Hallowed Be Thy Name: Why Dionysius Writes About Names, and Why the Divine Names Are Not Synonyms (ST I q.13 a.4)

Orientation #

He opens by “standing back” from the treatise on names before taking up article 4 of question 13, on whether the names said of God are synonyms; he refers back to article 2 (“some names are said of God substantially”) and to “the position of Rabbi Moses” as already treated (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next time. The previous class dealt with proper and metaphorical names (q. 13 aa. 2-4), and the next moves on to univocal, equivocal and analogical predication (aa. 5-6).

The class, in order #

1. Names in the Our Father (“Hallowed be Thy name”) #

Point: the prominence of names is warranted by the first petition of the Our Father.

• Both Augustine and Thomas: in giving the Our Father Christ taught not only how to pray and what to pray for, but what to desire and the order in which to desire it. First of the seven petitions (Matthew; Luke has fewer): “Hallowed be Thy name.” So “name” enters into what we are to desire most.
• Aside: his Greek dictionary gives opheilēmata (“trespasses”) in Matthew, hamartia (“sins”) in Luke.

2. Dionysius’s books are about names, the Summa about things (“one is about things, namely about God”) #

Point: the first difference between the Summa and Dionysius is what is up front.

• Thomas, at the start of his commentary on the Divine Names, says Dionysius “artfully divided” his works: De Divinis Nominibus (names said properly of God, e.g. good, found primarily in God and in a diminished way in creatures); the Symbolic Theology (symbol = metaphor; names said more properly of creatures, like stone, and carried over to God); a book on the Trinity (where nothing like it is found in creatures); and the Mystical Theology (when you get through all the names you still do not know what He is, and being joined to God is not really knowing Him as He is).
• The Summa is about things, chiefly God, and about other things as related to God as beginning or end. Only ex consequenti, because you must name what you talk about, does it treat names, here in q. 13 generally, and occasionally in a particular article when a problem about a name arises.
• Conversely, a book about names (Dionysius says so at the start, using onoma, the same word as in “Hallowed be Thy name” and in Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias) must talk about the things the names signify.
• Parallel: Aristotle’s fourteen books of wisdom are about things (first causes, substance), yet devote a whole fifth book to names, because those names are “equivocal by reason” and men are most deceived by such words.

3. The problem: why put names first? (“which is more important? Words or things”) #

Point: things are more important (we want names for the sake of things, not the reverse), so why does the great Dionysius put names up front rather than writing on the divine attributes?

• Thomas often says philosophy is about things, not names, though names must be discussed at some point.
• Student: because he is looking at how we know God. He: that will come out; the Summa’s order is the reverse, first the thing (God), then how we know Him, last of all names.
• Same problem in Thomas’s commentary on the Psalms: “who teaches, teaches either things or words”; teaching faith and morals is teaching things, teaching sacred Scripture is teaching words. Not a put-down of Scripture, but why speak that way? Dionysius cannot be more interested in the names than in the thing, “he wouldn’t be the great man that he is.”
• Student: the name signifies the thing by means of the concept in the mind, so perhaps it is a matter of the order of knowing. He accepts this as at least diminishing the difficulty.

4. Doctrina is named from the teacher; the student begins with words (“named for the doctor, the teacher”) #

Point: theology is most of all doctrina, most dependent on the teacher, so beginning with words is most appropriate.

1. Mathematics is named from the learner: the things learned most easily and most thoroughly by us (“kind of by antonomasia”), not the greatest things; the student there needs least belief in his teacher’s words, since he quickly sees they must be true.
2. Sacra doctrina / doctrina Christiana (Augustine’s term) is named from the doctor, a sign the student is most dependent on the teacher, especially the Teacher, Christ. Thomas at the start of the Summa: the argument from belief is weakest in philosophy, strongest in theology.
3. A text Monsignor Dionne used to cite (he has since found it in the disputed questions): the teacher gets knowledge from things, then seeks suitable words to express it, order things, thoughts, words; the student hears the words first, comes through them to the teacher’s thoughts, and ultimately to the things. So words have a priority, a “beforeness,” on the side of the student.
4. Conclusion: since theology is most of all doctrina, beginning with words (of John, Matthew, our Lord) and then working to the meaning is right; words come first, “not that they’re the most important.”

• Examples: teaching someone to pray, you first teach the words (“let the words of my mouth and the thought of my heart,” the Psalm puts words first); learning the Our Father from your mother and understanding it only later through Thomas, Augustine, Damascene; saying the rosary with children, one Hail Mary drawn out over a decade, they get the words down and understand gradually; the Arab philosopher who read the words of a difficult book and made no sense of them until someone helped him penetrate them.

5. One name or many: “Thy kingdom come” (“His name shall be one”) #

Point: the singular “name” of the Our Father against Dionysius’s plural “names.”

• Student: all the names are reduced to one. He goes further through the second petition: the kingdom (Augustine and Thomas) is “the ordered society of those who see God,” more precisely, of those who see God as He is.
• Argument: (1) we name things as we know them; (2) knowing God as He is, you do not have many thoughts, He is one and simple; (3) therefore one name. Thomas refers this to the end of Zacharias, read in class (vv. 8-9): living waters from Jerusalem… “in that day there shall be one Lord, and His name shall be one.”
• “Thy kingdom come” comes after “Hallowed be Thy name” in the order of execution, not of intention.

6. Article 4: the objections and sed contra (“It seems that these names said of God are synonymous”) #

Point: are the names said of God synonyms (a synonym: “another word for the same thing”)?

1. Obj. 1: synonyms signify altogether the same thing; the goodness of God is His essence, likewise His wisdom; so they are synonyms.
2. Obj. 2, aimed at the attempted answer “same thing secundum rem, different thoughts”: a thought to which nothing corresponds in the thing is vain and empty; if the thoughts are many and the thing one, they are vain.
3. Obj. 3, attacking the same premise: what is one in thing and in thought is more one than what is one in thing and multiple in thought; God is maxime unum; so the names do not signify diverse reasons, hence synonyms.

• Sed contra: synonyms added to each other produce nugatio (as if one said vestis indumentum); one could not then say Deus bonus, the wise God, the merciful God; yet Jeremiah says “Most strong, great, powerful, the Lord of Armies is His name.”

7. The body: one thing, many thoughts (“they are not synonyms”) #

Point: Thomas upholds the solution hinted at in obj. 2.

1. It would be easy if the names were introduced to remove something (immaterial, unchangeable: matter and change are not the same, and one can negate different things: God is not a stone, not a tree), or, on Rabbi Moses’ position, to designate a relation of cause to creatures (mover is cause of motion, maker cause of form). Then the thoughts differ by the things negated or the effects connoted.
2. But, as has been said, these names signify the divine substance, though imperfectly.
3. The ratio a name signifies is the conception of the understanding about the thing signified. Words signify things through thoughts, so the thought is closer to the word than the thing is; this is why, from the teacher’s words, you can get good thoughts more easily than from things.
4. Our understanding, knowing God from creatures, forms thoughts proportioned to the perfections proceeding from God into creatures; these pre-exist in God united and simply, but are received in creatures divided and multiplied.
5. So to the many perfections of creatures there corresponds one simple beginning, represented in many ways; to our many thoughts there corresponds one altogether simple thing, imperfectly understood by each.
6. Conclusion: the names signify one thing but under many diverse thoughts, so they are not synonyms.

• Reply 1: synonyms signify one thing by one thought; it is not enough to signify one thing. Names signifying diverse thoughts about one thing do not first and through themselves signify one, because (Aristotle, Peri Hermeneias, vocal sounds, thoughts, things) a name signifies a thing only mediante the thought. Example: outside me there are only individual men, Michael and so on; I have the word “man” only because I have a universal thought, which is in the mind, not outside it.
• Reply 2: the many thoughts are not in vain, because one simple thing corresponds to all of them, imperfectly represented through all in many ways.

8. Understanding in the man, love in the woman (“the man is by nature more understanding”) #

Point: a “good example” of one divine perfection divided among creatures.

• He “goes out on a limb”: the greatest minds in the Church have been men (Augustine, Thomas); Paul VI, making Teresa of Avila a Doctor, distinguished her from a Doctor like Augustine, but noted (quoting Francis de Sales) a contemplative love women are more capable of. Humanly, the great philosophers and scientists have been men; women are by nature more loving. So God’s understanding and love, one thing in Him, are reflected unequally, the understanding more in the man, the love more in the woman, both equal to God yet divided.
• Supporting cases: Francis de Sales on love takes examples from Gertrude and Teresa; the devotion to the Sacred Heart propagated by women (Gertrude before Margaret Mary Alacoque: “I’m in the heart of Gertrude”); the father more apt to disown a son who fails his standards, the mother’s stronger love; Aristotle, settling whether friendship consists more in loving or being loved, takes his sign from the woman who gives up her child, seeking more to love than to be loved.
• Even within one person, reason and will are not the same thing, so my understanding and my love of God are not one thing, though God’s are.

9. Footnote: bread and wine, faith and charity (“the bread is to what strengthen our faith”) #

Point: an extension of the same divided-likeness idea to the Eucharist.

• Thomas, in the treatise on the Eucharist, gives some credence to the bread being for the body and the wine for the soul. The Eucharistic psalm “for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts” names flesh first; one always receives bread before wine.
• His own suggestion “today”: the bread ordered to faith, the wine to charity. Signs: the Anima Christi’s inebria me, wine understood of love (the intoxication of love; the lover is “mad, in a good way”); Thomas’s prayer after communion, sit mihi armatura fidei et scutum bonae voluntatis, faith first, then will/charity; Vatican II (Dei Verbum, “the one on Divine Revelation”) on the bread of the word and the bread of the Eucharist, the bread of the word suggesting faith; the sacrament is called “the mystery of faith.”
• Student cites the current prayer before communion: sanctify our bodies with your body, purify our souls with your blood. He agrees but says this does not mean receiving under one form lacks the whole; he “doesn’t know how to explain” it further.

10. Reply 3 and the reason behind the whole article (“every maker makes something like itself”) #

Point: multiplicity of thought belongs to, rather than contradicts, God’s perfect unity.

• Reply 3: it pertains to God’s perfect unity that what is multiplied and divided in others is in Him simply and united; hence what is one in the thing is many in thought, because our understanding grasps Him in many ways just as things represent Him in many ways.
• His gloss, “the reason in a sense”: every agent makes something like itself, so God’s effects must be like Him; not being one and simple, they are like Him in many imperfect ways; since we know God through His effects, we have many thoughts, each corresponding to something in God as each creaturely perfection does. “It’s kind of beautiful to see that.” He compares Thomas’s reason why the universe requires intellectual creatures: likeness to God not only in the natural but in the spiritual order.
• He closes: is it clear why they are not synonyms?

His words #

• “name” / onoma: the word of “Hallowed be Thy name,” of Dionysius and of Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias.
• ex consequenti: as a consequence; how the Summa comes to treat names.
• “symbolic theology”: symbol has the meaning of metaphor.
• “fourteen books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “equivocal by reason” [ed.: analogous].
• “who teaches, teaches either things or words” (Thomas on the Psalms).
• sacra doctrina / doctrina Christiana: named from the doctor; mathematics named from the learner.
• “kingdom of heaven”: the ordered society of those who see God as He is.
• “synonym”: another word for the same thing; precisely, names signifying one thing by one thought.
• secundum rem: in reality, as opposed to according to thought.
• maxime unum: most one.
• nugatio (“nugatorie”): what synonyms added together produce; vestis indumentum.
• “thought” / “reason” / “meaning”: his renderings of ratio, the conception of the understanding about the thing signified.
• mediante: through a medium; a name signifies a thing only mediante the thought.
• “beginning”: his rendering of principium.
• armatura fidei et scutum bonae voluntatis: armor of faith and shield of goodwill (Thomas’s prayer after communion).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 4: objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3.
• Zacharias, ch. 14 vv. 8-9 (inferred chapter): “His name shall be one.”
• Jeremiah, quoted in the sed contra: “the Lord of Armies is His name.”

Mentioned

• The Our Father, Matthew and Luke.
• Dionysius, Divine Names (opening, use of onoma), Symbolic Theology, book on the Trinity, Mystical Theology; Thomas’s commentary on the Divine Names (its beginning).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics (“fourteen books of wisdom,” “fifth book about names”); Peri Hermeneias (vocal sounds, thoughts, things); Ethics on whether friendship is more in loving or being loved (inferred work).
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (“teaches things or words”); Summa I q. 1 (argument from belief weakest in philosophy); a passage in the disputed questions on teacher and student (unlocated); treatise on the Eucharist; prayer after communion; text on why the universe requires intellectual creatures.
• Augustine on the Our Father; Paul VI on Teresa of Avila; Francis de Sales; Catholic Encyclopedia on Gertrude; Anima Christi; Vatican II, Dei Verbum (inferred title).

His questions #

• Which is more important, words or things; do you want to know things for the sake of names or names for the sake of things? Names for things; things are more important.
• Why then does Dionysius write a book about the divine names rather than about the divine attributes? Because of the order of knowing: the student begins with words; theology is most dependent on the teacher.
• The argument from belief is weakest in philosophy but strongest in what? In theology.
• Why “Hallowed be Thy name” and not “names,” when Dionysius and Thomas give many? We name as we know; seeing God as He is, one thought and so one name (“His name shall be one”).
• What is the kingdom we ask to come? The ordered society of those who see God as He is.
• Do the names signify the same thing? The same thing, but through different thoughts.
• Are they synonyms, then? No: synonyms signify one thing by one thought.
• Women are by nature more what? Loving; the man more understanding.
• Is it clear why they are not synonyms? Left as his closing question.