Apophatic trends

Apophaticism has become quite fashionable. Contemporary theologians seem drawn to it for at least two reasons: first, given that traditional God-talk has been used to underwrite oppressive social structures, some theologians see apophaticism as a way of distancing that talk from its referent, so as to destabilise its authority (and ability to hold people in its bondage). If God is known only as ‘The Unknown’, the thinking goes, then any reference to God is symbolic and, thus, eminently replaceable.Footnote ¹ The second reason could be characterised as theology's ongoing struggle with Kant: if we can only have knowledge of – and intelligible reference to –that of which we have (a) sense-experience and (b) adequate concepts, it would seem that we can neither know nor refer to God. In addition to the fact that, on this account, God is not an object of our perception, even if God were, we could not make sense of such perception, because we lack the conceptual resources to do so; concepts only ‘work’ for objects which we can compare to, classify with, and differentiate from other objects, whereas God cannot be put in a series with anything else.Footnote ² In light of these limitations, some theologians turn to apophaticism, embracing our Kantian constraints. Hence, because (a) traditional God-talk has been used oppressively and (b) reference to God seems unintelligible, several contemporary theologians have sought refuge in apophaticism.

A correlate trend is the attempt to broaden our notion of which theologians belong in the ‘apophatic tradition’. The story runs something like this: apophaticism is not limited to Pseudo-Dionysius, John of Damascus and a handful of ‘Eastern’ theologians; it is, in fact, the majority tradition in the church's history, a fact to which we have been blinded because we have been looking back with modernity's eyes. Apophatic theologians have, accordingly, engaged in a bit of ‘Whig history’: they have reinterpreted certain key figures in order to show that these figures belong to a story which culminates in contemporary apophaticism.Footnote ³ Thomas Aquinas, unsurprisingly, has been one of the favourite targets of such a ‘second look’.Footnote ⁴

Victor Preller's Divine Science and the Science of God – subtitled ‘A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas’ – may be the best example of this approach.Footnote ⁵ Preller begins with the simple claim that, ‘[w]hen a significant concept is used to refer, the user is said to intend the object to which the concept refers’. Thomas, on Preller's account, agrees with this claim and with its theological correlate: ‘In order to refer to God, it would seem that we must be able to intend him – to “have him in mind”. To have something “in mind”, however, is to have some notion of what it is. God, says Aquinas, is that “being” concerning which we cannot know what he is or how he exists.’Footnote ⁶ If I want to refer to, or think intelligibly about, anything, I must have some conceptual grip on the object of that reference, but God's very nature is such that I cannot get this sort of grip. ‘To locate a thing within logical space’, Preller remarks, ‘is to imply that at some level of analysis it is a sort of thing – it belongs to at least one general class of real or possible referents. The name “God”, however, is unique: God, says Aquinas, falls into no general class. God cannot be located within logical space in terms of which we make significant references. There can be no conceptually significant intention of what God is, how he exists, or how he is related to things of which we can have meaningful intentions’. Accordingly, ‘[i]t is not clear that we can have “God” in mind when we say “God” – it is not therefore clear what we have in mind’.Footnote ⁷ Because God fits into none of our conceptual categories, and because we can only intelligibly refer to those entities on which we have some conceptual grip, Thomas concludes (according to Preller) that we cannot refer intelligibly to God. The moral of Preller's story is that in theology, ‘the way of remotion reigns supreme. We are closest to the truth when we deny of God that which we have consciously “in mind” – that which occurs significantly within our language’.Footnote ⁸ Thomas, on this account, clearly belongs in the apophatic tradition – indeed, according to Preller, no passage in the Summa can be rightly understood apart from Thomas's ‘apophatic rule’, that ‘[i]n this life God is radically unintelligible’.Footnote ⁹

Before proceeding, we should note that Preller's assertions about Thomas's ‘apophatic rule’ are intended to serve Preller's insistence that Thomas's Five Ways are not intended as ‘proofs’: Thomas, on Preller's account, knows that we cannot refer intelligibly to God, which means that he cannot have intended his ‘proofs’ in the way that they are usually read. Their point, Preller counters, is precisely apophatic: Thomas uses them ‘to drive home again and again the fundamental claim that man cannot know God in this life even by the most intense application of his higher intellectual faculties’.Footnote ¹⁰ Because Preller sees apophaticism functioning as a sort of rule for Thomas, he claims that Thomas cannot have endorsed any proofs of God's existence. To be clear, then, in regard to Preller's argument – that (a) Thomas was not engaged in ‘natural theology’, because (b) such natural theology would violate Thomas's apophatic rule – I am in agreement with some version of (a), but not (b).Footnote ¹¹ The reasons for this should become clear as my argument unfolds.

My argument, briefly stated, is that apophaticism is not a ‘rule’ governing the entire Summa; on the contrary, apophaticism is one of the tools that Thomas uses to establish his overall argument, namely, that we can make meaningful statements about God. Attention to the structure of the Summa's first thirteen questions will, I think, substantiate this claim.Footnote ¹²

Thomas's apophaticism

At first blush, this argument seems to have little to recommend it, given that Thomas does have a rule to the effect that in this life we cannot know God's essence: ‘It is impossible’, Thomas asserts, ‘for any created intellect to see the essence of God by its own natural power’ (I.12.4).Footnote ¹³ This rule follows from Thomas's epistemology: ‘[f]or knowledge is regulated according as the thing known is in the knower’, he writes. ‘But the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Hence the knowledge of every knower is ruled according to its own nature. If therefore the mode of anything's being exceeds the mode of the knower, it must result that the knowledge of that object is above the nature of the knower. Therefore the created intellect cannot see the essence of God’ (I.12.4). According to Thomas, our knowledge of anything depends upon two factors: our (sense-)apprehension of that thing and our conceptualisation of that apprehension. To know something, we must first apprehend it: ‘it is natural to man’, Thomas observes, ‘to attain intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense’ (I.1.9). To have a sense-impression is not yet to have knowledge, however, ‘[f]or vision is made actual only when the thing seen is in a certain way in the seer’. But how can a thing seen – a stone, for instance – be ‘in’ the seer? ‘[I]n corporeal things’, Thomas answers, ‘it is clear that the thing seen cannot be by its essence in the seer, but only by its likeness; as the similitude of a stone is in the eye, whereby vision is made actual; whereas the substance of the stone is not there’ (I.12.3). To see a ‘stone’, therefore (and not merely to have the neural effects of the light reflected from a stone), we must have in mind the concept (‘likeness’) of a stone. These concepts are the result of abstractions from mental images (I.85.1).Footnote ¹⁴ To put the point in a slightly different idiom, when the light from a stone stimulates the neurons in my eye, I only perceive those stimulations as a stone when they are met by the concept of a ‘stone’ – and this concept is the result of repeated interactions with such sense-apprehension, an ongoing process of ‘composing and dividing’ such apprehensions into concepts.Footnote ¹⁵ Because these are the twin conditions of perception, it follows that, ‘according to the present state of life’, perception ‘extend[s] to material things only . . . Hence in the present life we cannot understand separate immaterial substances in themselves’ (I.88.1). Given (a) that we can only know something as something insofar as we have a concept of that thing and (b) that such concepts are based upon abstractions (‘composition and division’) from mental images of sense-apprehension, it follows (c) that we cannot know God as God in this life. We cannot have a concept of God in this life, because (a) God is an immaterial substance, which entails (i) that we cannot have sense-experience of God and (ii) that we cannot have a concept of God, because concepts derive from abstraction (a process of increasing immateriality), whereas we cannot abstract from God to anything more immaterial (I.88.1, ad 5); and we cannot have a concept of God because (b) concept formation is a matter of composing and dividing, which presupposes an entity's existence in a class of such entities – but God is not in any class (I.3.5). As a consequence of these considerations, Thomas considers it a rule that we cannot know God's essence – know God as God –in this life.

‘In this life’ is, to be sure, a crucial qualification – Thomas maintains that such knowledge is not ruled out absolutely, but only under present conditions, for ‘if we suppose that the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else beside God; which is opposed to faith’ (I.12.1). Thomas must, therefore, provide an account of such knowledge, presumably one that coheres with his epistemology. This he does. He repeats his epistemological supposition that ‘two things are required both for sensible and for intellectual vision – viz., power of sight, and union of the thing seen with the sight’, which entails that ‘to see God, there must be some similitude of God on the part of the visual faculty, whereby the intellect is made capable of seeing God. But on the part of the object seen, which must necessarily be united to the seer, the essence of God cannot be seen by any created similitude . . . Therefore it must be said that to see the essence of God there is required some similitude in the visual faculty, namely, the light of glory’ (I.12.3). In the light of glory, the beatific vision, we will see God as God, because we will be united to God – united to the Word by which God knows Godself, who breathes forth the Spirit of love for God (cf. I.43.5, ad 2). United to God, we will accordingly see God through Godself.Footnote ¹⁶

Beyond apophaticism

This picture of eschatological fulfilment cuts two ways, however: it indicates the promise of seeing God as God, but it also points out the limitations of our present knowledge. This is the limitation which Thomas sets for himself at the beginning of the Summa: if in this life we cannot know God as God, what can we say about God? Thomas addresses this question by combining two premises: first, that ‘God’ is the name which we give to the cause of all that is; and second, that our thinking about God must proceed by way of negation. On the basis of these premises, Thomas funds his claim that we can make positive statements about God. The via negativa, in other words, is a step in Thomas's argument, not a rule governing his theology.

Granted that we do not know God's essence, we cannot define God – but we can talk about God's effects. ‘Although we cannot know in what consists the essence of God’, Thomas maintains, ‘nevertheless in this science we make use of his effects, either of nature or of grace, in place of a definition’ (I.1.7, ad 1). If we attend to their context, we can see that the Five Ways are precisely a means of using God's effects in place of a proper definition – or, better, as a way of grasping the contours of such a definition. Thomas defends his ‘proofs’ in just these terms: he argues that

Thomas recognises that, in this life, we cannot know God's essence as such. Thomas also recognises, however, an invaluable feature of ‘proofs’ of a cause's existence: as he notes here, one can ‘prove’ the existence of an effect's cause without knowing the essence of that cause. Such ‘proofs’ therefore supply just what Thomas is looking for, namely, a way of talking about ‘God’ even though we cannot know God's essence. Such ‘proofs’ take roughly the following form: ‘for any effect E of “X”, “X” is defined as “the X which causes E”’. This seems trivial, and that is just the point – in order to get such an argument off the ground, we only need to know that E is an effect of ‘X’, even where ‘X’ is only a placeholder for ‘that which causes E’. The Five Ways are five instances of this sort of argument: ‘God’, Thomas claims, is the cause of E. In this way, without violating his insistence that we cannot in this life know or define God's essence, Thomas proposes to specify the term ‘God’.

The content of those Five Ways is, to be sure, all too familiar.Footnote ¹⁷ First, one of ‘God's’ effects is motion, from which we conclude ‘that it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God’.Footnote ¹⁸ Second, one of ‘God's’ effects is cause-and-effect itself, which entails that ‘it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God’. Third, one of ‘God's’ effects is non-necessary (or ‘merely probable’) things, such that ‘we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.’ Fourth, one of ‘God's’ effects is the goodness in things, from which it follows that ‘there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God’. Finally, a fifth effect of ‘God’ is the teleological ordering of all that is; accordingly, ‘some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God’ (I.2.3). With the Five Ways, then, Thomas has taken an unknown, ‘God’, and added some specifications of its content: the one we call ‘God’ is first mover, first efficient cause, absolutely necessary, perfect and the director-toward-ends.Footnote ¹⁹

None of these content-specifications says anything positive about ‘God’, however – they merely provide some of the parameters within which positive statements might be made. In order to arrive at such statements, Thomas proceeds with the via negativa: ‘Now, because we cannot know what God is’, he repeats, ‘but rather what he is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how he is not’ (I.3, prologue). Thomas begins by negating that which is contrary to the specifications established in demonstrating ‘God's’ existence: ‘it can be shown how God is not’, Thomas argues, ‘by denying of him whatever is opposed to the idea of him – viz., composition, motion, and the like’ (I.3, prologue). If we know that ‘God’ is the cause of certain effects, then we can reasonably rule out that which is incompatible with ‘God’ causing these effects.

Thomas thus infers (1) that ‘God’, as first being, ‘must of necessity be in act, and in no way in potentiality’, for ‘whatever is in potentiality can be reduced into actuality only by some being in actuality’ (I.3.1). God must be pure act, for otherwise, God could not be the cause of the effects attributed to ‘God’ – because a not-purely-actual God would need to be actualised by another, another to whom the name ‘God’ would then properly belong. It must also be true (2) that ‘God’ is pure form, without composition of form and matter, because the cause of ‘God's’ effects must be pure agency: ‘because every agent acts by its form . . . the manner in which it has its form is the manner in which it is an agent. Therefore whatever is primarily and essentially an agent must be primarily and essentially form. Now God is the first agent, since he is the first efficient cause. He is therefore of his essence a form; and not composed of matter and form’ (I.3.2). From this fact, Thomas infers that (3) ‘God’ is the same as God's essence, because ‘in things not composed of matter and form, in which individualization is not due to individual matter – that is to say, to this matter . . . it is necessary that the forms themselves should be subsisting supposita. Therefore suppositum and nature in them are identified.’ And because this is the case, ‘[s]ince God is not composed of matter and form, he must be his own Godhead, his own life, and whatever else is predicated of him’ (I.3.3). ‘God’, then, is identical with God's essence – and (4) God's essence is identical with God's existence. ‘[E]xistence’, Thomas claims, ‘is that which makes every form or nature actual . . . Therefore, existence must be compared to essence, if the latter is a distinct reality, as actuality to potentiality. Therefore, since in God there is no potentiality, it follows that in him essence does not differ from existence. Therefore his essence is his existence’ (I.3.4). Similarly, Thomas maintains that (5) ‘God’ has no accidents, ‘because a subject is compared to its accidents as potentiality to actuality; for a subject is in some sense made actual by its accidents. But there can be no potentiality in God . . . Hence it follows that there is no accident in God’ (I.3.6).

In these five steps, then, Thomas has simply negated that which (by his lights, at least) is incompatible with the ‘God’ identified in the Five Ways – and in so doing, he has closed the gap between ‘God’ (construed as a placeholder for the unknown cause of certain effects) and God. Beginning with the rule that we cannot know God-in-Godself, Thomas has established that God's agency, existence, and ‘accidents’ are identical with God-in-Godself – which entails that, if we can find some way to speak about this agency, we will have meaningful knowledge of God's essence. It is crucial to note the role played here by the via negativa: from the rule that we cannot know God's essence in this life, Thomas concludes that we can only make statements about what God is not, but from these statements about what God is not, he has concluded that we can make positive statements about God's essence.

Thomas has not yet made any such statements, however; he has merely established some of the conditions for doing so. To make such statements, Thomas proceeds to a third set of arguments, intended to build a material link between God's essence and God's effects. Thomas begins these arguments by, once again, negating that which cannot be true of ‘God’: ‘the first active principle must needs be most actual’, Thomas writes, ‘and therefore most perfect, for a thing is perfect in proportion to its state of actuality, because we call that perfect which lacks nothing of the mode of its perfection’ (I.4.1). God could not be the one indicated by the Five Ways if God were somehow imperfect, so Thomas insists (1) that we must deny imperfection in God – which is another way of saying that God is perfect. Because this is the case, and because we find various perfections in created things, Thomas concludes (2) that every created perfection must preexist in God: ‘Since therefore God is the first effective cause of things’, Thomas argues, ‘the perfections of all things must preexist in God in a more eminent way’ (I.4.2). Given that every created perfection preexists in God, Thomas maintains (3) that creatures bear some likeness to God. Creatures are not, of course, duplicates of God, because such duplication would require God and creatures to be members of a common genus. Thomas is, accordingly, careful in his formulation: ‘if there is an agent not contained in any genus’, he remarks, ‘its effects will still more distantly reproduce the form of the agent, not, that is, so as to participate in the likeness of the agent's form according to the same specific or generic formality, but only according to some sort of analogy; as existence is common to all. In this way all created things, so far as they are beings, are like God as the first and universal principle of all being’ (I.4.3). On account of the absolute ontological distance (so to speak) between God and creatures, creatures cannot be duplicates of God – the only resemblance between God and creatures is that both are (‘have being’). Being is something that God can have in common with creatures, Thomas notes, precisely because being is not a genus (I.3.5) – creatures can resemble God insofar as they are, just as God is, without violating the rule that God is not a member of any genus. Because ‘being’ is not a genus, it provides Thomas with a basis for connecting God and creatures.Footnote ²⁰

To this, Thomas then adds the claim (4) that ‘Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea’ (I.5.1). This is the case, he argues, because ‘a thing is desirable only insofar as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect insofar as it exists; for it is existence that makes things actual . . . Hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really’ (I.5.1). Everything that is, Thomas claims, desires its own perfection – what everything desires, in other words, is the actualisation of its to-be-ing. Given that goodness is that which is an object of desire, and that being is the good desired by everything that is, it follows that being is convertible with goodness. Everything that is desires its own perfection (cf. also I.5.3). This fact entails (5) that all that is, is orientated toward a telos: ‘Since goodness is that which all things desire’, Thomas reasons, ‘and since this has the aspect of an end, it is clear that goodness implies the aspect of an end’ (I.5.4). From here, it is a short step for Thomas to argue (6) that the telos desired by all that is is God: ‘[a]ll things’, he insists, ‘by desiring their own perfection, desire God himself, inasmuch as the perfections of all things are so many similitudes of the divine being’ (I.6.1, ad 2). All that is comes from God, and all that is desires God as its end. Because this is the case, we can now see a proper connection between God and creatures: God is the perfection of all that is, which entails God is the One in whom all creaturely goodness preexists.

Thomas has, then, identified a basis for making positive statements about God. Given the complexity of this argument, let me summarise it before proceeding to those statements:

1. 1. In this life, we cannot know God's essence.

2. 2. Without knowing a thing's essence, we can specify its content by identifying it as the cause of whatever effects are attributed to it. This thought motivates Thomas's Five Ways, wherein ‘God’ is identified as first mover, first efficient cause, absolutely necessary, perfect and the director-toward-ends.

3. 3. Following the via negativa, Thomas rules out whatever is incompatible with ‘God’ being the cause of these effects. He thus argues that God must be without composition, from which it follows that God is (a) pure actuality and (b) form without matter; (c) that ‘God’ is identical with God's nature; (d) that God's essence is identical with God's existence; and (e) that God has no accidents. By ruling out that which is incompatible with God being the cause of the world, Thomas has assembled the conceptual resources necessary for a positive account of God – for if we can identify God's agency, we can attribute that activity to God's essence.

4. 4. Thomas identifies ‘being’ as the key term of this attribution. Because being is not a genus, we can licitly ascribe it to both God and creatures. Thomas then argues that all that is desires its perfection, and that all perfection is found in God.

This, in sum, is the way Thomas assembles the conceptual resources necessary for positive statements about God. The via negativa plays an indispensable role in providing these resources, but it is clearly not a ‘rule’ governing all of Thomas's theology; it is, on the contrary, a ladder that Thomas climbs . . . and then kicks away.

Signifying God's essence

In the question on naming God, Thomas spells out the implications of these arguments for God-talk. Thomas here notes that we can, in fact, genuinely signify God's essence. Not all names can do so, of course: ‘Negative names applied to God or signifying his relation to creatures manifestly do not at all signify his substance, but rather express the distance of the creature from him or his relation to something else’ (I.13.2). If we say, for example, that God is not created, or that God is the one upon whom creation depends, we have not yet spoken of God's essence – in the first instance, because saying what God is not does not indicate what God is, and in the second instance because God's relation to creatures cannot be considered a part of God's essence, for if it were, creatures would be necessary to God. As the preceding arguments have led us to expect, however, there are names which can signify God's essence. Thomas sets precise terms for such signification: ‘as regards absolute and affirmative names of God’, he maintains, ‘such as good, wise, and the like . . . these names signify the divine substance, and are predicated substantially of God, although they fall short of a full representation of him’. This is the case, because our positive knowledge of God is consequent upon creation's tending toward God's goodness – and therein lies both the significance and limitation of such knowledge. ‘Now since our intellect knows God from creatures’, Thomas explains, ‘it knows him as far as creatures represent him. Now it was shown above that God prepossesses in himself all the perfections of creatures, being himself simply and universally perfect. Hence every creature represents him, and is like him so far as it possesses some perfection; yet it represents him not as something of the same species or genus, but as the excelling principle of whose form the effects fall short, although they derive some kind of likeness thereto’. As such, ‘the aforesaid names signify the divine substance, but in an imperfect manner, even as creatures represent it imperfectly. So when we say, God is good, the meaning is not, God is the cause of goodness, or, God is not evil; but the meaning is, Whatever good we attribute to creatures, preexists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way’ (I.13.2). Note well the senses that Thomas denies to the statement, ‘God is good’: it signifies neither God's relation to creatures, nor something that God is not – neither, that is, of the two senses that cannot, according to Thomas, signify God's essence. The significance of positive statements about God's essence, on the contrary, is based upon the fact that all creatures tend toward God as the telos of their being. When we say, therefore, that God is wise, we are not saying that God is the cause of our wisdom, nor that God is not foolish; we are, rather, saying that, insofar as any creature is wise, that wisdom depends upon and tends toward that wisdom which is proper to God. In this way, the predicate ‘wise’ depends neither upon negation nor relation to creatures, and can accordingly be taken as a name for God's essence. Thomas thus insists that, ‘[a]s regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to him’ (I.13.3).Footnote ²¹

We can, accordingly, signify God's essence – but we can do so only ‘imperfectly’. Thomas cites one relevant difference between predicating a name of God and of creatures: ‘all perfections existing in creatures are divided and multiplied, [whereas they] preexist in God unitedly. Thus, when any term expressing perfection is applied to a creature, it signifies that perfection distinct in idea from other perfections . . . whereas when we apply it to God, we do not mean to signify anything distinct in idea from other perfections’ (I.13.5). Whereas perfections exist severally in creatures, they exist unitedly in God; accordingly, that which we predicate individually of creatures exists undividedly in God. As a result, when we ascribe some perfection to a creature, this ‘in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God; but it leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name’ (I.13.5). With this (ontological, not semantic) difference in mind, however, Thomas appears to suggest that concepts themselves mean the same thing when predicated of God and creatures: in such predication, he argues, ‘a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing; thus healthy applied to urine signifies the sign of animal health, and applied to medicine signifies the cause of the same health’ (I.13.5). If I say that someone has healthy skin, or a healthy laugh, or a healthy outlook on life, the word ‘healthy’ is referring to things which are signs of health. If, on the other hand, I say that someone has a healthy diet, or a healthy pattern of exercise, ‘healthy’ refers to causes of health. In both instances, however, ‘health’ means the same thing – the difference is not an equivocation in the term's meaning, but a difference in that to which the term is applied. Thomas's account of analogy is not intended as a way of saying that our concepts only ‘sort of’ mean the same thing when applied to God and creatures, but that a single concept – with a consistent meaning – is applied to two very different sorts of thing, and that we must keep these differences in mind. When we say, therefore, that ‘God is wise’, the term ‘wise’ means the same thing it always does – but since it is applied to God, we must remember that God's wisdom is not distinct from God's love, God's mercy, God's justice, etc. The difference in applying a term to God and to creatures is ontological, not semantic.Footnote ²²

This approach is exemplified by Thomas's treatment of God's love (though, note well, his treatment of God's life, justice, and mercy follow the same pattern). Thomas begins by defining love in creaturely terms, and then ascribes precisely this meaning of ‘love’ to God:

Thomas is answering the question of whether love exists in God, and toward this end he starts with an account of creaturely love as that which moves the appetite toward the good. Thomas applies this meaning of ‘love’ directly to God: since ‘it has been shown that will is in God’, Thomas reasons, ‘we must attribute love to him’ (I.20.1). What does ‘love’ mean when predicated of God? Just what it means when predicated of creatures: love is that which moves the appetite to desire the good. The conceptual content is precisely the same. When we apply the concept to God, the concept itself does not change – just as the concept ‘healthy’ does not change when variously applied to skin or lifestyle.

Given what we know about skin and lifestyle, of course, we will say that skin is a sign of health, and that lifestyle is a cause of health. We can, in other words, identify relevant differences among the things of which a concept is predicated. In the same way, Thomas points out the relevant differences between predicating something of God and of creatures – but he does so on ontological, not semantic, grounds. ‘[S]ince to love anything is nothing else than to will good to that thing’, Thomas writes, ‘it is manifest that God loves everything that exists. Yet not as we love. Because since our will is not the cause of the goodness of things, but is moved by it as by its object, our love, whereby we will good to anything, is not the cause of its goodness; but conversely its goodness, whether real or imaginary, calls forth our love . . . whereas the love of God infuses and creates goodness’ (I.20.2). To love means to will good to the thing loved – and this holds true whether we predicate love of God or creatures. The difference lies not at the semantic, but at the ontological level: when I love something, my love is a response to that thing's goodness, but when God loves something, that love generates the thing's goodness. I love, and God loves, and ‘love’ means the same thing when predicated of either – but my love responds, whereas God's love creates.

When we make positive statements about God's essence, then, we do so by affirming the preexistence in God of some creaturely good. In doing so, we apply ordinary concepts of these goods, with their usual meanings, to God. But because we are applying them to God, we recognise the way these concepts combine with relevant ontological differences. Hence, whereas Thomas's account of analogy has sometimes been understood as an element in his via negativa (as, in other words, the recognition that our concepts cannot ‘really’ refer to God), it is, in fact, a way of making positive predications about God's very essence.

Doing justice to apophatic trends

If the preceding account of Thomas is more or less correct, it brings us back to the concerns that made his putative apophaticism attractive: (a) the need for a critique of oppressive God-talk; and (b) the inability of our concepts to refer to God. Given that the preceding account sketches Thomas's response to the second concern, I will address these in reverse order.

Thomas takes our conceptual limitations as a starting-point: we cannot refer to God as God, he recognises, because (a) in this life, we cannot know God's essence, and (b) our concept-use depends upon a thing's membership in a genus, but God is in no genus. The genius of Thomas's strategy is that he moves from these limitations to making positive statements about God, without violating the initial limits. He does so, as we have seen, by exploiting two conceptual oddities: first, the fact that, in demonstrating the existence of a cause, one defines the contours of that cause without knowing its essence. This fact, in combination with the via negativa, provides Thomas with the materials which lead him to his second move: given that being is not a genus, we can use it as a common term between God and creatures – and because being implies the desire for its own perfection, and because this perfection is God, Thomas concludes that we can talk meaningfully about God as the One in whom all goodness preexists. In this way, Thomas provides epistemic justification for believing that we can refer intelligibly to God's essence.

What, however, of concerns about the way traditional God-talk has been used oppressively? One of the reasons that some feminists and liberationists have been drawn to apophaticism is that it puts so much space between God and our concepts of God – and in so doing, it allows us to talk about God in liberating ways. If one does without apophaticism, however, might one nevertheless use God-talk in liberating ways? Certainly – one could, for instance, identify liberation from oppression as one of ‘God's’ effects, and then rule out whatever is incompatible with God being the cause of that effect. This is the approach taken by Rosemary Radford Ruether, as illustrated by her claim that, ‘[t]heologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption’.Footnote ²³ ‘God’, on Ruether's account, is the cause of liberation, which means that non-liberating acts and attributes are incompatible with God.Footnote ²⁴ As this simple example suggests, we can adopt Thomas's approach without sacrificing our commitment to liberating God-talk. We can, in other words, be committed to justice without being committed to apophaticism.

Conclusion

Contrary to a fashionably apophatic reading of Thomas, it appears that the via negativa is only one moment in his construction of positive statements about God – apophaticism, ironically, is one of the steps Thomas takes in funding such statements. While we cannot, in this life, know God's essence as such, Thomas argues that we can still speak meaningfully about God. Three moves are decisive in this argument: (a) he avails himself of the peculiar features of ‘existence-proofs’ to argue that ‘God’ is the cause of certain effects, thereby delimiting the concept of ‘God’; he then (b) apophatically rules out whatever is incompatible with this concept; which allows him (c) to use the peculiar features of ‘being’ to claim that all creaturely perfections preexist in God. From this, Thomas concludes that we can use creaturely concepts to refer to God, and that we can do so without equivocation. Thomas has, ironically enough, used the via negativa as part of a strategy for dealing with some of the problems which have made apophaticism so attractive.