5.3 How to Assess SCG 1,28–36?
5.3 How to Assess SCG 1,28–36?
If you uncritically assume that Aquinas is always making philosophical sense, you might be happy to suppose that all that he says in SCG 1,28–36 is correct. Yet these chapters do raise serious questions, chiefly, I think, because of the way in which they rely on conclusions that Aquinas takes for granted given previous chapters of the SCG. As I have shown, SCG 1,28–36 draws heavily on the conclusion that God is simple. Yet if Aquinas is wrong when it comes to divine simplicity, then he is obviously wrong in much of what he says in SCG 1,28–36. Yet suppose, for the sake of argument, that Aquinas is right about divine simplicity. Does it follow that we can talk sense about God as Aquinas thinks that we can?
One reason for thinking that it does not would lie in the idea that if God is as different from creatures as Aquinas takes him to be, then we cannot say anything that is literally true about God since we cannot really know what we are saying. As Herbert McCabe notes, an obvious objection to Aquinas on literal talk about God “is that in e.g. God is good, ‘good’ must either mean the same as it means when applied to creatures or something different. If it means the same, then God is reduced to the level of creatures; if it does not mean the same, then we cannot know what it means by knowing about creatures, we should have to understand God himself; but we do not, hence we do not understand at all—we only have an illusion of understanding because the word happens to be graphically the same as the ‘good’ we do understand.”34
This line of criticism is one with which many philosophers of religion seem to sympathize. So we often find it argued that terms used of God and creatures should, abstracting from figurative usage, always be thought of as univocal in meaning.35 The idea here is that, when it comes to literally true discourse concerning God, words have to retain their ordinary or mundane meaning on pain of becoming incomprehensible or meaningless. Defenders of this approach happily concede that, say, goodness in God amounts to something different from goodness in me. At the same time, however, they typically hold that the difference here is only a matter of degree. Mary may be a better person than John because she generally behaves better than John usually does, but this does not mean that Mary and John are not both good in the same sense. What it means is that Mary has more of the same quality that John has in something like the way in which bag X might have more of the same stuff in it as does bag Y.
This line of thinking will evidently not appeal to someone who thinks that Aquinas is right about divine simplicity. Such a person will, with Aquinas, note that a word cannot be used of God and a creature univocally since, unlike creatures, there is no distinction in God between individual and nature. Even without recourse to the notion of divine simplicity, however, there is, perhaps, a case to be made for refusing to accept that when it comes to meaning we are faced with a stark alternative between “univocal” and “equivocal.” For why suppose that a word must either mean exactly the same when used of different things or else mean something quite different? Why not instead say that a word can be used of two different things with related meanings? After all, we do seem able to use words in this way. What Aquinas means by “analogy” is very prevalent in our use of language. Someone might say that his wife and his dog are both faithful. Such a person does not mean that his wife and his dog belong to the same species and have faithfulness univocally. He means that there is some reason to say that “faithful” is what his dog and his wife can be said to be. He means that we can speak of wives and dogs being faithful without supposing that what they are as faithful amounts to exactly the same thing even when it comes to matters of degree. Should we suppose that a wife and a dog should be ranked on a scale so that we might award them marks when it comes to their faithfulness? Surely, we cannot do this, though it does not therefore follow that it is nonsense to say of a dog and a wife that both of them are faithful. We might say that there are limits when it comes to faithfulness and that not just anything can be thought of as faithful, and so on for adjectives other than “faithful.” Yet what Aquinas says in SCG 1,28–36 does not argue otherwise. His main concern seems to be to suggest that if we are going to speak of God truly, and without resorting to metaphor, we can use words that we employ when talking about creatures without assuming that God is an individual with properties distinct from himself, as God would not be if thought of as entirely simple. Why does Aquinas think this? The answer is: “Because he holds that certain words used when talking of creatures can be used when talking of God for particular reasons.”
To some extent I have already shown what Aquinas has in mind in taking this view. That is because I have already shown that he generally believes that terms signifying perfections that have no creaturely meaning built into them can be used when talking of God since God, though entirely simple, is that from which all creaturely perfections derive. In the SCG, however, Aquinas turns at length to the task of explaining why particular reasons can be given for saying why certain words that we already employ when talking about creatures can also be used when we try to talk about God. As I have noted, in SCG 1,37 he begins to do this by focusing on the assertion that God is good. So let me now try to follow him as he discusses this assertion.