Religious language: Negative, Analogical or Symbolic - Aquinas and analogy

Positive language and analogical meaning

Positive theological language can affirm a perfection without claiming that God possesses it in the limited human way. The cataphatic way, or via positiva, makes positive statements such as “God is good”. Aquinas accepts that creatures do not disclose God's essence completely, but argues that their perfections permit meaningful divine naming.

Three kinds of meaning clarify the problem. Univocal use keeps the same meaning: calling two adult humans mortal attributes mortality in the same sense. Equivocal use gives the same word unrelated meanings, as with a river bank and a financial bank. If divine goodness were wholly equivocal, understanding human goodness would offer no help in understanding God. If it were straightforwardly univocal, it could wrongly place divine goodness within the same finite kind as ours.

Analogical use preserves a relevant relation without identity of meaning. This is more than saying that two things vaguely resemble one another. The relation explains why the shared term is appropriate. Aquinas's account is cognitive: it intends to express something true about God, even though the expression is incomplete. Cognitive does not mean certain or empirically measurable; it means truth-claiming.

In Summa Theologiae I.13.2–3, Aquinas distinguishes the perfection signified from our creaturely manner of signifying it. This is a paraphrase: goodness can belong properly to God although the way humans conceive and express it is limited. Analogy and negation can thus cooperate, affirming perfection while denying defect. Aquinas, I.13.

Attribution and causal dependence

The analogy of attribution relates different uses of a term to a primary instance or source. Aquinas illustrates this with health. An animal is healthy because it possesses health; a medicine is called healthy because it causes health; urine can be called healthy because it indicates health. Medicine and urine do not possess the animal's bodily health. Their different relations to it make the shared word intelligible.

In the theological application, God is the source of the positive perfections found in creatures. Created goodness is dependent and limited; divine goodness is primary and underived. We learn the word from creatures, but the reality it imperfectly expresses is prior in God. The direction of our learning is therefore different from the direction of dependence: knowing creatures first does not mean that creatures cause God's goodness.

There is an important limit to the health example. Aquinas does not conclude that “God is good” means only “God causes goodness elsewhere”, as if God lacked goodness personally. I.13.2 rejects that reduction. The divine perfection is real, not merely a label for effects. The example explains related predication; it does not make every detail of medicine analogous to God.

A challenge concerns the foundation of the inference. A cause does not automatically resemble its effect in every respect: a hot stove can produce a painful sensation without itself feeling pain. Aquinas appeals to positive perfections and causal likeness within his metaphysics, not the rule that every feature of every effect must occur in its cause. A critic must ask whether this specific God–creature relation is justified. Attribution explains divine naming conditionally on that relation; it is not a free-standing proof of God's existence.

Proper proportion and modes of being

The analogy of proper proportion considers how a perfection belongs appropriately to different kinds of being. It compares relations: a creature's knowledge relates to its finite nature, while God's knowledge relates to the divine nature. The comparison does not place both on one numerical scale.

An original illustration is calling a child and a skilled adult wise. The child may judge a friendship dispute well within limited experience; the adult may exercise sophisticated judgement over responsibilities the child cannot yet understand. Neither need possess identical knowledge for wisdom to be appropriately predicated. This illustration concerns ordinary finite cases; moving to God requires the further theological account of divine perfection.

For Aquinas, human knowledge is acquired, partial and dependent; divine knowledge belongs to God without those defects. “God knows” therefore neither means merely human thinking multiplied many times nor an unrelated use of knows. It retains the relevant perfection while recognising a different mode of possession. Proper proportion protects difference without surrendering every connection.

The distinction is supported by De veritate q.2 a.11. Aquinas's accounts vary across his works, and the labels attribution and proper proportion were systematised by later interpreters. They should not be treated as two completely disconnected theories exhaustively set out in I.13. Both address meaningful predication across the God–creature difference. Primary discussion.

The objection is that we know the human side directly but not the divine mode. Saying that God knows “appropriately to God” risks circularity unless we can explain what content survives. A defender replies that recognising knowledge as a perfection already excludes ignorance and error, even without comprehending its divine mode. The issue is whether that limited content is substantial enough.

Analogy as effective expression

Analogy succeeds only if it preserves enough content for an affirmation to differ from its denial. Saying “God is good” should give a reason to reject cruelty as a divine perfection, rather than allowing good to mean whatever God happens to do. It need not guarantee that every apparent evil has an explanation accessible to us.

Attribution supplies a grounding relation: created perfections depend on their source. Proper proportion explains why possession of those perfections need not be identical. Together they offer more determinate language than unlimited negation, while avoiding a magnified human God. They can also explain why religious believers make genuine claims rather than merely expressing feelings.

Nevertheless, three questions remain distinct. Is the causal foundation credible? Does the predicate retain intelligible content? Is the particular assertion true? An analogy may make a sentence intelligible without proving it. A critic who disputes a good creator can reject the foundation without showing that every analogical sentence is meaningless.

The preceding temporal debates provide an application. A timeless knower and a temporal knower might both know, though one does not predict or learn successively. Analogy helps express that difference; it does not by itself solve the freedom objection to infallibility. Its proper role is semantic clarification, alongside other arguments about the attributes.

A reasoned judgement might accept analogy as modest but valuable expression: it gives partial truth-claiming content under an explained metaphysical assumption. A stronger critic can argue that the unknown divine mode leaves too much indeterminate for public assessment. The best defence answers that challenge with a surviving meaning and its limits, rather than relying on the word analogy as a solution by itself.