On the Study of Signs, or Semiotics, in Relation to God’s Signified Will

Subsections

God’s Signified Will
God’s Revealed Will has Purpose
Teleology
Accommodation

Order of Contents

Articles & Books 30+
Quote 1
Encyclopedia 1
Historical 6+

Articles & Books

300’s

Chrysostom, John –

AI: “A contemporary of Augustine in the Eastern church, Chrysostom focused heavily on the relationship between divine speech and human language. He championed the theological concept of condescension (synkatabasis). He argued that human language is inherently limited and cannot capture the divine essence. Therefore, biblical words and physical signs are divine accommodations—God adapting Himself to human “baby talk” so that finite minds can grasp infinite realities.”

400’s

Augustine

in On Christian Doctrine

in On the Teacher

AI: “He defined a sign (signum) as “a thing which, besides the impression it conveys to the senses, makes something else come into cognition”. He split signs into natural signs (signa naturalia, like smoke indicating fire) and given/intentional signs (signa data, like human language used to express ideas). He also developed the theological distinction between use (uti) and enjoyment (frui), arguing that the physical world consists of signs meant to be used to guide the soul toward the ultimate reality to be enjoyed: God.

Augustine builds a sweeping semiotic framework to explain how humans should interact with reality. He divides the entire universe into two categories: things (res) and signs (signa).

Enjoyment (Frui): To cling to something with love for its own sake. It is finding ultimate fulfillment, rest, and happiness in an object as an end in itself.Use (Uti): To employ something in the search for what you love, turning it toward your true destination. It treats an object as a means to an end.

Augustine argues that God is the only “thing” that can truly be enjoyed (frui). Everything else in creation—including other humans, nature, and physical objects—is a “sign” meant only to be used (uti).

The World as a Signpost: Physical things point beyond themselves to their Creator.

The Problem of Misuse: Human misery and sin occur when we treat a temporary sign as the ultimate thing. If you fall in love with a signpost on a journey, you stop moving and never reach your home. For Augustine, idolatry is a semiotic error: enjoying what should merely be used.”

1000’s

Berengar of Tours –

AI: “Berengar sparked a massive theological controversy in the 11th century by applying early medieval dialectic and logic to the Eucharist. He argued that a sign, by definition, must be materially distinct from the thing it signifies. If the bread and wine become the physical body of Christ, he claimed, they cease to be signs. His work forced the Western church to sharpen its definitions of figurative signification versus substantial reality, paving the way for later scholastic sacramental theology.”

1100’s

Hugh of St. Victor – On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith

AI: “Hugh explored ontological signification—the idea that creation itself is a book written by God where physical things are inherently signs of spiritual realities. He refined the definition of a sacrament as a visible sign of an invisible grace.”

Lombard, Peter – Sentences

1200’s

Aquinas, Thomas – Summa, on Sacraments

AI: “Aquinas focused on the concept of sacramental signs as efficacious—meaning they do not merely represent grace, but actually cause or produce the grace they signify. He also laid crucial groundwork for how the human mind uses internal cognitive concepts (mental words) as formal signs to grasp external, real-world objects.”

Bacon, Roger – De Signis

AI: “Bacon argued that the sign is the foundational instrument of all the liberal arts. He shifted the focus of semiotics toward the relation to the interpreter, arguing that a sign cannot exist without a mind to perceive it. He meticulously categorized signs based on whether they signify naturally, by custom, or by deliberate human intent.”

Scotus, John Duns –

AI: “A Franciscan scholastic, Scotus built a highly technical semiotic system based on his philosophy of human cognition. Scotus argued that words do not directly signify physical things in the world. Instead, words are signs of concepts in the mind, and those concepts in turn signify real things. This created a dual-layered relation of meaning, separating linguistic communication from direct mental perception.

We must examine how he redefined the relationship between words, thoughts, and physical objects: Scotus rejected the simpler views of his predecessors to solve a specific puzzle: if two people have different ideas about an object, how can they still use the same word to talk about it?

Proximate Sign “Signum Propinquum”: A word is a direct sign of a concept in the human mind. When you speak, the immediate thing your voice represents is your thoughts.

Primary Sign “Signum Remotum”: The mental concept is itself a sign that points directly to the real thing (the object’s essence or quiddity) in the outside world.

Separation of Meaning from Understanding: Scotus introduced the revolutionary idea that a word can signify an essence even if the speaker does not fully understand that essence.

Example: A child and a physicist both use the word “gold.” The child thinks of a shiny yellow rock; the physicist thinks of atomic number 79.

Solution: Scotus argued that the word “gold” does not mean the subjective, flawed psychological image in either person’s head. Instead, the word points to the objective concept of gold’s nature. Because words target the essence via the concept, human communication remains stable even when human understanding is imperfect.

In his semiotics, he noted that while our words usually signify general essences (like “humanity” or “chair”), our minds are structurally capable of grasping the individual sign of a unique thing. This ensured that the physical world isn’t just a blur of general types, but a collection of distinct realities that can be mentally signed and known.

The Mechanism of Mental Sign Generation:

1. The Production of the Phantasm (Perceived Sensation):

First, the physical object acts upon human senses. This creates a phantasm—a vivid, material sensory image stored in the imagination or brain. The Limit: The phantasm is singular, material, and tied to a specific moment (e.g., your memory of a specific brown dog you saw this morning). It is not yet a universal mental sign because it cannot represent all dogs.

2. The Abstraction of the Intelligible Species

To turn this raw sensory image into a meaningful sign, the mind utilizes the Agent Intellect (intellectus agens, or the acting intellect). The Agent Intellect acts like a spiritual scanner. It strips away the accidental material details of the phantasm (like the color brown, the size, or the location of that specific dog) to uncover the underlying essence (quiddity). The result of this abstraction is the intelligible species. This is the foundational mental sign. It is a stable, immaterial representation of the object’s nature stored in the memory of the intellect.

3. The Actual Concept (Verbum Mentis)

Finally, when the mind actively thinks about that essence, the Possible Intellect (intellectus possibilis) expresses a concept. Scotus refers to this active concept as the “word of the mind” (verbum mentis). This concept is the formal sign that allows you to instantly recognize, categorize, and speak about any object encountered in the real world.

Crucial Innovations in Scotus’s Process

Co-Causality: Scotus argued that the external object and the human intellect are co-causes of the mental sign.

The object provides the real content, but the intellect provides the formal structure. The mind does not simply invent signs out of nothing, nor is it merely a blank slate stamped by matter.

Intuitive vs. Abstractive Cognition:

Scotus split mental signs into two functional modes. Abstractive cognition uses the mental sign to think about an essence regardless of whether the object is present or even exists. Intuitive cognition is the mind’s direct, real-time awareness of the object’s actual existence here and now.

Independence from Language:

For Scotus, this entire process occurs before human language is introduced. The mental sign is natural, universal, and identical for all human beings. Spoken or written words are simply secondary, arbitrary tags that humans invent to communicate these pre-existing mental signs to one another.

By turning the mental concept into a representation rather than a literal piece of the object (as Aquinas), Scotus paved the way for treating thoughts themselves as signs. This is the exact lineage that later allowed John Poinsot to argue that human thought is a continuous web of sign-relations.”

1300’s

William of Ockham –

AI: “As the pioneer of nominalism, Ockham completely revolutionized medieval semiotics by stripping away universal essences. Ockham divided signs into mental concepts (which signify things naturally and universally) and spoken/written words (which signify purely by human institution and convention). He argued that universals (like the concept of “humanity”) do not exist in reality; they are merely psychological signs used by the mind to group individual, distinct objects together.”

1500’s

Calvin, John –

AI: “The French Reformer developed a precise semiotic framework to reshape Protestant sacramental theology, seeking a middle ground between purely symbolic and literal views. Calvin viewed the sacraments as mirrors and seals. He argued that a physical sign and its spiritual reality are linked by the Holy Spirit. While the sign and the thing signified remain totally distinct in substance, they are presented together to the believer, allowing the mind to ascend to heaven through the physical element.”

1600’s

Poinsot (of St. Thomas), John – Tractatus De Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot tr. John Deely (1632; UC California) 607 pp.

Poinsot was a Portuguese Dominican friar.

AI: “This is considered to be the first standalone, unified treatise on semiotics. Poinsot solved a massive scholastic debate by arguing that the essence of a sign lies in a pure relation. Because a relation is distinct from the physical thing itself, Poinsot demonstrated that signs are uniquely unifiers of reality: they function exactly the same way whether they point to a real, physical entity (ens reale) or an imaginary concept/construct of the mind (ens rationis).

Before John Poinsot (John of St. Thomas) published his Tractatus de Signis in 1632, medieval thinkers split signs into two entirely different categories:

1. Natural Signs (Ens Reale): Signs rooted in physical reality (e.g., a footprint indicating an animal).

2. Cultural/Mental Signs (Ens Rationis): Signs existing purely by human convention or in the mind (e.g., words, red lights, or fictional ideas).

Philosophers struggled to find a single definition that could cover both. Poinsot solved this by shifting the focus from the material of the sign to its relation.

Poinsot argued that the essence of a sign does not depend on what it is made of, but on how it connects things. A sign functions as a pure, mind-independent relation:

A relationship like “above” or “equal to” remains structurally identical whether it applies to physical objects or mental concepts.

Because the structure of a relation is universal, Poinsot proved that natural signs and cultural signs operate using the exact same underlying mechanism.

By showing that meaning is a matter of relation rather than substance, Poinsot bridged the gap between nature and culture. He demonstrated that human thoughts, linguistic laws, and natural physical indicators all belong to a single, continuous universe of meaning.”

2000’s

Chandler, Daniel – ‘Semiotics for Beginners’ (2020)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

‘Intentionality’ (2023)

‘Mental Representation’

‘Diagrams & Diagrammatical Reasoning’

‘The Language of Thought Hypothesis’

‘Theories of Meaning’

‘Peirce’s Theory of Signs’

Mental Content

‘Teleological Theories of Mental Content’

‘Causal Theories of Mental Content’

‘Narrow Mental Content’

‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’

‘Philosophy of Linguistics’

Wikipedia

‘Semiotics’

‘Sign relation’

‘Semiosis’ (any activity using signs)

‘Interpretant’

‘Indexicality’

‘Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce’

Quote

1600’s

Samuel Rutherford

Christ Dying & Drawing Sinners to Himself... (London: J.D., 1647), “Of the third article”, p. 273

“Assertion 3. There be two things in the Law: 1. The authority and power to command, direct, and regulate the creature to an end, in acts of righteousness and holiness…”

Encyclopedia

1900’s

ed. Bouissac, Paul – Encyclopedia of Semiotics Pre (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) 702 pp.

Historical

Antiquity

Article

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – ‘Intentionality in Ancient Philosophy’ (2019)

On the Middle Ages

Articles

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

‘Medieval Semiotics‘ (2011)

‘Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy’ (2023)