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BOOK REVIEWS Spea/Ung the Incomprehensible God: ThomasAquinas on the Interplay ofPositive and Negative Theology. By GREGORY P. ROCCA, 0.P. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Pp. xxv + 412. $64.95 (cloth). ISBN-0-8132-1367-3. Gregory Rocca's book is a uniquely valuable contribution to the literature of Thomism. It is at present the most complete and careful coverage we have of St. Thomas's position on how we can speak intelligibly, philosophically, about God. We must be able to speak positively about God, yet he remains a mystery that exceeds the power of our finite minds to grasp comprehensively. Speaking the Incomprehensible God is about Aquinas's remarkable balancing act between positive and negative theology, as they are called technically. All competent Thomists admit the presence of both strands of theology (philosophy of God) in St. Thomas. But they differ, sometimes significantly, on how they interpret the relation between the two paths, the relative importance of each and the relation of priority between them. The author has the balance between positive and negative theology in St. Thomas exactly right, and expresses this central message of the book beautifully in two early paragraphs: The Dionysian path to God is fundamentally twofold: the way of negation and the way of affirmation, or more precisely, the way of negation based on God as the transcendent Beyond and affirmation based on God as Cause of all things. As we shall see, Aquinas will often interpret the Dionysian maxim about God's absolute unknowability to mean something quite different than what Dionysius originally intended. Aquinas will also elicit a threefold path from the statements of Dionysius, and he will tend to emphasize a domesticated version of the Dionysian via negativa, inasmuch as in his hands it becomes a "way" comfortably at ease within the contours of the positive theology. (25) The author goes on to develop each point in detail-first of all negative theology, then analogy, and finally positive theology. (I would have preferred if he had handled first the positive bond of similitude deriving from creation, then the negative as a qualification of this. But he has preferred to move from 633 634 BOOK REVIEWS negative to positive theology.) First he develops the incomprehensibility of God, then the via negativa as a part ofthe threefold path ofaffirmation through causal similitude, negation ofany attributes containing imperfection or finitude in their meaning, and reaffirmation ofthe perfection in its preeminenttranscendent state in God. Both these points he handles well, taking us carefully through all the relevant texts in St. Thomas. The author next deals with analogy as the tool for speaking positively about God. He does this first in Aristotle, then follows all the windings of Thomas's successive attempts to develop a general theory of analogy to meet the needs of his own much richer metaphysical vision. Aquinas tries persistently-and unsuccessfully-to fit these constructs into the framework of Aristotle, but he ends up dropping them, one by one, as inadequate to handle the intrinsic proportional similitude between God and creatures that is required by his own metaphysical vision, which goes far beyond Aristotle. TheAristotelian theory, as shown by the examples adduced by the author, is radically inadequate to explain any really intrinsic proportional similitude between its analogates, let alone between substances, and least of all between God and other beings. The author admits that the one general theory St. Thomas tries to defend most explicitly-namely, that analogy holds when a given positive attribute is predicated of one primary analogate intrinsically and properly, and of all the other analogates only by some relation to the primary one, as food as cause of health in an animal and clear urine as an effect of health-in fact prescinds from, is "neutral" toward, whether the relation in the secondary analogates indicates an intrinsic similitude or not with the primary one. This may be a helpful general linguistic theory of analogy, and is always present in some way in all the Thomistic uses of analogy. But by itself it is not enough to express Thomas's own rich metaphysical theory of the bond of intrinsic proportional similitude between God...

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