Cosmic semiosis: Contuiting the Divine

Abstract

Bonaventure's thirteenth century symbolic theology anticipates the semiotic theories of Poinsot and Peirce, while their theories elucidate the expressio-impressio-expressio dynamic integral to the signum in Bonaventure. The integrally triadic nature of all reality fundamental to semiotics accounts for what is self-evidently true in human experience. Peirce's Semiotics explains What Is; Bonaventure's Metaphysics of Manifestation reveals Why it is how it Is. “Every sign consists in the three-cornered relation itself connecting the sign at one and the same time to the mind and to the object signified”: this co-inhering relation makes the contuition (the simultaneous co-recognition of sign-vehicle and Object Signified) of God possible in, through, and together with the particular sensible expression of the sign-vehicle. On the occasion of sense experience, an “innate idea” of God is discovered and elaborated by the human intellect as it participates in the Divine capacitating model of its own thought processes.