5.1 The General Picture
Aquinas’s SCG approach to talking positively about God relies on some matters to which I drew attention in chapter 3. These are: (1) Aquinas’s distinction between univocal and equivocal causes, (2) his view that an efficient or agent cause can contain its effects “virtually,” and (3) his claim that the action of an agent is present in its effect. According to Aquinas, the effects of efficient causes derive from those causes, which act in their effects and also have the power to produce them, even if they do not look like them or resemble them strongly in some way. As Aquinas observes in SCG 1,29: “Effects that fall short of their causes do not agree with them in name and nature. Yet, some likeness must be found between them, since it belongs to the nature of action that an agent produce its like, since each thing acts according as it is in act.”2 My cat, as becoming fed by me, does not even belong to the same species as I do and might be said to “fall short” of me in terms of power and intelligence. But Aquinas holds that I am at work in my cat becoming fed by me and that what I am is being shown forth in my cat. By the same token, he argues, the existence of things depending on God can be thought of as somehow showing forth what God is, as being somehow like him.
Aquinas does not think that God is literally like anything that depends for its existence on him. That he does not think this should be clear from SCG 1,14–27, and especially from his claim that God is simple. But Aquinas does not, therefore, rule out the idea that we might be able to speak of God in positive terms, that we might be able truly and literally to say that “God is X,” “God is Y,” or “God is Z,” where “X,” “Y,” and “Z” are words with which we are familiar from ways people speak about things that are not divine.3 Aquinas does not think that any words have come into being so as to signify what only God is.4 He takes language to have evolved as people encountered things in the world and tried to communicate with each other concerning them. For Aquinas, all the words and sentences we use when attempting to say what God is are borrowed, as it were, from their day-to-day use. Yet Aquinas also thinks that some words can be used in order to construct literally true propositions concerning God, not just figurative or metaphorical ones.
He thinks this because he holds that some words do not have a meaning built into them that would prohibit us from using them so as to say what God truly is. If I say that my cat is hungry, I am talking about it having a property that can only be had by an animal, as God is not. Again, if I say that Mary is tall, I am talking about her having a property that can only be had by something physical, as God is not. Yet what if I say that something is, for example, perfect or excellent? Do “perfect” and “excellent” have a meaning built into them that prohibits us from using them so as to say what God literally is? Aquinas does not think that they do. He also believes that there are other words that can be used to speak literally of God, words that do not, in his view, have what we might call a “creaturely limitation” as part of their meaning.
When concluding along these lines in the SCG, however, Aquinas always keeps in mind his teaching that God is simple. So, while saying that God can be positively and truly spoken of or described using certain words and sentences, he evidently has to make some distinction between the use of words and sentences to talk about God, considered as simple, and the use of words to talk of what is composite. Aquinas, though, is aware of this fact, and the distinction he employs is that between “what is signified” and “mode of signification.”
This distinction is a technical one. It is not, however, all that complicated. Aquinas maintains that when talking of God we naturally do so as if he were composite. Since Aquinas denies that God is composite, however, he also holds that our way of talking about God is always going somehow to fall short of the reality of God. In other words, though Aquinas holds that we can sometimes speak truly and literally of God, he also holds that, when we do this, the way in which we speak signifies the divine reality imperfectly since it picks God out as if he were composite. For Aquinas, there are words that genuinely latch on to a reality in God. Yet Aquinas also thinks that we use them in sentences whose form was never designed to lay hold of divinity but to talk about composite things. “By means of a name,” says Aquinas, “we express things in the way in which the intellect conceives them. For our intellect, taking the origin of its knowledge from the senses, does not transcend the mode which is found in sensible things, in which the form and the subject are not identical owing to the composition of form and matter.”5 By “name” (nomen) here Aquinas is referring to any word that picks something out or describes it.6 So his point is that when we speak of God we express ourselves in a way fitted for the picking out and describing of what exists in the world and is composite, not simple. Aquinas therefore thinks that there is always going to be a kind of mismatch between the way we speak of God and the simple reality that God is. He does not, however, therefore conclude that we cannot speak about God so as, albeit imperfectly, to express what God positively is.
At this point, of course, you might want to say that Aquinas has to be wrong here since we can easily understand what, say, “God is good” means. We know what is being said when, for example, a human being is described as good. So why not just suppose that exactly the same thing is being affirmed when it is said that God is good? Aquinas would reply that the goodness of a human being cannot be just like God’s goodness since God is entirely simple. If God is good, that cannot be because God possesses a property distinguishable from himself, a property that might be had by many different things. So (1) “Nothing can be predicated univocally of God and other things.”7 Yet Aquinas also asserts: (2) “Not everything predicated of God and other things is said in a purely equivocal way.”8
By (1) here Aquinas means that “God is X,” where “X” is a term or word that we also use when talking of what is not divine, should not be thought to signify or mean that God is exactly like what we take what is nondivine to be when saying that it is X. And by (2) Aquinas means that “God is X,” where “X” is a term or word that we also use when talking of what is not divine, should not always be thought to signify or mean that God is in no way like what we take something nondivine to be when saying that it is X. According to Aquinas, when it comes to at least some sentences of the form “God is X,” we can take “X” to have a meaning related to what it has when used to talk of what is not God. Or, as Aquinas puts it, the same words can sometimes be used to talk of God and of what is not divine because “they are said analogically.”9 He means that, for example, the word “good” can be used in “Fred is good” and “God is good” without it being the case that there is no related meaning at all in what “good” signifies in each case. Aquinas does not think that we can understand what it is for God to be good since he does not believe that we can understand what God is. But neither does he think that “God is good” cannot be thought of as literally true, even though the sentence must fail to express what God is since God is entirely simple and since God cannot exhibit goodness in a way that anything that is not divine might.
In short, the main points Aquinas makes in SCG 1,28–36 are:
1. Since God is entirely simple, our human way of talking always falls short when we speak about God. That is because our human way of talking engages with or reflects an understanding of what is composite.
2. Yet some words we use when talking of what is not divine can be used to speak truly and literally of God even though they signify what God is imperfectly because God is entirely simple.
But let us now see how Aquinas actually gets to these conclusions in his text.