Aquinas on the Names of God, Part 2: Proper and Metaphorical Names, Figures of Speech in Scripture, and the Dangers of Imagination (Q.13, Aa.2–3)

Orientation #

He refers back to “the concrete and abstract we spoke about before” and to an article in the first question “on whether Scripture should use metaphors” (both his own back-references, not resolved from the context block). At the end he notes “we’re down to Article 4 now” but runs out of time. The previous class began q. 13 aa. 1–2, and the next takes up a. 4 on why the divine names are not synonyms.

The class, in order #

1. a.2 ad 2: etymology vs. meaning of a name (“that from which the name is imposed”) #

The point: the source a name is taken from is not what it is imposed to signify; this is “another distinction that’s very important.”

• Distinction: that from which the name is imposed (he calls it the etymology) vs. that to which it is imposed (the meaning). Often connected, but not necessarily.
• Examples: a new element “berkelium” named from Berkeley, “very little connection” with its meaning; lapis, which Thomas thought came from laedit pedem (“hurts the foot”), is not imposed to signify hurting the foot but a kind of body — “otherwise everything injuring the foot would be a stone.”
• Applied: divine names are imposed from the processions of perfections from God into creatures; our understanding “according to each procession knows and names God.” But the names are not imposed to signify the processions: “God is living” does not mean “from Him proceeds life,” but signifies the beginning of things “insofar as there pre-exists in it life,” in a more eminent way than we understand or signify.
• His circle analogy: the center point is God’s simplicity; from it proceed the many perfections in creatures; we start from these and work back up. He ties this to SCG IV’s opening explanation of “ecce haec sunt partes viarum eius” — creatures are “parts of His ways,” each procession a “way.”

2. a.2 ad 3 and personal remark (“makes us seem almost dead”) #

In this life we do not know God’s essence as it is in itself, but as represented in creaturely perfections, and so the names we impose signify it that way. His own experience: when he thinks “God is alive,” he is not thinking of God merely as cause of our life, but as “alive in a way that makes us seem almost dead” (recalling De Koninck on how sluggish our minds are).

3. a.3 objections: are all divine names metaphorical? (“the Lord is my rock, or a lion”) #

“Properly” here is opposed to “figurative,” not (as elsewhere) to “improper.” He reads three objections:

1. All names of God are taken from creatures; names of creatures are said of God metaphorically (“God is a stone,” “the Lord is my rock,” “a lion”); so all are metaphorical.
2. No name is properly said of that from which it is more truly removed than affirmed; “bonus, sapiens” are more truly removed from God (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 2).
3. Names of bodies are said of God only metaphorically; but all these names signify “with time and with composition,” bodily conditions.

• He notes the objections overlook the obvious difference between “the Lord is my rock” and “God is good.”
• Aside on obj. 2: reminds him of Fourth Lateran Council (Paul VI drew his attention to it in a sermon): no likeness of creature to God can be noted without a greater unlikeness — “who is like God?”

4. Sed contra: Ambrose and translativa (“carrying over of the name”) #

Ambrose (De fide II): some names “evidently show the property of the divinity,” others are translativa, said by likeness.

• Latin translatio and Greek metaphora are etymologically the same, “carry over.” In English, “translation” has come to mean carrying over the meaning but not the words, “metaphor” carrying over the word but not the meaning (a husband calling his wife “honey” does not mean the sticky substance). Latin is not so limited: Thomas writes translatio nominis. Here Ambrose means carrying over the name, though there remains a likeness between the name’s meaning and what is meant.
• Aside: Ambrose is one of the four great Western doctors (Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, Jerome); Peter Lombard occasionally has a better text from Ambrose than from Augustine, and this one is “particularly clear.”

5. Body of a.3: the thing signified vs. the way of signifying (“the modus significandi”) #

Conclusion: names like “good,” “life” are said properly of God, indeed “more properly” and per prius, as to the perfection signified; not properly as to the way of signifying.

1. We know God from perfections proceeding from Him into creatures, which are in God more eminently.
2. Our understanding grasps them as they are in creatures, and as we grasp, so we signify.
3. So in each name consider two things: the perfection signified (goodness, life) and the modus significandi.
4. As to the perfection, the name belongs properly and per prius to God — Christ could say “God alone is good,” but not “God alone is a stone.” As to the mode (composed, concrete/abstract, fitting creatures), not properly.

6. Replies: when a name can be said only metaphorically, and the third case (“private to the creature”) #

• Ad 1: if the imperfect mode of creaturely participation is included in the name’s signification — “stone” signifies a material being — it is said of God only metaphorically. Names signifying the perfection “absolutely,” without including a creaturely way of partaking (“being, good, living”), are said properly. He adds a third case from SCG I: primum ens, summum bonum name the perfection with what is private to God’s way of having it, so are said only of God.
• Ad 2: Dionysius negates these names of God because what they signify does not belong to Him in the way the name signifies, but more excellently (“above all substance and all life”).
• Ad 3: names said properly imply bodily conditions in the way of signifying; metaphorical names imply them in the thing signified.
• Boundary case: if a metaphor takes on a new meaning (“stone” coming to mean “firm,” “sweet” coming to mean “pleasant”) it is no longer a metaphor; then “sweet” is that from which the name is taken, “pleasant” that to which — back to the a.2 distinction. Student: “Xerox” for any copy — he says that is not really a figure of speech, “more like antonomasia.”

7. Digression: Thomas on figurative speech, metaphor and irony (“the meaning of your words is not the meaning of the speaker”) #

Thomas’s best account of figures is in the Pauline commentaries, where Paul uses irony and Thomas must show he is not lying: speaking figuratively, the meaning of the words is not the meaning of the speaker, yet not by mistake; there is a connection.

• Metaphor vs. irony: connection of likeness vs. of opposition. “Honey”/“sweet” for a wife: he does not mean what the words mean but something like it (“oh thou pleasant one” would be the proper way). Romeo calling Juliet “Juliet”: properly; calling her “Rosalind”: a mistake; “honey”: metaphor.
• Irony: “Gee, you’re nice” to someone mean; a drunk under the table — “what a fine example of an Assumption College student”; Mark Antony’s “so are they all honorable men.”
• Applied: “God is good” — my words mean what I mean; “the Lord is my rock” — my word means something like what I mean (support).

8. Antonomasia, synecdoche, metonymy (“the word was made flesh”) #

He pieces together the main figures from Thomas, who never lists them all in one place; Quintilian (to whom Msgr. Dionne referred him) is “not that” good; the names come from the rhetoricians and are “horrible.”

• Antonomasia: universal whole and its part, either way — common name to the particular (Aristotle “the philosopher,” the Bible “the book,” “Christ, the Anointed One”) or particular to common (“he’s a Romeo/Casanova” = a lover; “he’s a Hamlet” = hesitant; John XXIII calling Paul VI “the Archbishop Hamlet”). Plato’s Symposium: “love” for romantic love, compared with “poet” = maker (poiein, as in the Categories), “Homer is the maker.”
• Synecdoche: integral whole and part — “the Word was made flesh”; “the toe” for a field-goal kicker; “the nose”; “the brain” for a smart kid; “in the tomb three days” (parts of days). Arius took “flesh” as if said properly, so Christ had no soul: “that’s a big heresy.” Likewise people take “God was angry/sad” properly; God in His divine nature is never sad, His human nature can be.
• Metonymy: container and contained, perhaps also cause and effect — “a wicked place” (the people), “bad times” (the events), “let the earth bless the Lord” (those on it), “I drank a cup of tea,” a man’s words called “his wisdom.”
• His grouping: metaphor and irony together (likeness/opposition of things); synecdoche and antonomasia together (whole and part, composed vs. universal); metonymy different (container/contained, cause/effect). “I’m not saying I succeeded in enumerating all the ones” — list left open.
• Uses: daily speech without noticing, Scripture, poetry, speeches (Nixon: Democratic programs are “retreads of the New Deal” — a good metaphor).

9. Scripture speaking properly and metaphorically (“God is fire”) #

What is said metaphorically in one place is said properly in another. Fire: its heat = divine love, light = knowledge, transforming power = power; “God is all-loving/knowing/powerful” is the proper statement. Fire as metaphor for the Trinity (light = Son, heat = Holy Spirit) or for God’s action on us (light before warmth: faith before charity — “a beautiful metaphor”). Burning bush: bush = human nature of Christ, fire = divine nature, not consumed = human nature not swallowed up (as heretics would have it). The Summa and Dionysius’s Divine Names give what is said properly; Dionysius’s Symbolic Theology treats the metaphorical names. “I have come to cast fire upon the earth” (Luke) is metaphorical, about love.

• Student: “light from light” in the Creed — more than metaphor? Thomas is nuanced: if light means what manifests, “light” is said more properly of understanding than of sensing; a teacher “enlightens” is proper, though some never get beyond the metaphor.
• Aside: the Adoro te devote (singled out in the post-Vatican II Enchiridion of indulgences; recently preached on at the Vatican) has rhythm, rhyme, alliteration — like Shakespeare’s “full fathom five” but for a different reason.

10. Why Scripture uses metaphors; bold imagination (“the whole of man should be subject to God”) #

Thomas’s reasons: man is led by the sensible (some never get beyond it); to stimulate the mind to find what is hidden; and (from the Sentences) the whole man should be subject to God — we genuflect with our legs, so much more the imagination, between legs and mind, “very important but also very dangerous” (Shakespeare’s “sinful fantasy”); Scripture’s metaphors bring imagination into God’s service. Also refreshing: Shakespeare after abstract philosophy; Scripture “more refreshing than the Summa.”

• The main cause of error on the side of the knowing powers, from Dionysius as developed by Thomas: “bold imagination” — imagining things other than they are, or what cannot be imagined; boldness from pride. Not new: Arius; St. Alphonsus’s thick book on heresies (seen at St. Mary’s College, California, where he taught three years before his doctorate; LBJ spoke at the centenary); “parallel universes”; his brother Mark’s Liberalism, more geometrico demonstrata (“at any point in an argument to construct a tangent”; “a liberal’s mind and reality… will never meet”), imitating English novelists who knew Euclid; Toynbee likening the monstrance to grain-deity worship; a student adds websites linking Eucharistic devotion to sun worship. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (title links fiction and imagination) is his greatest treatment of its danger; Austen’s Northanger Abbey; modern customs give imagination great prominence, a problem in the spiritual life.
• Student: Thomas on Matthew, Pilate’s wife’s dream — dreams sometimes true, sometimes false; “many have been led astray by dreams” (a wisdom book); first reaction should be caution. He agrees; St. Teresa wanted a good confessor; St. John of the Cross: even if from God, ignore them.

11. Thomas on the metaphor “sweet” (“pleasant, refreshing, and restful”) #

In the Psalms commentary (“taste and see how sweet the Lord is”) Thomas finds three things in the likeness: sweet is pleasant, refreshing, restful. Applications: the crying lost child quieted with ice cream; his “daddy treat” candy bags on drives to Minnesota; vending machines for “refreshment”; the beautiful called sweet — “sight for sore eyes,” a restful view, the painting in the College of St. Thomas reading room after logic figures; being loved is pleasant, refreshing, restful, whereas “tenacious ill will” (Buckley’s phrase) makes one restless.

12. Closing aside: the seven orders (“this is nothing”) #

Reading Thomas today on why seven orders: he rejects connections to the seven gifts or the gratiae gratis datae (“this is nothing”) and explains them all by proximity to the Eucharist. Student: Maronites have nine, tied to the nine angelic orders — Thomas answers that objection too.

His words #

• etymology / meaning: that from which a name is imposed vs. that to which it is imposed.
• processions of the deity: the perfections proceeding from God into creatures, “ways” in SCG IV.
• properly: here opposed to figurative/metaphorical.
• translativa, translatio nominis: carrying over of the name (= metaphor).
• modus significandi: way of signifying, as opposed to the perfection signified.
• per prius: said of God before creatures.
• primum ens, summum bonum: names with what is private to God’s way — said only of Him.
• figurative speech: the meaning of the words is not the meaning of the speaker, with a connection.
• metaphor / irony: likeness / opposition; antonomasia: universal whole and part; synecdoche: integral whole and part; metonymy: container and contained (cause and effect).
• symbolic theology: Dionysius’s book on metaphorical names.
• bold imagination: false imagining plus boldness from pride, the main cause of error.
• poiein, poiskein [ed.: likely poiein, “to make”]: Greek “to make,” poet = maker.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.13 a.2 ad 2, ad 3.
• Thomas, ST I q.13 a.3, objections, sed contra, body, ad 1–3.
• Ambrose, De fide, book 2 (in the sed contra).
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 2 (in obj. 2).

Mentioned

• Thomas, SCG IV opening, “ecce haec sunt partes viarum eius” (Job 26:14, inferred); SCG I, “first chapter” as he says, on the three kinds of names.
• ST I q.1, the article on Scripture’s use of metaphors.
• Thomas, commentaries on St. Paul (irony), on the Psalms (sweet), on Matthew (Pilate’s wife’s dream, student), on the Sentences (whole man subject to God; seven orders).
• Dionysius, Divine Names; Symbolic Theology.
• Fourth Lateran Council; Plato, Symposium; Aristotle, Categories (poiein); Quintilian; Luke, “I have come to cast fire”; John, “the Word was made flesh”; a wisdom book on dreams; Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night’s Dream, “full fathom five”; Austen, Northanger Abbey; Adoro te devote; Alphonsus Liguori on heresies; Toynbee; Teresa of Avila; John of the Cross.

His questions #

• Are the etymology and the meaning of a name necessarily connected? No — lapis from laedit pedem, but it signifies a kind of body.
• Are names like “God is living” imposed to signify the processions? No; they signify the beginning of things in which life pre-exists more eminently.
• Could Christ say “God alone is a stone” as He said “God alone is good”? No — “good” belongs to God properly and per prius; “stone” only metaphorically.
• When is a name said of God only metaphorically? When the creaturely mode of partaking is included in what it signifies.
• Is “Xerox” for any copy a figure of speech? Not really; more like antonomasia.
• What figure is “he’s a Romeo”? Antonomasia, not synecdoche.
• Is “light from light” in the Creed merely metaphorical? Thomas is nuanced: light as “what manifests” is said more properly of understanding.
• Why does Scripture use metaphors like poetry does? Different reasons: man led by the sensible, stimulating the mind, subjecting even the imagination to God.
• What is the likeness underlying the metaphor “sweet”? Pleasant, refreshing, restful.