14. Knowing God by analogy
14. KNOWING GOD BY ANALOGY
In Norse mythology there is a “rainbow bridge” from earth to Heaven (Asgard). What is the real “rainbow bridge” from man to God? In objective reality it’s Christ, of course; but what is it in subjective reality, in our souls, in our minds? It’s faith, of course; but mustn’t there must be a bridge from reason too, for those who don’t yet have faith?—a bridge from reason to faith as well as from reason to God? But there’s a problem with any bridge from reason: our words and our concepts are finite, and made for finite things: dogs, atoms, galaxies. How can we label God? If we can’t label Him, how can we identify Him? When the mystics get close to Him, they all say that words utterly fail. How far can words (and the concepts they express) go? Can they help at all? How can our language about God be meaningful?
No name belongs to God in the same sense as it belongs to creatures; for instance, wisdom in creatures is a quality (an “accident”, or property, of the creature’s essence), but not in God (where nothing is accident but all is substance, essential nature). . . (and therefore) what is said of God and creatures is not univocally (with one and the same meaning) predicated of them. . .
God (Who is infinite) is more distant from creatures than any (finite) creatures are from each other; but the distance of some creatures (from each other) makes univocal predication of (even) them impossible . . . therefore much less can anything be predicated univocally of God and creatures. . . .
The term wise, applied to man, in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God. . . . Hence it is evident that the term wise is not applied in the same way to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated univocally of God and creatures.
Neither, on the other hand, are names applied to God and creatures in a purely equivocal sense, as some have said. Because if that were so, it follows that from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all, for the reasoning would always be exposed to the fallacy of equivocation. Such a view is against . . . what the Apostle said: The invisible things of God are clearly seen through the things that are made (Rom 1:20).
Therefore it must be said that these names are said of God and creatures in an analogous sense. . . . For in analogies the idea is not one and the same, as it is in univocals, yet it is not totally diverse, as it is in equivocals; but a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to one thing; thus healthy applied to urine signifies the sign of animal health, and applied to medicine signifies the cause of the same health (I,13,5).
St. Thomas, as usual, rejects two opposite errors here: rationalism and skepticism. Rationalism is far too optimistic about the power of our words to tell Who God is; for only God’s Word (Christ), and not our words, can fully express God. But skepticism is far too pessimistic; for since God designed man with a rational soul, with a mind that is dependent on and dimly reflecting the divine mind, words can help—a little. He has not left Himself without witness in our minds.
Rationalism thinks human reason can do more than it really can, in insisting that our words about God must apply to God as our words for creatures apply to creatures: univocally, with one and the same meaning. Skepticism thinks human reason can do less than it can, in insisting that our words about the infinite God can refer to nothing real in God, since our words are taken from our experience of finite creatures. Skepticism says our words about God are equivocal, that they have a wholly different meaning when applied to God than they do when applied to creatures. Thus there is no “rainbow bridge” for reason to get to God.
St. Thomas steers clear of both extremes. Our positive words for God (“good”, “wise”, etc.) are neither univocal—wholly the same—nor equivocal—wholly different—but analogical—partly the same and partly different.
And these two “parts” cannot be separated, like two quantities, into a univocal part and an equivocal part. God’s goodness (and His wisdom, His power, and all His other perfections) is not the same as man’s goodness; nor is it totally unlike man’s goodness; but it is a little bit like man’s goodness. Or rather, man’s goodness is a little bit like God’s. A good man is more like God than a good dog is, and a good man is more like God than a bad man is. Thus we can begin to move forward in the right direction on the rainbow bridge, to a significant and helpful extent.
But our words and concepts cannot take us all the way to the other side of the river. We cannot know God’s essence; we cannot know what He is. But we can know, by analogy, what He is like (or rather, what is like Him: for a person is not like his picture, a picture is like a person). Thus created things (all created things!) do give us clues and signs to their (and our) Creator.
We can also know what He is not, and here our words can be univocal, and perfectly clear. God is not an angel, or a man, or a dragon, or a lion, or a galaxy (though all these things resemble Him in some at least metaphorical way). By this clear, univocal negative knowledge we can avoid idolatry.
This is not just a theoretical, philosophical point. It affects our lives. Analogy means that we can know God by means of all things, in all things, but imperfectly. Our reason, like our faith, sees “through a glass, darkly”. The whole world consists of divine footprints, fingerprints, clues, pointing fingers. Look along them, not just at them, and you will be looking toward God. And looking toward Him is both a cause and an effect of longing toward Him and living toward Him and loving toward Him, i.e., being a saint.