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Chapter Four: Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language
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Four Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language . , ... What singles Thomas Aquinas out from an array of medieval thinkers, and sets him off decisively from many who followed him, is the way in which he was able to transform the philosophical frameworks given him, yet do so in a way that respected their logical and semantic integrity .1 Part of that transformation, certainly, was to exploit the analogical reaches of language to which Aristotle had alluded, and which he himself had employed to call attention to the fact that “‘being’ is said in many ways.”2 In Aquinas’ case, however, his encounter with Dionysius the Areopagite, with his typology of discourse in divinis, led him to a more constructive strategy regarding predicating “perfection terms” of creator as well as of creatures. Taking the perfection terms in question, Aquinas found a far more potent metaphysical use for the altogether ordinary semantic distinction of res significata and modus significandi— “thing signified” and “manner of signifying,” customarily used to show how a shift in syllogistic terms from a nominal to an adjectival “manner of signifying” need not alter the argument. His argument in the Summa Theologiae is that perfection terms do say that God is; they are predicated of him in the category of substance, but fail to represent adequately what he is. The reason for this is that we speak of God as we know him, and since we David B. Burrell, C.S.C. know him from creatures we can only speak of him as they represent him. [Yet] any creature, in so far as it possesses a perfection, represents God and is like him, for he, being simply and universally perfect, has pre-existing in himself the perfections of all his creatures. . . . But a creature is not like to God as it is like to another member of its species or genus, [so] words like ‘good’ and ‘wise’ when used of God do signify something that God really is but they signify it imperfectly because creatures represent God imperfectly.3 Both Aristotle and Dionysius help frame this response, with Aristotle reminding us how our knowledge is derived from sensible objects—“we know God from creatures”; and Dionysius insisting that whatever we find of perfection in our universe “represents God and is like him,” yet is more unlike than like, “since a creature is not like to God as it is to another member of the species or genus.”4 The crucial element being factored in at this point is what Robert Sokolowski calls “the distinction” of creator from creatures: a pre-philosophical stance which marks the thought and practice of all Abrahamic faiths, though each in a distinctive way, and becomes especially acute in Christian life and practice.5 Injecting the creator/creature relation directly into the argument at this point displays what Josef Pieper has so astutely noted: that creation is the “hidden element ” in the philosophy, or here, the epistemology, of Aquinas.6 By calling attention to the fact that the items which serve as the proper objects of our cognition are also creatures, Aquinas can argue that certain terms—evaluative rather than descriptive ones, of course—can properly be predicated of both creator and creature, though we cannot know how to use them properly of God, since as we use them they “signify [what God really is] imperfectly.” In the previous article of the Summa he had called attention to the fact that we can help correct our inevitable misuse by reminding ourselves how, in their concrete (or adjectival) form, terms like “just” or “wise” are predicated of subsistent things; saying “God is just” will remind us of that fact, whereas the abstract (or nominal) form of such terms articulates an identity rather than a predication, thereby indicating a simple form: “God is justice.” Yet since “God is both simple, like the form, and subsistent, like the concrete thing,” we need to use both forms of expression for him, for “neither way of speaking measures up to his way of being.”7 In this way, we remind ourselves that language as we use it “will fail to represent adequately what God is.” Yet since any warrant we have for using human language at all— even perfection terms—turns on the grounding fact of creation, such terms cannot be univocal, since they must be able to span “the distinction” of creatures from creator without collapsing it. For creation, with the all-important “distinc- [34.229.223.223] Project MUSE (2024...