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Analogy, negation, or “without asking how”: how can finite words say anything true of God?

Ikechukwu Anyanwu Fellow
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Faith & reasonIslamicJewishMedieval ChristianAsh'arismScholasticismAl-Ash’ariIbn Sina#analogy#divine-attributes#negative-theology#religious-language
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Every year one of my students asks the question that underlies everything else: when we say "God is good" or "God knows", what do the words mean? If they mean what they mean of us, God becomes a large human being. If they mean something entirely different, we are saying nothing.

The three great medieval answers I teach are these.

Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 13): the names are said of God neither univocally nor purely equivocally, but by analogy. Goodness is in God first and in creatures derivatively; we know the perfection signified but not the divine mode of having it.

Maimonides (Guide of the Perplexed, Book I): we cannot positively describe God's essence at all. True statements are negations, which clear away what God is not, or descriptions of God's actions, which describe effects rather than the essence.

Al-Ashʿarī: affirm the attributes revelation gives, knowledge, power, even hand and face, as real, but bi-lā kayf, without asking how. Neither reduce them to metaphor nor imagine them like ours.

My own Igbo tradition has its say too. Many of our names for God describe what God does: Chineke is often glossed as "the God who creates". That sounds close to Maimonides' attributes of action.

My open question: which of these is most defensible today? Or is the honest position that each solves one problem by creating another?

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4 answers

  1. Miriam Adler

    Fellow

    Maimonides is more radical than the summary suggests. Even "God exists" or "God is one", for him, cannot mean what they mean when said of creatures; the terms are used equivocally. And Aquinas knew this view. In the same question 13 he discusses "Rabbi Moses" and rejects the reading of "God is good" as merely "God is the cause of goodness" or "God is not evil", on the ground that it would make "God is good" no different from "God is a body", in the sense of being a cause of bodies. That medieval exchange is still the best way into your question.

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  2. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    Ibn Sina sits between them in an interesting way. His God is the Necessary Existent, and its attributes are understood either as negations or as relations, so that divine unity is never compromised. Al-Ashʿarī's "without asking how" was partly a reaction against such reductions: he wanted to avoid both likening God to creatures (tashbīh) and stripping God of attributes (taʿṭīl). So the Islamic debate maps your three positions quite closely, with "bi-lā kayf" as a deliberate refusal to choose a mechanism.

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  3. Nikos Theodoridis

    Fellow

    Let me add a fourth answer from my city. Gregory Palamas distinguished God's essence, wholly unknowable, from God's energies, which are truly God and truly known, in grace and in prayer. On that view we are not describing the essence by analogy, and we are not limited to negation; we are naming God as God acts and is experienced. Critics in the West thought it divided God. Orthodox theologians reply that it is the only way to keep both mystery and real knowledge.

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  4. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    Miriam's point about question 13 is one I will pass on to my students tomorrow. My provisional answer: Aquinas, but chastened by Maimonides. Analogy needs negation running beside it at every step, which Aquinas himself practised in the way of removal. And I suspect the Igbo names were wiser than the textbooks: we know God first by what God does.