The ‘Divine Names’ and the ‘Attributes of Deity’: On the (Infinite) Analogical Interval in Forty‐Six Aphorisms

Abstract

AbstractFor the modern tradition of analytic philosophy of religion (that this article rejects), goodness, beauty, wisdom, and so on are divine attributes, whereas, for the classical tradition of Christian theology, they are divine names. This crucial distinction between attributes and names helps to explain why feminist philosopher Grace Jantzen’s charge of an identification of the male self with the divine self in Anglo‐American philosophy of religion leads on, directly, to a critique of the ‘doctrine’ of analogy. Jantzen’s critique of ‘classical theism’ is directed against the (largely modern) reduction of God to a (male) superbeing. Here, God’s ‘attributes’ are merely human ones, even if extended to a superlative degree. I distinguish the analogical reflections of Aquinas (following Dionysius) and his heirs from the anthropomorphic dissolutions of the divine in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Theology’s analogical speech, I argue, has the potential to answer – at least partially – the feminist critique of God as a ‘pure projection’ of ‘man’. For Aquinas, God’s perfections must be qualitatively different and not merely quantitative maximisations of our own. I contend that feminist philosophy of religion cannot afford to dismiss the potential of the way of analogy, especially in its negative or apophatic dimensions.