Beyond Counting God
Transcategorial Unity, Revelatory Excess, and the Convergence of Natural and Revealed Theology
A systematic essay in natural theology, revelation, and divine unity
Abstract
The relation between natural theology and revelation is often described as a relation between two bodies of propositions about God. That description is correct but incomplete. Before their propositions can be harmonized, one must ask what sort of reality both forms of knowing claim to reach. Dale Tuggy’s attempt to clarify monotheism through the counting of gods makes this question unusually sharp. If the unity of God is fundamentally numerical, then Trinitarian confession can appear to introduce an unstable more-than-oneness into monotheism. Andrew Radde-Gallwitz’s response exposes a deeper problem: the counting model may already assume an ontology of things, properties, and individuals that does not transparently fit the patristic or medieval grammar of God. Thomas Aquinas supplies a further distinction between unity as a principle of number and unity convertible with being, while also denying that God belongs to a genus and maintaining that creatures disclose their source only analogically and proportionately. Recent grounding language, especially Jorge C. Lucero’s use of the term trans-categorial, provides a contemporary way to state the resulting metaphysical pressure: the ultimate source of the created order cannot simply be one member within the order it grounds. Jean-Luc Marion, from another direction, insists that givenness and revelation can exceed the conceptual measure of the recipient without ceasing to be intelligible. This essay argues that natural theology and revelation converge upon the same ultimate divine source under irreducibly different modes of access. Created effects mediate true but proportionate knowledge; free divine self-disclosure can communicate truths unavailable to inference from effects alone. Their harmony is grounded not in the reduction of one mode to the other, but in the transcategorial unity of their referent.
Introduction: The Question Prior to Counting
A familiar definition of monotheism sounds almost trivial: there is exactly one God. Dale Tuggy begins his essay “On Counting Gods” from precisely the apparent simplicity of this numerical scheme. He writes that “monotheism is belief in exactly one god, polytheism is belief in more than one god, and atheism is belief that the number of gods is zero.”[1] Yet his next observation is decisive: “But things are not so simple.” The difficulty, he argues, lies not in the prefixes mono, poly, and a, but in what counts as a god. Tuggy therefore distinguishes deity, godhood, and ultimacy, and he defines an ultimate as something uniquely unsurpassable in reality or explanatory priority.[2] The analytic virtue of the proposal is evident. It forces theology to disclose the domain over which its quantifiers range and the criteria by which a purported God is counted.
The present essay takes Tuggy’s demand for clarity seriously while pressing a prior question. What kind of unity can properly belong to an ultimate source before we assume that divine unity is fundamentally an instance of counting? Counting is never metaphysically innocent. To count three books, three persons, or three planets is to identify countable units under some relevant description. The operation presupposes criteria of individuation and a domain within which one thing is not another. If God is understood merely as the most exalted item in such a domain, then “one God” is naturally modeled as a cardinal claim: among all items satisfying the predicate god, exactly one exists. But if natural theology concludes instead to an ultimate source of the whole created order of being, unity, distinction, and dependence, then it is no longer obvious that the source is individuated within the same field whose intelligibility depends upon it.
This is not a strategy for evading the claim that God is one. It is a demand to specify the sense of one appropriate to the referent. Aquinas’s distinction between unity convertible with being and unity as the principle of number is therefore not an antiquarian curiosity. It exposes an ambiguity at the heart of apparently straightforward counting. In the Summa Theologiae he says that “‘One’ does not add any reality to ‘being’; but is only a negation of division; for ‘one’ means undivided ‘being.'”[3] In De potentia he is even more explicit that the one convertible with being must be distinguished from the one that functions as the measure and principle of numerical quantity.[4] This does not by itself settle the Trinitarian problem. It does, however, show that the statement “God is one” cannot simply be assumed to mean “God is one countable specimen in a genus.”
The thesis can therefore be stated precisely. Natural theology and revelation converge upon the same ultimate divine source without collapsing into a single mode of knowledge because the source is transcategorial with respect to the created order. Created participation permits true but proportionate metaphysical knowledge through effects. Divine self-disclosure can communicate truths that cannot be inferred from those effects alone. Revelatory excess surpasses natural theology without introducing a second divine domain, because both modes terminate in the source from which the created orders of being, unity, and intelligibility derive.
I. Tuggy, Counting, and the Ontology of the Counted
Tuggy’s essay is a useful point of departure because it refuses a lazy use of monotheism. He notes that historical religions employ words such as god and deity for very different sorts of realities. Some alleged gods are generated, vulnerable, morally imperfect, or restricted to a local sphere; others are conceived as perfect, necessary, creative, and unsurpassable. A classification that simply counts every being called a god therefore risks equivocating on its central noun. Tuggy’s response is to distinguish a deity, a god, and an ultimate. A god, in his technical sense, must be an ultimate and must also be a self. An ultimate is “the highest, most basic, most real, or ‘farthest back’ being.”[5] Tuggy even notes, in a footnote, that some traditions speak of an ultimate as beyond being or as Being Itself rather than a being. His scheme therefore recognizes the very pressure that will eventually complicate the grammar of counting.
The difficulty becomes acute in Trinitarian Christianity. Tuggy observes that Christians confess Father, Son, and Spirit as fully divine while insisting that there is one God, a combination that “sounds at first hearing like polytheism.”[6] If fully divine means satisfying the count noun god in exactly the same way that three human persons satisfy the count noun human, then the problem is immediate. Three divine persons would appear to yield three gods unless some further identity claim collapses the three into one. This is why much contemporary analytic theology has concentrated on identity, predication, relative identity, constitution, and counting.
Andrew Radde-Gallwitz’s response is important because it challenges not the demand for logical clarity but the metaphysical grammar imported into the historical texts. Discussing Gregory of Nyssa, he highlights a formula in which the same divine nature is “both distinguished in hypostasis and not divided in underlying subject.”[7] The sentence is not formally contradictory because the affirmations concern different respects: distinction according to hypostasis and non-division according to nature or underlying reality. Radde-Gallwitz summarizes the deeper dispute with memorable bluntness: “The root problem is the last word: thing.”[8] Tuggy’s reconstruction, he argues, can make ancient substance language look incoherent because it reads it through a modern ontology in which universals, concrete particulars, properties, and persons are sorted differently from the metaphysical schemes presupposed by the Cappadocians.
This criticism does not prove Trinitarianism. Nor does historical difference exempt a doctrine from logical evaluation. Its value is methodological. Before a numerical objection can be decisive, the ontology of what is being numbered must be established rather than assumed. A claim such as “there are three persons” is not yet the same as “there are three instances of a common divine kind.” The latter requires an account of person, nature, instantiation, and numerical diversity. Likewise, the statement “there is one God” does not yet tell us whether divine unity is generic, specific, quantitative, substantial, transcendental, or sui generis. The burden is therefore twofold: theology must formulate its unity and plurality without contradiction, and the critic must avoid treating one creaturely mode of individuation as the neutral logic of every possible reality.
The present argument uses that pressure to reopen the relation between natural and revealed theology. If natural theology reaches an ultimate source not as one divine specimen among others but as the explanatory source of the total created order, then the natural theological referent is already resistant to ordinary categorial counting. If revelation then discloses Father, Son, and Spirit, the question is not simply whether revelation has added two more objects to a preexisting inventory. The question is whether revelation manifests the intrinsic divine reality of the same source under a mode of access unavailable to inference from effects. Before that can be argued, however, the transcategorial character of ultimacy must be made precise.
II. From Ultimacy to Transcategoriality
The term transcategorial is useful only if it names an earned conclusion rather than a verbal escape. In this essay it has a deliberately minimal meaning: the ultimate divine source is not a member of the created ontological domain as though God and creatures were coordinate instances of a more comprehensive genus. Transcategorial does not mean unreal, unintelligible, impersonal, or merely outside the physical universe. It means that the source does not receive its identity by occupying a place within the field whose existence and differentiation ultimately depend upon it. The point of this essay is to explain and defend the thesis does not get into a systematic treatise on appropriating an appropriate realism to the identity or lack there of whatever God is. But, this thesis does give one a significant contribution to understanding the convergence of faith and reason as it relates to the God of reason and the Trinity of revelation more accurately, albeit moderately as it relates to the realism this term introduces.
Aquinas provides the classical metaphysical pressure for this claim. In Summa Theologiae I, question 3, he argues that God is not in a genus. His reasoning is not merely that God is very unusual. A genus is divided by differences and is common to members that agree generically while differing in some further determination. But God, on Aquinas’s account, cannot be composed from a common generic nature plus a differentiating feature. More importantly for the present argument, he concludes: “God is the principle of all being. Therefore He is not contained in any genus as its principle.”[9] The source of all being cannot be contained as one species within a limited genus that it happens to cause. Whatever one finally thinks of Aquinas’s demonstration, its intended asymmetry is clear: source and sourced do not occupy the same ontological level in the way two members of a class do.
Aquinas’s treatment of one and many sharpens the point. In ordinary arithmetic, one is the unit by which discrete quantity is measured. In transcendental metaphysics, however, one signifies undivided being. De potentia explicitly warns against confusing “unity which is convertible with being” with “unity which is the principle of number.”[10] The difference matters because numerical plurality follows a particular kind of division, while the transcendental notions of one and many are more extensive than quantitative categories. Aquinas therefore does not deny that there can be true plurality in immaterial realities. He denies that all unity and plurality are exhausted by the species of quantity studied in arithmetic.
This distinction provides a historically grounded way to correct an overly simple appeal to numerical identity. To say that God is one need not mean that the divine source is a unit measured within a larger class. Aquinas can affirm that God is one while denying that the one predicated of God is simply the quantitative unit. His argument in Summa Theologiae I, question 11 moves from simplicity, perfection, and the unity of the world to divine unity; it does not begin by placing God into a genus and counting its members.[11] The result is not that number becomes meaningless, but that the metaphysical sense of unity is logically prior to the arithmetical interpretation when the subject is the source of being itself.
A recent grounding argument makes the same pressure visible in contemporary language. Jorge C. Lucero argues conditionally that if the existence of beings admits of an ultimate ground and grounding is irreflexive, the ground cannot simply be another being within the grounded domain. He describes the resulting option as a trans-categorial ground that “does not belong to the category of beings. It is not an entity among entities.”[12] This formulation is stronger than the language this essay needs. The claim that the ultimate source is not a being at all raises substantial questions about analogy, reference, and the meanings of being. The more modest conclusion is sufficient: the ultimate source cannot be merely one categorial item whose existence is explained in the same way as the beings whose total existence it ultimately grounds.
III. Natural Theology as Proportionate Mediation
Transcategoriality immediately creates an epistemic problem. If God is not one item in a common genus with creatures, how can creatures mediate any genuine knowledge of God? A crude answer would oscillate between univocity and equivocity. If creaturely predicates apply to God in exactly the same way, God appears to be brought back within the categorial field. If they apply in a wholly unrelated way, natural theology loses determinate reference. Aquinas’s answer is analogy, grounded in causal dependence and participation.
The basic structure is causal. Created effects are not self-explanatory in the relevant metaphysical order. Their actuality, perfection, intelligibility, and existence are received and therefore can manifest something of their source. Aquinas says in the Summa that in this life “we know God from creatures as their principle, and also by way of excellence and remotion.”[13] The three movements are important. Causality identifies God as source. Excellence denies that the perfection is present in God merely under the finite mode found in the effect. Remotion denies creaturely limitations in the source. Natural theology therefore does not simply project creaturely properties upward; it reasons from derivative actuality while correcting the mode in which its concepts are applied.
This is why Aquinas insists that terms said of God and creatures are “not in a purely equivocal nor in a purely univocal sense.”[14] Analogy preserves genuine signification without placing cause and effect under one common generic definition. The creature is related to God as effect to principle, and creaturely perfections can therefore name the source truly while failing to express the divine essence comprehensively. Aquinas’s formula is especially useful for the present essay because it combines epistemic realism with metaphysical asymmetry. We can know something true of God because creatures really depend upon God; we cannot know God as though the divine essence were another observable instance of the perfections encountered in creatures.
Summa Contra Gentiles I, chapter 8 states the limitation with unusual clarity. Sensible things retain “some sort of trace of a likeness to God,” but this likeness is inadequate to manifest the divine substance. Aquinas continues: “effects bear within themselves, in their own way, the likeness of their causes,” yet an effect may fail to attain the full likeness of its cause.[15] The form of the argument is exactly what the convergence thesis requires. The effect truly manifests the source, but according to the effect’s own proportion. Natural mediation is therefore neither transparent comprehension nor radical silence.
Participation gives a metaphysical interpretation of this proportionality. A created perfection is possessed in a received and limited mode. To participate is not to possess a fragment of God, nor to instantiate deity as a species. It is to possess derivatively some actuality whose source is not possessed under the same limited conditions. This is especially important for being itself. In the Thomistic synthesis, finite things do not merely happen to coexist with God; their acts of being are radically dependent. If that dependence is real, then the world’s intelligibility is already a mediated reference to its source.
This discipline yields a precise characterization of natural theology. It is proportionate knowledge of the ultimate source through created mediation. Proportionate does not mean merely probable. A demonstration, if successful, can be demonstrative while still proportionate in content. The limitation concerns the mode and range of what is manifested. Effects can reveal that a cause exists and disclose real features required by the causal relation without exhausting what the cause is in itself. The transcategorial source can therefore be known truly precisely because its effects genuinely depend upon it, while remaining incomprehensible in the stronger sense that no created concept encloses the divine reality.
IV. Revelation as Self-Disclosure and Excess
Catholic theology supplies a formal distinction between natural reason and divine faith that is especially useful here. Vatican I’s Dei Filius teaches a “twofold order of knowledge,” distinguished both by source and by object: in one order we know by natural reason; in the other by divine faith; and mysteries hidden in God can be known only if divinely revealed.[16] This distinction does not say that reason and revelation terminate in two Gods. It says that the mode by which something is known and the range of what is knowable differ.
Aquinas had already formulated the same architecture. Summa Contra Gentiles begins by distinguishing truths about God attainable by natural reason from truths exceeding reason and proposed for belief. He also insists that “the truth of reason is not opposed to the truth of the Christian faith.”[17] The reason is theological but also logical: truth cannot contradict truth. What reason demonstrates and what God reveals cannot be contradictory if both judgments are sound and the revelation is genuine. Apparent contradiction may therefore expose a failed argument, a misunderstood doctrine, an equivocation, or an inadequate model. It cannot simply be neutralized by appealing to mystery.
Vatican II’s Dei Verbum deepens the notion of revelation beyond the communication of hidden propositions. God “chose to reveal Himself” so that human beings, through Christ in the Spirit, might have access to the Father and share in divine life. Revelation is realized by “deeds and words having an inner unity.”[18] The theological object is therefore not merely additional information about an already known object. Revelation is divine self-communication within a historical economy ordered toward communion.
At this point Jean-Luc Marion becomes a valuable interlocutor. His phenomenology should not replace metaphysics, but it clarifies what is meant by excess. In Givenness and Revelation he argues that revelation must be approached as a phenomenon whose rationality cannot simply be reduced to conditions antecedently imposed by a metaphysics of objects.[19] In Givenness and Hermeneutics, he describes a structural excess between what gives itself and what the recipient is able to conceptualize. “The gap between what gives itself and what is shown about it,” he writes, “irremediably characterizes the phenomenality of the givenness.”[20] Hermeneutics is needed because finite reception does not coincide with exhaustive manifestation.
This language helps state a theological possibility that natural theology alone cannot generate. If the ultimate source is free and intelligent, it may manifest itself under conditions not reducible to inference from effects. The difference is analogous to the difference between knowing a person from that person’s works and knowing something because the person freely tells you. The latter does not abolish the former. It introduces a new epistemic relation. Self-disclosure can reveal something genuinely belonging to the same person that could not have been inferred from external effects alone.
The Trinity is paradigmatic. Natural theology may establish divine unity, simplicity, intellect, or other predicates to the extent its arguments succeed. It does not thereby derive eternal generation or the procession of the Spirit. Aquinas can therefore say that one may know “by demonstration the unity of the Godhead, and, by faith, the Trinity.”[21] The object is not two Gods. The respects and warrants differ. What revelation adds is not a second ultimate reality but an intrinsic truth of the source unavailable to the proportion of created effects.
The word excess should therefore be defined epistemically and phenomenologically before it is used rhetorically. Revelatory excess means that self-disclosure can exceed what finite effects allow a recipient to infer. It does not mean contradiction, irrationality, or absence of conceptual content. Marion himself insists on hermeneutics because excess still calls for interpretation. The given can become “only partially but really” what shows itself to a finite recipient.[22] The phrase is useful for theological epistemology: finite mediation does not nullify truth, while truth does not become exhaustive comprehension.
V. The Convergence of Natural and Revealed Theology
The central problem can now be stated without ambiguity. If natural theology and revelation employ irreducibly different modes of access, what licenses the claim that they converge upon the same referent? One cannot simply assume convergence, because that would make the conclusion a premise. Nor can one establish it merely by noting that both discourses use the word God, since verbal identity can conceal equivocation. The convergence must be metaphysical, historical, and theological.
The metaphysical component begins with ultimacy. Natural theology, if successful, reaches not merely a powerful supernatural agent but the ultimate source of the created order in the relevant respect. Revelation, meanwhile, identifies the God of Israel and the Father revealed in Christ as Creator of all that is not God. Once these claims are jointly in view, the referents cannot be two independent sources of the same total order without qualification. Two absolutely ultimate creators would either be differentiated by some actuality one possessed and the other lacked, limited by a common field, or stand in some relation requiring a more ultimate explanation. The exact uniqueness argument depends upon the metaphysical route being used, but the basic convergence pressure is clear: absolute ultimacy is not the sort of explanatory office that can be duplicated like two causes operating within one larger order.
The historical-theological component is equally necessary. Christianity does not first construct an anonymous metaphysical ultimate and then arbitrarily rename it the biblical God. The revelation claim is that the God acting in the history of Israel and definitively in Christ is the Creator of heaven and earth. This claim is itself part of what revelation proposes. Natural theology can ask whether such identification is coherent and whether historical motives make revelation credible; theology receives the identification through revelation. The warrant therefore differs even where the referent converges.
This distinction is essential to avoid circularity. Philosophy should not argue: the first cause is the Trinity because Christianity reveals the Trinity; therefore philosophy has demonstrated the Trinity. Theology should not argue: revelation is true because philosophy has already deduced every revealed mystery. Instead, each route should disclose its grounds. Metaphysical reasoning establishes whatever its premises license about ultimacy. Historical and fundamental theology assess claims of revelation and their credibility. Supernatural faith assents to God revealing. Once the revelation is received, theology can identify the Creator confessed in revelation with the ultimate source natural theology has independently characterized to the extent that both claims concern the source of the same created totality.
This architecture corresponds closely to the Catholic distinction of orders. John Paul II, citing Vatican I, preserves the distinction between natural reason and divine faith while rejecting their isolation. Fides et Ratio later says that the relationship between theology and philosophy is “best construed as a circle.”[23] Theology begins from the word of God revealed in history; philosophy pursues truth according to its own laws; theological understanding can stimulate philosophical questions that reason might not otherwise have posed. Reciprocity is legitimate precisely because the warrants are not silently exchanged.
The term convergence therefore has a precise meaning. It does not mean that natural theology and revelation contain identical propositions. It does not mean that revelation can be translated without remainder into metaphysical conclusions. It does not mean that philosophical demonstration and supernatural faith are the same cognitive act. Convergence means identity of ultimate referent together with compatibility of true predication, despite irreducibly different modes of manifestation, mediation, and warrant.
This yields this essay’s key formula: participation grounds natural mediation; natural mediation yields proportionate knowledge; self-disclosure introduces genuine excess; finite reception preserves mystery; and the unity of the ultimate source requires convergence. Nothing in this sequence gives revelation a license to contradict demonstration. Nothing requires revelation to be deducible from demonstration. The harmony is ordered rather than reductive.
The phrase transcategorial unity does important work here. If the source were simply one individual inside a larger genus of divinities, then revelation of internal plurality would immediately raise a straightforward problem of counting additional instances. But if ultimacy is transcategorial, the divine unity is not first constituted by exclusion of peer specimens from a common class. It is the indivisible unity of the source of the created order itself. Revelation can therefore disclose real distinctions in God without automatically multiplying gods, provided those distinctions do not amount to multiple instances of deity or multiple ultimate sources. That further Trinitarian problem is substantial, but it cannot be settled merely by importing ordinary cardinal counting before the metaphysical grammar has been specified.
VI. The Trinity as a Stress Test
The Trinity is where the proposed framework is most exposed to criticism. A theory of convergence that works only for generic claims about divine goodness or intelligence would be insufficient. Christian revelation claims something natural theology does not merely fail to demonstrate but could not have anticipated from effects alone: the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Does this represent revelatory excess, or does it overturn the unity reached by metaphysical reasoning?
The first requirement is to preserve the exact level of the natural theological conclusion. Suppose an argument establishes that there cannot be several independent ultimate sources of the total created order. That conclusion does not establish that there can be only one divine person, because person and ultimate source are not obviously coextensive concepts. To infer one person from one ultimate source would require the additional premise that every numerically distinct person is a numerically distinct instance of the divine essence or a distinct ultimate act of being. That premise must be argued, not assumed.
Radde-Gallwitz’s Cappadocian material is relevant precisely here. Gregory can affirm distinction in hypostasis without division in the underlying divine nature. The grammar is not a ready-made solution to every analytic problem, but it identifies the respect in which plurality and unity are asserted. Tuggy is right that a doctrine cannot save itself by saying both one and three without explaining the respects. Radde-Gallwitz is right that the respects cannot be defined by importing a foreign ontology and then charging the older vocabulary with inconsistency. The real task is to determine whether what constitutes hypostatic identity must thereby add to or multiply the ultimate divine actuality.
Aquinas gives one especially precise articulation of the required distinction: relations of origin can be constitutive of personal identity without adding intrinsic actuality to the undivided divine reality. The present essay need not make that articulation identical with the revealed datum. Its more general point is enough: the one divine source can be non-composite and numerically undivided in essence while revelation discloses irreducible personal relations of origin, because what constitutes hypostatic identity need not thereby constitute an additional intrinsic component of deity. This is where a broader Catholic synthesis can remain more architectonically explicit than any one school. Doctrine sets the constraints; metaphysics tests possible accounts; patristic and scholastic genealogies show how the conceptual grammar developed; no explanatory model should be silently elevated into the definition of revelation itself.[24]
The counting question can now be reformulated. How many divine persons are there? Three. How many ultimate sources of created being are there? One. Does that alone solve the Trinity? No. One must still explain how the three persons are each fully divine without three instantiations of divinity, and how relations of origin can constitute irreducible personal identity without adding, partitioning, or multiplying the simple divine actuality. But the original numerical challenge has been made more precise. The inference from three persons to three gods is valid only if god is functioning as a count noun instantiated individually by each person. That metaphysical premise is precisely what the pro-Nicene and Thomistic traditions deny in different ways.
Aquinas’s distinction between numerical quantity and transcendental plurality becomes particularly relevant. De potentia argues that the number which is a species of quantity does not apply to immaterial realities in the same way; there can nevertheless be a plurality corresponding to formal distinction and to one convertible with being.[25] This does not make three cease to be three. It means that the mode of plurality is not quantitative extension. Applied to the Trinity, the claim is not that arithmetic becomes false but that arithmetic does not specify the metaphysical nature of the distinction it counts.
The Trinity thus becomes a stress test of convergence rather than an exception to it. If the source revealed as triune were a different reality from the source established by natural theology, Christianity would face a divided ultimacy. If Trinitarian revelation simply contradicted a demonstrated divine unity, one of the claims would have to be rejected or revised. But if natural theology establishes unity at the level of ultimate source and revelation discloses irreducible personal relations without multiplying that source, then the result is genuine excess: more is known of the same God than effects alone could have revealed.
VII. Four Objections
The proposal invites several objections. The first is that transcategoriality looks like an ad hoc escape from counting. Whenever a doctrine encounters a numerical difficulty, one might simply declare its subject beyond categories. The answer is that transcategoriality must be independently motivated by the metaphysics of ultimacy, not introduced after the Trinitarian problem appears. Aquinas’s no-genus argument, his distinction between transcendental unity and quantitative number, and contemporary grounding arguments all arise from questions about the relation between source and derived being. If those arguments fail, the transcategorial thesis loses its warrant. But if they succeed, then refusing to treat God as one specimen in a genus is not special pleading; treating God as such a specimen would be the unargued assumption.
The second objection is that transcategoriality threatens intelligibility. If God is beyond categories, perhaps every positive statement becomes equivocal. Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy is designed to block exactly this result. The source can be known through effects because the effects really depend upon and resemble their cause according to their finite mode. Analogy is not a semantic fog inserted between univocity and silence. It is an account of ordered reference grounded in causality. The creaturely perfection does not define a genus common to God and creatures, yet its dependence permits a true attribution to the source according to a higher mode. This is why Aquinas can say that divine names signify the divine substance “in an imperfect manner” as creatures represent God imperfectly.[26]
Lucero’s stronger phrase that the ground of beings cannot be a being intensifies this objection. The present essay therefore does not require that formula. It uses trans-categorial minimally to deny coordinate membership in the created domain. Whether the most adequate metaphysics should say that God is not a being, is beyond being, or is ipsum esse subsistens is a further genealogical and metaphysical question. The argument for convergence requires asymmetry of source and sourced, not premature settlement of every dispute over the semantics of being.
The third objection concerns Marion. If revelation gives its own conditions of manifestation and may saturate conceptual intention, does phenomenology become a license to evade metaphysical criticism? It should not. Marion’s contribution is strongest when it is read as a phenomenology of reception rather than as a replacement for ontology. His claim that hermeneutics “manages the gap between what gives itself and what shows itself”[27] describes how finite conceptualization can lag behind manifestation. But whether a claimed phenomenon is divine revelation requires further historical, theological, and ecclesial judgments. Excess does not authenticate itself. Nor does phenomenological description prove a metaphysical doctrine. The modes can illuminate one another while retaining their warrants.
The fourth objection is that convergence is asserted too quickly. Why could natural theology not reach one ultimate while a religious tradition falsely identifies another being as Creator? It can. The argument developed here does not prove Christianity simply from the concept of ultimacy. It is conditional upon a successful case that Christian revelation is genuine. Historical evidence, motives of credibility, ecclesial testimony, and the act of faith belong to that larger task. The convergence thesis says what follows if both routes are warranted: they cannot terminate in rival absolute sources of the same created totality. It does not convert the metaphysical argument into a historical proof of revelation.
Conclusion
The question “How many Gods are there?” is indispensable, but it is not philosophically first. Before God can be counted as one, the inquiry must determine what kind of unity belongs to the ultimate source and what sort of reality the divine name signifies. Tuggy’s analysis makes this demand unavoidable. Radde-Gallwitz shows that an ontology of ordinary things and properties cannot simply be projected backward into pro-Nicene metaphysics. Aquinas then supplies two distinctions that transform the problem: God is not contained within a genus because God is the principle of all being, and one convertible with being is not identical with the quantitative unit that functions as the principle of number. Contemporary grounding language allows the result to be named transcategorial, provided the term is used minimally and argued rather than asserted.
Transcategoriality, however, creates a second problem. If the source is not a coordinate member of the created domain, how can it be known? The answer developed through Aquinas is causal participation and analogy. Created effects are genuinely related to their source and therefore mediate true knowledge. Yet they manifest the source according to their finite proportion. Natural theology can consequently be realist without becoming comprehensive: it can know God as principle, by excellence and remotion, while denying that creaturely concepts contain the divine essence.
Revelation adds a different mode of manifestation. Vatican I’s twofold order of knowledge distinguishes what natural reason can attain from mysteries hidden in God and known only because God reveals. Dei Verbum deepens the point by presenting revelation as divine self-disclosure through deeds and words ordered toward communion. Marion’s phenomenology helps articulate why self-disclosure can exceed the conceptual measure of the recipient without ceasing to be intelligible. Finite reception requires interpretation; excess is not contradiction.
The convergence of natural and revealed theology therefore rests on neither reduction nor parallelism. Natural theology does not become revelation, and revelation does not become a philosophical deduction. Their identity lies at the level of referent. The God who freely discloses himself as Creator cannot be a rival to the ultimate source on which the whole created order depends. If both claims are warranted, they converge upon one source under distinct conditions of manifestation, mediation, and assent.
The final formula can now be earned rather than merely stated. Natural theology and revelation do not reach two Gods, but the one ultimate source under irreducibly different modes of access: proportionately through created effects and supernaturally through free divine self-disclosure. Their convergence rests in the unity of that source, whose transcendence is not merely numerical but transcategorial with respect to the created order.
This conclusion also clarifies the status of the Trinity. The three persons are not automatically three gods simply because three is a genuine count of persons. The inference requires a further ontology in which each person is a separate instance of deity or a separate ultimate source. Pro-Nicene doctrine denies that model. Revelation may therefore disclose real personal distinction as an excess over natural theology without negating the metaphysical unity of the source. The remaining Trinitarian task is to explain how relations of origin can be constitutive of irreducible personal identity without adding, partitioning, or multiplying the undivided divine actuality. But the problem has been located correctly. It is not solved by counting alone because the metaphysics of what is counted is precisely what is at issue.
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[1] Dale Tuggy, “On Counting Gods,” TheoLogica 1, no. 1 (2017): 188-89, https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v1i1.153.
[2] Tuggy, “On Counting Gods,” 196-97.
[3] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 11, a. 1, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
[4] Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 9, a. 7, trans. English Dominican Fathers.
[5] Tuggy, “On Counting Gods,” 196.
[6] Tuggy, “On Counting Gods,” 190.
[7] Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, “God Is Not a Thing: A Response to Dale Tuggy,” TheoLogica 4, no. 2 (2020): 56, https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v4i2.54423.
[8] Radde-Gallwitz, “God Is Not a Thing,” 56.
[9] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, a. 5.
[10] Aquinas, De potentia, q. 9, a. 7.
[11] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 11, a. 3.
[12] Jorge C. Lucero, “The Ground of Beings Cannot Be a Being: A Grounding-Theoretic Argument,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 99, article 30 (2026), section “Option 4: Trans-Categorial Ground,” https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-026-10013-9.
[13] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 1.
[14] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 5.
[15] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, ch. 8, trans. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Hanover House, 1955-57).
[16] First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, ch. 4 (1870).
[17] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, chs. 7-8.
[18] Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, no. 2 (1965).
[19] Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1-29.
[20] Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, trans. Jean-Pierre Lafouge (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2013), 49.
[21] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 1, a. 5, ad 4.
[22] Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, 61.
[23] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (1998), no. 73.
[24] Here ‘hypostatic’ means pertaining to the irreducible personal ‘who’ (Father, Son, or Spirit), rather than to the common divine nature. ‘Relations of origin’ are the relations by which those persons are distinguished according to origin. ‘Actuality’ means the intrinsic reality or perfection belonging to God, not a further element added to deity. Thus ‘constitutive of personal identity’ means identity-fixing without constituent addition: a relation may determine who a person is without becoming a distinct intrinsic constituent of what God is.
[25] Aquinas, De potentia, q. 9, a. 7.
[26] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 2.
[27] Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, 55.