity to produce effects of a relevant kind, given its nature, conditions, and manner of acting. To say an effect exceeds proportionate created power is stronger than saying it is unexpected or poorly understood. Both what occurred and how it occurred matter to that assessment.
God’s wise ordering of creation toward its goods and final fulfillment, including real created causes. Prayer and human action can belong among the means through which intended effects occur. This does not mean each suffering is a separately demonstrated necessity, or that theological confidence identifies the specific purpose of every event.
Keep distinct: Dependence alone does not establish care, or show why every permitted suffering was justified.
Concerning relations between mental activity and bodily processes. Psychosomatic commonly emphasizes bodily symptoms affected by psychological factors; it does not mean the symptoms are imaginary or intentionally produced. The miracle study includes these among possible created explanations and asks whether they account for the actual diagnosis, recovery, and lasting change.
Public revelation is God’s definitive self-communication in Christ, transmitted in the apostolic faith. Private revelations are subsequent claimed disclosures that may help people live that faith in particular circumstances. Even when ecclesially approved, they neither complete Christ’s revelation nor add a new article to the deposit of faith.
Keep distinct: An apparition, message, or healing must be judged on its evidence and scope, without replacing Scripture, Tradition, or sacramental life.
God’s definitive self-disclosure in Christ, transmitted through the apostolic witness for the Church. In Catholic teaching its completion does not mean understanding cannot develop; it means later apparitions cannot add a new definitive Gospel or replace Christ. Natural reasoning can assess credibility, but cannot generate every revealed determination by itself.
Names and variants: Pure act; actus purus.
Actuality without passive potency: the divine source does not await an actualizer to receive the actuality or perfection by which it is God. This does not mean inactivity or lack of productive power. The argument must establish the relevant exclusion of receptive actualization; the label alone proves neither all divine perfections nor free creation.
A proposed positive excellence whose content does not as such include defect or receptive limitation, such as understanding considered apart from learning. Identifying such content is a philosophical task, not an automatic permission to transfer a whole creaturely description into God. Courage includes a response to danger, for example; its finite circumstances must not simply be attributed to the source.
The final purification of those who die in God’s grace and whose salvation is assured, while their transformation is not yet complete. It expresses the distinction between being reconciled and having every distorted love healed. The doctrine belongs to Catholic revelation and tradition, not an inference from analogy alone.
Keep distinct: It is neither a second chance after damnation nor a way to purchase divine favor.
In this theological discussion, the demand that reason independently demonstrate the intrinsic truth of every revealed mystery before faith can be justified. This is narrower than all historical uses of rationalism. The study preserves reason’s role in testing credibility while allowing revelation to communicate truths beyond reason’s unaided discovery.
A difference founded in reality rather than produced solely by our way of thinking or speaking. Different things, personal relations, activities, and constitutive principles may differ in different senses; identifying a distinction as real does not yet identify its metaphysical category. A conceptual distinction concerns different ways of understanding, which can sometimes have a common real foundation.
Names and variants: Eucharistic real presence; Eucharistic substantial presence.
Catholic teaching that the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the Eucharist under the sacramental appearances. A reported Eucharistic miracle would concern extraordinary manifestation, not an increase in how really Christ is present. Its authenticity must be assessed separately; it does not constitute the sacramental reality it purports to disclose.
The actual condition in virtue of which a content or description is instantiated in a subject. Different descriptions may sometimes be supported by the same concrete reality without becoming synonyms. This possibility does not establish that all properties share one realizer, or that divine attributes are identical; each proposed identity still requires an argument.
Considerations that make an action intelligible to an agent as worth undertaking. A reason may favor an option without making it uniquely obligatory or inevitable. Whether reasons can explain a determinate choice without necessitating it is part of the project’s account of freedom. This distinguishes explaining an action’s point from guaranteeing its exact selection.
The possession of an actuality or perfection whose productive source is another. Reception need not be passive inactivity: receiving a real power can enable the recipient's own exercise. In this project reception is analyzed through causation and real possession; it does not already mean resemblance to the source, finite measure, free agency, or nonpartition.
The constructive proposal that different complete facts of God intentionally producing different effects can be real without requiring different intrinsic divine actualities. Terminus means the effect toward which the action is directed, not a new item added to God. This proposal must explain authorship and intentional direction; simply describing the result as relational or extrinsic does not establish the account.
A distinction of correlative relations that cannot be exchanged within the same origin: the Father begets the Son, and the Son is begotten of the Father. The opposition distinguishes who each Person is without assigning different amounts of deity. It is more specific than mere relatedness and cannot be inferred from a generic claim that everything is relational.
Names and variants: Personal origin.
The relations identifying divine Persons through eternal origin: the Father begets, the Son is begotten, and the Spirit proceeds. Their opposition distinguishes who the Persons are without dividing what God is. This is a specifically revealed application of relation, not a rule that every difference can be reduced to relation.
Keep distinct: Personal origin must be distinguished from the creature’s reception of a finite actuality.
Names and variants: Miracle quoad nos.
An event called miraculous relative to human knowledge or visible bodily powers, even though a created spiritual agent might be able to produce it. Lambertini distinguishes this looser category from a strict miracle exceeding all created power. The words greater and lesser in his classification concern causal range, not simply the event’s dramatic size.
Bodily remains of a saint or objects connected with a holy person, honored because of their relation to Christ’s sanctifying work. They are not independent stores of supernatural energy. If a miracle occurs in connection with a relic, divine causation, creaturely mediation, and what the event specifically attests still require distinct explanation.
God’s raising of the dead as the same persons in transformed embodied life. The Catholic promise concerns those who died, not replacements with matching memories or a return to ordinary mortal vulnerability. Continued personal identity and bodily transformation must both be retained; philosophy alone cannot establish the promised event.
Keep distinct: Resurrection differs from reincarnation, resuscitation, and merely producing an indistinguishable replica.
Resuscitation restores someone to mortal life; Christian resurrection in glory is definitive transformed life, exemplified by the risen Christ. A claim of return from death first requires sound evidence that death actually occurred. The distinction explains why Lazarus’s restoration is a sign of the final hope rather than that hope’s completed fulfillment.
God’s self-communication and disclosure, received in Christianity through his saving deeds and words, with their fullness in Christ. Philosophy can assess credibility and clarify implications; it cannot independently generate the Trinity or Incarnation. Revelation also confirms truths accessible to reason. An emotionally striking event or plausible interpretation is not thereby authenticated divine address.
Keep distinct: A possible disclosure, intense experience, or metaphysical source argument is not already evidence that God revealed a particular claim.
A Christ-centered devotional prayer joining remembrance of Gospel mysteries with repeated prayers, bodily rhythm, and contemplation with Mary. A decade consists of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and the Glory Be; five decades commonly form one set. The beads help count and direct attention.
Keep distinct: Neither repetition nor the object mechanically produces grace; customary schedules and additions are devotional practices.
An effective sign of grace instituted by Christ and celebrated by the Church. Its created signs do not merely evoke a thought; Christ acts through them to communicate the gift signified. General examples of effective communication illustrate a possibility, but cannot establish that institution or efficacy. The sacraments also differ, so one mechanism must not be imposed on all.
Keep distinct: An informative symbol, subjective feeling, or extraordinary experience is not thereby a sacrament.
The sacrament’s actual communication of the grace it signifies through Christ’s instituted action. This differs from an extraordinary visible manifestation or evidence that draws attention to it. The Eucharist does not require a prodigy to be real, and baptism does not cease to be sacramental because nothing medically or physically unusual is observed.
The affirmation that sacraments genuinely communicate what Christ instituted them to give, rather than functioning only as reminders or expressions of feeling. It does not identify supernatural reality with publicly measurable anomaly. Sacramental effects and a person’s fruitful reception require their own theological account; extraordinary phenomena are neither their definition nor their necessary proof.
Names and variants: Eucharistic species; Eucharistic appearances.
The remaining sensible appearances of bread and wine in the Eucharist. Species here does not mean biological kind or a second substance housing Christ. Catholic teaching holds that Christ remains wholly present while the species subsist. Dividing the host therefore divides the sacramental appearances without dividing Christ into fractions.
Keep distinct: What the senses encounter does not exhaust the doctrine’s claim about what is substantially present.
Names and variants: Validity and fruitfulness.
Validity concerns whether the sacrament genuinely takes place under its relevant requirements. Fruitfulness concerns the gift’s reception and its living effects in the person. These are connected but different: an infant can receive Baptism before understanding it, while strong emotion cannot make an invalid rite valid.
Keep distinct: Validity, lawful celebration, personal recognition, and mature cooperation are not interchangeable judgments.
The stable created gift or habitual disposition by which a person participates in God's life and is made capable of living in communion with him. It is received, not a portion of divine substance. Distinct actual graces assist particular acts; sanctifying grace names an abiding participation rather than only a passing help.
Keep distinct: The created gift is distinct from the uncreated Holy Spirit who gives and indwells.
God’s action in the composition of Scripture through genuinely human authors using their powers and abilities. Catholic interpretation therefore attends to authorial intention, literary form, historical setting, canonical unity, and the living Tradition. Inspiration grounds Scripture’s theological authority without eliminating its human language or the work of understanding.
Keep distinct: Inspiration is not permission to ignore genre or turn every private interpretation into an infallible reading.
Names and variants: Secondary causation.
The real causal activity of creatures whose existence and powers depend on God. A fire genuinely heats and a person genuinely acts; dependence does not make either a mere appearance of divine action. Calling these causes secondary identifies their dependence, not their unreality or unimportance.
Names and variants: Scope of signification.
The range of realities an event can reasonably express or signify in its actual context. A healing might manifest mercy, providential care, and hope of resurrection. This is broader than what God can be inferred to have specifically confirmed. The phrase is an analytical tool used by the study, not a doctrinal formula.
Keep distinct: Signifying several goods is not equivalent to accrediting every associated doctrine.
How clearly an event’s circumstances connect it with one proposed meaning rather than several rivals. Prior prediction, explicit prayer, timing, and publicly identifiable purpose can increase specificity. A close connection can strengthen an attribution, but does not by itself establish miraculous causality or authenticate every institution associated with the sign.
The study of meaning, reference, and conditions of truthful assertion. A semantic question asks what words, symbols, or signs actually say. It differs from whether the claim is justified or what causes its subject to exist. Interpreting the word is as predication rather than numerical identity, for example, changes the claim made and must fit its theological use.
The study of signs and how they signify. In the miracle argument, it distinguishes an occurrence, what it manifests, and an interpreter’s warranted recognition of that meaning. Calling a sign relation triadic highlights these three roles; it does not make the interpreter free to invent the event’s meaning.
The agent’s actually undertaking one eligible course rather than merely understanding possible courses. The project proposes that intelligent exercise for reasons can terminate this explanation without an earlier condition necessitating the selection. Settlement therefore adds a claim about authorship, not a new hidden selector. Voluntarily refraining must also be explained; absence of an effect alone establishes neither choice nor awareness.
Something that makes another reality intelligible through an identifiable relation. A healing may signify mercy or, in a sufficiently specified context, confirm a mission. The occurrence alone does not determine its meaning. The sign’s circumstances and interpretation must justify what is being disclosed, rather than merely associate it with nearby beliefs.
The study’s six-part audit: establish the event, assess created explanations, specify the causal excess claimed, evaluate divine attribution, determine what is signified or confirmed, and assess grounds for public ecclesial reliance. These are distinct questions, not six automatic steps to certainty. The numbered scheme reconstructs the sources; it is not Lambertini’s own official formula.
The study of salvation: how God rescues, reconciles, heals, and fulfills creatures through Christ. It concerns more than escape from danger or impressive supernatural power. A soteriological reading asks how a sign serves this saving good. The Christian content comes from revelation and its reception, not simply from a metaphysical assertion that every dependent being seeks fulfillment.
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.
Improvement or disappearance of disease without treatment adequate to explain it. Such improvement can occur naturally even when its precise mechanism is unknown. For miracle inquiry, a surprising remission is a fact to investigate, not a conclusion about its divine cause; the diagnosis, disease course, and persistence of recovery remain important.
Existing as the concrete subject rather than merely as a quality in another subject. In divine personal subsistence, the project follows the classical account of relations that are not accidents attached to already separate individuals. Naming a relation subsistent states that positive metaphysical claim; it does not by itself explain undivided deity and three really distinct Persons.
Names and variants: Subsistent relation.
In the classical Catholic account, a divine Person does not first exist as an independently identified subject and then acquire a relation. The relation of origin belongs to who the Person eternally is. Calling the relation subsisting denies that it is merely a thought or an accidental property added to God.
Keep distinct: It is not a fourth object, a detachable component, or a complete explanation of Trinitarian identity by itself.
In the classical vocabulary, substance concerns what exists as a subject; an accident qualifies that subject without being a separate substance. Substance is therefore not simply chemical material, and accident does not mean chance or mistake. Eucharistic teaching uses these distinctions to affirm conversion of what bread and wine are while their sensible appearances remain.
One class of facts supervenes on another when no difference in the first is possible without some difference in the second. The disputed case asks whether a different divine intention requires a different intrinsic divine profile. Denying that dependence opens a relational account of intention; it does not establish how its determinate direction is freely authored.
Names and variants: Synchronic alternatives.
The possibility of acting otherwise at the very act of choice, rather than merely being able to change one's mind later. The term is associated here with Scotus's account of will. Applying its insight to divine action does not require a temporal hesitation in God, and does not independently establish the project's additional claim of unchanged intrinsic actuality across alternatives.
Communication in which a person or source presents something as true on its authority as a witness. Its warrant depends on relevant access, responsible transmission, and checks on error, deception, genre, and dependence among reports. Testimony can be mistaken or false; its fallibility does not make every historical report untrustworthy.
Keep distinct: Sincerity or agreement is not sufficient by itself, and several reports may depend on a single source.
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.
An attempt to explain why God’s goodness and power are compatible with the existence and permission of evil. A detailed theodicy proposes justifying reasons; a more limited defense may only show that a contradiction has not been established. Both must distinguish moral disorder, natural suffering, and creaturely finitude.
Keep distinct: Explaining evil as privation is not already an explanation or justification of every permitted suffering.
Names and variants: Theophanic manifestation.
A manifestation of God in or through a created appearance, effect, or transformed recipient. Eriugena emphasizes that receiving such disclosure can itself transform the creature. The term must distinguish the divine source from the created manifestation and does not make the creature a constituent of God.
Keep distinct: Created theophanies must not be made a necessary substitute for God himself as the object of the promised beatific vision.
Names and variants: divinization.
The creature's graced participation in divine life, also called theosis or divinization. It makes communion with God real without changing the creature into the divine substance or adding a perfection God lacked. Its supernatural character requires Christological and theological warrants beyond the generic metaphysical account of received actuality.
Keep distinct: Deification is neither absorption nor a second Incarnation. Sanctifying grace names a stable created participation in divine life; it does not turn each recipient into a divine Person.
Names and variants: Mother of God; God-bearer.
The Greek title meaning “God-bearer,” traditionally rendered “Mother of God.” Mary bears the Person who is the eternal Son according to his humanity. The title safeguards Christ’s personal unity: the child born is not a separate human subject merely associated with the Word.
Keep distinct: Mary does not originate the divine nature, precede God, or become divine by giving birth.
A diverse tradition drawing on Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy and theology. In debates about providence, many Thomist accounts emphasize God’s efficacious causality while maintaining genuine created action and freedom. The school is broader than one theory of grace, and its members differ on important explanatory details.
Keep distinct: Aquinas is an important witness in this project, not the required vocabulary or governing authority for every philosophical proposal.
Names and variants: Substantial conversion; Eucharistic conversion.
The conversion of the whole substance of bread into Christ's body and of the whole substance of wine into his blood, while the Eucharistic appearances remain. Catholic teaching affirms the whole Christ's true, real, and substantial presence. This concerns what is present, rather than a change in communal interpretation alone.
Keep distinct: Breaking the host does not divide Christ. Real presence is the reality affirmed; transubstantiation describes the substantial conversion. A Eucharistic miracle is an extraordinary sign and is not required for that presence.
Names and variants: Holy Trinity.
The Christian confession that the one undivided God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: three really distinct Persons, each wholly God. The divine nature is neither split among them nor multiplied into three instances. The distinction is revealed, while philosophical analysis clarifies what it affirms and excludes.
Keep distinct: Three temporary roles would erase personal distinction; three separate divine beings would erase divine unity.
Treating Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three distinct instances of deity, even if perfectly similar or cooperative. Catholic Trinitarian teaching instead confesses one numerically undivided divine nature and three really distinct Persons. Distinct personal relations do not by themselves imply tritheism; the philosophical account must still explain why their reality does not multiply the divine actuality.
Names and variants: Truthmaker relation.
The relation by which reality accounts for a statement's being true. A patient's actual condition can make a report true without being evidence available to its writer. Similarly, an effect's existence may be required for a true assertion about it without the effect producing or informing God's knowledge. Truthmaking and cognitive acquisition therefore require separate analysis.
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.
Names and variants: Dyothelitism.
Catholic teaching that Christ has a genuinely divine will and a genuinely human will, corresponding to his two natures. The one Son truly wills and acts through each. His human obedience is therefore a real human act, rather than the passive movement of a body without human agency.
Keep distinct: Two natural principles of willing do not mean two competing personal subjects.
Names and variants: Underivation.
A source is an origin of the relevant actuality in another. Absolute underivation denies receiving or depending upon anything for the actuality by which the source is ultimate; aseity expresses divine being from no other. This is not self-production, infinity, or simplicity by definition. The Son's personal origin from the Father is a different theological relation from creaturely dependence.
The way a reality counts as one rather than merely an assortment. A pile can be one collection, while an organism integrates processes within one life; calling both one does not explain either organization. A non-derivative unity is not made one by more basic constituents or coordination. Establishing it requires an argument about the relevant whole, not the mere assertion that it exists.
The claim that every human person will finally be saved. This goes beyond affirming God’s universal saving will, praying for everyone, or hoping expansively. Catholic discussion must hold these affirmations together with responsibility, judgment, and the eternity of hell, rather than deriving every person’s destiny from sourcehood alone.
Keep distinct: A hope for all is not identical with a demonstration that salvation is inevitable for each person.
Using a concept with the same intelligible content across its applications. Scotus’s univocal concept of being does not by itself put God and creatures within one natural genus or give them an identical mode of existence. A claim about shared conceptual content differs from a claim about common constituting reality. Neither conceptual univocity nor analogy settles that metaphysical question by name.
Names and variants: Non-receptive determinacy.
Being genuinely and intelligibly thus without receiving the actuality by which one is so from a more basic determining principle. The phrase organizes the project's account of divine fullness; it is not a newly demonstrated primitive or a seventh proof of simplicity. Essential perfections, revealed personal origins, and freely specified outward acts retain different explanatory requirements.
Adoration is worship owed to God alone, traditionally called latria. Veneration honors created holiness: dulia names the honor of saints, and hyperdulia the special honor of Mary. Their intercession consists in praying within the communion Christ gives, without a competing saving power or any need to make God more willing to love.
Keep distinct: The distinction is one of kind, not simply weaker and stronger degrees of the same worship.
Different grades or manners of likeness to God, especially in Bonaventure’s exemplarist account. A vestige is a created trace of its source; image has a more determinate role in rational life; graced similitude concerns restored or perfected conformity. These distinctions prevent every creaturely expression from being treated as the same kind of resemblance. Their exact applications depend on the author and passage.
This study’s analytical label for a miracle whose circumstances warrant interpreting it as divine confirmation of a specific claim, mission, or person’s sanctity. Vindicatory means confirming or accrediting here, not taking revenge. It is not presented as an official magisterial technical term, and not every miracle has this evidential function.
Names and variants: Epistemic warrant.
The grounds that justify a belief or inference, with their proper scope. Conceptual clarification, metaphysical argument, historical testimony, empirical evidence, and revelation contribute different kinds of support. Warrant concerns responsible belief; truth concerns what actually obtains. An argument needs to show why its evidence or premises support its particular conclusion.
Keep distinct: Epistemic justification differs from theological justification by grace. Warrant, truthmaking, and a knower's cognitive actualization must not silently replace one another.
Names and variants: Whole-priority account.
An account on which a whole is metaphysically prior to its parts or properties, so the whole explains them rather than being explained by assembling independently prior items. It challenges a simple inference from plurality to constitutive dependence. The philosophical burden is to explain why the alleged elements are proper constituents at all and whether the proposed priority genuinely removes conditionedness.
Keep distinct: Whole-priority asserts a direction of explanation. Brute unity instead leaves the unity unexplained; these are different challenges to a composition-dependence argument.
Astonishment at an effect whose cause is hidden or not understood. Biblical wonders name the response an event evokes; powers or mighty deeds name its effective action. Neither response nor power alone establishes divine agency. Wonder can start an inquiry, but ordinary ignorance can produce the same feeling.