5.2 SCG 1,28–36: Details
1. SCG 1,28–36 employs some distinctions concerning predication that run throughout his account of talking about God. For he speaks of words being used “univocally,” “equivocally,” and “analogically,” and the differences he has in mind here need explaining.
Suppose that I say “John is a man” and “Henry is a man.” Here, “man” seems to mean exactly the same thing in both sentences. Aquinas would make this point by saying that, in “John is a man” and “Henry is a man,” the word “man” should be understood univocally.
However, suppose that I say “I keep my pen in my pocket” and “I keep my pigs in a pen.” Here, “pen” seems to mean something completely different in both sentences. It is an accident of the development of the English language that we have one word that serves both to refer to a writing instrument and to a place in which pigs can be housed. Aquinas would make this point by saying that, in “I keep my pen in my pocket” and “I keep my pigs in a pen,” the word “pen” should be understood equivocally and as having no meaning in common.
What though of “love” in “I love my wife,” “I love my job,” and “I love to visit Italy”? Love of a spouse is not exactly the same thing as love of a job or a place to travel. But I am surely not equivocating when using “love” in the three sentences just noted. There seem to be threads of connection between what we have in mind when thinking of love between spouses, love of a job, and love for a place to visit. Aquinas would make this point by saying that, in “I love my wife,” “I love my job,” and “I love to visit Italy,” I am using the word “love” analogically.
In SCG 1,28–36, Aquinas is concerned to argue that, in sentences like “Fred is X” and “God is X,” the word that we substitute for X in both sentences can be construed analogically, as not meaning exactly the same thing, while not meaning something completely different.
2. Aquinas begins his SCG discussion of our talking about God by discussing divine perfection (SCG 1,28). “The mode of a thing’s excellence,” he writes, “is according to the mode of its being. For a thing is said to be more or less excellent according as its being is limited to a certain greater or lesser mode of excellence.”10
Here Aquinas is saying that “perfect” is, in a sense, a relative term. He does not think that “X is perfect” merely expresses a speaker’s feelings toward X. He does not think that perfection is merely “in the eye of the beholder” and is, therefore, always totally subjective. He holds that, even if we do not always recognize this, some things can be truly said to be perfect or to have perfections or excellence in themselves. Yet Aquinas understands “perfect” to be an adjective of a certain kind. He thinks, for example, that “perfect” is not the same kind of adjective as is “wooden.”
“X is a wooden horse” tells us two distinct things about X, each understandable on their own. It tells us that X is wooden and, in addition, that X is a horse. But “perfect” does not work like “wooden.” I can know what something is if told only that it is wooden and not what kind of wooden thing it is. But I will not know what X is like if all I am told is that X is perfect. When saying that something is perfect or excellent we do so for reasons that can differ hugely depending on what we are talking about. What we count as perfection or excellence in a mathematician, say, will be different from what we count as perfection or excellence in a surgeon or an opera singer or a parent. In this sense, perfection and excellence are relative, though not subjective, since they differ in things of different kinds, things with different ways of being.
So in SCG 1,28 Aquinas does not argue for “God is perfect” as if perfection in everything amounted to exactly the same kind of descriptive property, as “being wooden” amounts to exactly the same kind of descriptive property in everything that is wooden. Rather, he settles for a general account of perfection and excellence according to which something is perfect insofar as it possesses being or existence to some degree. He also says that “if there is something to which the whole power of being belongs, it can lack no excellence that is proper to some thing.”11 On this basis, Aquinas holds that God, “who is his being … has being according to the whole power of being itself.”12 He also claims: (1) God is perfect since imperfection involves an absence of being of some kind, while God is Being Itself; (2) imperfect things proceed from what is perfect in some way, and God is perfect as that from which all that is not divine proceeds; (3) perfection follows from being in act, not being in potency, and God is perfect since God lacks potentiality and is fully in act; (4) something acts insofar as it is “in act,” and God is perfect since he acts so as to bring about all actuality in what is not divine.
3. SCG 1,29 turns to how “a likeness to God is and is not possible in things.”13 Things can be said to be like God, says Aquinas, insofar as they proceed from God as their first efficient cause. But, he adds, this does not mean that they do not fall short of what God is as they reflect him as working actively in them. He observes: “God gave things all their perfections and thereby is both like and unlike them.”14 Here Aquinas is drawing on the notions of univocal causation and equivocal causation mentioned above, and he is claiming that, as efficiently caused by God, all that is not divine must be somehow like God even though God is not like something else as, say, a mother is like her daughter.
4. What terms or words used to talk about what is not divine can be properly used when talking about God? In SCG 1,30 Aquinas answers this question by saying that they are terms signifying perfections, though not perfections that can be had only by what is creaturely. He writes: “Since it is possible to find in God every perfection of creatures, but in another and more eminent way, whatever names unqualifiedly designate a perfection without defect are predicated of God and of other things: for example, goodness, wisdom, being, and the like. But when any name expresses such perfections along with a mode that is proper to a creature, it can be said of God only according to likeness and metaphor.”15 Aquinas has no problem with speaking of God metaphorically. Indeed, he notes that metaphorical talk about God abounds in the Bible. But he does not take metaphorical talk of God to be literally true, while he does think that some talk of God is literally true, that it is, for example, literally true to say that God is “the highest good” or “the first being.”16
5. However, Aquinas also maintains that our words or “names” always signify imperfectly when used to speak about God (SCG 1,30). Here we come to the distinction between “thing signified” and “mode of signification.”
Some “names,” says Aquinas, “signify a perfection without defect.”17 But they do so “with reference to that which the name was imposed to signify; for as to the mode of signification, every name is defective.” Why so? Because we talk of and understand even perfect creatures as if they were composite, while God is not composite.
Take, for example, our talk about what is good and about goodness itself as present in different things. Aquinas holds that when we speak of goodness we are not referring to what subsists as a thing in its own right; we are not talking about a “subsistent form.” Yet God is something that subsists in its own right; God is a subsistent form. Again, when we speak of things being good we are always talking about composite creatures, not something wholly simple. “As a result,” says Aquinas, “with reference to the mode of signification there is in every name that we use an imperfection, which does not befit God, … And so with reference to the mode of signification no name is fittingly applied to God.”18
Here Aquinas means that our understanding of what we say about something created cannot carry over into talk about God that resembles it at what we might call a “surface” level. He means that what we say can sometimes be misleading when it comes to what we are talking about, and not just because we might be lying. In paragraph 64 of his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein distinguishes between “surface grammar” and “depth grammar.” He refers to “surface grammar” as “what immediately impresses itself upon us about the use of a word” given “the way it is used in the sentence structure, the part of its use—one might say—that can be taken in by the ear.”19 By “depth grammar” Wittgenstein means “what might be philosophically teased out from ‘what can be taken in by the ear’ so as to arrive at a better understanding of what is being said.” Consider the sentences “I have a key in my pocket” and “I have a pain in my back.” At the “surface” level, these sentences are alike since they are grammatically comparable. But we would surely be wrong to think of pains as being like physical objects such as keys. Thinking along somewhat similar lines, Aquinas suggests that when we speak truly of God we signify imperfectly and should be thought of as trying to speak of God as if God were a composite creature, which he is not.20 Aquinas holds that when using such talk we are in a serious sense trying to say more than we can mean. As Herbert McCabe (1926–2001) once said: “St Thomas thought that things in some way pointed beyond themselves to something which is not a thing, which is altogether outside the universe of things and cannot be included in any classification with them. Given this idea it is not too difficult to understand his notion that words can point beyond their ordinary meanings, and this he thought is what happens when we talk about God. We can use words to mean more than we can understand.”21
6. People use different words when “describing” God. They say, for example, that God is good and powerful. So, how can this fact be squared with the idea that God is simple? Aquinas deals with this question in SCG 1,31 while arguing that “the divine perfection and the plurality of names said of God are not opposed to his simplicity.”22 We can attempt to say what God is because God is active in different things and can be named from them. But it does not follow from this that God is anything composite. “Through his one simple being,” says Aquinas, “God possesses every kind of perfection that all other things come to possess, but in a much more diminished way.” He continues: “From this we see the necessity of giving to God many names. For since we cannot know him naturally except by arriving at him from his effects, the names by which we signify his perfection must be diverse, just as the perfections belonging to things are found to be diverse.”23 Here, of course, Aquinas is saying that we can talk about God, who is simple, by noting different things that he has produced. What something produces, thinks Aquinas, might be various, but this does not mean that the producing thing is composed of different parts.
7. The thesis of SCG 1,32 is that “nothing is predicated univocally of God and other things.”24 By now you may realize why Aquinas thinks this. For the record, however, his arguments are: (1) the effect of an agent cause that is not what the cause is specifically cannot be said to be univocally the same as its cause, even if comparisons between the cause and its effect can be made for some reason or other; (2) “There is nothing in God that is not the divine being itself, which is not the case with other things”;25 (3) when we predicate of different things univocally we do so by predicating a genus or a species or a difference or an accident or a property. But God is not a member of a genus to be distinguished from other members of that genus, and there are no accidents in God; (4) “Nothing is predicated of God and creatures as though they were in the same order, but, rather, according to priority and posteriority. For all things are predicated of God essentially.”26 Basically, Aquinas is here saying that nothing can be predicated of God and creatures univocally since creatures are composite and God is not. My cat and your cat can both be univocally referred to as feline. You and I can both be univocally referred to as human. According to Aquinas, however, God is not one of a kind, and there is no distinction between the individual that God is and the nature that God has, which Aquinas takes to mean that God cannot share any feature that a creature might have so as to have this feature as the creature does.
8. If terms used when talking of God and creatures are not to be understood univocally, however, does it follow that they are all to be understood in a purely equivocal way? That it does so follow is something that Aquinas denies in SCG 1,33, in which we find several arguments. In SCG 1,33 Aquinas rejects the idea that F in “X is F” and “God is F” always has to be construed as so utterly different in meaning as, say, “pen” is in “I keep my pen in my pocket” and “I keep my pigs in a pen.” And, in his defense of this position, the following arguments surface: (1) to say that X and Y are F purely equivocally is to note that they are totally unalike; yet God can be named from creatures as being a cause that accounts for creatures existing as somehow resembling what God genuinely is; (2) “There is a certain mode of likeness of things to God”; (3) we can actually express some knowledge that we have of God by using words that we employ when talking of other things; (4) “Equivocation in a name impedes the process of reasoning”27—but we can reason to true conclusions concerning God using language that we normally employ without reference to God; (5) “If names are said of God and creatures in a purely equivocal way, we understand nothing of God through those names; for the meanings of those names are known to us solely to the extent that they are said of creatures.”28 In arguments 1–5 here Aquinas is saying that it is possible to argue philosophically for some truths concerning God and that it would be impossible to do so if all that is said of God and of what is not God should be construed as being purely equivocal. In Aquinas’s view, even our feeble attempts to show that God exists as a first cause would fail if “cause,” used when talking of God, means something totally different from what it means in other contexts.
9. And now we come to Aquinas on analogy, the topic discussed in SCG 1,34. Here Aquinas concludes that “the names said of God and creatures are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally but analogically, that is, according to an order or reference to something one.”29 Aquinas is suggesting that we can sometimes literally apply to God a term normally predicated of a creature, and that we can do so in the light of reasoning from what can be thought of as an effect of God. In being able to do this, says Aquinas, we do not start from a knowledge of God but from a knowledge of what is creaturely. Then, having known and “named” the creature, we can apply that name to God while thinking of God as the cause of all creaturely perfections. So: “Because we come to a knowledge of God from other things, the reality in the names said of God and other things belongs by priority in God according to his mode of being, but the meaning of the name belongs to God by posteriority. And so he is said to be named from his effects.”30
10. What though of the fact that God is “named” by different names? Aquinas would say that, for example, God is good and that God is powerful while taking “good” and “powerful” to be different names. Yet if God is entirely simple, should we not conclude that different names used of God are in fact just equivalent or synonymous? In SCG 1,35 Aquinas argues that different names said of God are “not synonyms because they do not signify the same notion.”31 Yes, thinks Aquinas, God is simple. So God is not something with a range of different properties, and goodness and power, say, are not different attributes that God happens to have. But the words “good” and “powerful” are different words, and the fact that we might want to use them when talking about God does not take away from that fact and, therefore, does not make them synonymous. What happens, thinks Aquinas, is that we sometimes take words with different meanings and then apply them to God while realizing that what these words signify somehow exists in God even though God is simple. Or, as Aquinas says in SCG 1,36: “Although, as we have said, our intellect arrives at the knowledge of God through diverse conceptions, it yet understands that what corresponds to all of them is absolutely one.”32 To be sure, Aquinas agrees, God is simple, and our attempts to describe God from creatures in sentences like “God is good” or “God is powerful” fall well short of the reality that we are trying to talk about. They signify God imperfectly since they wear the appearance of talk about composite things, while God is simple. And yet, Aquinas thinks, it is not “futile for our intellect to form enunciations concerning God in his simplicity by means of composition and division.”33 Because of how we think and talk about creatures, we employ different notions when referring to God, and what we say about God is inevitably going somehow to misrepresent the reality of God, who is wholly simple. Yet it remains that there can be reason for saying certain even apparently different things of God because God is the cause of all that is not divine.
So Aquinas holds that God is simple and that we can have reason to make certain statements about God in which words used of God and creatures are to be understood analogically. That is the teaching of SCG 1,18–36 in one sentence. But you might find this teaching to be highly abstract since in SCG 1,18–36 Aquinas talks in general terms. He says enough for us to see why he thinks that certain words signifying perfections can be truly and not just metaphorically used when we speak about God. Yet, you might ask “When in the SCG is Aquinas going to tell us how he thinks we can be justified in making particular concrete statements about God, statements like ‘God is good’?”
The question is a fair one, and the answer to it is: “As soon as he is done with SCG 1,36.” I say that because in SCG 1,37–102, Aquinas embarks on a series of discussions concerning what are sometimes called “the attributes of God.” In SCG 1,18–36 Aquinas is scene setting. From SCG 1,37 onward he gets down to specifics, starting with an account of what he thinks can be said about the goodness of God. In the next few chapters I shall try to follow him as he makes his way through discussions, not only of God’s goodness, but also of God’s knowledge, will, and life. However, before I conclude this chapter I should, perhaps, say something about problems that people have had concerning the teaching of SCG 1,28–36.