Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology. By Gregory P. Rocca, OP. Pp. xxvi + 412. Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2004. isbn 0 8132 1367 3. $64.95

Abstract

According to Aquinas, what God is—his essence—cannot be known by creatures, even those who are permitted to encounter God (metaphorically: to see him) in the beatific ‘vision’. But this view of Aquinas', raises an acute question not only for the theologian but also for every Christian believer: if we cannot know God's essence, how can we successfully talk about him? By means of an exhaustive analysis of all the relevant texts, Rocca attempts to sketch out what he takes to be Aquinas's solution to this problem. In the first of the book's four parts, Rocca gives an account of Aquinas's negative theology, describing the various ways in which Aquinas holds that we can make negative claims about God, and showing that, for Aquinas, the possibility of such negative theology depends, reasonably enough, on the prior possibility of making affirmative claims about God. In part 2, Rocca shows how we can make such affirmative claims about God even in the absence of any knowledge of the divine essence: we do so by analogy, and this part of the book contains a lengthy initial account of Aquinas's views on analogy. Rocca makes a contribution to various debates in Thomist interpretation. He argues that analogy is fundamentally a logical or semantic matter, but one that is often (though not invariably) parasitic on certain metaphysical claims—thus combining the best insights of the two different schools of interpretation. For example, our use of analogous affirmative terms about God relies on the metaphysical assertion that creatures resemble God in certain ways: itself grounded on the prior claim that effects in some sense resemble their causes. According to Rocca, following a line of interpretation recently suggested by David Burrell among others, analogy is not grounded on any putative similarity of concept (such as wisdom) realized in God and creatures respectively, but on our capacity to make judgements about the truth and falsity of sentences even if we in some sense do not know the senses of the terms used in the sentences. The third part of the book looks at some key theological beliefs underlying the account of religious language outlined in the first two parts—beliefs such as the existence of God, God's creative activity, and the participation of creatures in God's essence. Rocca concludes, contrary to the usual exposition of Aquinas, that these beliefs are properly theological, and not fundamentally metaphysical, or straightforwardly accessible to human reason in the absence of grace. The fourth part considers Aquinas's positive theology of the divine names in more detail, again with exhaustive attention to the relevant Thomist texts. This part concludes the discussion of analogy by a treatment of the crucial distinction between what is signified by a word (namely, a concept), and the way in which the concept is signified—as realized in this or that being.