“Speaking the Incomprehensible God”
Gregory P. Rocca, O. P. Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology. Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004.
In the present study, Rocca pursues three closely related aims with relation to St. Thomas Aquinas’s theological epistemology. First, he seeks to reveal Aquinas’s epistemology as a combination of both negative and positive theology, the positive side being rooted in an analogy subsisting in judgements rather that concepts (thus privileging truth over meaning). Second, he relates Thomistic analogy to the truths of the faith, thereby expanding analogy beyond its typical setting within the largely philosophical lacunae of the doctrine of God. Finally, Rocca reveals Aquinas’s theological epistemology to be grounded upon his doctrine of God and creation. Rocca places Aquinas within his historical context, illuminating both his indebtedness to and creative distinctiveness from the philosophical and theological lineage in which he stood, and offers a close intertextual reading from across Thomas’ vast corpus.
In the first of four sections, Rocca begins by surveying approaches to negative theology in the Hellenistic and Patristic traditions, defining key terms such as aphairesis (Latin: remotio/abstractio) and apophasis (Latin: negatio), outlining the origin and use of various ‘alpha privative’ terms for God among Jewish, Platonist, and Gnostic writers, and noting precedents for theological negation in Scripture (e.g. Ps. 145:3, Job 5:9, 1 Tim. 6:16), Albinus, Plotinus, and the 2nd c. Greek Apologists. All of this leads to a consideration of Pseudo-Dionysius, for whom God is “absolutely unknowable in conceptual, notional, or rational terms” (24). The Dionysian path to God is fundamentally twofold (though Aquinas will later interpret it in a threefold manner), the way of negation—which is primarily a non-conceptual mystical ascent but can take the form of symbolic denials—and the way of affirmation based on divine causality.
Turning to the nature and tenor of Aquinas’s apophatic theology, Rocca notes St. Thomas’s Dionysian description of God as “preeminent darkness” and Aquinas’s sense of dwelling in the human darkness of unknowing due to God’s infinite transcendence. This divine incomprehensibility has two key elements. First, no created intellect possesses by nature a quidditative knowledge of God’s essence. Second, though in heaven by grace, through the lumen gloriae, the saints may have quidditative knowledge of God—they will see God ‘face to face’—this knowledge is not comprehensive. So, Thomas says, “The very boundlessness (immensitas) of God will be seen but it will not be seen boundlessly (immense): for [God's] total measure (totus modus) will be seen but not totally (totaliter)” (DV 8.2 ad6 in Rocca, 45). This negation is always grounded in a sense of God’s transcendence. Unlike Dionysius, argues Rocca, Aquinas’s via negativa is not primarily a movement beyond the boundaries of rational theology but a key corrective element internal to it. Also unlike Dionysius, Thomas employs a threefold negative way—causation, negation, eminence—freely varying both the order and terminology of the elements. Rocca also detects three distinct methods of negation used by Aquinas: qualitative, objective modal, and subjective modal. The source and goal of negation for St. Thomas is divine preeminence: due to God’s infinite act of subsistent being, excessus leads to negation.
Part two, entitled “Analogy and the Web of Judgment,” opens with a discussion of Analogy in Aristotle and sketches in broad outline the Christian appropriation of Aristotle from Augustine to the early scholastics. Following this, Rocca unpacks the various meanings of analogy in Aquinas, beginning with an acknowledgement of the critiques of analogy advanced by Barth and Pannenberg, as well as the ameliorative responses by von Balthasar and Bouillard. He also notes Cajetan’s interpretation of Thomistic analogy—a conception of Aquinas that is central to the Barthian critique, and of which Rocca is critical as well. Resisting Cajetan’s reduction of all intrinsic analogous predication to the structures of four-term proportionality (A:B::C:D), Rocca finds that for Aquinas, the analogy of proportionality is secondary to and dependent on the analogy of referential multivocity, which is said to be neutral with regard to ontology, though it does function ontologically at times when this is theologically warranted.
Rocca delves into the finer points of Aquinas’ analogy of referential multivocity, interpreting his use of the concept per prius et posterius to denote how analogous names signify according to a web of primary and secondary meanings that only makes sense within a matrix of intelligibly connected predications, or even of true judgments about the relevant realities themselves. Analogical names signify through reference to an individual reality or nature, and Aquinas reveals a nuanced perspective on this function by both accepting and rejecting the phrase per prius et posterius in relation to God depending on the context. Through a diachronic report of St. Thomas’s position, Rocca reveals the centrality of Thomas’s account of an ‘analogical community’ and his distinction between “common meaning” and “different meanings” (146). The central point that allows especially for creator and creature to share a community of analogy without reducing analogy to a core of univocity is the fact that “the moment of identity in an analogical term's various meanings is not a meaning at all but an individual reality to which all the different meanings necessarily refer” (151). In other words, even the term ‘meaning’ (ratio) itself requires analogical extension in order to be used in Aquinas’s explanation of analogy; a point missed by Cajetan and many of Aquinas’s critics.
Part two concludes with a chapter on analogy as judgment, in which Rocca keys in on Aquinas’s use of judicium in the sense of “the intellect’s act of declaring its conformity with reality, which takes place in the mind’s second operation of forming propositions” (160). Rocca outlines Aquinas’s argument for theological analogy as a mean between univocity and equivocity and shows, both through Thomas’s discussions of analogy and through the placement of analogy within his treatises on God (it comes before questions of God’s operations and after [some] questions of God’s essence), that his doctrine of theological analogy arises out of his epistemological reflections upon what Thomas sees as the necessary presuppositions and consequences of true theological judgments. In other words, Aquinas’s understanding of analogy presupposes the theological judgment that there exists a God who is the subsistent act of being itself, who is universally perfect, and to whom creatures bear some likeness. Looking forward to questions of whether these judgments are rooted primarily in reason or faith, Rocca concludes with an outline of Aquinas’s view of faith as a “graced judgment about God” (187). Because the truth of God is faith’s goal, faith necessarily includes judgments, but the judgments themselves are only ever the means, not the end. Aquinas reveals the place of the will in faith by following Augustine’s definition of faith as “thinking with assent” (as opposed to vision which is “assent without thinking”). Rocca concludes that Aquinas’s theological analogy subsists in judgments that necessarily transcend the concepts of which they are comprised: whereas the truth of normal concepts is meaning-dependent, the meaning of the divine names is truth-dependent.
Part three, “Crucial Truths About God” opens with a consideration of whether reason or faith has pride of place in Aquinas’s understanding of the existence of God the creator. After outlining Aristotle’s own approach, Rocca highlights Aquinas’ interpretation and creative theological advance on Aristotle’s position. At the core of Aquinas’s understanding of God’s existence is the concept that God is ipsum esse subsistens and that there is a real distinction between being and essence in creatures—which is another way of saying that “their existence is not essential but accidental, that it arrives contingently from outside their essence instead of flowing necessarily from within it” (246). By a detailed consideration of St. Thomas’s use and development of these judgments, Rocca argues that it is more by faith than by reason that Aquinas recognizes these realities, which leads Rocca to the same conclusion regarding the inspiration and justification of Aquinas’s transcendental analogy and theological epistemology of the divine names (254). This section closes with a chapter outlining the fundamental theological truths underlying Aquinas’s theological epistemology: the purity, perfection, infinitude, transcendence, immanence, and freedom of God as the Creator to whom all creation bears a likeness.
The fourth and final section deals with the Divine names. Although Aquinas’s explicit treatment of divine naming reveals an emphasis on concepts, propositions, and discrete units of meaning, Rocca highlights the deeper sense that “the concept can be the fruit of judgment and carry a contextual sense within the whole proposition, and that creaturely names denoting perfections are analogically extended to God not prior to but simultaneous with our knowing a truth about God” (297). Through a discussion of Aquinas’s defense of positive theology, his arguments for the most proper names of divinity (Deus, Qui est, and the Tetragrammaton), and his distinction between proper and metaphorical predication, Rocca provides a comprehensive synopsis of Aquinas’s taxonomy of the names of God:
Designed by Austin Stevenson
Rocca concludes this chapter with a discussion of Aquinas’s approach to primacy and dependence in divine predication, in which Aquinas argues that divine names are said primarily of God as regards the absolute perfection they signify and primarily of creatures as regards their meaning and their manner of signification (metaphorical names are said primarily of creatures regarding the relative perfections they signify). He also notes St. Thomas’s defense for the actual difference in meaning between various names of God (i.e. although attribute X and attribute Y are really the same in God, the names denoting them are not therefore simply synonymous).
The final chapter engages with Aquinas’s acknowledgement of the traditional triad of mode of being, mode of understanding, and mode of signification, each item supporting the one after it. Further, Aquinas’s res/modus distinction “refines our positive assertions about God by separating from God every composition, abstraction, concretion, and accident. Aquinas’s denial of the mode of signification makes sense only in the context of previously known theological truths, for such truths justify our removing from God the imperfections implied by our human modes of understanding and linguistic expression. Upholding positive theology's affirmations of a reality in God and at the same time purifying its predications by recourse to theological truth, the res/modus distinction is a microcosm of how Aquinas' positive and negative theology work closely together” (349).
Rocca concludes with three reasons why Aquinas’s combination of positive and negative theology is a valuable resource today: First, the primacy of truth over meaning is the basis for his theological epistemology. Looking back at his original theological judgments, Aquinas searches for the underlying epistemic conditions of possibility for the truth of those judgments. Second, faith, more than pure reason, is the foundation for the truths undergirding his theological epistemology. And third, his theological epistemology is balanced and comprehensive, and allows him to acknowledge the tension at the heart of our knowledge about God. Rocca concludes that Thomas’s academic theology serves Thomas the spiritual guide: “for the church cannot really worship God unless it is somehow able to know that God and somehow able to speak to and about that God, while at the same time the church cannot worship the real God unless it worships the incomprehensible God” (353).