Naming God: analogy, negation and the limits of language

Program / Course 8: God, Trinity, and Creation / Lesson 1.2

What you will learn

• Explain why speech about God is difficult for a Christian who believes God is beyond all creatures.
• Distinguish univocal, equivocal and analogical language and say which one Aquinas defended.
• Describe the way of negation and the way of eminence in the Eastern and Western traditions.
• Recognize that Scripture itself uses images, names and revelation of a name.

The big idea

Christians say that God is good, wise and living, yet they also say that God is not a creature and cannot be fully grasped. This creates a puzzle: how can ordinary words apply to One who is not ordinary? The main answer in both East and West is that such words are used truly but not in the same way as for creatures. Language about God works by analogy, by denial of creaturely limits, and by pointing beyond itself to a reality that remains greater than any statement.

Key terms

Univocal

Used in exactly the same sense each time. If good meant the same thing for God and for a good meal, it would be univocal.

Equivocal

Used in entirely different senses that share only a sound. A river bank and a savings bank are an example.

Analogy

Use of a word in senses that are related but not identical, so that one sense is primary and the other depends on it.

Apophatic theology

Speech about God by saying what God is not (God is not limited, not changing). From a Greek word for denial.

Cataphatic theology

Speech about God by affirming what God is (God is good, wise, living). From a Greek word for affirmation.

Anthropomorphism

Describing God in human terms, such as the hand or eye of God.

Revelation

God making himself known, in the Christian view through creation, Scripture, the history of Israel and above all Christ.

Essence and energies

An Orthodox distinction between what God is in himself, which cannot be known, and the divine activities by which God reaches creatures.

Background

Scripture speaks of God in many ways. It calls God a rock, a shepherd, a father and a king. It says God has a mighty arm and sees the earth. It also says that no one can make an image of God (Exodus 20:4) and that God said to Moses, “there shall no man see me, and live” (Exodus 33:20). The Bible gives images freely and yet insists that God exceeds them. Christian theology inherited both habits and had to explain how they fit.

Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, also influenced the question. Some of its writers described the highest reality as beyond being and beyond description. Christian thinkers such as Clement of Alexandria and later Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius, who wrote under the name of Paul’s convert at Athens, used some of this vocabulary. Scholars still debate how much the Christians borrowed and how much they changed, since they added the claim that God has spoken and become flesh. Most agree that the borrowing was real but always reworked.

In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas gave the most influential Western answer, the doctrine of analogy. In the Orthodox East, a parallel answer was shaped by the Cappadocian fathers and later by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century. These answers differ in emphasis, and the differences matter, but both say that the words of faith are true, the reality is greater, and God’s own self-revelation is what makes any speech possible.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: The problem

If God made everything, then God is not one more thing among things. Human words are formed to describe creatures. When someone says that a person is wise, a listener has in mind a person who learns, forgets and grows. Applied to God, these words risk shrinking God to the size of a person, or else saying nothing clear at all.

Two simple solutions fail. If the words were univocal, God would be on the same scale as creatures, only larger. If they were equivocal, saying God is good would tell the listener nothing, since it might mean something unrelated to goodness. Most Christian theology rejects both.

Step 2: The way of analogy

Aquinas taught that words such as good, wise and living apply first and fully to God and only secondarily to creatures, whose goodness comes from God as an effect resembles its cause. The meanings are related, so the words are not empty, but they are not the same, so God is not made small. He wrote that in this life people know of God what God is not, and how all things are related to him, more than what God is (Summa Theologiae I, Question 3, introduction).

This is a careful claim. It does not say people understand God. It says that creatures reflect their Maker in some way, so that good words used of them can point upward. Protestant and Catholic writers have debated whether analogy gives too much to natural reason. Karl Barth, a twentieth-century Reformed theologian, was suspicious of it and preferred to begin from God’s revelation in Christ. Other Protestants, such as the older Reformed scholastics, defended a form of it.

Step 3: The way of negation

The apophatic way says what God is not: not bounded, not changing, not made of parts, not in need. The idea is that such denials protect the mystery by removing creaturely limits. Gregory of Nyssa described Moses entering the cloud on Sinai as a picture of knowing God by realizing that God cannot be seen or grasped. Orthodox writers such as Vladimir Lossky stressed this way strongly.

Apophatic and cataphatic speech are meant to work together. Affirmations alone can lead to the idea that God is a bigger person. Negations alone can leave nothing to pray to. The tradition uses both: God is wise, and God is not wise as people are wise. A third step is sometimes called eminence: whatever perfection is found in creatures is in God in an unlimited way.

Step 4: The role of revelation

All traditions agree that Christians do not speak of God only by reasoning upward. In the Bible God gives a name, I AM THAT I AM (Exodus 3:14), and in the New Testament Christ says that whoever has seen him has seen the Father (John 14:9). The Eastern distinction between God’s essence, which no creature can know, and God’s energies, by which creatures are really met by God, is one way of saying that real knowledge is possible without comprehension. Catholic teaching has questioned whether this distinction divides God; Orthodox theologians reply that it does not, and the question remains a live disagreement between the churches.

1. When I say God is good, what do I mean, and does it match what I mean of a good person?
2. Which images of God in Scripture do I find easiest and which hardest to take seriously?
3. Do I tend to think of God as a larger version of a human being?
4. What happens to prayer if I only say what God is not?
5. What happens to reverence if I only say what God is?
6. How does Christ’s life change the way I read the names and images of God?

Examples

Different perspectives

Catholic

Catholic teaching, following Aquinas, holds that human words can apply truly to God by analogy. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 taught that between Creator and creature no likeness can be noted without a greater unlikeness. The words say something real, and the difference always remains larger.

Orthodox

Orthodox theology gives a leading place to the apophatic way and to the distinction between essence and energies, which Gregory Palamas defended against critics. God is known by participation in the divine life, but God’s essence stays beyond all knowledge. Orthodox writers often suspect that Western analogy gives reason too large a role.

Protestant

Reformers such as Calvin said that God accommodates himself to human weakness in Scripture, speaking in a way that suits creatures, as a nurse speaks to a child. Many Reformed writers hold that human knowledge of God is real but derived from God’s own knowledge, and call it ectypal, a copy, of God’s own. Barth and others have pressed the priority of revelation.

Jewish

Maimonides, a twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, argued strongly for negative language about God and held that positive descriptions apply to God only in a loose way. His Guide for the Perplexed influenced Christian writers, including Aquinas, who also disagreed with him in places.

Secular and philosophical

Some philosophers argue that if words lose their ordinary meaning when applied to God, then they say nothing at all. Defenders reply that analogy is a normal feature of language, found in science and poetry alike, and does not empty the words.

Why it matters

Everything in the rest of the course depends on this lesson. When the church says that God is simple, unchanging and eternal, or that three persons are one God, it is using language under the constraints described here. Without this lesson a student may read these claims as exact descriptions, or else dismiss them as empty. Understanding how the tradition thinks language works lets a reader take the claims at their intended strength, no more and no less.

Common misunderstandings

Knowledge check

Think it through

1. Choose one name or image of God from the Bible that you find difficult. What would it mean to take it truly but not literally?
2. Is there a word you use of God in prayer that you suspect you use univocally?
3. Why might some Christians fear that stressing mystery makes belief seem arbitrary?

Independent assignment

Three sentences about God

In your own notebook, write about 400 words. Choose the sentence God is wise. First explain it as if it were univocal. Then explain it as an analogy, using one of Aquinas’s examples or one of your own. Then add the negative statement that corresponds to it. Finally, write a short paragraph on which of the three feels most helpful for prayer. Do not send this to anyone.

Further study

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Read Part I, Question 13, on the names of God, and notice how he handles analogy.
• Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church Read the opening chapters on the apophatic way in the Eastern tradition.
• Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises, etc. (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2, vol. 5) Look for passages on how the divine nature surpasses every name.
• John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith Read the opening chapters on what can and cannot be said of God.
• David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss Read selectively for a modern defense of speaking about God as source of being.
• Exodus 3:14 The revelation of the divine name.
• Exodus 33:20 No one can see God’s face and live.
• Isaiah 55:8 God’s thoughts are not human thoughts.