Non-Cognitivism

A symbolic understanding of religious language renders religious discourse incomprehensible. Critically evaluate this claim. [40]

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A symbolic understanding of religious language does not render religious discourse incomprehensible. As Paul Tillich explains in his “Dynamics of Faith”, symbols participate in the ultimate reality which they refer to.  If they do not so participate, then the symbol has no power.  If they do participate in ultimate reality, it follows that symbols have an external point of reference with which they correspond. They can, therefore, be either true or false and are cognitive.  Tillich confirms that symbols are not arbitrary or created intentionally; no one person can create a symbol or determine its meaning by themselves. Rather, symbols grow out of the collective unconscious, something akin to what Hegel called the zeitgeist. Because the process of symbols being created, and dying away, is an organic one it is difficult to see why symbols would be created – as they so obviously are – if they were indeed “incomprehensible”. The power of the symbol depends on the extent to which it participates in and so communicates ultimate reality, so it is unfair to say that symbolic language is incomprehensible, even if symbols resist being reduced to or explained in more literal terms.

Further, if religious communities produce symbols together, then it seems likely that the symbols will at least be comprehensible to members of those communities, at least on the level of cohering with their language game and form of life, being true or false in relation to accepted doctrines and beliefs. As Wittgenstein observed, meaning depends on usage, so whether or not Tillich is correct about symbols participating in ultimate reality, within a form of life – such as a religious community – symbols are meaningful and, presumably, comprehensible – when they follow the rules of the agreed “language game”. It is clear that people “comprehend” many symbols and claims that cohere with their cultural frame of reference, whether they refer to things that we can see, touch, taste or smell or not. Take the portcullis, a symbol of the British Parliament and of parliamentary democracy… in terms of what people can see, it refers only to a gate to the palace of Westminster, but everybody in the UK is able to comprehend its broader and deeper meaning. Similarly, the cross refers only to the way Jesus of Nazareth died, but all Christians are able to comprehend its broader and deeper meaning as a symbol of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice and triumph over death, and of the hope for eternal life that those who believe in Jesus sustain. Because it is so obvious that people do comprehend symbolic religious (and other) language, Tillich rejected the “logical” criticisms of philosophers such as Paul Edwards, who argued in his paper “Professor Tillich’s Confusions” that symbols are incomprehensible because they do not point towards anything that we can clearly understand or experience. Tillich maintained that the comprehensibility of symbolic religious language is demonstrated by its adequacy, by the fact that it works for those who use it and sustains the faith of more than two billion Christians.

As Wittgenstein observed, and Tillich would surely have agreed, insisting on meaning depending on reference and on comprehensibility depending on a symbol corresponding with an external state of affairs that can be observed through the empirical senses – in the way that Paul Edwards seems to demand – is unrealistic and betrays a superficial understanding of how language of any type can work. As David Hume pointed out in his “Enquiry concerning Human Understanding” 1748, our empirical senses do not deliver objective, external experience of anything; instead they deliver a narrow range of data which must then be interpreted according to subjective categories, values and ideas. The ball is not red in itself; redness is a property of the way most human eyes see the ball, not of the ball in itself. Further, as Wittgenstein noted, our experiences of the world are like beetles in boxes, necessarily private. Nobody can peer inside my mind to find the external point of reference which would make any claim, religious or otherwise, meaningful according to the standard of the Verification Principle. The meaning and “comprehensibility” of language, including religious language, can only depend on what coheres within a form of life, not on correspondence. Indeed, the idea that meaning depends on verifiability has long been rejected, even in the context of science. Scientists need to discuss states of affairs which can never be verified, including how the “Big Bang” happened, what will happen in billions of years’ time as the universe cools and slows etc. Karl Popper showed how scientific method relies not on verifiability, but on falsification and being willing to modify or drop any hypothesis which conflicts with the evidence. Further, in quantum science the state of the object is changed by the act of observing it, so the meaningfulness of scientific claims about the probability of quantum events can only be tested by the extent to which these claims work. For example, how mobile phones share limited bandwidth is worked out using quantum mechanics; the fact that I can make and receive calls demonstrates that quantum mechanics is meaningful. Richard Swinburne argues that religious claims are a bit like claims in quantum science; we cannot observe what they refer to and so the meaningfulness of religious claims has to be evaluated in a different way. He used the analogy of “toys in the cupboard” to make this point; can a child talk meaningfully about his belief that his toys come out of the cupboard at night when he is asleep? Obviously enough, they will all be in the cupboard when he sets out to check – there is no doubt that his belief might reasonably change how he feels about his toys and how he behaves towards them. Similarly faith-claims are based on faith; we cannot set out to demonstrate their basis, because to do so is impossible and undermines their very nature. Religious symbols cannot be validated because they point towards something that we can experience through our senses or clearly define in the language of the ordinary world of space and time, nor can they be validated because they are falsifiable in the same terms, and yet the fact remains that they work and have profound effects on religious believers, so in some sense must be “comprehensible”.

Paul Edwards would reject this argument, arguing that “comprehensible” refers specifically and narrowly to being cognitive. As religious symbols do not refer to clear and distinct ideas or to states of affairs that we can see, hear, smell or taste, they cannot be cognitive and must, therefore be regarded as non-cognitive. Nevertheless, being non-cognitive in character does not equate to being “incomprehensible”. As Tillich’s colleague Randall argued in “The Role of Knowledge in Western Religion” chapter four, although symbols are in no sense representative, they still do things in provoking emotional and/or actual responses in both individuals and communities, in communicating shared experiences effectively and in revealing or disclosing insight or vision. While they may be non-cognitive, symbols work in communicating religious experiences and concepts and inciting specific forms of understanding and religious actions. It is, therefore, not reasonable to say that symbols are “incomprehensible”, even though they may be impossible to reduce or explain in terms of other things and even though they refer to what is beyond empirical experience or clear, logical definition.

Naturally enough, Edwards would reject this, arguing that the very fact that religious symbols are irreducible makes them – at least Tillich’s account of them – circular. You can’t understand symbols unless you understand symbols, you can’t comprehend symbols unless you already comprehend whatever generally incomprehensible thing they refer to. Edwards would conclude that this shows that the religious symbols themselves are incomprehensible and add nothing in themselves to the business of trying to understand what it is that they refer to. Nevertheless, Tillich would rightly defend the comprehensibility of symbols, drawing on Aristotle to argue that they are both cognitive and successful in communicating new meaning, thus helping people to open up understanding and develop their comprehension of what would otherwise be closed and opaque. Symbols are not the same as metaphors, which are more carefully constructed by an individual author or speaker, but they rely on the same process of new meaning being created through concepts coming together, in what Aristotle called the epiphora between them. As Nietzsche and later Heidegger argued, we communicate entirely by placing one word next to another with the intention of meaning being transferred in the process of connecting them, from the space and tension between them. Real human communication is not just pointing (whether physically or auditorily) to a series of things as a chimpanzee might do, it is about creating rich and dynamic pictures in other peoples’ minds. It is wrong to reduce human language to a string of words and their verifiable points of reference. Just as it would be wrong to think that by writing “the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than the life of an oyster” Hume was only making a point about bivalves, it would be wrong to see language as a series of signs pointing towards specific points of reference in a static and predictable way. Hume chooses the oyster, then cheap and plentiful fast-food sold by the pint in the London streets – as a symbol for a disposable form of life. The use of this symbol enabled readers to comprehend Hume’s position on the sanctity of life more quickly and precisely than many hundreds of other words and arguments. This is demonstrated by the fact that this quotation is much better remembered than any other part of Hume’s essay “On Suicide”. Symbolic language, therefore, often supports comprehension more effectively than more straightforward uses of words.

Edwards – along with thinkers such as Ayer and Flew – would again reject this argument, drawing on Frege’s 1898 essay “Sense and Reference” to distinguish between claims supported by reference – which are meaningful in a strict, logical sense – and those which can have sense, but which lack reference and so include much room for misunderstanding and speculation. The word “symbol” comes from a Greek root meaning “thrown together”, which points to the essential problem with symbolic language, that there is nothing to regulate how symbols are developed or used and no standard against which to check their comprehensibility. While this criticism might just apply in the case of metaphors, which are chosen by individuals with more or less success, symbols develop organically and are projected by groups, not individuals. The standard against which the comprehensibility of religious symbols can be checked is the extent of their adoption and the length of their life within the community of faith. Further, as Plato suggested in his Cratylus, in a sense the whole of language is built out of symbol, not out of bald and arbitrary auditory signs. Words are not arbitrary but are usually chosen – consciously or unconsciously – because they seem to participate in what they refer to. Plato’s own example was the Greek word “Anthropos”, which according to Socrates appears to break down into anathrôn ha opôpe, ‘one who reflects on what he has seen’ – the word does not point to a meaning beyond itself, but – through the creation of what Ricoeur called a “semantic kernel” – actually participates in the meaning to which it points. In this way, translation is not just a matter of swapping one sound for another, referring to exactly the same object or concept, but is more of an art which involves a deeper understanding of what words connote in each language and the attempt to convey not just the superficial meaning as in reference of words, but their full sense. Critics of symbolic language like Paul Edwards miss the essence of what language is and what it means to “comprehend” something. Comprehension does not come from somebody pointing at an object – say a ball – or having something rephrased for us – by Paul being a bachelor I mean that he is an unmarried man. Rather, real comprehension comes from the new connections that words in combination create in our minds. Further, as Hume acknowledged, but his empiricist disciples too often choose to ignore, we do not experience the world directly but rather through the conceptual filter of our minds, which is surely built and enriched not only through direct sensory experience and rational reflection, but also through real communication, which enables us to deepen our understanding by sharing in others’ experiences and reflections. These points show that lack of formal regulation does not render religious discourse (understood symbolically) meaningless, because the same lack of formal regulation applies to non-religious discourse, when it is understood properly, and because insisting on such regulation betrays a misunderstanding of the essence of all forms of linguistic communication.

In conclusion, a symbolic understanding of religious discourse does not render it incomprehensible. Certainly, religious discourse is often incomprehensible to those outside the religious community or “form of life” which generates and validates the symbols it draws on. Certainly, religious symbols cannot be checked and their comprehensibility resists normal measurement. Nevertheless, religious discourse is successful in sustaining faith; its many symbols are widely used and live for generations, doing more than just pointing towards an external reality but actively participating in and animating the faith experience. Perhaps, in the end, it comes down to what “comprehensible” actually means.   While it is fair to say that both religious discourse and its object is often baffling, even to those trained in Theology, this does not mean that either the discourse or the religious symbols it employs are “incomprehensible”. There is no question that labelling something “incomprehensible” is pejorative, and that to agree with the title-statement would be to dismiss the value of a symbolic understanding of religious discourse. There is a difference between discourse which is rich and sophisticated and which cannot be reduced or explained in other terms and discourse which has no value. While few, if any, religious people will ever completely “comprehend” religious discourse, let alone its object, a symbolic understanding of religious discourse goes some way to explaining the value of continuing to engage in the process of discussing what can never be fully understood. It is in that process that faith resides and grows.

“Religious Language is Meaningless!” Discuss [40]

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For religious believers, the importance of arguing that religious language refers to something and is thus meaningful is obvious.  Without meaningful language, religion becomes difficult.  Faith may well be possible without formal, positive doctrine or liturgy – as the silent worship and commitment of members of the Society of Friends demonstrates – but without the ability to describe beliefs in religious doctrines it is difficult to hold a religious community – let alone a religious denomination – together for long.  The multiple splits in the Quaker community and the diversity that still characterizes it is evidence of this.   Plato and Aristotle understood words to be signs, pointing towards meaning beyond themselves.  For Plato, ultimate meaning was metaphysical in the forms, which we recognize through reason as reflections in the world around us.  For Aristotle, the forms exist within human reason itself, but they still exist for words to point towards.  The central problem with religious language is that if religious words are signs, they point towards something that we cannot see, hear, touch, smell or taste… nor even understand in a complete way.  Can a sign which points towards nothing determinate really be understood as a sign at all? If language is seen in this traditional way, then religious language must be meaningless, and yet this is not the only way of seeing language.  

For David Hume, human knowledge is much more limited than it first seems.  Knowledge based on sense-experience is more certain than that which is not, but even the senses can be misleading.  A red ball is not really red, but is just perceived as such by the rods and cones in our eyes, which are stimulated in a way that our brains usually interpret as red by the particular wavelength of light that the ball reflects. Yet Hume agreed with Locke that the only way that the philosopher can progress is to cut away the undergrowth of assumption and conjecture, identifying the few relatively certain propositions and concentrating on those.  This critical approach to philosophy inspired Immanuel Kant, who in the “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781) divided all claims into three categories

  1. synthetic claims which are supported by observation and provide new knowledge, albeit of a quite limited variety (this ball is red, geese honk loudly, crisps are salty)
  2. analytic claims which refer to logical relationships between terms and provide no new knowledge, although they clarify and support understanding (2+2=4, an unmarried man is a bachelor, a triangle has three sides)
  3. meaningless claims which refer neither to observable things nor to logical relationships between terms.

For Kant, it is impossible to speak meaningfully about God.  The arguments for God’s existence all fail because human knowledge is rooted in our phenomenal experience and claims about what lies beyond it in the noumenal realm, including about God, are just speculation.  The most human beings can do, argued Kant in “Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone” (1794) is to POSTULATE God’s existence as the best explanation of order and the necessary reason to trust in the fairness of the universe and carry on trying to do what it appears we cannot do… be good.

Kant’s critical approach to knowledge was highly influential, but it rests on some very big assumptions and (arguably) needs to stretch the limits of knowledge beyond breaking point by its own definitions in order to work.  Firstly, American logician WV Quine attacked Kant’s “Two Dogma’s of Empiricism” in 1951, pointing out both the difficulties in relying on sense-data (Descartes previously described these in the 17th century) and the fact that Kant and the later logical positivists accept logic as a form of knowledge and as a means of refining and interpreting sense-data without real argument.  What makes unquestioning faith in logic and assumptions about things being the way they appear to some people’s senses better than unquestioning faith and assumptions about other things?  Secondly, Kant’s system needs the postulates of God, freedom and immortality to work… none of which can be known to exist by Kant’s own categorization of knowledge and against how things appear to most people.

  • Human freedom seems to be constrained by everything from social norms to genetics, yet Kant has to suppose that people are free both in order to support the credibility of reason and the demand of the moral law.
  • The evil and chaos in the world speaks against the existence of God and yet Kant has to postulate God to explain the order he needs to believe exists in order that reason and morality retains credibility.
  • Finally, there is no observable or logical evidence for an afterlife, yet Kant has to suppose that one exists or he cannot hang on to order in the universe, on which reason and the credibility of the moral law depends.

In the end, Kant relies very heavily on things that can neither be proven nor even supported through experience in order for his critical system to work.  Although Kant raises serious questions about the possible meaningfulness of religious language, the force of these questions is taken away by the cracks in the foundations of Kant’s critical system.   

Nevertheless, despite the problems with Kant’s critical approach to knowledge and language, through the 19th Century philosophers were heavily influenced by it.  Gotlob Frege drew heavily on Kant in his work on Logic, which went on to inspire the work of Russell and Moore (and Russell’s protege Wittgenstein) in pre-war Cambridge, as well as Viennese philosopher-scientists Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick and their “Vienna Circle”, which started to meet in 1921.  Seeking advance understanding, Schlick brought Mathematicians, Scientists, Psychologists and Philosophers together to follow on from work done by Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein in establishing the nature and limits of human knowledge. Starting with Kant’s distinction between synthetic, analytic and meaningless claims (and inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had argued that “of that which we cannot speak, we should be silent” at the end of his first work the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921)), Schlick proposed that a “Verification Principle” should be used as a test of meaning – claims that are not in-principle verifiable through the senses (i.e. claims that cannot be physically checked) or which are not related to the logical relationships between terms should be labelled meaningless and excluded from academic discussion.  Because of this, during meetings of the Vienna Circle, discussions were strictly focused on what can be known… an adjudicator was even appointed to prevent discussions straying into speculative metaphysics by making claims about such matters as… God.

Partly because the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle were published in a Manifesto in 1929, and were of unusual political interest, Schlick’s ideas were influential.  In Oxford, following a visit to Vienna instigated by his tutor Gilbert Ryle, AJ Ayer developed and refined the Verification Principle in “Language Truth and Logic” (1936), the same year in which Schlick was murdered by a former student who claimed (at his show-trial) that Logical Positivism had “interfered with my moral restraint”.  The book was reprinted after the war and caught the mood of the times.  After the discovery of Hitler’s crimes and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima, it was difficult to hang on to any belief in God or moral absolutes!  Logical Positivism dominated Philosophy into the 1950s, with its exclusive focus on what can be known through science and mathematics and its relegation of topics outside these spheres – moral philosophy, aesthetics and religion – to junk-status. Nevertheless, despite the popularity of Verificationism it failed to show that religious language is meaningless. This is because…

  1. Verificationism rules out many areas of academic discussion along with theology and religion.  The consequences of not being able to discuss morality meaningfully were thrown into sharp relief when Schlick’s Nazi student Johann Nelbock shot him on the steps of the university.  Nelbock claimed that Schlick’s teaching had “interfered with his moral restraint” and maybe he had a point.  If Schlick (and Hume and Ayer) was right and morality depends only on sentiment, personal emotion and preferences, then it is difficult to argue that Schlick’s murder was wrong – especially on the eve of the Anschluss when Nazi ideology was incredibly popular in Vienna.
  2. Ayer was forced to accept that many fruitful forms of academic discussion are not even in-principle verifiable.  Historical events cannot be verified except through secondary sources.  Some scientific questions are not open to verification – for example, quantum events cannot be observed accurately because the act of observation affects the event.  In additio, as Thomas Kuhn and Norwood Hanson pointed out, no observation is ever entirely neutral, no matter how “scientific” it might appear.  We interpret what we see through an accepted paradigm… maybe we only actually see what we want to see…  As the great Art Critic John Berger argued in “Ways of Seeing”, seeing is avowedly political rather than scientific and neutral.
  3. As Verificationism cannot itself be verified it is a self-defeating theory that fails to mean its own standard of meaningfulness. 

Verificationism lacks credibility as well as practicality as an approach to defining meaning in language generally, so its attack on meaning in religious language must fail.  

Verificationism was definitely in decline by the 1950s, but it was replaced by the Falsificationism proposed initially by Karl Popper and rooted in scientific method.  Falsificationism suggests that the meaning of a claim depends on being able to define circumstances in which the claim could be falsified.  Scientific claims such as “all swans are white” are meaningful, not because they can be verified – and they cannot be, because even without black swans, the total population of swans through history is never going to be available to check – but rather because we can describe a situation in which the claim would be shown false… such as the discovery of black swans.  Falsificationism presents a more serious challenge to the meaningfulness of religious language than either Kant’s critical approach to knowledge or verificationism because it goes against the nature of faith to describe circumstances in which faith will be falsified.  John Wisdom’s parable of the gardener was used by atheist Anthony Flew to make this point.  Two people look at the same patch of land – one sees the weeds and claims that it is uncultivated land and another sees the shadows of paths and claims that it is a garden whose gardener is on holiday.  Assuming the gardener never shows up there is no way that either person will change their claims about what they see.  Flew claimed that Religious faith is like this – unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.  A believer looks at the world and sees God’s fingerprints all over it… they will never accept that there is no God, even when they see a film about the Holocaust, when their pet dies in agony or when they themselves have a run of undeserved bad luck.  The believer will always explain away things that go against their belief rather than accept that the belief has been falsified.  In Psychology this would be called confirmation bias – people tend to see things that agree with their world-view and ignore or explain away things that challenge their worldview.  As Kuhn, Hanson and Berger said, no observation is neutral.  Flew definitely has a point.  Religious claims – at least those made by most ordinary believers – are often unfalsifiable.  Attempts by John Hick and Richard Swinburne to argue that religious claims are in principle verifiable and falsifiable with reference to the afterlife are unconvincing. 

Yet despite the fact that religious claims such as “God exists” or “Jesus loves me” are often unfalsifiable, it is possible that other forms of religious language retain meaning of a different sort.  Ludwig Wittgenstein rejected the traditional view of words as signs, pointing towards a meaning beyond themselves, and argued instead that meaning comes from the way in which words are used.  Language is like a game; you can only understand somebody if you understand the rules of the game they are playing.  What it means to score a goal in football and in netball are different – and knowing the rules to one game will not help you to understand a conversation about the other.  Similarly, understanding religious language depends on knowing the “rules” of the religion, denomination, community or even smaller group within which that language is being used.  For Wittgenstein, and later for Anti Realists like DZ Phillips and for some Postmodernists, meaning depends not on what words correspond to, but on what they cohere with.  It is possible for the same religious claim to be true within one form of life and yet false within another.  Jesus rose from the dead is true for Christians and false for Muslims at the same time, regardless of whether the resurrection actually happened or not.  Compare religion with the famous “Schrodinger’s Cat” experiment.  After 5 minutes, nobody knows whether the cat is alive or dead… for Wittgenstein it is as meaningful to say that the cat is alive as that the cat is dead – both are true just as surely as both are false or one is true and one is false.  For anti realists in religious language, words cannot be understood as simple signs, because they point towards a God who is “other, completely other” (St. Augustine), “radically other” (Karl Barth) and “neither something nor nothing (St. Thomas Aquinas).  The meaning of religious language cannot depend only on what it refers to; it also depends on the effects it has on human beings and their spiritual state. 

Maybe, as Paul Tillich suggested, religious language is symbolic rather than built up of simple signs.  Religious claims participate in the meaning they refer to rather than just point towards it.  In a very real sense repeating the words becomes and defines a world of faith rather than creating it.  Religious language is necessary to religion in the way that God is necessary to the universe – not just as a cause in fieri, the words giving rise to a belief that can continue with or without the words – but as a cause in esse, the words sustaining the belief and its object in being.  In a way, this is what Iris Murdoch gestured towards in her version of the Ontological Argument.  She used the analogy of a tooth, venerated for centuries as a relic.  It may have been a dog’s tooth, but in the light of sincere veneration it begins to glow.  As Murdoch and before her Karl Barth recognized, the success or failure of the Ontological Argument does not depend on whether it is valid or sound.  Its true value is as a spiritual exercise, forcing the believer to reflect on the nature of existence itself and in so doing growing closer to a spiritual understanding of God’s necessity if not to an analytical proof of it.  Reflecting on the nature and possible meaning of religious language is a similar exercise.  While it shines a light on the difficulties in taking religious claims at face value, it also exposes wider difficulties in human beings making any claims to knowledge… and so brings people closer to appreciating the necessity of God. 

The Via Negativa is the best way to approach religious language. Discuss [40]

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Whether this claim is valid or not very much depends on the concept of God in question.  If God is inside time, everlasting but personal – as the God of Abraham and Isaac in the Bible seems to be – then using religious language in a positive and univocal way seems reasonable.  On the other hand, if God is eternal outside time – as the God of the Philosophers, the Prime Mover, “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” seems to be – then using words coined to describe things within time seems more problematic.  Maimonides, the most famous proponent of the Via Negativa, was heavily influenced by the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and so saw God as eternal outside time.  Given this, his claim in the “Guide for the Perplexed” that… “To give a full explanation of the mystic passages of the Bible is contrary to the law and to reason… God cannot be compared to anything…” and his proposal that the most that can be said about God is what God is not i.e. God is not limited, evil, something physical etc… seems persuasive.  Nevertheless, Maimonides’ Via Negativa, his apophatic way of approaching God leaves religion in a difficult position.  Religions make positive claims about God; the Holy Books and doctrines of all religions are full of them!  Maimonides’ approach makes religion die the death of a thousand qualifications.  Believers need to have something positive to fix their faith on, not silence, the empty space left by negations and a lot of small print saying that Holy Texts can’t be understood to mean what they say.  The Via Negativa – for all its logical appeal and for all its possibilities in terms of framing that language of spirituality and personal faith – is far from being the best approach to religious language. 

In a sense, Christianity is defined by the Nicene Creed:

“We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen. 

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God…”

Approaching the Creed from the Via Negativa is problematic.  Admittedly, it doesn’t start too badly.  One God.  Oneness is a quality being positively ascribed to God.  Is oneness a concept bound by time and space?  Arguably.  Maimonides might replace this line with “We believe in a God who is not many…” but the sense is very much the same.  Nevertheless, things quickly go downhill.  We believe in God “the Father”… clearly “Father” is a word rooted in time and space.  Maimonides – along with Christian proponents of the Via Negativa such as Tertullian, St Cyril of Jerusalem and Pseudo-Dionysus – might have to admit that the word has no positive meaning when applied to God and worse, that it is likely to be positively misleading about His nature.  While St Cyril’s point that believers should “candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him…” (Catechetical Homilies), this approach is unlikely to have found favour at the Council of Nicaea or in Churches today.  The central Christian mission would be a lot more difficult if believers openly confessed that they have little idea what it is they believe in!  As Maimonides wrote “However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.” (Guide for the Perplexed)  This doesn’t offer people much incentive to be baptized, attend Church or read the Gospel; it pushes people towards deism or non-denominational “spirituality”.  In this way, the Via Negativa is not the best approach to religious language as it makes religion dysfunctional.  

Further, there is a better alternative to the Via Negativa in the form of Aquinas’ doctrine of Analogy.  Aquinas read Maimonides and was persuaded both by his concept of God and by his skepticism concerning the positive meaning of terms applied to God.  He strongly disagreed with the univocalism employed by scholars like St Anselm and absolutely rejected the idea that people can know and describe the nature of God sufficiently to analyze it and find necessary existence within it a priori, as proponents of the ontological arguments do.  In Summa Theologica 1:2:2 Aquinas wrote “because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition “God exists” is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are known to us…”  In Summa Theologica 1:2:3 he responded to the question “Is God a body” by making quite clear that the meaning of words applied to God can only be understood in a strictly limited and analogical sense.   Aquinas argues that words applied to God have meaning as analogies of being (1) and sometimes discusses two separate senses in which meaning should be understood; analogies of attribution (2) and analogies of proportion (3).

  1. Most importantly, God’s being is not the same as our being – he is Wholly Simple and timeless and as such has no potential.  The meaning of words applied to God have to be consistent with the mysterious, timeless nature that we know that he must have as a result of reasoning from movement, causation and contingency.  For Aquinas, when believers say that God is good they cannot understand that God is morally good, because that implies freedom and choice which are concepts which only make sense in time.  God is timeless and eternal, so His goodness can only be timeless and eternal – goodness in the sense of perfection and the fulfilment of nature only.  Hence, there is a positive sense in which attributes positively ascribed to God can have meaning; that in which they are compatible with His being or nature.
  2. In addition, the meaning of terms applied to God and to earthly things has an overlap in the way that I might say that I am healthy and my yoghurt is healthy.  Healthy is a property primarily of living creatures like me and only secondarily of foods or activities which contribute to my health.  According to John Milbank, Aquinas suggests that the primary sense of attributes such as “good” relate to God and the meaning of the word in an earthly sense is only secondary.  There IS a positive connection between the meaning of attributes applied to God and earthly things; the connection is not large but it is rationally defined.
  3. In addition, God’s unchangingly perfect and actual nature dictates that he must be 100% everything that can be ascribed to Him.  God cannot fall short, because to do so implies potential which is not compatible with God’s timeless nature.  Given this, God is the scale against which we make judgements about things in this world.  If I say “Jamie Vardy is a great footballer” I have to have an idea of what greatness means.  Vardy can only fulfil a proportion of what that idea is, because he is only one man in one time playing for one team – and he is not a rugby player, rower, artist or opera singer, all of which might be described as reflecting greatness in a different way.  The meaning of attributes ascribed to earthly things has a proportional relationship with the meaning of divine attributes.  Again, the shared meaning (analogy) is not a large one, but it can be rationally described.

Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is a much better approach to religious language than the Via Negativa because it enables believers to use and defend the meaning of positive claims about God, while not supporting naïve univocalism or a philosophically unsatisfying and ultimately limited concept of God.  Aquinas’ model of God is deeply appealing in that it is supported by real experience, but it also retains the “otherness” and unlimited idea of God that is so important to believers.  Aquinas’ theory of religious language completes his model of God because it shows how believers are worshipping in an ultimately meaningful way, even though God is beyond ordinary understanding.  The Via Negativa is not the best approach to religious language because Analogy is a much better approach. 

Scholars who employ cataphatic theology and approach religious language through the Via Positiva reject the Via Negativa on the grounds that it ignores the important connection between God – the creator – and the world – the creation.  In the same way that Philosophers reason from movement, causation, contingency, grades of perfection in things, order and purpose to the existence of a necessary being who explains these qualities we experience in the universe, people should be able to apply words based on qualities we experience in the universe to the God who created them.  Anselm and John Duns Scotus both defended the univocal use of religious language on these grounds, arguing that words refer to concepts which depend on God to define them through His creation.  Anselm’s ontological argument depends on this argument, because it analyses the definition of God and finds necessary existence within it.  This could not work if the word “greater” meant anything different when applied to God than it does when applied to things in this world.  The problem with the univocal approach to religious language is that the type of connection between creator and creation does not support a literal approach to the meaning of language.  When a person creates something, their creation does not have to be like them.  The potter is not made of clay and a skilled potter is capable of making a bad pot. We have no reason to believe that words apply to God in exactly or even much the same way as they apply to things in this world.  Aquinas strict limitations on the sense in which meaning should be understood when words are applied to God seems much more realistic in relation to a God whose relationship with the world is understood to be the creator, Prime Mover, uncaused cause, necessary being, supreme perfection and intelligent designer.   Because of this, the Via Negativa is a better way to approach religious language than the Via Positiva, but it is still less good than Analogy.

Certainly, the Via Negativa has its uses, but these are more apparent when it comes to Philosophy or the practice of personal spirituality than they are in the practice of religion.  The word “religion” refers to what binds us as people together; the ties that bind need to be clearly defined and understood if they are to function and endure. In terms of Philosophy, approaching the nature of God through negation is an important check in naïve literalism.  As Maimonides wrote “it is of great advantage that man should know his station, and not imagine that the whole universe exists only for him.”  For philosophers, it is all too easy to move from saying that there are absolute limits to human knowledge to ignoring what lies beyond those limits to denying that there is anything beyond those limits to denying that there are limits.  As philosophers and as individuals, reflecting on the nature of God as “wholly other” forces us to confront the falsity of the prevalent assumption that “man is the measure of all things” and deepen their spiritual understanding, which includes confronting limitation and embracing humility.  As Tertullian said “our very incapacity of fully grasping Him affords us the idea of what He really is…”  and as St Cyril said “in what concerns God to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge…”  Certainly, the Via Negativa is a useful brake on naive literalism and a spiritual tool for individuals, but it cannot be described as the best approach to religious language in general.

In conclusion, the Via Negativa is far from being the best approach to religious language, although it is still useful in some ways. The best approach seems to be Aquinas’ doctrine of Analogy, which treads the line between acknowledging the otherness of God and retaining the ability to say some meaningful things about God successfully.  Ian Ramsey’s suggestion that words being used in an analogical sense should be signposted or qualified in some way seems a sensible way of improving Aquinas’ analogy further, avoiding the probability that believers could miss the careful sense in which words are being applied to God and confuse religious language with ordinary language.  Thomist scholars such as Gerry Hughes SJ use the word “timelessly” as such a qualifier, showing that words such as “good” should not be taken to mean more than can be defended in relation to the being and attributes of God and as proportional to His qualities.