The complete index
All 1,036 pages and passages are linked below. Use your browser’s Find command to look through their titles and descriptions, or browse either inquiry directly.
Robert DryerGuide
Participation and creation How can a gift become genuinely another’s own reality? Simplicity, freedom, and divine action How can God freely act without being completed by creation? Identity, relation, and…
Robert DryerGuide
How can a gift become genuinely another’s own reality? Begin with Participation Participation and real created being
Robert DryerGuide
How can God freely act without being completed by creation? Beyond Participation Divine Agency The twenty-five questions on simplicity
Robert DryerGuide
What is one, what is distinct, and in which respect? Reality, determination, and relation The Trinity investigation Identity, predication, and counting Before Counting: how plurality carries across an argument
Robert DryerGuide
What can a finite disclosure establish—and what requires revelation? Manifestation, analogy, and revelation Catholic faith and philosophical explanation Read with Dionysius
Robert DryerGuide
How do nature, person, knowledge, and action belong together? The human person One person, two natures The incarnate Son
Robert DryerGuide
What fulfills a creature, and how does evil obstruct that good? Goodness, finality, and fulfillment Providence, evil, and history Evil, suffering, and hiddenness
Robert DryerGuide
How does received life become lived communion? Grace, prayer, and deification Church, sacrament, and liturgy Sacrament and Eucharistic presence
Robert DryerGuide
When can an extraordinary event be received as a divine sign? Miracle and Divine Testimony Thirty questions on miracles The limits of manifestation
Robert DryerGuide
What is fulfillment without absorption into God? Resurrection, beatitude, and God all in all Grace, vision, and all in all
Robert DryerProject
A Catholic and Christian reflection on the whole of knowledge: theology, philosophy, and the life of prayer.
Robert DryerProject
A sustained inquiry into the simple God, Scripture, free creation, knowledge, Trinity, and communion. Twenty-five complete answers, objections, primary-source quotations, and connected reading paths.
Robert DryerProject
A thirteen-page philosophical and theological atlas asking how created life can be truly from God, genuinely its own, and fulfilled in communion without becoming a piece of its source.
Robert DryerProject
A developing systematic account of reality, dependence, agency, disclosure, and fulfillment. It asks how a source can communicate real goodness without being constituted or completed by what it gives.
Robert DryerProject
A complete Catholic study of miracles, evidence, divine testimony, and the limits of what an extraordinary sign can establish. Twenty-nine chapters, source appendices, and thirty reader answers.
Robert DryerResource
A reference for Catholic teaching on faith, worship, moral life, and prayer.
Robert DryerResource
The Second Vatican Council's constitution on divine revelation, Scripture, and Tradition.
Robert DryerResource
John Paul II's apostolic letter on the Rosary as a contemplation of Christ with Mary.
Robert DryerResource
Thirteen connected studies, with core questions and answers, source references, and fuller arguments.
Robert DryerResource
A study of prayer, grace, and the Rosary within the Participation atlas.
Robert DryerResource
Plain-English definitions, important distinctions, and linked arguments across Participation and Robert Dryer.
Robert DryerGuide
I write about Catholic theology, philosophy, and prayer, with a particular interest in how created life can be fully real while depending upon God. My work returns to a connected set of questions: What…
Robert DryerQuestion
Faith and understanding
Philosophical arguments, revealed theology, and freedom in reading order.
Robert DryerQuestion
Faith and understanding
The Father’s communication through the Son in the Spirit.
Robert DryerQuestion
Faith and understanding
One received deposit and the teaching office that serves it.
Robert DryerEssay
Theology and philosophy
A count tells us how many items there are. A further argument must establish what that plurality implies about substances, sources, or the divine nature.
Robert DryerEssay
Prayer
Why attention can serve prayer without making prayer depend on a particular feeling or mental state.
Robert DryerEssay
Philosophy
How something received can become truly our own without becoming independent of its source.
Robert DryerEssay
Thinking clearly
A useful distinction explains a difference. It also shows which further argument is still needed.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 01
A Catholic philosophy of simplicity receives the Church's confession while making its own arguments answerable to reason.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 01 · What does Catholic faith affirm about simplicity, and what remains a philosophical explanation?
The Catechism's profession of one entirely simple divine essence appears within its confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Simplicity belongs to the living God Christians worship. It excludes a deity…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 01 · What does Catholic faith affirm about simplicity, and what remains a philosophical explanation?
Philosophy asks why a proposed source would be underived, what composition would imply, and how wisdom and power could belong to one divine actuality. Such questions involve premises about explanation and…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 01 · What does Catholic faith affirm about simplicity, and what remains a philosophical explanation?
We distinguish several kinds of warrant. A theological exposition unfolds what is received in faith. A philosophical demonstration argues from premises offered to reason. A conditional model shows what…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 01 · What does Catholic faith affirm about simplicity, and what remains a philosophical explanation?
The Catholic commitment is stronger than saying that God happens to have few parts. Divine being is not assembled from a subject and the actuality that completes it, nor from independently contributing…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 01
No. The distinction identifies what is being affirmed and what is being argued. A Catholic receives divine simplicity while asking whether a particular argument successfully explains it. Rejecting an…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 01
The conciliar profession confesses one eternal, unchangeable, almighty God, then names the three Persons and the entirely simple divine essence. This excerpt begins within that profession.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 01
The paragraph defends philosophy's proper principles and methods while preserving the Magisterium's responsibility to discern conflict with revelation.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 02
Biblical speech reveals God's living goodness through real covenant history, without making creatures the source of his knowledge, love, or perfection.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
A lament, a prophetic warning, and a narrative of covenant betrayal make different assertions through different forms of speech. Dei Verbum 12 therefore asks interpreters to consider literary forms,…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
First Samuel 15 brings the apparent tension into one narrative. God regrets making Saul king in verse 11, while verse 29 denies that God repents as a human being does. The latter concerns the firmness of…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
Human anger commonly involves bodily agitation, wounded pride, or impaired judgment. Attributed to God, anger can truthfully signify holy opposition to evil and a judgment that takes victims seriously,…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
The classical reconciliation distinguishes change in God's intrinsic perfection from changes God knowingly wills in history. A sinner becomes repentant; punishment is averted; a covenant relationship is…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
Christ's tears, fear, and agony require a further distinction. They are genuinely human experiences of the eternal Son, who assumes a complete human nature. The one who suffers is a divine Person; the…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 02 · How can divine simplicity be reconciled with Scripture’s descriptions of God grieving, becoming angry, relenting, and answering prayer?
In Exodus 32:11–14 Moses intercedes by appealing to God's name and covenant promises. The narrative gives his petition a real place in Israel's deliverance. A classical account understands prayer as a…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 02
It could, if an interpreter removed grief, anger, and relenting without preserving their definite claims about goodness, judgment, covenant, and deliverance. The proposed reading instead answers to the…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 02
The statement concerns Saul's disobedience; verse 29 in the same narrative denies humanlike repentance of God and affirms the announced judgment's firmness.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 02
Samuel declares the firmness of God's rejection of Saul as king; the wording must be interpreted alongside the chapter's own uses of divine repentance in verses 11 and 35.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 02
The potter passage describes conditional warnings and promises in verses 7–10 and calls Judah to conversion in verse 11; the evil threatened by God means calamity rather than moral wrongdoing.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 03
The ascent from received actuality to one source requires distinct arguments about dependence, scope, and uniqueness.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 03 · Why affirm one universal underived source rather than a brute order or several ultimate sources?
Something can be actual without explaining its own actuality. Living activity depends upon powers and conditions; a composite depends upon its organization. The first task is to identify the dependence.…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 03 · Why affirm one universal underived source rather than a brute order or several ultimate sources?
A local stopping point can remain dependent. A battery may explain a circuit's operation while requiring an explanation of its own. Universal sourcehood concerns a broader field: anything receiving the…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 03 · Why affirm one universal underived source rather than a brute order or several ultimate sources?
Several independent explanatory chains do not become one source merely because each has a terminus. The uniqueness argument asks what could distinguish wholly unreceived existential actuality from another…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 03 · Why affirm one universal underived source rather than a brute order or several ultimate sources?
An underived cause of this process need not yet be the source of every existing thing. A proposed terminus could possess a restricted nature and powers sufficient for one domain. To widen the conclusion,…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 03
That position directly rejects the demand for explanatory completion. The reason to resist it is that every member's actuality has already been characterized through dependence, while the proposed total…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 03
Aquinas argues from participation to a universal source after invoking his earlier arguments for subsistent being and its uniqueness. The passage should not be presented as an inference from one observed change directly to every divine attribute.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 04
Six related inquiries examine whether anything more basic makes the divine source actual, one, existent, determinate, or perfect.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
Pure actuality asks whether the source requires an actualizer to possess its actuality. If that perfection is received, the explanation has not reached the ultimate in that respect. Pure actuality therefore…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
Anti-composition concerns constituents whose combination explains or conditions the whole. The argument identifies these parts and shows how the source depends upon them. Calling every difference a part…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
Essence–existence identity addresses a subject that receives existence through a distinct actualizing principle. Such a recipient would not explain its own existential actuality. The classical conclusion is…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
The argument about actuality begins with a specified reception: a subject possesses some actuality because another principle actualizes it. If that received actuality is what makes the subject capable of…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
Constitution concerns what makes a whole the reality it is. Where constituents supply essential actuality to a whole, the whole cannot be actual in that respect apart from their contribution. This…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
There is a positive reason to connect composition with dependence. Consider an organized living body. Its constituents are identifiable through their intrinsic activities and organization; they are not…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
A whole can be prior to its parts in one respect while depending on their contribution in another. An organ has its functional identity through the living organism, yet the organism lives through its…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
The essence–existence route examines a real recipient–actualizer structure. If what a subject is does not include its existential actuality, and a really distinct act supplies that actuality, the subject…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
This argument supports attribute realism without making every attribute a constituent. Wisdom concerns understanding truth; power concerns efficacy; goodness concerns perfection and right willing. These…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
A property theorist can say that God's wisdom is real without being a part or an ingredient. A whole-priority theorist can say that God's differentiated features are explained by the one fundamental…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
Divine complexism, as used here, is the view that God includes genuinely distinct intrinsic realities as proper parts. These need not be spatial pieces or separable objects. A whole-priority version holds…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 04 · What does simplicity exclude, and how do its six accomplishments establish that exclusion?
The six accomplishments apply this reasoning in distinct respects. Pure actuality excludes an intrinsic recipient needing actualization. Non-derivative unity excludes coordination through which several…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 04
A theory that gives the whole explanatory priority challenges the constitution–dependence premise. The reply concerns the work those features perform. If they supply the actuality, determination, or unity…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 04
This is one of several arguments for simplicity in this article. Its force depends on the stated priority and dependence of components and on the prior first-being argument; it is not a definition making every conceivable distinction a dependent part.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 04
Gregory opposes Eunomius's unequal ranking of Father, Son, and Spirit: unlimited divine goodness admits no greater or lesser degree. This supplies a materially different argument about divine infinitude; it does not establish every one of the six simplicity audits or erase personal distinction.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 05
The positive fullness of God requires warranted perfections as well as freedom from constitutive reception.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
A source described only as uncaused remains insufficiently characterized. It might be a primitive power with no intelligence, or a structure whose effects include minds. Understanding among those effects…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
A pure perfection is a positive excellence whose content does not require a defect or a particular material organization. Understanding truth differs in this respect from having eyes: vision requires an…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
Understanding is a positive achievement because a reality becomes present to a subject as intelligible: the thinker grasps what a claim means and why a reason supports it. A proof displayed on a screen can…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
The strongest rival grants one necessary, nonspatial, unified source with primitive powers sufficient for every created actuality, including conscious reasoners. It need not depend on externally imposed…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
Goodness begins with an appropriate fulfillment: truth perfects understanding, health perfects a living organism, and justice perfects relations between persons. These standards distinguish successful…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
Once a perfection is warranted, simplicity asks how it belongs to God. If a distinct principle makes an incomplete subject intelligent or good, that subject receives completion. An absolute source cannot…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 05 · Why is the simple source positive plenitude rather than an unspecified absence of parts?
Plenitude names God's fullness in himself. The All names that fullness considered as the universal source of finite actuality and perfection. Neither expression means an aggregate containing God and…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 05
A source with primitive powers sufficient for cognitive effects remains a rival to the stronger perfection argument. Our claim is that ultimate adequacy includes genuine possession of the pure perfection's…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 05
This is the second of two arguments for divine perfection. Aquinas supplies a positive bridge from subsistent being to perfection; the article also distinguishes eminent causal possession from possessing each creaturely form in its creaturely manner.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 05
Dionysius combines causal precontainment with an apophatic account of the source beyond ordinary existence. His language of super-essential transcendence differs from Aquinas's subsistent-being analysis and should not be silently equated with it; the passage does not establish free selection among worlds.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 05
The Catechism attributes these words to Bonaventure to explain that creation manifests and communicates divine glory rather than increasing it. The same paragraph immediately quotes Vatican I on creation with absolute freedom of counsel. Communicability therefore supplies no inference here to necessary emanation or to a world needed for divine perfection.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 06
Truthful differences of meaning need not divide the divine reality they describe.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 06 · How can wisdom, goodness, and power differ in meaning while belonging to one divine actuality?
Power concerns efficacy; wisdom concerns understanding and order; goodness concerns perfection and the good. We learn these contents through creaturely realities. Their difference enables meaningful claims…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 06 · How can wisdom, goodness, and power differ in meaning while belonging to one divine actuality?
What concretely makes these claims true of God? Creaturely understanding, strength, and moral formation can involve distinct capacities and acquired states. Transferring that arrangement to God requires a…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 06 · How can wisdom, goodness, and power differ in meaning while belonging to one divine actuality?
Analogy preserves positive content while qualifying its mode. Divine understanding includes no learning from ignorance; divine power requires no borrowed instrument. These qualifications have force only if…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 06 · How can wisdom, goodness, and power differ in meaning while belonging to one divine actuality?
Wisdom, power, and goodness answer different questions. An act can be effective yet foolish, or intelligently planned yet unjust. Calling God wise therefore affirms something that calling God powerful does…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 06
It establishes only that semantic plurality need not entail composition. A further argument has to exclude distinct completing actualizers in God and defend their common divine realization. A rival can…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 06
Aquinas preserves differences in the meanings of divine names while arguing for one simple divine reality. His account connects our multiple conceptions with perfections received separately by creatures.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 06
Augustine argues for the Son's equality with the Father in all predicates signifying divine substance, contrasting God with a human mind that can lack virtues. The passage concerns essential perfection within a Trinitarian argument, rather than making personal relations interchangeable.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 07
Participation joins genuine creaturely possession to dependence upon a source that remains distinct from its gift.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 07 · How can creatures possess received being without becoming parts, modes, or appearances of God?
A creature's actuality is genuinely its own. The tree lives; the person understands; the friend keeps the promise. Dependence does not relocate these realities into God as their only subject. Participation…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 07 · How can creatures possess received being without becoming parts, modes, or appearances of God?
Creation communicates finite actuality without dividing the divine substance. God does not become the material from which creatures are assembled. The source's causal intimacy therefore differs from a…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 07 · How can creatures possess received being without becoming parts, modes, or appearances of God?
Receiving a power does not establish its present exercise. An account of action identifies the creature's own judgment, intention, and productive role. Likewise, causal dependence does not automatically…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 07 · How can creatures possess received being without becoming parts, modes, or appearances of God?
A fire's heat belongs to the fire even though the fire does not explain its own existence. When it warms water, the relevant created conditions matter: its temperature, contact, and duration help explain…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 07
Its received actuality is what is its own. Ownership here names real possession according to a created mode, not self-origination. A person's knowledge can depend on teaching and still be that person's…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 07
Participation here concerns caused possession of being, contrasted with subsistent being. It does not mean that creatures are fragments of the divine substance or that their existence is unreal; agency and disclosure need further arguments.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 08
A created reality can truthfully disclose its source when the relation carrying that disclosure supports the claim made.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 08 · What warrants saying that a creaturely manifestation truly discloses God?
An effect can establish a cause's capacity without displaying every feature of that cause. An artisan forms stone without being stone. A machine prints meaningful sentences without understanding them.…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 08 · What warrants saying that a creaturely manifestation truly discloses God?
A medium makes something present through a different mode. A spoken sentence carries meaning through sound; the meaning need not be a sound in the speaker's intellect. Divine manifestation allows created…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 08 · What warrants saying that a creaturely manifestation truly discloses God?
Objective expression and a person's recognition of it can come apart. A real source-related likeness may go unnoticed, while an emotionally powerful interpretation may be mistaken. Knowledge therefore…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 08 · What warrants saying that a creaturely manifestation truly discloses God?
Consider a patient who recovers after prayer. First comes the event: an actual restoration of health, assessed through the patient's condition and appropriate evidence. Next comes its causal explanation.…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 08
A bounded claim can be genuinely positive. Knowing that an agent understands does not require comprehending everything the agent knows. The restriction concerns the scope of warrant, not the disappearance…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 08
The same answer allows knowledge that God exists and of what belongs to the first cause through its effects, while denying comprehension of the divine essence by sense-based reasoning. Causal evidence is bounded and is not automatically a revealed message.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 09
God's complete actuality excludes receptive deficiency while allowing the distinct question of freely exercised productive power.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 09 · How can pure actuality include active power to create otherwise or create nothing?
A capacity to be perfected differs from a power to act. Ignorance awaiting knowledge involves a lack in the subject. Productive efficacy concerns what can proceed from an agent. Aquinas explicitly locates…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 09 · How can pure actuality include active power to create otherwise or create nothing?
A possible good gives intelligible content to generosity. It does not follow that every such good must be actual or that omitting one makes God deficient. The recipient benefits; divine goodness possesses…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 09 · How can pure actuality include active power to create otherwise or create nothing?
Creative freedom reaches beyond differences among positive worlds. The absence of all creation would leave divine fullness intact. Establishing its possibility also requires an account of willing:…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 09 · How can pure actuality include active power to create otherwise or create nothing?
A skilled musician who remains silent need not lack musical ability. Performing would actualize a performance, although in this finite case it also involves bodily change and may improve the musician. The…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 09 · How can pure actuality include active power to create otherwise or create nothing?
The positive case adds a theory of voluntary agency. A recipient's good can make giving intelligible without imposing a uniquely binding demand to give. If divine goodness is complete, and if no additional…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 09
It would leave a possible effect uncreated. That is not yet an unrealized essential perfection in its source. The objection succeeds only if every productive capacity necessarily requires its exercise in…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 09
Aquinas distinguishes active power from receptive potentiality. The distinction supports creative efficacy without deficiency; it does not itself explain why one possible creation is freely intended rather than another.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 10
A possible world becomes a gift through intelligent authorship, not through possibility alone.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
An alternative tells us what could occur. A reason tells us what makes an action intelligible or good. An intention directs an agent toward a determinate outcome. Efficacy concerns whether that outcome…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
The good of creatures can give intelligible reason for generosity without remedying a deficiency in the giver. A gift can be worthwhile because its recipient receives a real good. We need not make creation…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
A complete intentional action includes its understood object and the agent's control. Its direction cannot be read into the outcome after the fact. Two actions can produce similar effects while meaning…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
An agent's practical grasp of an undertaking need not begin by observing its results. Someone writing a letter ordinarily understands what the writing is for without first discovering that purpose in the…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
Consider someone able to fund either of two worthwhile public gardens. The goods explain why either gift is reasonable. They need not uniquely rank the gardens. On a libertarian account, choosing one for…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
Reasons can favor eligible alternatives without uniquely requiring one. A gift may be made for a recipient's genuine good even when an alternative gift would also be reasonable. In the proposed divine case,…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 10 · What makes this creation a freely authored intention rather than an unexplained or random outcome?
Control requires more than the absence of an external cause: the outcome must issue from the agent's understood direction, and its specificity must be owed to that exercise rather than to an independent…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 10
Not every contingent event is random, but contingency alone does not establish control. The proposed explanation is that God originates this determinate act for intelligible reasons. Its strongest rival…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 10
Aquinas offers three arguments for voluntary divine causality and distinguishes intellect, will, and executive power in the replies. This historical position must still face the question of how a definite free intention accounts for the actual world.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 11
The decisive question is whether God's necessary actuality necessarily entails this particular intention.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 11 · Why does necessary divine actuality not make this world necessary?
An efficacious intention cannot fail in the respect in which it is efficacious. If God efficaciously intends this world's existence, this world exists. Yet a necessary connection between intention and…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 11 · Why does necessary divine actuality not make this world necessary?
Our account distinguishes God's intrinsic actuality from the complete fact that God intentionally creates this world. It proposes that the latter includes a contingent direction originated by God. The…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 11 · Why does necessary divine actuality not make this world necessary?
Aquinas distinguishes absolute necessity from necessity on a supposition when discussing divine willing. This gives us an important question to ask: is the world unavoidable simply because God exists, or…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 11 · Why does necessary divine actuality not make this world necessary?
Let I state the complete intrinsic divine actuality, T the actual efficacious intention toward this world, and W this world's existence. If I is necessary, I necessarily entails T, and T necessarily entails…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 11 · Why does necessary divine actuality not make this world necessary?
A useful comparison is an action performed without failure. If an agent undertakes either of two available tasks, success follows; it does not follow that the agent must undertake this task. But the…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 11
Only after the act and the relevant necessity have been specified. If the complete world-specific efficacious intention is necessary, its effect follows necessarily. Our proposal disputes that premise…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 11
Aquinas distinguishes willing divine goodness necessarily from willing creatures non-necessarily. The body also distinguishes absolute necessity from necessity by supposition; the quotation does not license transferring necessity from divine existence to each created effect.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 12
Noncomposition, immutability, and sameness across alternative creations make different claims.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
Something may lack constituent parts without lacking every intrinsic determination. It may also remain unchanged throughout its life while admitting alternative possible conditions. These familiar…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
The attraction is clear. Creation contributes no ingredient to divine perfection, and no possible world determines what God must become. The proposal seeks to preserve this independence while affirming that…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
The strongest rival grants divine independence and free creation but allows intrinsic intentions to differ across possibilities. It denies that such differences must be proper parts, received perfections,…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
Not acquiring a state from creatures concerns explanatory direction: creatures do not perfect God's cognition or will. Temporal immutability concerns succession: God does not pass from one intrinsic…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
The strongest positive proposal treats intending as an agent's real exercise toward understood content, rather than as an intrinsic representation plus a separately caused outcome. God's self-present…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
Intrinsic invariance cannot mean that every complete truth about God's action is necessary. Let W1 and W2 name alternative created orders, and let T1 and T2 name the respective intentional exercises. The…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
In creating W1, God originates T1 for its understood good; in creating W2, God originates T2. On the invariant account, practical self-awareness concerns the whole actual exercise, including its direction.…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 12 · Does simplicity require the same intrinsic divine profile across alternative creations?
The rival agrees that God receives nothing, undergoes no temporal change, and freely creates. It holds that intending this world rather than another is intrinsically different, although neither intention is…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 12
The proposed difference belongs to the complete intentional action: this understood object, voluntarily intended and effectively caused by God. Yet a changed object alone would be insufficient. The account…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 12
Aquinas distinguishes the necessity of the divine essence and powers from necessity in the will-object relation. This is his historical reconciliation claim, not a demonstration that the complete intrinsic intentional profile is invariant across possible worlds.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 13
Knowledge of possible worlds must be distinguished from knowledge of this actual creation.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
An intelligent source can know an intended effect through adequate knowledge of its own actual exercise and what that exercise unfailingly produces. This is the proposed structure of productive knowledge.…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
A true judgment that a creature exists requires that creature's existence. Without the creature, that judgment would be false. It does not follow that the creature produces a new cognitive perfection in…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
A creature may exercise a received power through its own intention. God's sustaining that power does not, simply as such, make every chosen intention God's intention. Productive knowledge of divinely…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
Knowing every possible design does not tell an architect which design is being executed. Even knowing that any executed design would succeed leaves the actual undertaking unspecified. The divine proposal…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
The productive account now has a positive order. Possible content is understood; an actual undertaking is directly present through the agent's self-manifesting exercise; and its effective scope is known…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 13 · How does God know this actual world without receiving cognitive completion from it?
This route is conditional on knowing the actual intention. If intrinsic actuality is invariant, appealing to self-knowledge of that actuality alone leaves world-specific direction unexplained. The model…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 13
That follows only if every difference in known actual content requires a different intrinsic cognitive actualizer. Our proposal contests that requirement while retaining factive knowledge. It must explain…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 13
The surrounding argument explicitly says that an intelligible form alone does not determine an effect without willing. Productive knowledge is Aquinas's account here; citing it does not independently explain actual-world knowledge or settle the harder case of free creaturely action.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 14
A received power can be genuinely possessed and exercised without becoming independent of its source.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 14 · How can divine sustenance support a creature's own action and freedom?
Receiving a capacity does not make its possession unreal. A person can possess understanding, bodily powers, and opportunities that depend on sources beyond the person. The further question is how those…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 14 · How can divine sustenance support a creature's own action and freedom?
Divine causality is not one finite force competing with another for a percentage of the same action. The account concerns the source of the agent's actuality and operative power, while also recognizing the…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 14 · How can divine sustenance support a creature's own action and freedom?
Moral responsibility requires further distinctions. The act's positive actuality, its intended object, its conformity or failure to conform to an appropriate good, and God's permission are not…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 14
The creature's contribution is its actual exercise as a created cause, including its intention where personal agency is involved. Dependence on a source does not make this exercise causally empty.…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 14
Aquinas explicitly rejects the view that created powers produce no effects. He argues that primary divine causality includes rather than replaces creatures' own operations; a further account of voluntary action is required for responsibility.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 15
A timeless source need not make its effects timeless, but temporal knowledge and response require careful explanation.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 15 · How can an eternal God genuinely act in time, answer prayer, and govern history?
A life stretched through infinitely many moments would still have succession. Eternity, in the classical account explored here, denies that God's life is acquired moment after moment. Aquinas distinguishes…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 15 · How can an eternal God genuinely act in time, answer prayer, and govern history?
The source's mode need not be reproduced in what it causes. An intention can concern an ordered history: this event after that event, this creature developing through these stages. Temporal succession can…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 15 · How can an eternal God genuinely act in time, answer prayer, and govern history?
A petition can be a created condition through which a gift is given, even if the divine intention includes both petition and answer without successive deliberation. The person truly prays; the received good…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 15
Infallible knowledge cannot be false, but that does not alone establish that its object occurs by necessity rather than freely. The difficult issue is how the knowledge, the actual choice, and its…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 15
Aquinas distinguishes a changing intention from an unchanged intention for ordered changes. This concerns temporal immutability, not by itself sameness of complete divine intentional content across alternative possible creations.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 16
Relations of origin distinguish the Persons without distributing divinity among them.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 16 · How can three really distinct Persons subsist without composing or dividing God?
Father and Son are not two names for one Person. The Father begets; the Son is begotten. These opposed relations mark a real personal distinction. Their contrast is not a division of what it is to be…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 16 · How can three really distinct Persons subsist without composing or dividing God?
In created things, a relation can qualify a subject already constituted independently of it. The account of divine subsistence does not place fatherhood on an underlying divine individual as an additional…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 16 · How can three really distinct Persons subsist without composing or dividing God?
The Son's being from the Father must not be treated as the creature's reception of existence from a cause. Eternal generation does not actualize a previously incomplete Son, confer a smaller portion of…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 16 · How can three really distinct Persons subsist without composing or dividing God?
Being from another does not have one uniform metaphysical meaning. A creature receives existence as another substance, actual through a cause it is not. The Son's eternal generation concerns personal origin…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 16
A real distinction is not automatically a relation of constituent to whole. A part contributes to a whole in the relevant constitutive respect; no divine Person contributes a portion of deity missing from…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 16
This sentence introduces the Catechism's conciliar citations on relational names, opposition of relationship, and the Persons' mutual indwelling.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 17
The logic of identity remains binding while theological language requires precise interpretation.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 17 · How should identity, predication, and counting be understood in Trinitarian claims?
A count concerns distinct things under a specified respect. Trinitarian confession names three Persons while deity remains numerically undivided: neither portions, cooperating gods, nor examples of a divine…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 17 · How should identity, predication, and counting be understood in Trinitarian claims?
If A is numerically identical with B and B with C in the same interpretation, A is identical with C. Nothing about God licenses affirming those premises and rejecting that consequence. The first task is to…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 17 · How should identity, predication, and counting be understood in Trinitarian claims?
Aquinas's treatment of persons and essence attends to both what a term signifies and how it signifies. This supplies a resource for careful theological predication. We should not pretend that the resulting…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 17 · How should identity, predication, and counting be understood in Trinitarian claims?
Let F designate the Father, S the Son, and G one individual. Under ordinary numerical identity, F = G and S = G entail F = S. Adding F ≠ S makes that set inconsistent. Specifying different counting respects…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 17
They would be if the distinctions lacked a metaphysical basis. Relations of origin and undivided deity must do substantive explanatory work. Distinguishing nature and Person blocks one elementary…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 17
The Catechism confesses the consubstantial Trinity, then quotes conciliar texts affirming one undivided divine substance.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 18
Personal origin distinguishes Father, Son, and Spirit without assigning unequal measures of deity.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 18 · How does the Father's monarchy preserve the Son's and Spirit's full equality?
A creature receives existence through a creative act and remains distinct in substance from its Creator. Eternal generation is a different relation. The Son is from the Father, but not as an effect whose…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 18 · How does the Father's monarchy preserve the Son's and Spirit's full equality?
The Catholic confession joins the Father's first origin with the Spirit's procession from Father and Son. It does not posit two independent sources cooperating to produce a third Person. The Son's relation…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 18 · How does the Father's monarchy preserve the Son's and Spirit's full equality?
Equality means that no Person lacks divine perfection. It does not mean that the Father can be exchanged with the Son in statements of origin. The Father begets; the Son is begotten. These statements…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 18
Created production involves a recipient's dependence for actuality in a substance distinct from its source. It does not follow that every kind of origin entails inferiority of nature. Eternal generation is…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 18
Gregory rejects the dilemma that Father must name either an essence different from the Son's or an action that makes the Son a creature; he then affirms identity of nature between begetter and begotten.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 19
The real distinction of the Persons does not divide divine knowledge or willing into three independent lives.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 19 · What does it mean to call God personal while confessing one divine intellect and will?
Person and nature perform different explanatory work. A person is the subsisting subject; a nature accounts for the kind of life and operation. Among human beings, distinct persons have numerically distinct…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 19 · What does it mean to call God personal while confessing one divine intellect and will?
The same divine knowing does not make Father, Son, and Spirit interchangeable names. Knowing and willing specify essential perfection; paternity and filiation specify personal opposition. Aquinas explains…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 19 · What does it mean to call God personal while confessing one divine intellect and will?
The Incarnation makes the distinction concrete. The Son assumes human nature, including a genuinely human power of willing. Christ therefore has a divine will and a human will without being two persons. His…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 19
Independence is not part of the definition of every personal relation. The question is whether there are real, noninterchangeable subjects and real relations between them. Trinitarian teaching affirms both…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 19
The preceding paragraph teaches one divine operation and each Person's unique personal property; this paragraph explains communion with the Persons without separating their nature.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 20
Mercy can belong fully to God without requiring that creaturely misery first supply a missing divine actuality.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 20 · How can impassible divine love be genuinely merciful and responsive?
Human compassion usually includes being emotionally affected. That can disclose another's distress and move us to help. Yet the emotional alteration and the good it enables are distinguishable. The…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 20 · How can impassible divine love be genuinely merciful and responsive?
Responsiveness has more than one meaning. It can mean undergoing an internal reaction, or knowingly acting in relation to someone's actual circumstances. Impassibility denies the first as a mode of divine…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 20 · How can impassible divine love be genuinely merciful and responsive?
Language of divine anger, tenderness, and compassion communicates determinate truths. Anger names opposition to evil and the reality of judgment; mercy names loving action toward misery. Reading these…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 20
Love would be empty if it lacked knowledge, concern, or self-giving. Those do not follow from the absence of passive alteration. The Christian confession also includes the Son's actual human solidarity with…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 20
Aquinas distinguishes sorrow's passive affection from mercy's removal of misery and explains goodness, justice, liberality, and mercy as distinct aspects of God's bestowal of perfection.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 21
The Son's humanity is personally his without becoming a constituent that completes or changes the divine nature.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 21 · How can the simple eternal Son become human and truly suffer?
The question is first who lives this human life. Christianity answers: the Son himself. His humanity is not a costume, a separate human person adopted by God, or a finite segment of deity. Chalcedon's…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 21 · How can the simple eternal Son become human and truly suffer?
There is real novelty. A human life begins, develops, acts, and suffers. Its subject is not merely related externally to the Son as a message is related to its sender. The Son lives it. Saying that divine…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 21 · How can the simple eternal Son become human and truly suffer?
The assertion that God suffered is true when God names the incarnate Son and suffering is attributed according to his human nature. It does not mean that suffering becomes an essential property of deity.…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 21
The incarnate Christ is truly acknowledged in two natures. What is denied is composition within the divine nature, as if humanity became a divine constituent or completed an imperfect deity. The union…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 21
The paragraph receives Constantinople II's confession that Christ is one Person of the Trinity, while the following paragraphs preserve his full humanity and two natural wills.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 22
An account of created goodness must explain defect and permission without making suffering an ingredient of divine perfection.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 22 · How do evil, suffering, and hiddenness challenge unreceived plenitude?
Blindness is a privation because sight belongs to the appropriate good of an eye. Its character is understood through the good that is absent. Calling it privation does not say that no one suffers or that…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 22 · How do evil, suffering, and hiddenness challenge unreceived plenitude?
Three cases need separation. Ignorance can deprive a knower of an appropriate perfection. Succession constitutes a melody, so removing it would destroy that good rather than perfect it. Danger can occasion…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 22 · How do evil, suffering, and hiddenness challenge unreceived plenitude?
Freedom helps explain possible wrongdoing, not every permission. Natural suffering also exceeds human choice. Divine hiddenness adds another difficulty: a person may sincerely seek God and experience no…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 22
An unexplained evil is not a demonstrated contradiction, but neither is the absence of contradiction a sufficient defense of divine goodness. The evidential challenge concerns whether the world gives…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 22
The question is why evil exists if the almighty Creator cares for all creatures; the Catechism situates its answer within the whole Christian faith rather than a single explanation.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 23
Created signs can truly mediate divine gifts, while the Eucharist requires its own account of substantial conversion and Christ's whole presence.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 23 · How can material sacraments mediate Christ without dividing God or reducing presence to symbolism?
A sign can do more than invite an idea. Words can establish a promise; bodily action can enact reconciliation. Meaning and effect need not exclude each other. These examples do not establish sacramental…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 23 · How can material sacraments mediate Christ without dividing God or reducing presence to symbolism?
The Catholic claim is that what was bread and wine becomes Christ's body and blood through substantial conversion. Substance here concerns what the reality is, rather than merely how it appears or is used.…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 23 · How can material sacraments mediate Christ without dividing God or reducing presence to symbolism?
Christ's presence is sacramental. Breaking the host does not divide him into bodily or divine fractions; he is present whole under each species and each part while the species subsist. This differs from the…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 23
Unchanged appearances do not alone establish that the conversion is merely verbal. The sacramental claim concerns a substantial difference that is not a difference in immediately measurable appearances. Its…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 23
The preceding paragraph confesses transubstantiation, and this paragraph states the duration and undivided character of Christ's sacramental presence.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 24
Consummation is creation's transformation in communion, not an achievement that supplies a missing perfection to God.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 24 · How do grace, beatific vision, and God all in all fulfill creatures without completing God?
Every creature depends on God for being. Sanctifying grace adds a different gift: participation in divine life through Christ and the Spirit. It heals and elevates the recipient for communion beyond natural…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 24 · How do grace, beatific vision, and God all in all fulfill creatures without completing God?
The beatific vision concerns God himself, not a created image that stands in for him as the object through which the divine essence is seen. This immediacy does not eliminate God's enabling grace or make…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 24 · How do grace, beatific vision, and God all in all fulfill creatures without completing God?
The All names plenitude as origin, sustaining gift, and final good, rather than an aggregate made by adding creatures to God. In Paul's resurrection argument, all in all follows Christ's reign, the defeat…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 24
The phrase cannot bear that conclusion by itself. Its context concerns Christ's victory and the final ordering of creation to God. Judgment, freedom, damnation, and hope require their own theological…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 24
Verses 20–28 concern Christ's resurrection, his reign, the defeat of death, and the kingdom's consummation. The Son's subjection is read within the incarnate economy, without assigning him an inferior divine nature.
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 24
Maximus juxtaposes the persistence of embodied human nature with becoming God by grace. This supports real deification without identifying created and divine natures. The wording is quoted through Korb; adopting it does not adopt the article's further disputed interpretation of deification as hypostatic identity or attribute the site's constructive metaphysical model to Maximus.
Robert DryerQuestion
Divine Simplicity · Question 25
A philosophy earns its distinctive voice through the explanatory connections it establishes and the objections it can answer.
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 25 · What is distinctively this account's contribution, and how can it be tested?
The guiding claim is that dependence need not diminish possession. A creature's existence and powers are real even when received. Divine simplicity concerns the source's actuality without constitutive…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 25 · What is distinctively this account's contribution, and how can it be tested?
Four questions discipline an inference. What kind of relation connects the terms? In which respect does it hold? Is the conclusion necessary, possible, or actual? What warrants the passage? This prevents a…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 25 · What is distinctively this account's contribution, and how can it be tested?
Catholic doctrine supplies theological commitments; it does not endorse every philosophical model used to explain them. Historical attribution requires an author's actual argument. Formalization contributes…
Robert DryerArgument
Divine Simplicity · Question 25 · What is distinctively this account's contribution, and how can it be tested?
A new synthesis earns its place by explaining more while preserving the realities it seeks to explain. John Henry Newman’s tests of doctrinal development offer an analogous discipline: preserve the…
Robert DryerObjection
Divine Simplicity · Question 25
Some of its resources are inherited, and renaming them adds no argument. The contribution becomes substantive where the coordination explains a previously obscured distinction, supplies a warranted bridge,…
Robert DryerSource passage
Divine Simplicity · Question 25
This statement explains philosophy's proper rational autonomy; the encyclical also requires attention to revealed truth and distinguishes that autonomy from exemption from doctrinal discernment.
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
The project asks five recurring questions. What is real? What explains it? What could genuinely differ and who acts? What is truthfully disclosed? What would fulfill the subject? These are different…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
We ask what differs, what realizes that difference, and what makes the reality one. Meaning, intrinsic state, constituent, personal identity, and relation cannot be exchanged without argument. Several true…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
We ask what explains what, through which relation, and in which respect. Productive causation, sustaining dependence, constitution, personal origin, truthmaking, and cognitive actualization do different…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
We distinguish real alternatives, intelligible reasons, actual settlement, and successful execution. Reasons can explain an action without necessarily selecting it. An indeterminate outcome can occur…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
We ask what becomes truthfully present, by what relation, and with what warrant. A finite expression need not reproduce its source's mode of being. A manifestation can be adequate in a stated respect…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
We ask what good belongs to the subject, what conditions constitute that good, and what defects impede it. Actuality, efficacy, satisfaction, and goodness are not interchangeable. A real creaturely good may…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
Participation joins reception to real possession. Agency, expression, finality, and supernatural elevation require additional warrants. Receiving a power is not yet exercising it; sharing a cause is not yet…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
Type asks which relation is involved. Respect asks what precisely is explained, received, known, or perfected. Modality asks whether the claim is actual, possible, necessary, or contingent and whether the…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Method
State the proposed explanation and its indispensable bridge. Remove that bridge and ask what serious rival remains. Defend the premise that excludes the rival, or acknowledge the remaining dispute. A formal…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Sources and their use
The project distinguishes Scripture, Catholic doctrinal teaching, primary philosophical arguments, and its own constructive synthesis. These sources are consulted for particular claims. A reference does not…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Sources and their use
Romans 11, especially verse 36, gives the doxological language of all things from God, through God, and toward God. Its context should remain visible when that language is used philosophically. 1…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Sources and their use
The Catechism on speaking about God, paragraphs 39 through 43, concerns truthful language about God together with the limits of creaturely concepts. The Catechism on the one God, especially paragraph 202,…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Sources and their use
Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae provides especially relevant arguments in I question 2 on God's existence, I question 3 on simplicity, I question 4 on perfection, I question 11 on unity, and I question 13…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Sources and their use
The expressions unreceived plenitude, measured manifestation, supported agency, and the All name the constructive work developed in these essays. Their value depends on the explanations they supply. A cited…
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · About this project
Divine Simplicity and Participation is a Catholic philosophical inquiry by Robert Moses Dryer. Its central concern is how God can be unreceived plenitude while creatures genuinely receive being, exercise…
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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. The formal motive of faith names this reliance on God’s authority; motives of credibility concern the grounds for recognizing a purported revelation as credible.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
Christ’s effective action through a valid sacrament, communicating the grace it signifies in fruitful reception. Its efficacy does not depend on the minister’s personal holiness; fruitful reception also requires the dispositions appropriate to the sacrament. 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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
Robert DryerGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
Counting identifies how many distinct items qualify within a specified domain. Transcendental unity, in the classical account, concerns a being’s undividedness as the being it is; a numerical count considers items as units. Neither heterogeneous enumeration nor a shared predicate establishes a common natural genus. A further plurality of sources, substances, or constituents requires a bridge connecting those distinctions.
Robert DryerSource passage
Read with Dionysius · The Divine Names II.11
The gifts are differentiated according to their recipients; the giver is neither divided among them nor assembled from them. Dionysius explicitly measures deification by each recipient's capacity. His 'Indivisible Plurality' must be read with the denial that God is one item in the many or their aggregate.
Robert DryerSource passage
Read with Dionysius · The Divine Names IV.7
Beauty here gives existence, communicates determinate form, gathers things into harmony, and draws them toward fulfillment. 'Each kind being beautiful in its own manner' preserves the creature's received mode. A finite expression can be truly beautiful without setting the measure of divine beauty.
Robert DryerSource passage
Read with Dionysius · The Divine Names IV.13–14
The phrase 'whereby He yet stays within Himself' governs the image of ecstasy. God is intimately present through providential love without the divine actuality migrating, suffering loss, or acquiring a needed completion. The movement describes communication and attraction while preserving the source's transcendence.
Robert DryerSource passage
Read with Dionysius · The Divine Names VII.3
'All Things in all things and Nothing in any' joins causal fullness to transcendence. God is not a stone, tree, or intelligence under its finite received mode. Created perfections can nevertheless disclose their source. 'In proportion to their quality' keeps the expression's measure from becoming a measure imposed on God.
Robert DryerSource passage
Read with Dionysius · The Mystical Theology I, opening invocation and counsel to Timothy
Dionysius begins with prayer to the Trinity. Darkness names a reality exceeding the mind's grasp, rather than an empty source about which nothing is true. The intensity of light and the inadequacy of finite comprehension can belong together. Reception is genuine without becoming containment.
Robert DryerGuide
Divine Simplicity · Primary-text companion
Giving without division or diminution The gifts are differentiated according to their recipients; the giver is neither divided among them nor assembled from them. Dionysius explicitly measures deification…
Robert DryerGuide
Follow the central argument Begin with the doctrine, the six arguments, real created possession, and the promise of communion. Begin with Scripture and prayer Read divine responsiveness, impassible love,…
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Editorial Note
This manuscript reconstructs a previously in development Handbook on Miracles, includes text of an argument presented by Ethan Muse (published on youtube in response to Dr. Ryan Mullins), and…
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · The Problem of Miracle
Miracles are often handled at one of two inadequate extremes. At one extreme, an extraordinary event occurring in a Catholic setting is treated as if it immediately established Catholicism. At the…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 1
A theology of miracle must begin before miracle. If God is imagined as one finite cause among others, miraculous action will look like competition with nature. Classical Catholic theology begins…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 2
Created causality is not an embarrassment to divine action. It is one of providence’s achievements. The distinction between ordinary providential action through creatures and extraordinary divine…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 3
Miracle should not be described as God arriving at a location from which God was previously absent. Omnipresence requires a more refined vocabulary of presence, operation, manifestation, and…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 4
A miracle is extraordinary only against the background of a real order. Catholic theology therefore distinguishes what belongs to ordinary created powers, what may exceed familiar human powers…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 5
The biblical vocabulary already resists reducing miracle to brute anomaly. Scripture presents mighty deeds as acts of power, as occasions of wonder, and, crucially, as signs whose meaning belongs…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 6
Aquinas offers the classical metaphysical grammar. Miracle is not defined by human surprise alone, still less by the present limits of scientific explanation. It concerns the relation of an effect…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 6
Lambertini preserves the Thomistic core while distinguishing a strict miracle, which exceeds the powers of the whole created order, from looser uses of the term for effects exceeding visible corporeal…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 7
Miracle has a phenomenology because human beings encounter effects before they possess complete causal explanations. Yet wonder must be disciplined by metaphysics and discernment.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 8
Christian miracle cannot be understood apart from Christ. The Incarnation provides the deepest grammar of sensible mediation, while the Resurrection provides the paradigmatic case of a miracle…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 9
The Catholic tradition gives some miracles an explicitly evidential function. The native vocabulary is sign, witness, confirmation, testimony, and motive of credibility. “Vindicatory miracle” is…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 10
Aquinas and Lambertini distinguish two objects of divine attestation that are often confused: the truth of a proclamation and the sanctity of a person.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 11
The evidential meaning of a miracle must be indexed to the object toward which the event is intelligibly ordered. This study calls that relation the semantic scope of vindication.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 12
The evidential use of miracle presupposes the truthfulness of God. Catholic theology therefore joins the ontology of divine action to an epistemology of revelation and faith.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 13
Prospero Lambertini, later Benedict XIV, stands at a decisive junction in the tradition. He inherits scholastic metaphysics but writes as a jurist, canonist, theologian, and experienced Promoter…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 14
The mature analytical model can be expressed as six judgments. Lambertini does not number them in this modern form, but his practice repeatedly distinguishes them.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 15
Healing claims provide Lambertini’s most developed laboratory for evidential discipline. The Church cannot infer miracle merely from temporal proximity to prayer or from the surprise of witnesses.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 16
A rigorous miracle theory must control not only for ordinary bodily causes but also for the mind, fraud, misperception, and, within the traditional Catholic ontology, created spiritual agency.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 17
Canonization shows in a concentrated form how Catholicism distinguishes moral evidence, divine attestation, and ecclesial judgment.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 18
The communion of saints is intelligible only if creaturely mediation is distinguished from divine principal causality. Saints do not rival God; their intercession belongs within the one divine…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 19
The sacramental economy and the miraculous economy intersect, but they are not the same. A sacrament is efficacious because Christ acts in it according to his institution, not because something…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 20
The Eucharist sharpens every distinction concerning presence and manifestation. Catholic faith confesses Christ’s unique substantial presence independently of extraordinary sensible phenomena.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 21
The patristic tradition already possesses categories for recognizing something genuinely Christological outside full visible communion without vindicating separation itself.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 22
The extension from separated Christians to non-Christian religious contexts requires greater caution. Catholic teaching does not authorize a blanket declaration that reported miracles in other…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 23
The existence of extraordinary claims in rival traditions is a serious evidential problem only if one assumes that every genuine miracle automatically validates the entire surrounding religion.…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 24
The positive argument begins not with isolated later marvels but with Christ. His works, death, Resurrection, apostolic mission, and the Church’s historical witness form the primary field within…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 25
Not all miracle claims have equal evidential weight. The stronger cases combine an extraordinary event with reliable evidence, determinate semantic connection, independence from rival…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 26
The classical skeptical challenge is not exhausted by asking whether miracles are metaphysically possible. It asks whether testimony can ever rationally establish such an event, especially when…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 27
A theology of miracle becomes pastorally and intellectually distorted if it implies that the unhealed lacked faith or that divine love is measured by spectacular intervention.
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 28
The strongest objection to a confessional miracle theory is that it could immunize itself against every contrary case. A disciplined Catholic account must distinguish a theological prediction from…
Robert DryerChapter
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Chapter 29
The preceding analysis yields not a paranormal appendix to theology but a theology of signs embedded within Catholic doctrine as a whole.
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Miracle within the Economy of Signs
A Catholic theology of miracle begins with a world already dependent upon God. Nature is neither godless machinery nor an illusion. It is a created order endowed with real secondary causes and…
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix A
The following guide preserves the complete chapter map from the research handbook. It is retained as specialist apparatus rather than interrupting the main argument.
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix B
This dossier preserves a compact pool of primary witnesses used by the systematic argument. Quotations are intentionally brief; the cited works should be consulted in full for context.
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
The Latin quotations below are normalized only for typography and obvious scan/OCR corruption in the supplied research transcription. The English renderings are working translations. Statements…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“At nos majoris claritatis gratia dicimus, Miracula majora excedere vires totius naturae creatae, & Miracula minora excedere vires naturae tantum corporeae, & visibilis.” “For the sake of greater clarity,…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
At the opening of Chapter II: “Solus Deus causa est efficiens principalis Miraculorum, independens, & authoritativa.” “God alone is the principal, independent, and authoritative efficient cause of…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
After reviewing the dispute over physical versus moral instrumentality, Lambertini deliberately brackets the scholastic disagreement: “Sufficiet, Deum solum esse veram causam efficientem, independentem,…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini immediately adds that miraculous power is not simply handed to a creature as a permanent stock of power: “Miraculorum potentia purae creaturae a Deo non communicatur per modum habitus, sed per…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Discussing the demonic use of the serpent, Lambertini makes the distinction explicitly: “Daemonis locutio per Serpentem fuit aliquid excedens vires, & facultatem naturae corporeae, & sensibilis; sed…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini's summary is concise: “Uno verbo, nec Angelus bonus, nec Angelus malus sui naturali virtute possunt Miracula facere, quae excedant vires, & facultatem cujuscumque naturae creatae.” “In a word,…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
One of Lambertini's most important propositions: “Miracula enim sunt testimonium Divinae Virtutis, & Veritatis.” “For miracles are a testimony of Divine Power and Truth.” Book IV, Part I, ch. III, p. 30.…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Here Lambertini states in his own synthesis a point especially relevant to the comparative question: “Posse videlicet Paganos a Deo assumi unquam instrumenta in patratione Miraculorum, ut per ea aliqua…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Immediately before this, after considering various theological opinions: “At, stricte procedendo, dicimus, Infideles, Haereticos, Schismaticos non posse a Deo assumi tamquam instrumenta pro patrandis…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
At the opening of his chapter specifically on final causality: “Finis generalis primarius Miraculorum est gloria Dei.” “The general primary end of miracles is the glory of God.” Book IV, Part I, ch. IV, p. 40.
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini then names the two forms of vindication already distinguished: “Inter fines Miraculorum secundarios, qui tamen ad primarium finem ordinantur, recensentur tum confirmatio pro ostendenda veritate…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
This is the scholastic nuance I especially wanted preserved: “Nobis sufficere Deum in praesenti Providentia, & de Potentia Ordinaria Miraculum operari non posse petitum pro confirmatione falsae doctrinae,…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
This may be the most important sentence for the scope-of-vindication principle: “Miracula semper sunt vera testimonia ejus, ad quod inducuntur.” “Miracles are always true testimonies of that to which they…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“Unde a malis, qui falsam doctrinam enuntiant, numquam fiunt vera Miracula ad confirmationem suae doctrinae.” “Hence true miracles are never worked by evil persons who proclaim false doctrine for the…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“Quamvis quandoque fieri possint ad commendationem nominis Christi, quod invocant, & in virtute Sacramentorum, quae exhibent.” “Although at times [miracles] can occur for the commendation of the name of…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“Miracula sunt vera testimonia, & a solo Deo, qui non potest esse testis falsitatis, cum sit Veritas per essentiam.” “Miracles are true testimonies, and [come] from God alone, who cannot be a witness to…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini introduces the analogy by saying theologians use the example of a prince's seal, and then quotes Cardinal Gotti: “Non potest Deus facere Miraculum; nam alias Deus fieret illo Miraculo testis…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini then gives Bellarmine almost as a formal argument: “Vera Miracula non possunt fieri, nisi Dei virtute.” “True miracles cannot be worked except by the power of God.” “Deus autem non potest esse…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
After discussing true and false miracles, Lambertini turns to practical discernment: “Ex variis capitibus, & causis dubitationem oriri posse de Miraculorum falsitate.” “Doubt concerning the falsity of…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“Necessarium non est, veluti quidam male seriati autumant, quod nobis cognitae sint omnes naturae leges.” “It is not necessary, as certain ill-advised persons suppose, that all the laws of nature be known…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
“In Canonizationis Judicio ante omnia praecedere debere exactissimam Virtutum, aut Martyrii discussionem, & post eam feliciter resolutam transitum fieri ad discussionem Miraculorum.” “In the judgment of…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini asks explicitly how one can know that God performed a miracle to disclose a particular person's holiness: “Quaeres, quomodo ostendi possit, a Deo fuisse patratum Miraculum ad patefaciendam…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
When several servants of God are invoked, Lambertini becomes very strict: “Hoc unum certum est, assertum Miraculum non posse deservire pro Beatificatione, vel Canonizatione, ad quas oportet, ut de Miraculis…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini later summarizes what must be established in healing cases: “Probanda est gravitas morbi una cum difficultate sanationis per media naturalia; probanda est subita, & instantanea sanatio; docendum…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini explicitly recognizes sudden natural improvement and then concludes: “Judicium Medicorum necessarium est in hoc secundo requisito: idemque judicium necessarium est in tertio.” “The judgment of…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
After citing cases in which confidence or imagination produced apparent improvement, he says: “Haec omnia facile admitti possunt.” “All these things can readily be admitted.” He then insists that the real…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix C
Lambertini describes an established practice: “Inolevit consuetudo Sacrae Congregationis Rituum examinandi sanationem, illam approbandi tamquam miraculosam, si necessaria concurrant requisita, sed nullo…
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix D
This appendix gathers the analytical model used throughout the book. The labels are modern reconstructions intended to organize the traditional materials, not magisterial formulae.
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix D
Event → Causal Discernment → Divine Attribution → Signification → Scope of Attestation → Ecclesial/Doctrinal Integration
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix D
Six judgments of a miracle claim Judgment Controlling question Historical Did the alleged event actually occur? Scientific/causal Can ordinary bodily, psychological, environmental, medical, or other created…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix D
extraordinary ≠ miraculous miraculous ≠ automatically vindicatory vindicatory ≠ unlimited vindication divine action through a person ≠ endorsement of everything that person believes medical inexplicability…
Robert DryerArgument
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Appendix D
Vindicatory force rises, other things being equal, with extraordinariness, evidential reliability, semantic specificity, independence, and convergence. This heuristic is not intended as a literal…
Robert DryerGuide
Miracle and Divine Testimony · Bibliography and Primary Sources
The Holy Bible. New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE). Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011.
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
A miracle is not simply an unusual event or something for which we presently lack a scientific explanation. In the manuscript’s classical Catholic account, a miracle properly so called is an extraordinary…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
“Violation of a law of nature” is misleading within the manuscript’s metaphysics. God is not another physical agent inside the universe who overpowers one natural force with a stronger one. The created…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
Because divine and creaturely causality do not occupy the same explanatory level. Creatures possess genuine powers and really produce effects, but their existence and causal powers are themselves received…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
Every natural event already depends upon divine providence, so divine causation by itself cannot define miracle. Ordinarily, God governs through the created powers and causal relations he has given things.…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
The natural belongs to the powers and order of created nature. A preternatural effect may exceed ordinary human or corporeal capacities while still lying within the powers of some created agency,…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Meaning and causality
No. The manuscript emphasizes Lambertini’s important distinction here. The Incarnation, sanctifying grace, sacramental efficacy, and glorification are supernatural realities, yet they are not therefore…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
No. Rarity concerns frequency; miracle concerns causality. A natural event could be extraordinarily rare and remain natural, while an effect repeatedly produced beyond proportionate created powers would…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
They do so through historical and forensic inquiry rather than immediate metaphysical intuition. The first task is to establish the event itself through witnesses, records, chronology, physical evidence,…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
The manuscript follows Lambertini’s enduring methodological structure: diagnosis must be secure, the seriousness and prognosis of the disease understood, treatment history examined, the character and timing…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
They are competing possibilities that must be investigated rather than dismissed by religious enthusiasm. Misdiagnosis can make an ordinary recovery appear extraordinary; psychological and psychosomatic…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
Science and medicine can establish important components of the case, but the manuscript does not ask them to make the entire theological judgment. Medicine can establish diagnosis, prognosis, treatment,…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Evidence and discernment
The very word miraculum is associated with wonder: we encounter a manifest effect while its cause is hidden. But ordinary ignorance can also cause wonder. An eclipse may astonish someone ignorant of…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
This is one of the manuscript’s central distinctions. A miracle is miraculous by reason of its causal relation to the created order. It functions as a sign insofar as the event intelligibly manifests…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
A vindicatory miracle is one whose circumstances give sufficient reason to understand the divine action as confirming some determinate object: a proclaimed truth, a messenger, a mission, sanctity, or…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
Meaning must arise from the intelligible relation between the event and its context. Antecedent prayer or prediction, timing, location, explicit invocation, devotional focus, relics, prior intention, public…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
“Semantic scope” names the range of realities an event can reasonably manifest or signify. “Attestative scope” is narrower: it concerns what the event warrants us in treating God as actually confirming or…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
They provide what might be called the event’s evidential address. Lambertini’s canonization analysis shows this particularly clearly: if one servant of God is explicitly invoked and an extraordinary effect…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Signs and attestation
Yes, and the manuscript regards this as indispensable. A sinful preacher could be involved in a miracle confirming something true without thereby being declared holy. Conversely, a miracle attesting a…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
Yes, at least in principle. The manuscript draws upon Augustine, Aquinas, Lambertini, and Catholic ecclesiology to distinguish God’s freedom to act through or for a person from divine endorsement of that…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
Potentially, but only according to what the event actually attests. A Muslim, Hindu, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, Mormon, and Catholic might each pray for divine mercy and receive extraordinary healing…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
They do not cancel merely because their recipients belong to contradictory religions. Cancellation would follow only if equally warranted genuine divine testimonies actually attested contradictory…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
On the manuscript’s reconstruction of Aquinas and Lambertini, no, within the providential economy God has actually established. The prince’s-seal analogy is important: if a ruler knowingly supplies his seal…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
An apparent counter-sign certainly could count as evidence that must be investigated. Catholicism cannot simply define inconvenient evidence away. But if an event were genuinely divine testimony, divine…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
By applying substantially symmetrical evidential standards. Catholic and non-Catholic claims alike must face scrutiny concerning witnesses, documentation, medicine, fraud, psychology, ordinary causes,…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Rival claims and counterevidence
Only when an additional inferential bridge is warranted. Attestation of proposition P does not automatically authenticate every institution associated with P. One must distinguish attestation of a truth,…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Faith, sacraments, and suffering
They can function as motives of credibility, providing rational grounds for recognizing a purported divine revelation or messenger as credible. They do not ordinarily make mysteries such as the Trinity…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Faith, sacraments, and suffering
Sacramental efficacy and miraculous manifestation belong to different theological orders. A sacrament is efficacious because Christ acts according to his institution; it does not become real because an…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Faith, sacraments, and suffering
A genuine Eucharistic miracle would be manifestative or vindicatory, not constitutive. Christ does not become more really or more substantially present because an extraordinary phenomenon occurs. On…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Faith, sacraments, and suffering
The manuscript refuses the inference that the unhealed must lack sufficient faith or divine favor. Miraculous healing is an eschatological sign, not a universal promise that mortality and suffering will…
Robert DryerQuestion
Miracles · Faith, sacraments, and suffering
They should be treated as elements within a larger, hierarchically ordered evidential complex rather than isolated supernatural “proof tokens.” The Resurrection occupies a uniquely central position because…
Robert DryerGuide
Nine parts, twenty-nine chapters, and research appendices.
Robert DryerGuide
Primary texts, bibliography, and working translations.
ParticipationProject
A critical, constructive investigation of the smallest basis for Christian participation metaphysics, with derivations, countermodels, and historical evidence.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
This page asks a deliberately narrow question: what is the smallest honest metaphysical grammar needed to explain how a finite creature can be from God, genuinely like God, and yet remain genuinely other than God?
ParticipationArgument
Participation
Actuality, received dependence, and measure are not sufficient. They cannot establish likeness, exclude God as a constituent of creatures, or establish free creation without additional premises.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
Participation connects realization, dependence, agency, manifestation, and fulfillment. Each connection needs its own warrant.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
Everything below is a modern constructive proposal. Historical texts supply constraints and resources; no author is credited with this formal system.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
Arrows show the clauses used in this reconstruction. “Conditional” means that the stated assumptions about the source are adopted; no cosmological existence proof is being presented.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
The explorer tracks the stated proof paths. A missing path is not a proof of underivability by every imaginable alternative argument. Countermodels and their scope are documented in the formal dossier.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
The countermodels are schematic formal witnesses, not assertions that their rival ontologies are philosophically coherent in every other respect. The formal dossier states actual assignments and retained-clause checks.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
Non-exhaustion defeats one possible necessity argument: no finite effect is an adequate measurement or completion of unlimited actuality. It does not defeat every argument for necessary production.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
These are material contributions, not a chronology of uniform doctrine. Exact evidence and interpretive limits sit in the linked research dossiers.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
A metaphysical reconstruction can preserve Christian commitments without becoming a defined ecclesial doctrine. Newman supplies an analogical discipline, not retrospective authorization.
ParticipationArgument
Participation
The proposed circle—actuality → reception → measure → participation → source → unreceived actuality—can organize inquiry. It cannot replace the argument that the source exists or the principles connecting these categories.
ParticipationQuestion
Participation
A creature possesses an actuality that God causes and sustains. That actuality is genuinely the creature's: the received life is its life, and a received capacity can be its capacity to exercise. Participation names this real,…
ParticipationQuestion
Participation
They can possess a real perfection whose positive content corresponds to perfection in their source, although its mode of possession differs. But being caused does not, by itself, establish that correspondence. Causation…
ParticipationQuestion
Participation
A perfection can correspond without being possessed in the same way. A creature receives actuality according to its capacity; the adopted divine source receives none of the actuality by which it exists. The finite measure…
ParticipationSource note
Participation
Causal orders, being not a genus, and actuality-priority supply background; none independently yields Christian creation.
ParticipationProject
A sixfold audit of divine simplicity, positive fullness without reception, genuine creative alternatives, intentional agency, and knowledge through actual intelligent action.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
Participation concerns real received possession. This inquiry asks what further arguments would establish a simple, intelligent source whose creative action is genuinely free.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
Inherited results retain their premises. The source’s existence, universality, and positive perfections require arguments beyond the participation model.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
The six accomplishments ask how the source could still receive what makes it actual, one, existent, determinate, or perfect. Their arguments must identify the dependence rather than assume it.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
Non-exhaustion removes a claim of adequacy: no finite world expresses the whole source. A further modal argument must establish that creation could genuinely have been otherwise.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
A complete account must explain what is possible, why an option is fitting, who chooses it, and why the intended result actually occurs.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
The agent’s action must explain its direction toward this world. Reading an intention backward from the finished effect would leave authorship unexplained.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
The source can know an effect through its own efficacious intention if it knows that actual intention and its efficacy. Knowing a power or every possible plan is insufficient.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
Toggle commitments to see which documented arguments remain available. A selected premise is not an independently warranted truth.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
The arrows identify different explanatory jobs. A result about constitution cannot silently supply alternatives, intentional control, or cognitive warrant.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
No final system is attributed to these authors. The constructive architecture can develop beyond them, provided it preserves the achievements it retrieves and makes disagreement visible.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
Newman is an analogical methodological guide. Historical continuity neither guarantees metaphysical truth nor forbids a genuinely new explanatory distinction.
ParticipationQuestion
Beyond Participation
Absolute underivation excludes receiving the actuality of one's being from anything more fundamental. With a further principle that proper intrinsic constituents ground the actuality of the whole they constitute, it excludes…
ParticipationQuestion
Beyond Participation
Completeness and inexhaustibility alone do not establish contingency. A source could necessarily produce one finite world while remaining unlimited, undivided, and uncompleted by that world. The world's failure to exhaust its…
ParticipationQuestion
Beyond Participation
A free intelligent action requires four contributions. Real alternatives establish what could occur. Reasons explain why an outcome is fitting. Actual voluntary direction makes this outcome the agent's doing. Efficacy explains…
ParticipationSource note
Beyond Participation
Claim: Every composite is posterior to and dependent on its components.
ParticipationArgument
Beyond Participation
The constructive achievement is an explicit account of what simple, intelligent, free communication would require, with distinct warrants for its decisive passages.
ParticipationProject
How can God freely and knowingly create this world without acquiring an intrinsic determination? A study of divine agency, real differences, finite goodness, and knowledge.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
How can created outcomes and divine intentions differ without making God dependent on creation?
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
A difference in meaning, an intrinsic constituent, and a real relation require different explanations.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Six comparisons expose what an explanation must supply.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
The same physical result can serve different intentions. Having a power does not mean using it.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
A complete account must explain alternatives, reasons, choice, and successful production.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
A truth’s dependence on an event is not automatically the knower’s acquisition of a cognitive state.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
These are resources and critical interlocutors, not co-authors of a modern system.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Dependence can enable a subject’s own act; finite conditions can constitute its good.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Essential meaning, personal origin, and contingent action cannot prove one another.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Actuality, agency, and knowledge each make a distinct explanatory demand.
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Its contribution is to connect distinct explanatory achievements without making them interchangeable.
ParticipationQuestion
Divine Agency
The proposed answer is an actual intentional action directed toward this creation. The source understands the intended good and voluntarily exercises effective power toward it; the world receives the resulting actuality. This…
ParticipationQuestion
Divine Agency
Through knowledge of his own actual intelligent action, if that action and its effect are adequately disclosed to him. Knowing every possible plan is not yet knowing which action occurs. The proposal therefore adds warranted…
ParticipationQuestion
Divine Agency
Because received reality and goodness remain real. Some finite conditions constitute particular goods: succession belongs to a melody; distinct speakers belong to conversation; a history allows a promise to be kept. Removing…
ParticipationSource note
Divine Agency
A category distinction: genuine personal difference need not imply different divine nature or created product
ParticipationArgument
Divine Agency
Creaturely fulfillment can be real without constituting or completing God.
ParticipationCase study
Divine Agency
Must a changed effect mean that its provider has changed?
ParticipationProject
When descriptions differ, what must differ in reality, and when does a real difference imply composition or dependence?
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
A difference in meaning is not automatically a difference between things. A real difference is not automatically a division into parts. Yet differences cannot be dismissed merely because one wants a unified reality. The task…
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Actuality means that something genuinely is so: an organism lives, an event occurs, a relation holds, a judgment is true. These grammatical differences matter. Saying that a promise exists need not make the promise a substance…
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Philosophical distinctions; Trinitarian application
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Philosophical argument; limited compatibility result
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Constitution concerns what makes up or internally actualizes a reality. Productive causation concerns bringing about or sustaining an effect. A carpenter produces a table without becoming its timber. Timber constitutes the…
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
A patient improves because treatment works; a diagnosis is warranted because evidence supports it; a report is true because the patient has the reported condition. Production, evidence, and truth are different relations.…
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Philosophical argument; conditional theological application
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Philosophical clarification with doctrinal boundaries
ParticipationArgument
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Constructive synthesis; conditional on the source arguments
ParticipationQuestion
Reality, Determination, and Relation
No such universal inference has been established. Distinct objects, intrinsic constituents, relations, activities, and intelligible aspects need not all be parts in the same sense. Composition is a substantive explanatory…
ParticipationQuestion
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Yes. Different questions can concern the same concrete reality. The meaning of knowing differs from the meaning of being able to act; semantic difference alone does not determine whether their ultimate actuality must be…
ParticipationQuestion
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Possession and independence answer different questions. A living organism really lives even though its life depends on conditions it did not produce. A student can genuinely understand after receiving help from a teacher.…
ParticipationSource note
Reality, Determination, and Relation
Thin actuality, determination, typed explanatory relations, received possession, and non-partitioned personal distinction.
ParticipationProject
How can finite words, events, and witnesses give truthful access to God without either containing God or certifying themselves?
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
A thing can disclose more than itself because its relations carry information. A footprint can disclose an animal; a promise can disclose an intention; an action can make someone's fidelity visible. Yet those relations license…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Presentation means that something appears, is represented, or is reported. Disclosure adds successful access to the reality presented. A thermometer can display a number without accurately measuring the patient's temperature.…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Causation first warrants causal claims. A printed page shows that something produced the marks; it does not establish that the printer understands them. Likewise, creating intelligent creatures does not by itself prove that…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Much ordinary knowledge arrives through other people. A historian need not have witnessed a coronation to know that it occurred. Testimony carries knowledge when witnesses had relevant access, transmitted their claims…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Doctrinally received, with philosophical clarification
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
First establish occurrence: what happened, when, and on whose evidence? Second examine cause: known mechanisms, treatment, spontaneous change, fraud, and psychological factors. Third assess divine attribution: medical…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Marion challenges the assumption that a phenomenon is genuine only if a recipient can master it conceptually. A person, artwork, or religious event can exceed an observer's available categories and call for continuing…
ParticipationArgument
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Philosophical clarification within a Catholic theological horizon
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
No. A creature can express its source through a real received perfection without being specially sent to communicate a particular proposition. A beautiful landscape may provide grounds for reflection on order and goodness; it…
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Yes. Evidence can be substantial and limited. A strongly supported cure in response to a specific invocation may count toward divine benefaction or the significance of that invocation while leaving unrelated doctrines…
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Yes. Truthful apprehension does not require exhaustive comprehension. Someone can know that a friend is faithful without possessing a complete account of that person's mind. In divine predication, the claim is stronger in its…
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
No. Revelation discloses mysteries beyond natural reason and also confirms truths that reason can discover. The same truth may therefore be known through philosophical inquiry and received on God’s authority. Their overlap…
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
No. This atlas offers philosophical arguments to examine, not a philosophical school that every believer must adopt. Theology receives its governing revelation through Scripture and apostolic Tradition. Philosophy can clarify…
ParticipationQuestion
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
No. Testimony and signs can give rational grounds for judging a claim to revelation credible. Faith assents because of the truthful God who reveals, with grace and the Holy Spirit preceding and assisting this free response.…
ParticipationSource note
Manifestation, Analogy, and Revelation
Christological fullness, deeds and words, naturally knowable truths also revealed, grace and faith, genuine human authorship, interpretation, and theology’s foundation in Scripture and Tradition.
ParticipationProject
What makes something genuinely good for a subject, and how can fulfillment perfect finite life while preserving the one who receives it?
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
A power can be real and efficiently exercised while being used badly. A life can continue while its characteristic goods are damaged. Goodness therefore adds an indispensable question to actuality and causation: what would…
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
A good eye enables sight; a good diagnosis tracks the patient's condition; good care serves the person rather than the institution's convenience. These judgments identify standards appropriate to what something is and does.…
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Cruelty requires real intelligence, bodily power, and successful action. These positive capacities explain how harm is possible; their actuality does not make their harmful direction morally good. A capable liar can produce an…
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
First, a limit can be a defect relative to a good: a distorted note damages a performance, and ignorance obstructs understanding. Second, a finite condition can help constitute a good: melody requires succession, conversation…
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Philosophical interpretation; disputed explanatory bridge
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Reasons can favor more than one good course. A person may have sound reasons to pursue medicine or teaching without one profession being mandated by the total amount of goodness in the universe. An account of rational freedom…
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Philosophical synthesis; ultimate return conditional
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Philosophical argument within a Catholic account of dignity
ParticipationArgument
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Philosophical argument with revealed consummation distinguished
ParticipationQuestion
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
No. Some limits obstruct a good, while others belong to its particular form. A less distorted performance is a better performance of the melody; eliminating succession does not produce an infinitely improved version of that…
ParticipationQuestion
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
A good response explains something important about the responder; it does not automatically explain why the suffering occurred or justify anyone's causing it. Courage and compassion are genuine achievements. Their value gives…
ParticipationQuestion
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
For personal goods, complete independence is neither necessary nor always desirable. Friendship, learning, and love involve receiving from others while acting genuinely oneself. Absorption fails in the other direction: if the…
ParticipationSource note
Goodness, Finality, and Fulfillment
Received possession, positive finite conditions, the threefold limit test, supported agency, and communion without absorption.
ParticipationProject
How can Father, Son, and Holy Spirit be really distinct without dividing God into three beings or reducing the Persons to appearances?
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
Catholic faith receives the Trinity through God's self-revelation in the Son and the Holy Spirit. Philosophy does not discover three divine Persons by inspecting an underived source. Its contribution is to distinguish…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
The Christian begins here with the Father revealed by Jesus Christ and the Spirit sent into the Church, rather than with a numerical speculation about ultimate reality. Baptism names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together. The…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
A nature answers what something is; a person identifies the subsisting subject. These questions are connected but not interchangeable. In ordinary human life, distinct persons possess distinct instances of human nature.…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
The Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Spirit eternally proceeds. These are positive personal determinations, not concessions to imperfect deity. A created effect receives limited existence and remains distinct from…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
Father and Son are not distinguishable by comparing degrees of wisdom, goodness, or power. The difference is relational: the Father begets; the Son is begotten. Nor is paternity an acquired property attached to a divine…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
Creation is not divided into the Father's contribution, the Son's contribution, and the Spirit's contribution. The three act inseparably through one divine power. Nevertheless, the Incarnation is properly the mission of the…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
Christian prayer to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit is a received share in divine communion. The creature does not complete an otherwise lonely God. The Trinity eternally possesses the fullness of divine life,…
ParticipationArgument
Trinity
Gregory Nazianzen's confession of equal deity, reproduced in CCC 256, insists on holding unity and threefold personal distinction together. His Oration 29 §16 gives a sharper category correction: Father names neither a…
ParticipationQuestion
Trinity
No. The confession counts one undivided divine nature and three really distinct Persons. It does not assert one Person and three Persons in the same respect. Each Person is wholly God; the deity is not a genus containing three…
ParticipationQuestion
Trinity
The Son is really from the Father, but eternal generation is not the production of a finite effect or the reception of a missing perfection. Catholic faith confesses the Son as eternally consubstantial with the Father. There…
ParticipationQuestion
Trinity
No. Catholic doctrine confesses one divine nature, knowledge, power, and operation, together with three real personal distinctions. It does not define the Persons as three independent psychological centers negotiating a shared…
ParticipationSource note
Trinity
Revelatory warrant; one nature and three Persons; relations of origin; procession; inseparable operation and divine missions.
ParticipationProject
How can Jesus Christ be truly God and truly human, with real human knowledge, freedom, suffering, and history, without dividing his Person or confusing his natures?
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
The Incarnation identifies a Person before offering a theory of mediation: the eternal Son himself became human. The one who speaks, acts, prays, suffers, dies, and rises is the Son of the Father. His humanity is complete and…
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
A picture can represent someone who is absent. A prophet can speak a message entrusted by another. The Christian claim about Jesus is different: the one who lives this human life is personally the eternal Word. His humanity…
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
Doctrinally received; philosophical argument from integral natures
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
Doctrinally received; philosophical account of agency
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
The Son truly hungers, learns through human experience, suffers, and dies according to his humanity. These are not misleading descriptions of someone else. The subject is divine, while the mode and capacity in which the…
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
Doctrinally received; Christological explanation of Mariology
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
Historical and revealed claims; theological interpretation
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
Doctrinally received; distinction of modes of union
ParticipationArgument
Incarnation
The mysteries of the Rosary return contemplation to a particular human life: annunciation, birth, public mission, suffering, resurrection, and glory. Words, bodily repetition, memory, and imagination can serve sustained…
ParticipationQuestion
Incarnation
The one who has these human experiences is God the Son, and he has them through his true humanity. His divine nature does not become hungry or mortal. The personal subject and the nature according to which an experience occurs…
ParticipationQuestion
Incarnation
Yes, in the Catholic confession: the complete humanity includes a rational soul, body, intellect, will, and genuinely human operations. Its subsisting personal subject is the eternal Son. Completeness of human nature does not…
ParticipationQuestion
Incarnation
No. She is the mother of the Person who is God the Son, according to his human birth. She does not originate the divine nature or precede the eternal Son's divinity. The title safeguards the identity of her child: the one born…
ParticipationSource note
Incarnation
One divine Person, two complete natures, two wills and operations, Mary's divine motherhood, real death, and the resurrection's historical and theological dimensions.
ParticipationProject
What makes an embodied, dependent human being someone whose life, freedom, and good matter for their own sake?
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
A human person lives bodily, understands, desires, remembers, acts, suffers, and receives care as one subject. These activities have different explanatory requirements, but their difference does not establish several persons…
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Philosophical argument and doctrinally received anthropology
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Philosophical argument with an unresolved explanatory burden
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
A communication device can enable someone to answer a question; an interpreter can make their decision intelligible; an accessible room can allow attendance. The causal contribution of assistance does not make the communicated…
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Ethical argument under an explicit dignity principle; doctrinally confirmed
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Philosophical analysis within Catholic moral teaching
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Moral argument and doctrinally received account of sin
ParticipationArgument
The Human Person
Theological interpretation with philosophical preparation
ParticipationQuestion
The Human Person
No. Catholic teaching understands soul and body as principles of one living human nature, with the soul the spiritual form of the body. Seeing, remembering, grieving, and acting are acts of the human person, even though they…
ParticipationQuestion
The Human Person
Because dependence for a power and authorship of its exercise are different relations. A teacher can make understanding possible while the student is the one who understands. A communication aid can enable someone to express…
ParticipationQuestion
The Human Person
Not in this anthropology. Equal basic dignity belongs to the human person, not to a level of achievement. Abilities determine some forms of responsibility and the support needed; they do not determine whether someone is owed…
ParticipationSource note
The Human Person
The human being is bodily and spiritual, one nature, with the spiritual soul the form of the body; personal dignity is not mere usefulness.
ParticipationProject
How can God give himself without becoming a part of us, and how can everything be grace while our response remains genuinely ours?
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Grace is God’s freely given fellowship, received through Christ in the Holy Spirit. Its effect is a real transformation of the creature: forgiveness, adoption, faith, hope, charity, and the capacity for a communion beyond the…
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
The Catechism distinguishes sanctifying grace, a stable supernatural gift, from particular divine helps traditionally called actual graces. It also describes grace first as the gift of the Spirit who justifies and sanctifies.…
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Doctrinally received; conditional philosophical argument
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Doctrinally received; constructive account of cooperation
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Prayer has different acts and objects. Praise acknowledges divine goodness; thanksgiving receives a good as gift; confession recognizes fault; petition asks for a good; intercession asks for another; contemplation attends…
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Mary’s consent is a concrete instance of grace becoming personal response. Her fiat is an intelligible, freely given assent to God’s promise, not the independent initiation of salvation and not an involuntary role. Divine…
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Received devotional practice; philosophical interpretation
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Repeated words can support attention because embodied minds are trained through practiced actions. A familiar phrase can carry an intention while another aspect of attention dwells on a mystery. Returning after distraction can…
ParticipationArgument
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Prayer’s fulfillment is not permanent absorption in an inward state. Charity becomes patience with a neighbor, truthful work, repentance, service, and justice. The Holy Spirit gives communion by enabling distinct people to…
ParticipationQuestion
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
The good act is left for you to do, with the help that makes it possible. Grace is not a rival action occupying the place where your decision should be. It awakens and sustains your own understanding, desire, assent, and…
ParticipationQuestion
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
You can speak directly to God. The Rosary is an additional way of contemplating Christ and praying within his communion of saints. Asking Mary to pray resembles asking another Christian for intercession, with the further…
ParticipationQuestion
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
No. Felt consolation is an experience; grace is God’s gift and the transformation it brings. Those realities can be related without being identical. A tired or grieving person may pray faithfully without peace or vivid…
ParticipationSource note
Grace, Prayer, and Deification
Gratuitous participation, sanctifying and actual grace, cooperation, merit, holiness, and the limits of experiential self-certification.
ParticipationProject
How can a visible, human Church truly transmit divine truth and life without becoming their source or reducing them to human experience?
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
The Church receives a mission before she exercises one. In Catholic teaching, Christ gathers a people, entrusts the apostolic witness, gives ministries, and communicates his life through the Holy Spirit. The resulting…
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
An assembly can be more than a collection of independent religious experiences. Common baptism, confession, worship, ministry, and charity give a determinate shared life. Catholic ecclesiology identifies this communion as…
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Doctrinally received; source-based theological account
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Dei Verbum 10 explicitly places the teaching office in service of the word of God. The Magisterium authentically interprets what it receives; it is not a higher source authorized to manufacture a contrary revelation. This…
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Doctrinally received; conditional account of instrumental mediation
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
The personal holiness of a minister is not the source of a sacrament’s efficacy. CCC 1127–1128 locates that efficacy in Christ’s saving action, traditionally described by ex opere operato. This does not mean that every…
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Catholic doctrine received; philosophical articulation
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Liturgy is the worship of Christ and his body, offered to the Father in the Spirit. Scripture, song, silence, posture, material signs, and ordered ministry engage embodied people. The assembly’s responses are real acts, while…
ParticipationArgument
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Doctrinally received; moral and theological application
ParticipationQuestion
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
God’s ability to act directly does not exclude a freely chosen economy of shared words, history, bodies, and acts. Human beings learn and live through such relations. In Catholic faith, Christ establishes particular forms of…
ParticipationQuestion
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
No. Sacramental efficacy concerns Christ’s faithful action through an instituted sign; it is not a power possessed or controlled independently by a human performer. The minister’s holiness does not produce the gift, and…
ParticipationQuestion
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
The Catholic warrant is Christ’s institution and word, interpreted in the Church’s apostolic faith, not a change that must appear to the senses. The claim distinguishes the reality substantially present from the appearances…
ParticipationSource note
Church, Sacrament, and Liturgy
Apostolic transmission, Scripture and Tradition, the Magisterium serving the word, human authorship, disciplined interpretation, and prayerful reading.
ParticipationProject
How can all created actuality depend on God while creatures remain responsible agents and evil is neither a divine perfection nor a necessary contribution to God's fullness?
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Providence concerns more than the world's dependence for existence. It adds intelligent care and direction toward good. Catholic theology receives that claim through the God disclosed in Christ; natural metaphysics must…
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Doctrinally received, with conditional philosophical bridges
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Conditional philosophical argument and Catholic doctrine
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Conditional metaphysical reconstruction within a doctrinal boundary
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Philosophical clarification and open metaphysical question
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Philosophical argument with an unresolved theodicy burden
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Conditional philosophical account and received theology of prayer
ParticipationArgument
Providence, Evil, and History
Conditional causal analysis and Christian theological interpretation
ParticipationQuestion
Providence, Evil, and History
God sustains the agent and the positive powers involved; the claim that God therefore authors the moral defect requires another premise. A lie uses genuine capacities whose wrongful ordering belongs to the speaker's intention.…
ParticipationQuestion
Providence, Evil, and History
It can change the created history through which a good is given. An intention can include both a request and a response, making the request a genuine condition rather than an attempt to repair the giver's knowledge. On this…
ParticipationQuestion
Providence, Evil, and History
We do not possess a general explanation of that distribution. Christian doctrine permits interpreting a genuine healing as a gift and a sign of hoped-for restoration, while explicitly denying that intense prayer guarantees…
ParticipationSource note
Providence, Evil, and History
Conservation, providence, secondary causes, permission, evil remaining evil, the limits of healing, and prayer as cooperation.
ParticipationProject
How can the same created persons be raised, judged, and brought to immediate communion with God while God remains inexhaustible and creation remains genuinely other?
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Christian hope promises more than continued dependence on an eternal source. It promises resurrection through Christ, judgment of a morally serious history, purification, immediate vision of God, and renewed creation. These…
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Doctrinally received claim with a conditional philosophical model
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Doctrinally received vision; philosophical distinction
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Eriugena offers an unusually rich account of theophany: divine manifestation becomes actual in the recipient according to the recipient's capacity. In Periphyseon I.447D–448D, however, the discussion moves toward the claim…
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Doctrinally received judgment and purification; moral interpretation
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Doctrinally received boundary with unresolved theological questions
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Mary's Assumption is the taking up of the Mother of Jesus, body and soul, into heavenly glory. It is a singular participation in her Son's resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians (CCC 966).…
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Doctrinally received hope with constructive philosophical interpretation
ParticipationArgument
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Scriptural-theological interpretation with explicit metaphysical premises
ParticipationQuestion
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Because the promise concerns the restoration of the same person, and matching a description is not enough for that. A duplicate could share memories and appearance without being numerically identical to its original. Catholic…
ParticipationQuestion
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
The finite measure belongs to the act of the knower, not to a piece of God carved out for inspection. The promise is immediate vision of God himself through a capacity God gives. Immediate access does not entail exhaustive…
ParticipationQuestion
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
Neither conclusion follows from the phrase alone. Its Pauline setting concerns Christ's victory and the consummation of God's reign. Participation permits a real transformation of creation while retaining the distinction…
ParticipationSource note
Resurrection, Beatitude, and God All in All
The principal doctrinal boundaries, including bodily identity, immediate vision, definitive judgment, and cosmic renewal.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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. The formal motive of faith names this reliance on God’s authority; motives of credibility concern the grounds for recognizing a purported revelation as credible.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
Christ’s effective action through a valid sacrament, communicating the grace it signifies in fruitful reception. Its efficacy does not depend on the minister’s personal holiness; fruitful reception also requires the dispositions appropriate to the sacrament. 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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
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.
ParticipationGlossary
Shared glossary · Both projects
Counting identifies how many distinct items qualify within a specified domain. Transcendental unity, in the classical account, concerns a being’s undividedness as the being it is; a numerical count considers items as units. Neither heterogeneous enumeration nor a shared predicate establishes a common natural genus. A further plurality of sources, substances, or constituents requires a bridge connecting those distinctions.