The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition

The Analogical Structure of Language about God

The Analogical Structure of Language about God We have now completed the two basic modes of philosophical discovery of God currently being used by leading NeoThomist schools of thought: the inner path through the dynamism of the human spirit toward Infinite Being and Goodness and the cosmic-metaphysical path through participation metaphysics, rising from the many to the One and from the finite to the Infinite, as ultimate Source of all being. Now arises the problem of whether we can say anything more about God than just that He is the ultimate Source of all, wrapped in a mystery into which we can penetrate no further. This is the problem which St. Thomas and the medievals treated under the ‘‘names of God,’’ which for St. Thomas involves the analogical structure of all our meaningful language about God. There has been a great ongoing dispute in contemporary philosophical circles as to whether 69 70 The Philosophical Approach to God language about God, insofar as He is a being beyond our experience, can be meaningful at all, and if so how this is justified.16 Positivists, empiricists, naturalists, and some types of analytic philosophers deny that language about God or about any transcendent being can be meaningful. They refuse even to discuss arguments for the existence of God: since the very term in question can be given no meaningful content, propositions about ‘‘God’’ are neither true nor false, but simply meaningless. Their basic reason is that all meaningful language about the real world is drawn from a matrix of human experience, and that to use such language to talk about a being beyond our experience and not testable in experience is in principle impossible because it is empty of any content we can understand when applied to such a being. Nor can the traditional recourse to analogy, as done by Thomists, be of any help, it is said.17 For an analogous term is defined as partly the same, partly different when applied to different subjects (or analogates, as they say). Hence the term used—e.g., ‘‘intelligence’’—partly shifts in meaning when applied to God as compared with its meaning when applied to man. But there’s the rub. The new meaning that is different because applied to God, precisely because it lies beyond anything we experience, or can test in experience, turns out to be empty. Hence what we can understand in the term ‘‘intelligence’’ applies only to man, whereas what applies to God in its new use we cannot understand. Consequently, as applied to God it remains empty and can tell us nothing meaningful. But even among contemporary religious thinkers—even many Christian thinkers, both philosophers and theolo- The Analogical Structure of Language about God 71 gians—analogy, especially of the technical Thomistic kind, has fallen on bad days and is rejected by perhaps a majority, outside Thomists. At least so it seemed to me a few years ago among the philosophers of religion with whom I am acquainted. They do not feel that Thomistic analogy is any real help in solving the problem, either because it remains too formal and empty, too agnostic, or because it is based on a dubious metaphysics they cannot accept. Many of these thinkers, in fact, have abandoned any philosophical attempt to prove or argue at all for the existence of God or His attributes. They have recourse instead to faith or revelation, to suggestive metaphors and symbols or ‘‘veridical parables,’’ to existential disclosure experiences (Ian Ramsey, for example ) and the like. I must say that I deeply sympathize with their dissatisfaction with Thomistic analogy as a tool for speaking about God, since I find it a sad fact that it is very difficult to find a good, clear, trustworthy explanation of Thomistic analogy that makes sense to contemporary thinkers and also does justice to St. Thomas’s thought. One reason is that around 1960 a rather profound revision of interpretation of analogy in St. Thomas took place among contemporary Thomistic scholars, concomitant with and partly resulting from the rediscovery of the notion of participation and its role in his metaphysics. Thomistic scholars are now generally agreed that it is impossible to find any one consistent theory of analogy that fits all the texts of St. Thomas, that his thought has evolved rather profoundly on this point, and that in particular the doctrine expressed in the...