Abstract
Perhaps no other topic treated in this book has generated more secondary literature among Thomists in the twentieth-century than the problem of religious language. The crux interpretatum concerns Aquinas’s central claim that certain predicates derived from creatures can be said to be true of God analogically. Aquinas offers analogical predication as steering a middle course between the Scylla of univocity (where the predicate has the same meaning), which would compromise divine transcendence by purporting to compass God within a creaturely concept, and the Charybdis of equivocity (where the predicate has no shared meaning), which would evacuate the language of faith of any cognitive content and so lead to agnosticism. In working out his doctrine of analogical predication, Aquinas is thus trying to balance the demands of apophatic or positive theology, the legacy of the western tradition, and kataphatic or negative theology, the legacy of the eastern tradition. Thomists have typically hailed the results as one of the most original and enduring features of Aquinas’s thought, while nonThomists have sometimes wondered what all the fuss was about.
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References
Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1, Part I: The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. G.T. Thompson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1936) p. x. It has since been argued by many that Barth’s critique of analogy does not really apply to Aquinas himself and that there are actually points of deep agreement between them. See Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. J. Drury (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); Henri Bouillard, La connaissance de Dieu (Paris: Aubier, 1967); Battista Mondin, The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology, second edition (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968); and Henry Chavannes, L’analogie entre Dieu et le monde selon Thomas d’Aquin et selon Karl Barth (Paris: Cerf, 1969). A recent work is Eugene Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
See Elizabeth Johnson, “The Right Way to Speak about God? Pannenberg on Analogy,” Theological Studies 43 (1982): 673–692.
On Scotus’s views, see Olivier Boulnois, “Analogie et univocité selon Duns Scot: La double destruction,” Les études philosophiques 3–4 (1989): 347–369. For critiques of analogy as veiled univocity from two different perspectives, see Patrick Sherry, “Analogy Today,” Philosophy 51 (1976): 431–446 and Kai Nielson, “Analogical Talk about God: A Negative Critique,” The Thomist 40 (1976): 32–60.
This work has been translated into English by E. Bushinski and H.J. Koren as The Analogy of Names and the Concept of Being, Duquesne Studies, Philosophical Series, no. 4 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1953).
Georges Klubertantz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy. A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis (Chicago: Loyola, 1960). Ralph Mclnerny, The Logic of Analogy: An Interpretation of St. Thomas (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1961). Bernard Montagnes, La doctrine de l’analogie de l’être selon s. Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1963).
I am following the outline here of Gregory P. Rocca, O.P. in Analogy as Judgment and Faith in God’s Incomprehensibility: A Study of the Theological Epistemology of Thomas Aquinas (Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1989), 33–49. This dissertation is the most comprehensive and insightful treatment of the topic that I know and this chapter bears a substantial debt to Rocca’s work.
Cajetan’s major division of analogy into proportionality and attribution are unhelpful categories that have been largely abandoned by Thomists. I do not want to muddy the waters here by trying to explain his doctrine. The interested reader can fiind accounts of Cajetan in the references of the previous two notes.
It is well known that Aquinas never explicitly designates his doctrine of how being is unifiied by the term “analogy of being.” Nevertheless it is generally agreed that such a term is appropriate for the way in which he adopts Aristotle’s doctrine of pros hen equivocation. The classic work on this point is Montagne’s La doctrine de l’analogie de l’être. See also Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 73–93.
Michael B. Ewbank, “Diverse Orderings of Dionysius’s Triplex Via by Thomas Aquinas,” Mediaeval Studies 52 (1990): 82–109.
See Claude Geffré, “Theologie naturelle et revelation dans la connaissance de Dieu un,” in L’existence de Dieu, Cahiers de l’actualité religieuse 16 (Paris-Tournai: Casterman, 1961), 297–317. Also, Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht, O.P., “La theologie negative chez S. Thomas d’Aquin” Revue thomiste 93 (1993): 535–566; 94 (1994): 71–99.
; For more on these arguments, see Chapter Eight, pp. 179–185.
See the prologue to question 3 in ST I and SCG I, 14.
SCG I. 14 and III. 39 and 49.
See John F. Wippel, “Quidditative Knowledge of God” in his Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, 215–241 and The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 502–543. The seminal piece on this topic is H.F. Dondaine, “Cognoscere de Deo ’quid est’,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 22 (1955): 72–78.
STI, 12,4.
STI,12,11.
ST I, 12, 13, ad 3 and II-II, 1, 5 ad 1.
ST I, 12, 7. See Karl Rahner, “An Investigation of the Incomprehensibility of God in St. Thomas Aquinas,” in his Theological Investigations, Vol. 16, trans. D. Morland (New York: Seabury, 1979), 244–254.
See Gregory P. Rocca, O.P., “Aquinas on God-Talk: Hovering Over the Abyss,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 641–661.
SCG I, 29.
The best short introduction to the topic of participation in Aquinas is W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas,” in his Explorations in Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 89–101. See also John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas and Participation,” in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John F. Wippel (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 117–158 and his The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 94–131.
Klaus Riesenhuber, “Partizipation als Strukturprinzip der Namen Gottes bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Miscellanea Mediavelia, Vol. 13/2, Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter (Berlin: De Gruyter, l981) 969–982
SCG, I, 29.
ST I, 13, 2.
ST Ia, 13, 3, ad 1 and SCG I, 30.
“Analogy and Meaningful Language about God” in Explorations in Metaphysics, 132.
See Gregory P. Rocca, O.P., “The Distinction between Res Signifiicata and Modus Significandi in Aquinas’s Theological Epistemology,” The Thomist 55 (1991): 173–197. Evelyn Ashworth, “Signification and Modes of Signifying in Thirteenth-Century Logic: A Preface to Aquinas on Analogy,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991): 39–67.
STI, 13,5andSCGI,32.
Le thomisme, Sixième Edition (Paris: J. Vrin, 1989), 123. See SCG I, 33.
ST I, 13, 5.
STI,13,6.
See Le thomisme, 121–129. Humbrecht and Geffré (among others) are much influenced by Gilson.
Jean Duns Scot. Introduction à ses positions fondamentales. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952), 101.
ST I, 3, 4, ad 2.
“The Non-Conceptual Intellectual Dimension in our Knowledge of God according to Aquinas,” in Revelation and Theology, Vol. II, trans. N.D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 157- 206. For analysis and background to Schillebeeckx’s view, see Philip Kennedy, O.P., Deus Humanissimus. The Knowability of God in the Theology of Edward Schillebeeckx, 79–142.
Ibid., 177.
An example of this kind of language can be found in William J. Hill, O.P., Knowing the Unknown God (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), 136–144.
This is how Herbert McCabe describes analogy in “The Logic of Mysticism I” in Religion and Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 31, ed. Martin Warner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 56.
“Analogy and the Meaningfulness of Language about God,” in Explorations in Metaphysics, 1467. Clarke acknowledges the seminal work of David Burrell, C.S.C. for helping him to see the centrality of judgment and the actual lived usage of meaning to understanding analogy: Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), Chapter Six.
ST I, 13, 3 ad 1.
STI, 1,9.
The close affinity between analogy and metaphor is stressed by Ralph Mclnerny in “Metaphor and Analogy,” in his Studies in Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 67–84.
Ibid., 81.
Hill, 140–141.
Knowing and Naming God, Volume 3 (q.12–13) of the Summa theologiae (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 106–107.
ST I, 1, 8 ad 3.
For a Thomist response to the Process critique of the doctrine, see William J. Hill, ”Does the World Make a Difference to God,“ in his Search for the Absent God, ed. Mary Catherine Hilkert (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 108–119.
See W. Norris Clarke, S.J., “Causality and Time,” in Experience, Existence, and the Good, ed. Irwin C. Lieb (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 143–157.
As Brian Davies puts it: “God’s bringing things about need be understood only in terms of things coming about, not in terms of things happening at some time in God.” An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, New Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 147. See also his “The Action of God,” New Blackfriars 75 (1994): 76–84.
SCG II, 10 and ST I, 25, 1.
See DP 3, 15 and SCG II, 23 and 31.
SCG II, 35.
See the criticisms of Nelson Pike by Stump and Kretzmann in their “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): 447–450.
ST I, 13, 7. For a discussion of relations in Aquinas, see Mark G. Henninger, S.J., Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13–39.
“God’s Relation to the World,” Logic Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 321–2.
See Emilie Zum Brunn, “La ‘Mdtaphysique de l’Exode’ selon Thomas d’Aquin,” in Dieu et l’être: , exégèse d’Exode 3:14 et de Coran 20:11–24, ed. P. Vignaux et al. (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1978), 245–269. See also Etienne Gilson, Le thomisme, 99–112.
ST I, 13, 11.
I Sent. 8, 4, 1 ad 1.
See Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R., “Aquinas—Darkness of Ignorance’ in the Most Refined Notion of God,” in Bonaventure and Aquinas: Enduring Philosophers, ed. Robert W. Shahan and Francis J. Kovach (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 69–86. On how Aquinas’s conception of divine unknowability differs from the Neoplatonic tradition, see Armand Maurer, “Penitus Manet Ignotum,” Mediaeval Studies 27 (1965): 212–226.
ST I, 13, 8 and 13, 11, ad 1.
“St. Thomas on the Sacred Name ‘letragrammaton,’” Medieval Studles 34 (19/2): /5–28b.
(Paris: Fayard, 1982).
Trans. Thomas H. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 31–66. The entire issue is titled Saint Thomas et l’onto-théologie and includes a number of papers on the topic given at a colloquium in 1994. I have commented on the collection in “St. Thomas, Onto-theology, and Marion,” The Thomist 60 (October, 1996): 617–625. The material here is adapted from that discussion.
See the discussion of this topic in the previous chapter, pp. 37–38.
Marion cites Sertillanges’s La philosophie de saint Thomas d’Aquin, Deuxième edition (Paris: Aubier, 1940), 166 and several other texts by the same author in his note 81 on page 62.
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Shanley, B.J. (2002). Religious Language. In: The Thomist Tradition. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9916-0_3
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