Religious language

Aquinas successfully demonstrates that religious language should be understood in terms of analogy. Discuss. [40]

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As the Summa Theologica makes clear, St Thomas Aquinas’ approach to religious language emerged from his concept of God.  As a Classical Theist, Aquinas saw God as timeless eternal, meaning that words applied to God cannot be understood univocally, to mean the same as they would when applied to created things. While the Bible, the Creeds and Christian doctrines use language univocally in ways that make God seem like a person, subject to limitation and change, for Aquinas God is timelessly other and should not be so anthropomorphised and limited by language.  He saw some merits in the apophatic approach to language, which speaks of God by negation if at all seeing direct religious language as equivocal, but wanted to preserve the possibility of affirming some things about God in a meaningful way, recognising that an equivocal approach to language undermines philosophy and doctrine in a way that must eventually be fatal to organised religion.  The result was Aquinas’ argument that words applied to God should be understood as analogies which is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving in to equivocalism, although it depends heavily on his concept of God and so may not be useful to all Christians.

Firstly, Aquinas claimed that claims such as “God is good” should not be taken to imply that God is morally good, such as would imply choice and the existence of independent values but should instead be understood as analogies of proportion. When we say that something is good, we mean that it largely fulfils its nature.  Human nature is to be free and moral, but if God is the origin of our freedom and of moral values it makes little sense to anthropomorphise him by assuming his nature is like ours.  Nothing in this world is perfect; because of time and space nothing can fulfil 100% of its nature.  For example, a person has the potential to be a baby and an adult.  However good they are, they can only fulfil part of their potential at one time, such as by being a good adult.  Nevertheless, God is outside the time and space that holds us back from actualising our full potential and being perfect. When we say that God is good, we mean that God fulfils 100% of his timeless divine nature, being changelessly perfect; what it is for God to fulfil God’s nature is not what it means for us to fulfil our more limited nature.  John Hick used the example of a man and his dog, both of which might be said to be faithful. What it is for a man to be faithful and for a dog to be faithful are not quite the same, but by saying they are faithful we mean that both do a large proportion of what we expect of a faithful member of their species. It follows that our goodness is not the same as God’s goodness… the word good is not used univocally when applied to God… but there is a connection between our goodness and God’s goodness which means that words applied to God are not equivocal either.   In this way, Aquinas’ analogy of proportion is successful in avoiding both the pitfalls of univocalism and giving into equivocalism.

Secondly, Aquinas claimed that attributes like goodness exist primarily in God as the creator and only secondarily in created things, so that what we say about God and created things is connected while still having different meanings and preserving the otherness of God. To explain his analogy of attribution, Aquinas used the example of a bull and its urine… the health of the bull is primary and the health of the urine it produces is secondary… the health of the bull and its urine consist in different things, but the health of the one is the source of the health of the other, so there is a connection.  Simon Oliver uses the example of me and my breakfast yoghurt… both might be said to be healthy, but the healthiness of the yoghurt is secondary and depends on my healthiness, which is primary.  My health might consist in having clear skin, energy and a habit of going jogging… but the health of the yoghurt does not consist in any of these things.  In the same way, the goodness, power or wisdom of God is primary, and the goodness, power or wisdom of created things is secondary.  What it is for God to be good, powerful or wise might be radically different from what it means for a person to be these things, and not only by degree, avoiding limiting God through a univocal use of language.  Yet, there is a clear connection between the goodness, power and wisdom of God and of created creatures, which avoids an equivocal approach to religious language also. 

On the other hand, as Anthony Kenny pointed out the analogical meaning of God’s attributes preserved by Aquinas is extremely limited, making this approach to religious language unsuccessful when it comes to sustaining religion in a practical way.  Kenny suggested that the idea of timeless attributes such as goodness, power or wisdom seems “radically incoherent”, which is a fair criticism, as is the related point that many believers do not understand language analogically, even those who lead or have led the Church.  While Ian Ramsey was right to point out how people often use “qualifiers” like “timelessly” to signify that their use of words to describe God should not be taken as “ordinary language” but as religious language which is “logically odd”, in practice many people do not use such qualifiers or seem to understand that there should be any difficulty in using language univocally at all. Further, as Nelson Pike observed, the God of the Bible is “unavoidably tensed”.  It makes little sense to see God as timeless when that would make the creation, the fall and the resurrection simultaneous in God’s timeless vision. This is why Protestant philosophers look for other ways of understanding religious language, seeing Aquinas analogical approach as bound up in a concept of God which is fundamentally unchristian. John MacQuarrie lamented the adoption of the Greek concept of God into the Christian tradition, seeing this as the cause of multiple avoidable philosophical problems that have beset the faith through the best part of two millennia.  In this context, Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff approach religious language in a more straightforward univocal way.  Further, some Classical Theists support a more univocal approach to religious language than Aquinas.  For examples, St Anselm and John Duns Scotus reasoned that God as creator must have created the concepts through which we understand and speak of Him, meaning that we can speak confidently about God using a far wider range of words and meanings than Aquinas would allow.  All of this suggests that the success of Aquinas’ analogical approach to religious language is limited to those who share his concept of God and does not extend even to all of those.

In conclusion, Aquinas’ analogical approach to understanding religious language is coherent and persuasive if one shares his concept of God, although it is possibly too limited to support religious practice.  Nevertheless, many Christians do not accept either Aquinas’ concept of God or his analogical approach to understanding religious language because they choose to focus on revealed rather than on natural theology as the primary source of their knowledge of God.

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.

The best approach to understanding Religious Language is through the Cataphatic Way. [40]

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The word “cataphatic” comes from the Greek “kataphasis” meaning affirmation.  To take the Cataphatic Way is to affirm things positively of God and to assume a univocal understanding of words and claims.  By this approach, if somebody says “God is good”, they mean much the same as if they said “St Anselm is good”.  The Cataphatic Way is sometimes called the Via Positiva; it uses language confidently and positively to describe God, as a painter might use paints confidently and positively to represent what is in front of them.

There is no doubt that the Cataphatic Way supports people in understanding what is said about God.  Insofar as people understand what is said generally, people can understand what is said about God through the Cataphatic Way.  For those believers and theologians working with an everlasting, personal model of God supported by religious experience and/or a priori faith in the revealed status of the Bible – arguably mostly for Protestants – the Cataphatic Way is the natural and therefore the best way to understand religious language.  In the same way as I might affirm things about any other thing that I experience or read about, I can affirm things about God.  Nevertheless, this model of God is philosophically unsatisfying.

  • Firstly, many believers have no personal experience of God to support their affirmations, and those who do often suggest that their experience was ineffable (James) and resisted normal description in any case.  It is difficult to confirm religious experiences as genuine, so there is no quality control when it comes to things affirmed of God on the basis of them.
  • Secondly, Biblical criticism makes believing in the revealed status of the whole Bible very difficult, both because it seems to have been compiled by multiple authors and editors over a very long period of time – before even considering the late and politically influenced development of the Canon – and because it seems to reflect several different models of God rather than one unified model.  The God of Genesis 2-3 walks in the Garden of Eden and has to look for Adam and Eve, whereas the God of Job 38 – who asks “where were you when I set the foundations of the earth” – seems beyond such anthropomorphic descriptions.

It seems fair to conclude that saying that the Cataphatic Way is the best way to understand Religious Language may be limited to Theistic Personalists.  It might be the best way of understanding what somebody already knows about God and/or religion on some other basis, but it might not be the best way of coming to understand something new about God and/or religion.

Certainly, for believers and theologians who are Classical Theists and believe in an eternal, timeless God, the Cataphatic Way raises questions about the meaning of what is said, whether what is said and understood about God refers credibly to actual attributes of God and whether a theologian taking the Cataphatic Way can mean what they say and so be understood.  For many Roman Catholics, but also for others whose faith relates to if not depends on reason, God cannot be a thing that we can experience and observe in any normal way.  Religious experiences, if any are genuine, are best understood to be non-sensuous (Stace) and noumenal (James), an experience of ultimate reality that goes well beyond normal sensory experience and normal description.  It is certainly fair to suggest that the Cataphatic theologian is not like a painter representing a normal subject on canvas; what is affirmed of God is much further removed from what it could mean than the 2D canvas is removed from the 3D subject.  For most theologians, God’s nature cannot properly or fully be conceived or understood.  As God said to Moses in Exodus 3 “I am what I am” and as He said through the Prophet Isaiah

“my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways.” Isaiah 55:8-9

When the cataphatic theologian affirms attributes of God univocally they seem to be going beyond possible experience and beyond what the human mind can possibly comprehend.  In this way, using language confidently and univocally to describe God seems like trying to represent a singularity in paint… it wouldn’t do to rely on the artists’ impression because in many ways the nature of what is being represented is beyond and even the opposite to the medium being used.  Because it is highly likely to lead to misunderstandings about God, it seems that the Cataphatic Way is not the best way to understand Religious Language.

Further, as Pseudo-Dionysus argued, affirming things positively of God seems to limit Him.  To say that God is good in the same way as Anselm is good implies that God’s goodness is changeable, moral, relative to other things, because goodness when referring to things in this world implies such conditions and limitations.  For Classical Theists, God’s nature cannot be understood in the way that we understand other things because God is necessarily unlimited, timelessly perfect.  Words cannot, therefore, be applied univocally to God and the Cataphatic Way fails to support any true understanding of God’s actual nature and attributes.  Because of this, in the 11th Century Moses Maimonides argued that the only credible approach to religious language was the very reverse of the cataphatic way, the apophatic way.  For Maimonides, human words refer to human experience and are inescapably tied to the spatio-temporal framework that encompasses human experience.  Applying human words to God can only lead to misunderstanding.  The changeable, contingent nature of things in the world which leads people to recognize God’s necessary existence and to understand that whatever we can experience, understand and say then God is not that.  For Maimonides, this leaves open the possibility of using language in a negative sense to leave an impression of what God is.  Like a sculptor chipping away what is unnecessary and leaving an impression of what they are trying to represent, Apophatic theology takes away what it is not possible to affirm of God.  For example, God cannot be evil, because to be evil is to fall short, something which a changeless, timeless, perfect God cannot do.  For another example, God cannot swim because to swim requires a body to move through water from position a to position b.  God is changeless, timeless and perfect, which precludes his acting or moving in time and space in any way, aquatic or otherwise.    For some Classical Theists, it is the Apophatic Way, not the Cataphatic Way, that is the best way to understand religious language.

Nevertheless, scholars such as St Anselm rejected this approach, arguing that God gave being to this world as it is, so it is reasonable to affirm of God attributes of the being He created.  In the Monologion St Anselm argued that we are able to understand the world through concepts that exist in our mind because our mind comprehends God as their ultimate form.  We judge things to be unjust, more or less just… and this suggests that we have something against which to measure justice in our minds.  God is that against which we grade perfections in other things that we encounter in the world that God created.  God is not a thing in the world, but God created those things and we understand their goodness, greatness, perfection in relation to God.  In a way, Anselm’s philosophy relates back to Plato’s.  For Anselm, the world of the forms – the metaphysical concepts of justice, beauty, truth – are more real than the partial, contingent world we experience through the senses.  For Anselm, human beings understand what they experience through the senses through the concepts that already exist in the mind.  Words are just signs, attached to concepts that are hard-wired into reason by God, our creator, so it follows that these signs can be traced back to and applied to God.  Anselm safeguards against the possibility that people affirm just anything of God by arguing that signs are in a sense controlled by what it is that they point towards, so it is not possible to say something about God which is not consistent with His nature.  Given that only “the fool says in his heart that there is no God” (Psalm 14:1, Proslogion 2) we all have the concept of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” in our minds (in intellectu) and would understand the impossibility of affirming attributes that are not consistent with God’s supremely perfect nature.  As Marcia Colish suggests, Anselm sees language like a mirror reflecting some of the being of God very precisely, but only when it is directed correctly.

Clearly, Anselm’s Cataphatic approach is much more sophisticated than the seemingly naive univocicity of believers who affirm things of God such as “God is so pleased to see you here this evening!”  Nevertheless, it assumes a world-view which is very much in the minority in the modern world.  Most people, and most Philosophers, tend towards the Aristotelian model of concepts being built out of experiences, which are primary, rather than experiences being understood through concepts which precede them as in the Platonic way. Although neuroscientists are now gathering in support of Chomsky’s nativist approach to language acquisition, which seems to support Plato’s world-view, the dominant framework remains empiricism and the idea that human beings start as tabula rasa (as Locke put it) and that concepts and reason itself is constructed out of experience and socialization.  In addition, Anselm’s argument makes the assumption that human beings have an idea of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” in intellectu, something which St Thomas Aquinas rejected.  Before moving on to his famous five ways, Aquinas dismissed the possibility of proving God’s existence a priori, as in Anselm’s Ontological Argument.  He wrote

“because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature — namely, by effects.” Summa Theologica 1, 2, 1

He continued, arguing that “univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures...” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 5 because the cause and effect relationship is too slight to support a single meaning for what is affirmed of the two.  For Aquinas, what can be affirmed of God and in what sense needs to be even more strictly controlled than Anselm suggests, to prevent the imprecision in the use of religious language that attends on Cataphatic theology and subsequent misunderstandings.  Aquinas was persuaded by Maimonides arguments for apophatic theology, saying

“The reason why God… is said to be above being named, is because His essence is above all that we understand about God, and signify in word… Because we know and name God from creatures, the names we attribute to God signify what belongs to material creatures… these kinds of names fail to express His mode of being, forasmuch as our intellect does not know Him in this life as He is.” Summa Theologica 1, 13, 1

For Aquinas, the most that can be affirmed of God is analogous, affirmed in a strictly limited “timeless” sense.  As John Milbank explains, words have primary and secondary usages which are connected but not the same.  A person is healthy in a primary sense and a yoghurt in a secondary sense… what it means for the two to be healthy is different but still linked.  Similarly, the primary sense of words like “good” belongs to God and only the secondary sense to things in this world.  The meaning of attributes affirmed of God is not to be understood univocally, although there is still some meaning.  For Aquinas, the Cataphatic way is not the best way to understand Religious Language because it depends on the flawed claim to know or understanding the nature of God and because it conflates the two distinct meanings of attributes affirmed of God into one misleading claim.  While Aquinas’ argument is compelling, it leaves religious believers with a very limited set of things that they can say about God which makes it difficult to hold on to the spirit of doctrines, if not the letter.   Analogy may be a philosophically better way to understand religious language than the Cataphatic way, but it is not in practice much more helpful to religion than the apophatic way.

In conclusion, religion demands a different approach to language, one which is neither cataphatic nor apophatic, nor yet as abstract and technical as analogy.  The Cataphatic Way, for all the possibilities that it seems to offer in terms of making religious language understandable, fails to support any true understanding of God’s actual nature and attributes and actually symbol offers a better balance between the need for religious people to affirm their beliefs about God and the need for theologians and philosophers to conduct quality control by testing the possible meaning of those affirmations.  Symbol has the advantage of requiring people to learn a new religious language rather than seeking to apply ordinary words positively, negatively or with the use of implied or stated qualifiers (Ramsey).  Symbolic language draws attention to its difference and its specific relation to theology and in both cases, what is affirmed of God invites discussion and interpretation and discourages people from taking things on face value.  Symbolic language has clear roots in the Bible and in how believers have sought to express their religious experiences, but it resists facile, superficial interpretations and the misunderstandings about the nature of God that attend upon Cataphatic univocicity.  As Tillich suggests, the symbol starts to participate in the meaning it refers to, so that in using it words become more than just pointers to meanings beyond themselves.  God becomes present in the use of symbols; symbols acknowledge the need to draw on as many means of communication as possible, indirect as well as direct, when trying to express ultimate reality.  As Randall argues, symbols also invite a response and so acknowledge that what people are doing when they affirm God’s attributes is not just inert description.  Religious language does not just describe a state of affairs more or less accurately, it calls people to action.  In these several ways symbol and not the Cataphatic way is the best way to understand religious language.

 

 

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.