Aquinas's Two Concepts of Analogy and a Complex Semantics for Naming the Simple God

Abstract

Aquinas's Two Concepts of Analogy and a Complex Semantics for Naming the Simple God Joshua P. Hochschild THE TOPIC OF "divine names" as treated by Aquinas can be traced back to pagan Greek thinkers, Aristotle and earlier. More proximately, it can be traced to a Christian heavily influenced by that Greek tradition, (Pseudo-)Dionysius. At the beginning of his commentary on Dionysius's Divine Names, Aquinas describes it and three other works of Dionysius in terms of their relation to human reason. Features of God that pertain to the three divine persons and their essential unity "find no adequate likeness" in creatures; these are mysteries "exceeding the whole faculty of natural reason," treated in De divinis hypotyposibus. There are other truths about God revealed in Scripture that "our intellect cannot conceive" and that "exceed all that which can be apprehended by us"; these are treated in a work on Mystical Theology. There are other divine features that can be investigated by human reason, insofar as "some likeness in creatures is found"; in that case, it is possible for our intellect to be led to conceive of God from creatures. Some of these are merely metaphorical similitudes, as when God is said to be a lion, a stone, or the sun. Such "likenesses" obtain "according to something transferred from creatures to God." These characteristics, truly in creatures and not properly in God, are treated in a work on Symbolic Theology. But some likenesses obtain because of "something that in creatures is derived from God." Such divine characteristics— [End Page 155] expressed in words like "good," "just," "wise," and "powerful"—are treated in the work On Divine Names.1 Thus, according to Aquinas, Dionysius's Divine Names treats what can be understood of the proper attributes of the one God that are knowable by reason. Though the work clearly draws inspiration from faith, we could anachronistically say that it functions very much as an exercise in "natural theology." In particular it reflects on how our concepts and language can be extended to God precisely because they are derived from likenesses that emanate from and participate in their preeminent, perfect source. Words express—even if in a very exceptional way—what we know about divine reality. For Dionysius, reflecting on these words and the ways that they express divine realities is a matter not just of theological language, but of theological epistemology and metaphysics: the divine names are an occasion to contemplate divinity and its attributes. [End Page 156] Although Aquinas is deeply informed by this work, when he writes his own theological treatises the topic of "divine names" becomes more circumscribed. In the Summa theologiae, question 13 of the Prima pars addresses divine naming, but quite a lot is said about God, and about our knowledge of God, in questions 2 through 12. (A comparable structure is evident in the Summa contra Gentiles.) We could say that Aquinas is content to engage in divine naming before making it an object of reflection in its own right, but it is clear that, for Aquinas, the topic of divine naming is a more circumscribed part of theology. Rather than encompassing the investigations of natural theology, it is about how, as Lawrence Dewan has described, certain words as applied to God have "a distinctive meaning … and a distinctive way of meaning what they mean."2 For Aquinas, as for Dionysius, the "names" in question are not proper names, but any true predicates of God. At issue are words like "good," "just," "wise," and "powerful"—even the very word "God" (which is not really a proper name, for Aquinas, but functions more like a common term, albeit a very unique common term). The presumption is that these words can be truly predicated of God. However, given God's otherness from the creaturely context in which such words are learned, how do these words function when they are predicated of God? In short, rather than encompassing natural theology tout court, Aquinas's own doctrine of divine names is what we might call a theological semantics. Aquinas's doctrine of analogy is sometimes taken to be almost coincident with the topic of divine names, or at least...