Signs are all about you, but you may not know how to interpret the most important of them?

One of the great Dominican heirs of St. Thomas Aquinas, John Poinsot (1589–1644), developed what we now call semiotics: the study of signs and the real relations of being they reveal. His goal was simple and bold — to recover a unified way of understanding the world and our place within it.

Poinsot saw what modernity would later forget: signs exist in both nature and culture, and because they are real relations, they give us a single grammar for interpreting everything — from physics and daily life to ethics, liturgy, and sacred doctrine.

This unified field of relationality matters because our age is trapped in false dichotomies:

• faith vs. reason

• science vs. religion

• symbol vs. sacrament

• subjective meaning vs. objective truth

• private experience vs. public authority

These splits are not only false — they are alienating. They make the world unintelligible and leave individuals isolated. When meaning collapses, authority collapses, and when authority collapses, only power remains. This is the “dictatorship of relativism.” If unchecked, as our last century reveals, it is an invitation to totalitarianism where "truth" is a function of the will to power.

Poinsot’s Thomistic semiotics offers a way out by saving the Sacramental from the reductionism of the "symbolic" and the cultural devastation following both nominalism and voluntarist Christianity's wake.

By grounding meaning in real relations, not in private opinion or cultural convention, Poinsot restores the possibility of truth that is both knowable and shareable. His approach reunites what modernity tore apart: that the epistemology of the moderns and the ontology of the ancients differ only in their starting points. It also gives us a way to build cultures that obey the inner logic of nature with confidence — the very logic that undergirds the Natural Law — and to renew institutions that depend on this shared meaning.  Such a task is vital for our civic future depends upon our positive "man made" laws that shape entire societies.

Most importantly, Poinsot strengthens sacramental theology. If signs are real relations, then sacraments truly mediate grace. They bridge:

• Christ of the Gospels

• the Logos of Creation

• the Hypostatic Union

• the divine institutions of the Church

This is not abstraction. Quite to the contrary-- it is an overhaul of realism.  It is the recovery of an enchanted, intelligible world of the spiritual past that also undergirds our greatest scientific achievements of the modern era.

And so much for institutions-- what then of the individual?

The spiritual life is the art of attending to signs — the subtle movements through which God speaks. Elijah searched for God in fire, wind, and earthquake, but found Him in the “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11–13). To hear that voice, one must learn how the world signifies such that only God's voice alone remains.

Poinsot helps us do exactly that by first explaining what signs are and what we ordinarily are to do with, by, and through them (pick your favorite ablative!).

He shows through St. Thomas Aquinas that the world is not mute, that God is not distant, and that meaning is not subjective. There is a way out of the modern wasteland of nihilism, solipsism, and egotism. There is a way to live in a world where truth, nature, culture, and grace form a single intelligible whole and each bears light on the other including our own private confusions.  How else can we speak of a universe as unified in all of its rndless diversity and distinctions?

So let us see what John of St. Thomas was about.

Be well.

On the Science of Signs and Signification:

The "Leg Work" of my spiritual reflections on Signs (both in nature, society, and religious tradition) derives from the following scholarly milestones:

Part Ia. A Lexicon of Thomistic Semiotics

Part Ib. A Semiotics Index of the Thomistic Corpus

Part II. The Isagogue of John of St. Thomas (for the Summa Theologiae)

Part III. Tractatus de Signis (by John of St. Thomas) [& Its Reception by Modern Semioticians]

Part IV. The Biblical Commentaries and Sermons of St. Thomas Aquinas

Part V. Patristic Commentaries on "Signs and Wonders" [More to Come]

Part VI. Research in Biosemiotics: Phytosemiotics & Zoosemiotics (or, Ethology)

Part VII. 'Signposts in a Strange Land' --- Meditations on Walker Percy's Literary and Scholarly Output

Part VII. Re-reading Aquinas' Summa Theologiae through the Cosmovision of Christian Logos

Appendix A: The "Religious-Turn" in Wittgenstein Studies

Appendix B: An Annotated Bibliography of Semiotic Literary Criticism

A Timeline:

Post-Pentecost Cycle:

Stage 1: A Close Reading of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae (Pars Prima) w/ Marginalia of Semiotic Terminology

Stage 2: An Annotated Commentary of John Poinsot's Isagogue [For Synthesis of Thomistic Philosophical Theology]

Advent-Candlemas Cycle:

Stage 3: A Close Reading of John Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis [w/ Notes and Commentary] alongside "New World" tracts on religious missionary experiences related to theological discourse.

Septuagesima-Lenten Cycle:

Stage 4: A Compilation of Aquinas' Sermons and Biblical Commentaries w/ Semiotic References (w/ Inter-Textual Commentary)

Easter Cycle [Novel Research]:

Stage 5a: Begin Annotated Bibliography of Semiotic Literary Criticism w/ a Focus on the interstices of Natural Theology and Foundational Theology (!)

Stage 5b: Begin Annotated Bibliography of Biosemiotics w/ a Focus on the interstices of Natural Theology and Foundational Theology (!)

Stage 6: A Critical Study of "Parson-Naturalists" of the English Reformed Tradition alongside the Jesuit Missionaries [Reflections on Nature & Grace, Faith & Reason, Religion & Science, etc.]

Ongoing Contributions:

A Compilation of Patristic Authorities on the Topic of "Signs and Wonders" and the Miraculous

Outlining Scientific Journals and Books on Biosemiotics, Phytosemiotics, and Zoosemiotics/Ethology

Book Reviews in Semiotic Literary Criticism

Annotated Bibliography of Cleric-Scientist Publications

The Role of Professor John Senior in the Formation of Clear Creek Abbey

A Necrology of Clear Creek Abbey