He suggests that words can be used to "try to mean" what God is, even though they do not circumscribe what God is. The obvious objection to this is that in, e.g., "God is good," "good" must either mean the same as it means when applied to creatures or something different. If it means the same, then God becomes another thing in the universe; if does not mean the same then we cannot know what it means by knowing about creatures -- we should have to understand God himself; but we do not, hence we so not understand it at all -- we only have an illusion of understanding because the word happens to be graphically the same as the "good" we do understand. Thomas wishes to break down this either-or. It is not true, he says, that a word must mean exactly the same in two different uses or else mean something altogether different. There is a possibility of a word being used with related meanings (Aristotle's point).
We might ask why he is not content to say simply that our language about God is metaphorical. He does not say this because he wants to distinguish between two different kinds of thing said about God; between statements like "The Lord is my rock and my refuge" and statements like "God is good." The first of these is quite compatible with its denial -- "Of course the Lord is not a rock" -- whereas the second is not. Theists would not say, "God is not good," though they are quite likely to say "God is good, but not in the way that we are." It is an important point about metaphor that while we can easily say, "God is not really a rock," we cannot so safely say, "The Lord is not a rock in the way that Gibraltar is." Being a rock in the way that Gibraltar is, is what the poet has in mind. Unless we think of God as being just like Gibraltar -- although of course not really being a rock -- we betray the poet's meaning. Qualification enervates the meaning in a way that flat contradiction does not. In the case of "good," however, since there are in any case many ways of being good amongst creatures, there is nothing incongruous in saying, "God is good, though not in our way." It does not, as Thomas insists, follow from this that to call God good is to say that God is the cause of goodness; it is to say, he thinks, that there is something we can only call goodness in God -- goodness is the best word available for signifying this although it does so imperfectly.
No metaphor is the best possible metaphor -- you can always say, "I don't really mean that." But Thomas thinks that some things said of God, even though they are imperfect, cannot be improved on by denying them: their imperfection lies in our understanding of what we are trying to mean.
--CGE (all but the first paragraph comes substantially from a note in the Blackfriars edition of Thomas' Summa theologiae)
On Mon, 13 Dec 2004, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Well, I think to the extent that such a line of argument would be
> taken up by a proponent of DA, then that proponent would seem to be
> leaving behind the reliance upon empirical based analogies which
> underly most forms of the DA. Most of the appeal of the DA rests with
> its appeal to the seemingly intuitively obvious analogies such as the
> analogy between a divine designer and human designers, between the
> universe conceived of as a designed artifact and the artificacts
> created by human workmanship. I am not sure that the notion of a
> metaphysically simple substance to which people like Aquinas, Duns
> Scotus or Leibniz might appeal to can be grounded in the sorts of
> empirically based analogies to which the DA appeals to...