Analogy and Symbol

Overview

Recall questions on the via negativa, univocal and equivocal language, Aquinas's analogy of attribution and of proportionality, Tillich's distinction between sign and symbol, symbols across religious traditions, and the problems of treating religious language as symbolic.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is the via negativa, and what is it for?

   Model answer

   The approach of saying only what God is not - not finite, not changing, not a body - on the ground that any positive term borrowed from creatures will distort a being unlike anything created. Maimonides argued that each denial genuinely narrows our error, so we learn something real without pretending to comprehend. It protects transcendence rigorously. The complaint is that an endless series of denials never adds up to knowing anything, and that worshippers plainly mean something positive when they call God good.

2. 2

   What is univocal language about God, and what goes wrong with it?

   Model answer

   Univocal language uses a word in exactly the same sense of God and of creatures, so that calling God wise means what it means of a wise neighbour. Its advantage is that it says something definite. Its cost is anthropomorphism: it shrinks God to a very large person, subject to the limitations that make human wisdom what it is, and most theists regard that as a description of an idol rather than of God.

3. 3

   What is equivocal language, and what goes wrong with it?

   Model answer

   Equivocal language uses one word in two wholly unrelated senses, as bank does of rivers and of money. If our words applied to God like that, calling God good would carry no connection whatever to anything we understand by goodness, and we would not know what we had said. The result is complete agnosticism about God's nature, and worse, it would empty preaching, praise and prayer of any content.

4. 4

   What is Aquinas' solution to the failures of univocal and equivocal language about God?

   Model answer

   That religious language is neither of those but analogical: words are used of God in a sense related to, though not identical with, their ordinary use. Creatures derive their being from God, so their qualities genuinely resemble his, at an immeasurable distance. That real resemblance is enough to let language reach God without either domesticating him or draining the words of meaning.

5. 5

   Explain analogy of attribution.

   Model answer

   A term belongs primarily to one thing and derivatively to another because of a real relation between them. Aquinas' example is health: a diet or a complexion is called healthy because of its relation to the health of the living body, which alone is healthy in the full sense. In the same way creatures are called good or wise because God, their source, is good and wise in the primary sense and has caused those qualities in them.

6. 6

   Explain analogy of proportionality.

   Model answer

   Each thing has a quality in the manner proper to its own nature: a dog's loyalty is loyalty at the level of a dog, a person's at the level of a person. Applied to God, wisdom belongs to him in the way appropriate to an infinite being, which is why the word is used neither in our sense nor in a wholly different one. The difficulty is that unless we already know something of God's nature we cannot say how great the proportion is, so critics complain the account tells us that the words apply without telling us what they mean.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.