Speaking of God

I would like to shift gears a bit and discuss how we speak about God.

Christians claim that God is wholly other and transcendent and in the Incarnation God became human in Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Thus, we must say something about God and we do, yet we must always keep in mind that our language can never "correspond" to God as this would require that God be a finite being comparable with language. So, how can we speak meaningfully about God with becoming idolators? This is indeed a difficult question and the one I want to address.

I want to propose, along with many others in the Christian tradition, the way of analogy. Analogy allows us to us know, albeit improperly, God and speak about him while allowing him to still be transcendent. Analogy differs from both univocal speech and equivocal speech. Univocal speech is using the exact same meaning of the word in different cases (e.g. John is good person and Salley is a good person.) Equivocal speech is when two terms have completely different meanings (e.g. Salley is a good person and that was a good bank robbery). Analogical speech is neither one of these.

Analogy is often thought of as A is to B as C is to D (A:B::C:D). An example of this is 2:4::3:6. Both are 1/2 of the other, so we can reduce them to a proportion. However, by reducing knowledge to a proportion we smuggled in a univocal core as this presumes a base 10 system. Thus, we cannot use analogy in this way to speak about God though it is useful in other areas. Analogy cannot have a univocal core if we want to retain God's transcendence. When we say "God is good" and "John is good" we cannot mean the same thing by "good." Even if we want to say that "God is perfect goodness" we must be careful not to make God simply the biggest thing around thereby once again fall into univocity. Put in formal terms: trying to find ways to explain analogy is always self defeating as the explanation requires finding a univocal core. So, is our language about God completely equivocal? We must say no, otherwise we can have no knowledge of God.

Another way to understand analogy is to that we can truly use the word "good" of both God and John without implying the shard any features or properties (univocity). If we pay attention to how we use analogy in an ad hoc manner, we can still retain its usage and therefore speak about God, albeit improperly meaning that the language does not function in the way it usually does in our knowing about other things.

Citing E. Gilson, David Burrell notes how for Aquinas, analogy refers to our capacity to make the kind of judgments that we do and that analogy, therefore, must be explicated on this level of judgment not a conceptual level like univocity requires (Analogy and Philosophical Language, 153-54). In other words, analogy is a practice not a theory. It is tempting to think that "practice" is reducible to a core. However, this simply manifests a confusion that we treat the noun "practice" just like other nouns like rock, house, and cat. These can be ostensively defined and explained (e.g. rocks are hard). However, part of the grammar of the word "practice" is that it is irreducible to logic or semantics. Does this mean analogic speech is irrational?

No. Just because something cannot be reduced to words doesn't mean it is not rational or even non-linguistic. A non-theological example would be saying to someone "Explain to me what a G note is." The problem is a G note cannot be explained! But that is not to say it is irrational . Sure, one can say how to play a G note (put your finger here) but this does not say what it is. Nonetheless, trained persons can recognize musical notes; this is hardly irrational. This is akin to how I want to understand analogy. Trained persons can speak analogously of God without falling into idolatry, but it does take training. This is one way in which theology is helpful; it helps us discipline our speech about God so we are not idolators.

Comments, questions, thoughts, ramblings???


Tim