Since the theological traditions which I shall explore– Jewish and Christian in the context of Islam – eschew any direct discourse about God, except as origin of the universe (creator) and source of revelation, I shall direct my reflections to some ways in which we ought not to speak about God, relying on an exemplary figure from each tradition: Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). Both were concerned with showing how believers in their respective traditions had to have recourse to philosophical strategies to align the semantics of their revelations with the central stricture against idolatry, while the fact that Thomas engages explicitly with ‘Rabbi Moses’ will enhance the interchange on which I want to focus. The medieval west referred to Moses ben Maimon as ‘Maimonides’, while Judaism often employs the acronym ‘the Rambam’ (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon).

Exploratory and confirming role of reason in matters religious

Jose Faur delineates, from a rabbinic perspective, the way that the Rambam employs reason to explore and to confirm revelation:

An entire programme of philosophical theology is outlined here, culminating with resonances of Wittgenstein. The first step suggests that analogous uses of language will be indispensable, lest our imagination spontaneously associate statements intending to indicate the creator with inappropriate images. The second reminds us how using language analogously will presuppose a developed capacity for sensing an order which can never accurately be described (since it transcends imagining), while the third step – cognisance of the creator – takes us to the ‘post-rational’ heart of the matter: ‘the realm of esoterics and prophecy’ (p. 119).

Before following his lead to trace the Rambam's rich exercise programme, however, we need to free Faur's image of steps ‘from the grip of imagination’. The mention of ‘esoterics’ offers an entry. For the polarity exoteric/esoteric can easily mislead us into thinking of the first as literal: ‘the Torah speaks in human language’, as Maimonides never tired of reminding us; while the deliberately ‘contradictory premises’ which he warns us will signal an invitation to ‘esoteric and prophetic’ understanding will require decoding. But the very image of decoding presumes that intelligent persons will be able to transform scrambled language into something clear, thereby undercutting the signal difference in the third step: from saying to showing, from words to silence. As Faur puts it: ‘If one were to regard Creation as God's speech or writing – as the Scripture and rabbis teach – then a distinction must be established between what the system says and what it only indicates. [Creation] is structurally connected with the doctrine of silence’ (p. 14). Yet if so, how can he go on to advise (as he does) how ‘to decode God's speech and writing’?Footnote ² In fact, of course, much of the discussion of this exoteric/esoteric polarity has been infected with the decoding metaphor, which we shall have to ask the Rambam to help us excoriate, as a vestige of imaginal discourse, in order to be faithful to the path of interpretation which Jose Faur has opened for us. One way of beginning to do so is to remind ourselves (1) just how analogous are the notions of ‘God's speech and writing’ in all of the Abrahamic faith-traditions, and (2) to use the deliberately ambiguous ladders of Sufi ‘stations’ to explicate how the three steps which Faur proposes for articulating the Rambam's intellectual ascent from discourse to silence are not, of course, steps at all! That is, one never quite mounts from the first to the second and then to the third, since imagination will ever bedevil our notions, while we shall ever be tempted to project the orders, which our intellect needs to understand, into the source of order itself. Sufi writers take little care to be consistent in labelling the stations along the way to proximity with the divine, for there seems to be no single path, though a path will open for each and it will be one of ascent, so steps or stations will prove to be useful metaphors so long as we realise that is what they are. As the Rambam will suggest, that realisation will distinguish a properly analogous use of language from one which simply relies on metaphors themselves to make the point.Footnote ³ Yet the very structure of the Guide, with its repetitive perambulations, is intended to prompt just such a realisation.

So, as human beings, our minds will never be freed ‘from the grip of imagination’, nor can our intellects ever claim to have grasped ‘objective reality’. Indeed, with the help of our friends, we shall always be freeing whatever discourse we employ from unintended implications which imagination will spontaneously supply, just as we shall ever be directing our critical faculties to more adequate conceptualisations, as the history of science palpably reminds us.Footnote ⁴ We find this strategy operative in the Guide once its author moves beyond the foundational distinction of knowledge from opinion, largely paralleling that of reason from imagination, to attempt to lead us into an appreciation of the ways revelation can enhance our understanding of matters which surpass demonstration – notably (as Faur identifies it) free creation. In short, we can learn to employ the very critical capacities we constantly need to move us beyond imagination, to help us ascend to a ‘post-rational’ stance – though never without a guide, whose guidance will be displayed as we delineate the structure of his text: the Guide of the Perplexed.

Let me recall the suggestion of my initial guide in these matters, Joel Kraemer: that the Guide itself proceeds dialectically. That means, first, not demonstratively, which is clearly the case. Yet if demonstration is the signature of reason, must that situate the Guide in the realm of opinion? Hardly, for then we would be entrusting ourselves to following what the Rambam says, rather than undertaking the exercises he has designed for us to do. A second meaning for ‘dialectical’ can help resolve this apparent dilemma: a strategic amassing of examples to lead students to realise where the argument is headed; in short, pedagogy. This constructive sense also responds to any reader's appreciation of the author of the Guide as an accomplished teacher. It is by virtue of such assembled examples that we are led to an ever more articulate way of expressing, say, how necessary emanation differs from free creation. Moreover, since the emanation scheme offers greater philosophical elegance, one will have to parse ‘free creation’ in such a way as to excoriate any Zeus-like wilfulness from the action. Yet the action of free creating itself will escape positive articulation, since we cannot understand an action which is free yet does not alter the agent in effecting it. Nor are we able to parse activity which does not take place in time yet whose effect is temporal. So we are pressed to try as best we can to articulate who and what this agent is.

Here is where Maimonides’ celebrated treatment of divine attributes emerges, for to safeguard the ‘distinction’ between creator and creatures, he will insist that ‘God is One in every respect without plurality and without additions to His essence’Footnote ⁵ (1.52). Furthermore, he will deny any relation between creator and creatures, intending, of course, a reciprocal relation of the parent–child sort, best expressed in the Arabic custom of naming parents after their first son, so that the father becomes Abu Samir and the mother Umm Samir, though it is Samir who has come into the world through their agency. So what would it be like to have an agent who is in no way affected by its agency being operative? We could have recourse to Aristotle's teaching that the activity of the cause is in the effect, as the flame burns what is combustible without its being altered as a flame. Or we could give it a name, as Sara Grant does, using Shankara's nonduality to express creation in these traditions as a ‘non-reciprocal relation of dependence’.Footnote ⁶ Yet while that offers a tidy formula, corresponding to Aquinas’ insistence that, while the relation of creatures to the creator is a real one, that of creator to creatures is not; both statements have evoked stiff objections: would not such a God be uncaring? Maimonides has a response, of course: caring cannot be said of God, for that would be adding something to the divinity, though one could certainly speak – as the scriptures do – of God's actions as exhibiting caring. Yet those same scriptures often describe divine care in ways which would defy comparison with caring human actions. This further confirms the Rambam's insistence that we cannot ‘imagine a relation between a thing and Him which shares no common trait with anything outside Him at all. . . [So] there is no possible true relation between Him and anything He has created, because relation can at any time be only between things of the same immediate species.. . . [Indeed,] how could there be any relation between God and any creature, when there is that immense difference in the nature of existence, greater than which no difference can ever be’ (1.52)? But if the only relations we can imagine will be correlations, can we and do we not affirm a unique relation in naming God creator? And is not the divine activity of creating itself able to bridge that ‘immense difference’? The answer must be yes, of course, yet the Rambam has forcibly reminded us that we have no way of ‘tracking’ such activity.

His way of showing this will be to offer different ways of presenting creation, where the differences in his presentation have led to fierce controversy over whether Maimonides held the universe to have been created such that it has an initial moment of existence or so that it has always existed. Sara Klein-Braslavy has laid out his consistent efforts to interpret the story in each of these ways without attempting to reconcile them.Footnote ⁷ Yet she goes on to conclude that such a strategy ‘shows that he wished to conceal his true view – namely, that the universe is eternal – from the common man’.Footnote ⁸ But following the pedagogical dialectic of the Guide, there is no way of inferring Maimonides’ ‘true view’; that would be like asking Socrates what he really thinks! Yet if Socrates were to tell us what he ‘really thinks’, we would be inclined to accept his opinion of things, when his goal – like the Rambam's – is to spur us on to think it out ourselves. Would it not be more in line with his intent, as manifested in the structure of the Guide, to read the dual presentation as a reminder that we have no way of suitably articulating in human speech the activity of creating, so are impelled to affirm of it what we must – that it is free – and allow for different, even conflicting, conceptual articulations? For at this point our speech can at best try to show what it realises it cannot say. So any attempt to detect and convey ‘Maimonides’ secret position on creation’ will prove to be a vain search.Footnote ⁹

Here we find a lead to Jose Faur's use of ‘post-rational’ to characterise the goal of the Rambam's pedagogy: why else would one need to ‘exercise one's independent power of thinking. . . after having obtained knowledge of the truth’? This is the transition from Faur's step two: ‘perceiving reality as an objective entity governed by precise and universal laws’, to step three: ‘realizing that the universe in which they reside may be the design of a Creator, Absolute and Supreme’. Moreover, that very ‘exercise of the mind’ manifests itself as ‘a form of service to God. . . reserved for those who have apprehended Truth’. In Islam, the Arabic term for ‘service’ is interchangeable with that of ‘prayer’, and in Maimonides’ tradition, with fidelity to the Torah. The only way for the intellect to ‘grasp’ what is beyond its grasp will be by way of altering one's life in the direction of the object sought – in this case, the One who is creator of all. After a particularly recondite exposition which leads beyond what can properly be said, the Rambam will often close the chapter by ‘ponder this well!’ or in another rendering: ‘endeavor to understand this fully’ (3.52). Or more fulsomely:

How might we ponder things well, or endeavour to understand, or train ourselves to understand? As he himself suggests: be with God or at least strive towards him. The most obvious connection in Maimonides’ cultural environment would be the Sufi practices of recollection (dhikr) leading to ‘closeness to God’. Al-Ghazali details these in several places in his magnum opus, Ihya’ ‘Ulum ad-Din (with which most scholars think the Rambam had to be familiar), notably in the Book of Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence (Kitab at-tawhid wa tawakkul).Footnote ¹⁰ The structure of this book displays also its strategy: the first third treats of the foundational Islamic article of faith in the oneness of God; the last two-thirds the quality of trust in this One God which testifies to our understanding of that foundational article (tawhid) which itself defies a proper articulation. For Maimonides, ‘striving towards Him’ will involve trusting in

The ‘proper methods’ for obtaining a ‘clear perception of God’ will involve modes of service which lead to the grades of human perfection which he details in the culminating chapter (3.54). So we should know that ‘perception’ here must be taken metaphorically (or analogously), and that it will not admit of the articulation proper to knowledge as we obtain it; it will, in short, be a ‘post-rational’ sort of perception. The intellectual mode may best describe it, but the manner of apprehension will exceed our intellectual powers as they are exercised in their best manner, in demonstration.Footnote ¹¹

Whatever it is, it will result from ‘that emanation which is granted to all who make an effort to obtain it’, where the Rambam identifies the emanation with prophecy, and ‘prophecy’ always refers, in the Islamicate, to the scriptures in their power as the Word of God. And while intellectual effort remains a sine qua non, prophecy can only be granted; it can never be an achievement. This suggests an affinity with Aquinas’ celebrated response to the question whether ‘besides human reason, there is a further understanding which comes as a result of grace?’ He not only answers yes, but obliges with a lucid explanation of how it does: just as the deliverances of the senses are rendered intelligible when penetrated by the agent intellect, so the God-given images of scripture (which he calls ‘prophetic visions’) can be illuminated by the intellect strengthened by grace to offer us an understanding greater than reason could yield (Summa Theologiae 1.12.13). So the ‘images of scripture’, the literal sense of the (largely) narrative accounts, take the place of ‘deliverances of the senses’, while the ‘light of grace’ strengthens the agent intellect to yield the proper – that is, the God-given – sense of these ‘God-given images’ (or ‘prophetic visions’). And while ‘grace’ is a term Christians more easily employ, it would falsify the pervasive tone of these final chapters of the Guide were one to attempt to deny its efficacy in Maimonides.Footnote ¹² What is of primary interest here, however, is the manner of employing scripture to enhance our properly human understanding of the universe itself, and especially in its relation to its creator. We need to learn how to let ourselves be guided by it, but if we may follow Aquinas’ analogies, that guidance will be not unlike the guidance a teacher like Maimonides can offer in his Guide. God-given as it may be, its mode will follow the modes of understanding proper to us; we cannot expect any special illumination but can nonetheless trust to God-given guidance.

A fine example of this is given in Maimonides’ discussion in the Mishneh Torah of messianic times, which many have dubbed ‘rationalist’. Famously, he teaches:

In denying that ‘the laws of nature will be set aside’, he may sound ‘rationalist’ in the sense of eschewing any overt miracles, yet his insistence that ‘all will accept the true religion, and will neither plunder nor destroy, and together with Israel earn a comfortable living in a legitimate way’, could hardly be called ‘natural’ (or customary) comportment in the human world we all know! So the presence of ‘King Messiah’ will clearly bring about transformations of a monumental sort, which no self-respecting ‘rationalist’ would ever expect or soberly predict. Here again, it seems characteristic of what Maimonides will call ‘the imagination’ to fancy the ‘supernatural’ in overtly miraculous terms, while the Rambam himself has already reminded us of the utterly unlikely transformation which can be worked even in fractious times in ‘those who have obtained a share of that emanation which is granted to all who make an effort to obtain it;. . . it will never be possible for any evil of any kind to befall them, because they are with God and God is with them’ (3.51). Not much ‘rationalism’ in that description!

Before concluding, let us return to Jose Faur's third step: the heart of what he calls the ‘post-rational realm of esoterics and prophecy’. This step can be likened to allowing the scriptures of our traditions to guide our reflections, with a guidance which cannot promise an illumination beyond the ordinary, but which will prove a reliable guide to properly weighing the factors affecting our understanding. In this way, we will learn to trust our scriptures as leading us beyond what we could ourselves judge to be the case. Yet note that such guidance does not translate into a ‘secret position’ or a ‘special insight’ which we could formulate for anyone else. So it cannot rightly be called ‘knowledge’, but those who trust in it can be called ‘post-rational’. In this sense, the scriptures, meditated and lived over a period of time, can provide a prescient context for the exercise of reason in inquiry, and so rightly be called a ‘grace’. Faithful followers of revelation can enter, then, ‘the realm of esoterics and prophecy’, by allowing themselves to trust the guidance given them by revelation as it is received and elaborated in the community it forms.

World-bridging today

Something is happening in our time; something which offers a serendipitous complement to that world-destroying penchant of our respective religious collectives which we cannot help but find shameful. Just as Jose Faur has suggested (and persuasively documented) a fresh way of reading the Rambam – notably by showing us how the passage to the esoteric is already inscribed in our shared faith (as Abrahamic believers) in the free creation of the universe – so similar readings have propelled to prominence thinkers in other Abrahamic traditions whose paths are remarkably parallel. Moreover, unlike Moses Maimonides, these particular thinkers have not often enjoyed such prominence; though like the Rambam, each of them has been dubbed heretical by his respective tradition. I am speaking of Ibn al-Arabi and of Meister Eckhart. And the point of contention has been the same as that which Jose Faur identifies in Maimonides: the ineffable relation of creator to creatures, as well as of creatures to the creator. (For these are not reciprocal, as Maimonides presumed they had to be, yet Aquinas famously denied: a difference which Sara Grant articulates adroitly with Shankara's help.) Moreover, it was precisely the way both Meister Eckhart and Ibn al-Arabi struggled to portray the uniqueness of this relation which made them suspect to their respective communities: Eckhart was publicly tried by ecclesiastical authorities for preaching pantheism, and Ibn al-Arabi continues to be banned in portions of the Arab Muslim world (including, until recently, Egypt) for his famous (or notorious) teaching of wahdat al-wujud, or ‘unity of existence’ between creatures and their creator. Yet again, neither of them denies that creator and creatures are distinct from one another, but both are struggling to articulate how utterly unique that distinction must be: that it cannot be at all parallel with the distinctions we draw among creatures. That should be obvious to anyone who realises how arresting it is to assert that all-that-is is created freely by one God; could we coherently diagram the universe and its creator on the same plane, over against one another? And if not, how can we picture that relation? We can't, of course; though any attempt to articulate it will be forced to deconstruct such misleading pictures, and so be open to the jejune charge of ‘pantheism’. The Rambam's strategy for avoiding a pantheism which effectively denies free creation by eliding any distinction at all between origin and result was to deny any relation at all between creatures and creator. But that only succeeds in underscoring the ‘distinction’ by making talk of creation itself incoherent, for asserting that all things are freely created by one God clearly requires the unique relation of creating; the trick lies in articulating it. His wholesale denial may well have expressed a heroic attempt to avoid falling into the diagrammatic trap, given the ubiquitous and diverting power which images have in shaping our attempts to articulate these recondite matters.

Both Ibn Arabi and Eckhart countered this propensity directly by proposing pregnant alternative metaphors, designed to divert the conventional powers of imaging by offering arresting counter-images. In doing so, they each displayed their respect for the Rambam's concerns about religious thinkers unwittingly promoting idolatry, and were predictably rewarded for their efforts by religious authorities’ finding them suspect as well. What to do? About religious authorities, apparently very little; but Jose Faur has shown us how the Rambam offers a way inquirers may wean readers away from their own proposals by presenting them in contradictory ways, so returning fellow inquirers to revelation itself, thereby helping us to recognise when revelation itself directs us not to take its assertions at face value, but rather opens our minds and hearts to a teaching which defies straightforward articulation, however overtly it may assert the free creation of the universe! The initial challenge will be to recognise those moments, while the next one will be to resist the offer of some to decode them for us, thereby promising to clarify what scripture itself leaves obscure. Yet as each of these thinkers joins the Rambam to insist: neither obscurity nor the idolatrous pretension to know need be the last word. For we can let ourselves be guided by these liminal moments in our revelations to respond with a willing heart, letting the obscurity lead us to give witness to the truth which emerges from our puzzlement. Then we will have learned how to apprentice our powers of reasoning to a revelation which can shape both our understanding and our lives, as we allow the power inherent in that revealing activity to be made manifest in thought and in action.

Following through with Aquinas

To show how Aquinas’ classical treatment corroborates that of his interlocutor, Moses Maimonides, as well as that of his fellow Dominican successor, Meister Eckhart, and of Ibn al-Arabi, I would like to examine a thesis recently proposed by Denys Turner's Faith, Reason and the Existence of God,Footnote ¹⁴ using it to explore the neuralgic issue of the ‘univocity of being’, which Scotists demand as the precondition for the rational pursuit of theology, and others of us regard as the door to ‘ontotheology’ and eventually (with Maimonides) to idolatry!

But first to Deny Turner's thesis: it is quite straightforward, though its implementation is philosophically astute and persuasive. In that respect, it is reminiscent of John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1992), while the thesis is developed in vigorous dialogue with Milbank. Turner contends (against most contemporary philosophical theologians) that the insistence in 1870 by the First Vatican Council ‘that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason’ is not only true, but must be accepted if our faith is to mean anything in the larger human arena, which he identifies as the very point of the Vatican statement. Moreover, he supplies the therapy appropriate to philosophical inquiry, tracing our spontaneous opposition to this insistence to a view of reason which cannot countenance the range of reason native to Aquinas’ mode of inquiry. Indeed, he insists that an Enlightenment set of presumptions about reason forced many to reject the claim in question: whatever reason can conclude must, by that very fact, be circumscribed within the presumed limits of reason, so the God we worship cannot be demonstrated. Yet Turner proceeds to show us how, as Aquinas employs reason, a rational proof can conclude to an object which it realises it cannot comprehend, in such a way that the very structure of human reason can anticipate that of faith.

It may help to grasp the novelty of this utterly traditional reading of Aquinas to contrast it with the bulk of twentieth-century Thomism, and then see how it culminates a series of recent studies intended to reorient that trajectory. The ‘Thomism’ in question stems from Leo XIII's rousing encyclical Aeternae Patris (1893) and lasts up to the emergence of the nouvelle theologie in the 1950s, followed before long by the work of Barth's Catholic interlocutor, Han Urs von Balthasar. The signature of this early ‘Thomism’ was a bifurcation between ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’, which became institutionalised in Catholic colleges and universities, along with the imposition on Aquinas himself of an Enlightenment view of reason privileging certitude over understanding. The penetrating historical work on Aquinas (of Chenu, Grabmann and others) contributed to the demise of this version of Thomism, since that work followed the lineaments of ressourcement, refusing to content itself with bare conceptual elaboration. Such contextual studies informed the work of my mentor in Aquinas, Bernard Lonergan, whose encouragement of our ‘search for understanding’ revealed (by contrast) how much earlier responses to Leo XIII's call to return to Aquinas had in fact been shaped by a Cartesian ‘need for certitude’. Indeed, Lonergan's lasting philosophical inspiration had been John Henry Newman – himself quite opposed to the ‘Thomism’ he encountered on becoming Catholic.

What has subsequently emerged, largely through the sustained work of the Thomas Institut in Utrecht, has rather been a keen appreciation of the way Aquinas himself serves as a model for transforming philosophical categories into subtle instruments for elucidating the sui generis ‘distinction’ of creator from creatures. This shift in focus, from a ‘Thomism’ which hardened lines of delineation between ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’ to one more sensitive to Aquinas’ own practice of interpenetration, can be traced to a lapidary remark of Josef Pieper, that ‘the hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas is creation’.Footnote ¹⁵ By which he meant free creation, itself an affirmation of faith; effectively subverting the stark bifurcation between ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology’ endemic to neo-Thomism.Footnote ¹⁶ The bifurcation inspired institutional arrangements in Catholic universities whereby ‘philosophy’ (i.e. Thomism) was to speak to a wider public, thereby offering an appropriately ‘secular’ way of evangelising. This never succeeded, of course, since secular interlocutors sensed other premises to be surreptitiously at work, thereby corroborating Pieper's prescient observation.

Turner's treatment of Aquinas’ distinctive use of reason culminates a series of salient accounts, including those of David Braine, Eugene Rogers and four Dominicans: Herbert McCabe, Fergus Kerr, Brian Davies and Gregory Rocca.Footnote ¹⁷ What distinguishes Turner's treatment is his sustained focus on the ineffable creator/creature relation, and the way this difference, differing as it does from any difference among creatures, demands a special set of strategies for properly affirming similarity-cum-difference. Indeed, Aquinas’ strategies of ‘naming God’ ‘reflect and replicate within reason the tensions between affirmative and negative moments which structure the inner nature of belief itself’ (p. 51). Moreover, this internal parallel between the structures of reason and of faith properly distinguishes Aquinas’ philosophical theology from that of Scotus, and also (on Turner's incisive account) nullifies the standard objections (rooted in Scotus) to arguments employing analogous terms. As he puts it:

Here we have a preliminary response to the persistent query regarding to whom it is that Scotus is objecting in his insistence that ‘being’ (as used of creator and of creatures) must be used univocally. His obvious foil is Henry of Ghent's account of analogy, but the suspicion lingers that Aquinas is the hidden (and perhaps the real) target. Yet if their views so differ regarding the very capacity of reason, then Scotus’ demand for univocity as the precondition for proper reasoning in theology would simply bypass Aquinas’ presuppositions. Indeed, in the terms in which Scotus poses it, the move is quite comprehensible and also allows us to see why most philosophers of religion will spontaneously endorse it.Footnote ¹⁸ For the reason which Turner elaborates as that of Aquinas is decidedly other than the Enlightenment view which prevails in current philosophy of religion. Indeed, it is precisely by developing such a view of reason that he can defend the insistence of the First Vatican Council that Catholic believers must believe that the existence of God can be proved.

Standard objections to this demand – paradigmatically those of Karl Barth – simply presume that anything which is a product of reason must be comprehensible to reason, so that whatever god might be demonstrated could hardly be the incomprehensible God of Abrahamic believers. Yet Turner's extended riposte delineates how the reason to which Aquinas introduces us ‘reaches its limit not in some final question-stopping answer but rather in a final answer-stopping question. Proof comes into it on the one hand as the characteristically and centrally rational activity of demonstrating the necessity of the question [why is there something at all rather than nothing?], and on the other as the demonstration of the impossibility of taking full rational possession of what must count as its answer. For the answer could not have the form of a knowable “something:”.’ Turner calls this exercise of reason ‘“kenotic”, for as it were from “below” it completes itself in its self-emptying, apophatic, depletion in that which is “above” it’ (pp. 232–3). Put more simply: presuming reason cannot negotiate the difference between creator and creatures without neutralising it overlooks the sophisticated ways which reason itself has of delineating how this difference differs from differences between creatures. Echoing both Kathryn Tanner and Robert Sokolowski, he notes how ‘Augustine's sense of the divine “otherness” is such as to place it, in point of transcendence, closer to my creaturehood than it is possible for any creatures to be to each other. For creatures are more distinct from each other than God can possibly be to any of them’ (p. 214).Footnote ¹⁹ Furthermore, since ‘the difference between God and creatures cannot stand on the same logical ground as differences between creatures stand on’, he counters Scotus’ insistence on univocity by insisting that ‘no a fortiori case seems warranted that, since there are objections to arguments across genera [from Aristotle], even if successful, they must apply all the more to suppositious arguments for God. Hence it is a logically open question whether argument can get you “across” the gap’ (pp. 214–15).

The ‘gap’, of course, cannot be imagined or articulated extensionally, as Kathryn Tanner has reminded us, yet Scotus’ equal insistence that ‘were being not a univocal concept, no science of metaphysics would be possible’ leads him to conclude that ‘the primacy of being as a univocal concept [becomes] the necessary condition for metaphysics, for any language about God and for any science of theology’.Footnote ²⁰ Thus Mary Beth Ingham, with whom Richard Cross concurs, in his book as well as in a personal communication regarding Denys Turner's arguments:

Clearly what both authors are presupposing is a univocal meaning for ‘science’, while Rudi te Velde (in a recent manuscript) identifies the work of ‘the Thomas Institut at the University of Utrecht [as having] developed a way of reading the theology of Thomas presented as a consistent negative theology’.Footnote ²¹ Indeed, one of this group (Harm Goris) has shown how Aquinas displaces Ibn Sina's crucial distinction of necessary from contingent being to focus more directly on the activity of creating, as at once distinguishing the creator from all else while linking them as well.Footnote ²² Yet a ‘science’ utilising the sui generis notion of causality which must characterise ‘the emanation of all of being from the universal cause of being’ (ST 1.44.5) will hardly be using ‘cause’ in a fashion univocal with causes within the universe; that is, with what we call ‘science’ could understand a cause to be. So it will be that anyone familiar with ‘the way Aquinas practises’ theology could never imagine his intent to illustrate how theologia could be a scientia resulting in a ‘science’ on all fours with other sciences.

Indeed, some fascinating recent work on Aquinas is intent on showing how he must transform Aristotelian definitions and categories to achieve this explicit intent: to retain enough structural similarity with ‘science’ as Aristotle conceived it to show that theology qualifies, but never to demand that the resulting ‘science’ fit a template. This is what a ‘consistent negative theology’ will demand, once one identifies creation as the founding activity, with the resulting transformation of Aristotelian substance (‘what exists in itself’ by contrast with accidents) into what exists ‘in relation to its source’: esse ad creatorem. So what Aquinas had to develop, through the way he practises the art of reasoning proper to theology, is a way of reasoning which respects difference, teaching us how to discern relevant differences, and so refine our native capacities to employ key terms analogously. If the only alternatives are univocity or equivocity, Scotus would be right; but ordinary language use displays terms used evaluatively (and therefore analogously), which we learn how to use in practical reasoning, as Jesus did in reminding univocally minded Pharisees that he ‘came to save not the just but sinners’. So the initial step into the kingdom he announced will involve foregoing any empirical way of identifying either group, thereby suggesting quite different norms governing self-knowledge and practice, but ones intelligible to any practised agent. Similar things could be said of the ‘science of metaphysics’, since the univocal notion of being which Scotists contend can alone ground such a ‘science’ must itself be so thin that it is doubtful if it could ‘ground’ any substantive inquiry. Indeed, there can be no answer to the pseudo-query: ‘How many things are there in the room?’ any more than one can find a generic animal in the local animal shelter.

Returning to the vexatious metaphor of the ‘gap’, Denys Turner positively identifies the ‘kenotic’ exercise of reason (needed for a ‘consistent negative theology’, te Velde) as ‘proto-sacramental’: it is in the esse or ‘actuality’ of creatures, ‘their deepest reality, that creatures reveal the Creator who has brought them to be, ex nihilo, so that as the questioning gets closer and closer to God, it gets deeper and deeper into, not further distanced from, the creature’ (pp. 256–7). Rational discourse of this sort becomes ‘proto-sacramental’ as it attempts to delineate ‘the difference between a created and an uncreated world [which] is no difference at all in so far as concerns how you describe it.. . . The only difference it makes is all the difference to everything’ (pp. 257–8). Yet that peculiar difference is also the ‘foundation of the very possibility of. . . God's intimacy to the world as Creator, [which in turn] is the foundation of that other intimacy of God to creation which is the incarnation’ (p. 258). So a reason which keeps attempting to articulate this peculiar difference deserves to be called ‘proto-sacramental’ in the strongest sense. Moreover, in the other two Abrahamic faiths, al-Ghazali and Maimonides both argued that only a free creation could render possible the ‘coming down’ of the Qur'an to Muhammad or the giving of the Torah to Moses.

Denys Turner has identified the deeper reason for this internal connection between the deliverances of faith and of reason: the very capacity of reason to reason to a termination which shows itself to transcend the categories native to reason. Enlightenment reason, ex professo, was restricted (either on Kant's terms or the empiricists’) to its categories, so its deliverances are inherently ‘categorical’, whereas the exercise of reason most illustrative of this further reach lies in the judicious use of analogical language. Yet a reason which professes not to be able to execute such a reach will be forced to deny the propriety of analogous discourse. But rather than attempt to delegitimise analogous discourse a priori, one needs only to attend to ‘the way Aquinas practises it’ to find illuminating ways of proceeding in these matters. We are fortunate to find in Denys Turner's most recent work a diagnosis of this practice which exposes the genius of Aquinas’ adaptation of philosophical reason to theological ends. And in each case, we shall be observing the spirit of the Rambam's inquiry, though moving beyond his stark denials, as we examine ways of employing human reason to articulate a God distinct but never separate from the universe that God creates.