Analogical Language versus Agnosticism
William Lane Craig, one of the foremost classical apologists of today, has rejected the Thomistic view(s) of analogy in religious language as leading to agnosticism (or “acognosticism” or skepticism) about God. We asked Dr. Matthew J. Coté, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the topic of analogical religious language, to give a defense of the Thomistic view(s) of analogy from the charge of agnosticism.
Through a Glass Darkly:
A Primer on Analogy & God-Talk
Matthew J. Coté, PhD
December 2025
Introduction
What is typically referred to as analogy, or the doctrine of analogy, is essentially a particular relation of understanding about the way that knowledge is expressed using language. As it relates to how we communicate things about God, or sometimes referred to as God-talk, it is the expression of our knowledge about God, typically through verbal or written language. As such, language is representative. A word is a token, or symbol, expressing what is known in the mind or intellect. Words signify what the intellect understands. Given these basic clarifications, analogy is understood to be an extension of an expression of something we know, and more specifically in this case, what we know about God. It is the infusion of meaning from what the mind/intellect knows in an expression, or what might be called semantic representation.
This subject, analogical predication of God, or more simply, to say something about God with analogy, is important for a number of reasons: First, because such expressions must uphold God as that through whom all things exist, subsist, and ultimately are directed,1 and God is the sovereign and provident I AM, or He Who Is that defies being reduced to a finite image or conceptual representation in any way that everything that is not God exists. This preserves and encourages a sense of awe, wonder, and reverence of God as the infinite and simple perfection of Being Itself, rather than a being created from mere human intellects with finite concepts, and thereby unworthy of adoration. Second, God-talk is important because total agnosticism about God is both unbiblical and relationally untenable. Human beings are made in the image of God, and such a notion cannot imply meaninglessness or a contradiction. As such, there must be words that signify, or indicate, some truth about the relationship between creature and creator. In pointing to this contention, in his book The Dark Knowledge of God, Swiss Theologian Charles Journet perceptively states: “It is true that we cannot talk about God. It is equally true that we cannot be silent about Him. His name is hidden beneath every word.”2 As such, the following article provides a summary of a contemporary univocal position on God-talk as well as a consistent model rooted in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.3
Univocity, Equivocity, and Analogy
The term ‘univocal’, in its most basic sense, is understood to mean, “that which is applied to one or to many in an identical meaning.”4 It is further established as something “having the same nature of which an identical essential definition is truly predicable.”5 This second clarification on the definition is especially important, as the significance in understanding natures or essences is paramount to the distinction between what a thing is, and that a thing is. It should be noted, however, that a rejection of the moderate realist essence/existence distinction poses a problem to any univocity of metaphysical and epistemological identity, and by extension to the notion of analogical being and predication. It follows that if there are no essences, what are called exemplar causes in the knowledge/will of God6 conjoined with an act of existence, that it could never be asserted that any one thing and another thing have any kind of commonality necessary to that which makes a being what it is, either univocally or analogically. On anominalist view, like that of eminent philosopher William Lane Craig, adjudication between what kinds of things exist and what makes them what they are would become a meaningless exercise in arbitrary labeling. In support of this he states: “So I’m inclined to think that God doesn’t have proper parts, not because He is simple in the Thomistic sense, but because there are no such things as proper parts. Talk of proper parts, like talk of properties, is just a useful and perhaps indispensable façon de parler.”7 Though in other contexts he contradicts his nominalism in defense of the notion that God’s attributes are proper parts: “To say, for example, that God does not have distinct properties seems patently false: omnipotence is not the same property as goodness, for a being may have one and not the other.”8 So, either there are no proper parts, consistent with nominalism, or there are proper parts, as he argues is the case with God. In addition, a univocal view of being contends that there is unity between all things in the exact same sense, which is not consistent with the nominalist view that all things are particular.
Continuing on, the univocal use of terms is imperative for clear identification and communication about things that are known via the senses. Without an epistemological realist foundation of understanding rooted in univocal concepts and signified by terms, nothing could be clearly known nor communicated, and one would be isolated to a world of confusion and chaos. In other words, given that knowledge begins in the senses, if nothing could be clearly known and predicated univocally, then a synthesis of understanding rooted in correspondence to reality would be impossible. In the order of knowing, everyone begins the intellective process with univocal concepts abstracted through sense experience, which are expressed linguistically as words.
The term ‘univocal’, as it relates to the notion of being is understood to mean that being is the same, rather than differentiated. Instead of a multiplicity of being, it is undifferentiated, i.e., identical. Being, in this sense, just means the exact same thing in all expressions of an act of existence. However, if being is identical in all expressions of it, then the possibility of a real differentiation between those instances of being becomes impossible. This view, with no plurality of being, results in monism, at least insofar as being is concerned. If, however, there truly are differentiations in the notion of being, then all being is not univocal. For example, if the univocity of being were true, then the differences in being between men, tardigrades, and trees would be illusory, even if their essential genus distinctions were the difference between rational-animal-being, non-rational-animal-being, and vegetative-being, respectively. An even more startling entailment on this view would be that the notion of being between God and orchids would be the same. And, while in a non-univocal sense both can be pursued through the way of beauty, their order and actuality of being is an example of the metaphysical distinction between necessity and contingency, simplicity and composition, supereminence and delimitation, and cause and effect. God is Being Itself Subsisting, and the orchid only participates in, or has being delimited by its essence, and, as such the relationship between the two necessarily entails that the causal reality of Pure Act is not the same act of being as what the orchid only has by participation as an effect.
Given these counterexamples to the univocal approach to the notion of being, the resolution comes through the analogy of being. First and foremost, an analogy of being must in some way include a similitude between God and creatures, which can be understood more clearly with a brief explanation of the fundamental metaphysical relationship between essence and existence. Aquinas makes a very careful distinction between that which makes a thing what it is, or its essence, and the actualization of that essence, which is an act of existence. What a thing is, and whether or not that thing has existence are two different questions. He states:
Every thing, furthermore, exists because it has being. A thing whose essence is not its being, consequently, is not through its essence but by participation in something, namely, being itself. But that which is through participation in something cannot be the first being, because prior to it is the being in which it participates in order to be. But God is the first being, with nothing prior to Him. His essence is, therefore, His being.9
As such, there is a distinction between the unlimited Pure Act of Being itself (i.e., God) and all other beings, which are delimited by an essence and merely participate in God’s being as a created effect. God’s essence is His existence, i.e., He Who Is, while all other beings are a metaphysical composite of essence and existence. From this explanation on the difference between Pure Act and created being as a composition of potency and act, it can be argued that being is not a univocal notion, and if He Who Is is not knowable in His essence, then univocity is not possible. To this effect James Dolezal opines:
Though creatures bear the image of God’s existence and attributes, their similarity to God is better understood as analogical than univocal. The manner in which God exists and possesses attributes is so radically unlike anything found in creatures that he cannot be classified together with them in a single order of being or as the highest link on a great chain of Being. As the one who ultimately counts for being in general, as its first and final cause, God does not stand within that general ontological order.10
Nor is the notion of being purely equivocal, since Pure Act is the primary efficient cause of the effect. That is, these are not wholly unrelated notions. Primary efficient cause is to effect as infinite being is to finite being. As such, an analogy of being must be affirmed. Joseph Owens astutely qualifies this in stating:
Is not analogy the condition under which anything enters into the metaphysical realm in the context of Thomistic reasoning? A genuinely metaphysical aspect, then, is not something that is immediately given in conceptualization. It is not something that can be indicated or pointed to with the finger, as plants for botany or stars for astronomy. If you try to isolate being in this matter as an object for a science, do you not get something entirely empty of objective content? To reveal characteristic content, the concept of being has to be kept focused on what is known through judgment, that is, on that fact that something exists. It is in this way that the subject of metaphysics is established. It has to be constituted by combining the objects of the intellect’s two basic and irreducible operations. In the complex notion the “something” is the general object of conceptualization, and is focused upon what the judgment grasps in the knowledge that something exists.11
Here Owens emphasizes the role of judgment in our knowledge of the notion of being and metaphysical understanding in general. It is ultimately an act of judgment that provides the content of the subject of metaphysics, and as such, by way of analogy, the notion of being is universalized. However, as the notion of being relates to God’s existence, Owens is careful to not reduce He Who Is to the highest member of the chain of finite existent things, all of which being known through the intellective process of conceptualization and judgment. He states:
The subject of metaphysics has two important consequences in regard to the primary instance of being. It means that God does not come under the subject of metaphysics. Rather, it is the principle of the subject of this science. Accordingly common being comes under it, and not vice versa. The other notable consequence is that the demonstration of God’s existence is based upon the judgment that something exists here and now in the observable world. Not on anything originally known through conceptualization can a metaphysical reasoning to God be grounded. Existence as grasped through judgment has to be the operative factor. An ontological argument is accordingly impossible.12
The common notion of being, then, is understood through the sensible world via analogical judgments, ones which begin their intellective process conceptually with particulars, but are focused on the role of judgment in that “something exists,” rather than a direct conceptual formation of being. As it relates to God’s existence, it is via an act of judgment that God is the principle of the subject of metaphysics; the supereminent cause and infinite Pure Act of Being Itself Subsisting that one signifies Him, but this is the admission of a certain darkness; a certain epistemic limitation about what this is in itself. Owens is clear about this in stating: “Just as there is no necessary sequence from the greatest conceivable perfection to the existence of God, so the indeterminate ocean of substance does not express what God is, or what the nature of being is.”13 Étienne Gilson similarly opines: “This rule applies to all the names of God, without exception. Even esse, ‘being,’ is the name of a creature. The only beings we know are creatures, the only way to be we know is that of creatures, and we cannot form any concept of what it is ‘to be’ for the universal cause we call God.”14
As alluded to previously, ‘equivocity’ is defined as “a term or proposition having two or more wholly different meanings, with mere resemblance for words or sounds employed.”15 This is understood to be the opposite position from univocity. Terms which appear or sound the same as other words are actually completely different. For example, the bank of a river is not similar, nor even related to a financial bank where money is deposited. It would be unwise to deposit money in a riverbank, and equally unwise to climb up a financial bank, but switching the contextual meaning normatively employed by each of these terms is not typically understood to be unusual or unwise. The important notion here is that equivocal terminology results in ambiguity as to the intended meaning, and this leads to the fallacy of equivocation. Regarding this, Peter Kreeft states: “Equivocation is the simplest and most common of all the material fallacies. It means simply that the same term is used in two different senses in the course of an argument.”16 He elaborates further in making a distinction between concepts and terms in stating:
Concepts are not equivocal, only terms (i.e., the words that express them). To have a concept in your mind is to know what it means. If your minds holds two meanings, it holds two concepts, not one. But you may be using only one term to express the two concepts. E.g. you may use the term “pen” to express both the concept “ink writing instrument” and also the concept “pig enclosure.” But the two concepts are clear and distinct: the first concept is just what it is and nothing else; and the second concept is just what it is and nothing else. The disease of equivocation is in the term, not the concept.17
As it relates to knowledge and predication, the use of equivocal language cannot amount to saying anything meaningful about the subject, since the concept the term intends to signify is either ambiguous at best, or completely mistaken and unknown at worst. Using terms which appear to be univocal, while the concepts they signify are completely different is a sure path to skepticism about the essence of the subject. As such, equivocation is best suited for usage in humor, which employs the truth that first principles of being apply to reality, finite essences are able to be known, and univocal predication is a normative mode of communication about what makes a particular thing what it is. If these were not true, then the use of equivocal language could not possibly be humorous. It is precisely the fact that a term is used in at least two different senses that equivocation can result in humor. Put in a negative sense, nothing would be humorous if the principles of being did not apply to all reality and linguistic expressions were not meaningful. In this sense, humor through equivocation proves that different concepts identified with the same term can actually be known and made distinct through their essences, which presupposes metaphysical and epistemological realism.
As alluded to, the bridge between univocity and equivocity is analogy. It is defined in its simplest form as “resemblance without identity; any imperfect likeness between two or more beings that are compared with each other.”18 Aquinas clearly articulates the relationship between the three linguistic expressions of knowledge in stating: “Now this mode of community of idea is a means between pure equivocation and simple univocation. For in analogies the idea is not, as it is in univocal, one and the same, yet it is not totally diverse as in equivocal; but a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing . . . .”19 Here Aquinas proposes a third intermediary way of predication that both signifies something truly genuine about the subject, but yet lacks perfect identity between analogates. As such, essential diversity remains. This multivocity, as Aquinas explains it as, entails some similarity between things. As this notion relates to knowledge and predication, analogy entails that a judgment of participatory reference between things can meaningfully demonstrate some similarity between predicable subjects, while yet having some differentiation, or lack of complete sameness. Kreeft, cueing off a similar example used by Aristotle and Aquinas, succinctly illustrates this through stating: “‘Healthy food’ and ‘healthy exercise’ use ‘health’ univocally (both mean something that causes health in a human body), but ‘a healthy climate,’ ‘a healthy body,’ and ‘a healthy sweat’ uses ‘healthy’ analogically, for a healthy climate is a cause of a healthy body, while a healthy sweat is an effect of a healthy body. ‘Exercise’ is an action, ‘sweat’ is a substance, ‘climate’ is neither.”20 This example demonstrates the similarities between the way in which each term is being used, while yet distinguishing a lack of complete sameness or total difference.
From this philosophical framework and these definitional explanations and examples of univocity, equivocity, and analogy, further analysis of the role concepts and judgment play in the formation of analogical predication of God is necessary. However, given the established lack of quidditative knowledge about God, i.e., one never has a concept of Pure Act, but only finite particular expressions of an act of existence delimited by an essence, the problem of concepts has certainly begun to emerge. At the same time, given that we must not be silent about Him, true positive predication of God without the problems of conceptual univocity must be achieved. Joseph Owens puts this point forward clearly in stating: “Privation of both intuitional and conceptual light requires that the most refined notion of the primary efficient cause be enshrouded in darkness in order to permit, on the metaphysical level, the successive predication of its infinite richness without the hindrance of finite restrictions.”21
Dr. Craig on Being and Predication of God
As had been demonstrated, the eminent philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig holds to a univocal position on both being and predication of God. His rejection of analogical predication of God is rooted in his explicit rejection of the analogy of being, which will be made more evident subsequently, though a further demonstration of his affirmation of the univocity of being is warranted. The most significant explicit quotation found is as follows: “I agree wholeheartedly with Scotus that there is a univocal concept of being which applies to both God and creatures. Scotus rightly saw that when we say that God exists, we are using the term in the same sense in which we say that a man is or exists.”22 Here Craig is unequivocal about his affirmation of Scotus’s univocity of being. The primary contention from this quotation is his example of God and man having the exact same conceptual understanding of existence. In other places Craig himself does not seem to think that the concept of existence is the same between God and man, as briefly demonstrated previously, and as such the univocity of being is in contention. Nonetheless, the univocal notion of being in all things seems to contradict the nominalist notion that all things are particular, rather than the same or similar, i.e. univocal or analogical. It seems that equivocity would be more consistent with nominalism than either univocity or analogy.
In his book Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, Craig, in response to Aquinas’s view of the doctrine of Simplicity states:
While we can say what God is not like, we cannot say what he is like, except in an analogical sense. But these predications must in the end fail, since there is no univocal element in the predicates we assign to God, leaving us in a state of genuine agnosticism about the nature of God. Indeed, on this view God really has no nature; he is simply the inconceivable act of being.23
The significant point of contention here is the assertion that because analogical predication has no univocal element within it, that therefore analogical predications ultimately fail and cannot say anything meaningful about God. Without going into any detailed explanation now about how analogical predication is properly understood in Thomism, Craig summarizes the view in stating:
All we really have [on Thomism] are negative predications of God that are true. There are no univocal predications of God that are true. At best we can speak of God analogically in the same way that I can say that food is healthy on the analogy of a person’s being healthy. Clearly the food is not healthy in the same sense that a person is healthy. In the same way the Thomist would say we can speak analogically of God being good, loving, holy, and so forth, but these are not univocal concepts when applied to God. We really have no univocal knowledge or concepts of God on Thomism because he doesn’t have an essence that we can grasp. It is just the pure act of being.24
From these two quotations a clear picture of Craig’s rejection of analogical predication emerges.
In addition, Craig’s animosity toward Aquinas’s work surfaces in a final illustration of his rejection of analogical predication in stating: “One of the aspects of Thomas Aquinas’ thought that I find most disturbing is his claim that we can speak of God only in analogical terms. Without univocity of meaning, we are left with agnosticism about the nature of God, able to say only what God is not, not what He is.”25 As such, it can be concluded that Craig’s rejection of analogical predication as a meaningful mode of God-talk stems from what will be shown to be a misunderstanding of what Aquinas’s notion actually asserts. It is simply not true that a genuine agnosticism about God follows from the Thomistic notion of analogical predication of God. Neither is it the case that Aquinas’s way of the negative is the only true predication of God in Thomism. Moreover, given that Craig rejects an analogy of being and the metaphysics behind the essence/existence distinction in Thomism, his rejection of analogical predication of God follows with no surprise.
Response to Craig on Being and Analogical Predication of God
As demonstrated in Craig’s quotations, he rejects the principle of an analogy of being for a univocity of being. His affirmation stems from an adherence to Scotus, who argues that a univocal concept of being or existence applies to everything. However, this does not take into consideration the difference in the order of being between necessity and contingency, which is an important and significant difference. While finite and infinite being share a common similarity of existence, that mode of existence is not univocal, but analogical. Craig argues that the term ‘being’ is exactly the same in all instantiations of it, and from this, a further response can be given that undermines his objection.
The most surprising find is that Craig himself actually admits that God is the only self-existent being, and as such is not finite or caused, but rather the only being who gives being, and in this sense does not exist in the same sense as created being. He states: “What makes God more than just one being among many is precisely His aseity: God alone is self-existent; everything else exists contingently. Only God exists of Himself (a se); everything else exists through another (ab alio). That makes God the source of being for everything apart from Himself.”26 Here Craig states that God alone is self-existent, which means that ‘being’ in God is not the same ‘being’ in created creatures. A few attributions in support include: Necessity, Self-existent, Pure Actuality, Simple, Immutable, Eternal, Infinite, etc. The effects of God: contingent, caused, act/potency, composite of form/matter (for physical beings), changeable, temporal, finite. If, on Craig and Scotus’s view, God and man exist in an exact univocal sense of being, and God is at least self-existent, as Craig states, then it follows that it is not the case that God and man exist in a univocal sense. Craig’s own work on Divine Aseity seems to entail that being is not univocal. Moreover, this relation between cause and effect, necessity to contingency, and infinite to finite, entails that minimally there is God, whose essence is the same as his existence, and then all other beings, which participate in the being of God as cause is to effect. Peter Kreeft nicely illustrates this notion of the cause of existence and the necessity of God’s essence being his existence. He states:
It’s really intuitively very simple. Suppose I tell you there is a book that you want, a book that explains everything. You ask me, “Will you give it to me?” I say yes, but I have to borrow it from my friend. You ask, “Does he have it?” and I say no, he has to borrow it from the library. Does the library have it? No, they have to borrow it from someone else. Well, who has it? No one actually has it, everyone borrows it. Well, then, you will never get it. And neither will anyone else. Now imagine that book is existence. My children have it. They got it from me. I got it from my parents. If no one has it by nature and doesn’t have to get it from someone else, in other words if there is no first, uncaused cause of existence, then it couldn’t be handed down the chain, and no one would ever get it. Therefore, someone has it. And the being that can give existence because He has it by his own essential nature is called God.27
This participation of being bears with it an analogy, and as such argues for an ability to predicate about God in this way, but the ontological chasm that separates the two orders of being necessitates that a univocal concept of being is impossible. Just as sense experience cannot know the essence of God directly, so that same sense experience cannot bridge the infinite chasm between the being of God and created being in participation. Aquinas opines to this effect:
Our natural knowledge begins from sense. Hence our natural knowledge can go as far as it can be led by sensible things. But our mind cannot be led by sense so far as to see the essence of God; because the sensible effects of God do not equal the power of God as their cause. Hence from knowledge of sensible things the whole power of God cannot be known; nor therefore can His essence be seen. But because they are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God “whether He exists,” and to know of Him what must necessarily belong to Him, as the first cause of all things, exceeding all things caused by Him. Hence we know that His relationship with creatures so far as to be the cause of them all; also that creatures differ from Him, inasmuch as He is not in any way part of what is caused by Him; and that creatures are not removed from Him by reason of any defect on His part, but because He super exceeds them all.28
Here Aquinas clearly distinguishes the epistemic separation in the order of being between cause and effect. He is emphatic that God, whose being differs from his creation, is not part of the effect. He carefully explains the knowledge component as well, in that because God’s being is not directly sensible, that therefore his essence, which must also be his existence, is unknown in its totality. Gregory Rocca summarizes this clearly in stating:
Univocity can apply only to those realities in which essence and being differ, for two humans share their humanity, not their acts of being; but in God, whose “act of being is his nature,” any form signified by a name is identical with the divine being itself, and thus nothing can be said univocally of God and creature, for any perfection said of God always implicates the divine act of being, which can never belong to the creature.29
Given the division in being and our knowledge, it is imperative that we do not conflate God with that of His effects. As such, Craig’s affirmation of the univocity of being has been shown to be problematic, both because of the epistemic limitation of knowing God’s ‘being’ directly, as well as his own assertion of God’s aseity as distinct from the created order, as substantiated in his own work.
Regarding the charge that Thomists, in rejection of univocal predication, only have predication through Aquinas’s way of the negative, is to be rejected as well. This allegation stems from Craig’s contention that analogical predication is nothing more than meaningless metaphor. He states: “For analogical predication without some univocal, conceptual content cannot be regarded as anything more than metaphor.”30 The focus here is on the notion that analogical predication of God is the same thing as metaphor, and that such leads to an agnosticism about His nature. Additionally, to say what God is not (the way of the negative), is not the only way for Thomists to predicate meaningfully about God. The goal then, is to demonstrate that analogical predication is in fact meaningful, even though the being of God in his totality will never be fully comprehensible because of the limitations of sense perception and abstraction.
The accusation that analogical predication of God is synonymous with metaphor is false. The term is usually defined as “A figure of speech or verbal composition in which an expression is used to denote a thing to which its literal sense does not apply. For example, ‘A baby is a flower’ is a metaphor because ‘flower,’ taken literally, does not describe a ‘baby.’”31 In reiterating the most basic definition of an analogy, it is understood as a “resemblance without identity; any imperfect likeness between two or more beings that are compared with each other.”32 At first blush, it may seem like these terms are synonymous, and in fact at times specific types of analogy, like improper proportionality, include the use of metaphor, however, Craig uses the term metaphor in conjunction with the assertion that all analogy leads to utter agnosticism about the nature of God, and if this definition of metaphor were in fact what Thomists meant by analogical predication of God, then Craig might be right. However, when they say that man is good and God is good, it is a literal similarity pointing to the relationship of cause and effect, not a figurative or metaphorical one, like a ‘baby’ and a ‘flower.’ Rather, it shares the same term with some similarity between subjects. Given the ontological transcendence of God’s essence, the Thomist begins with knowing a thing as it exists in reality, for example, experiencing what it is for a thing to be a flower, or what it is for a thing to be a ‘good flower’, etc. From this one understands and judges the relationship between the essence of a ‘good flower’ and some other essence acting in accordance with its nature (to be good), thereby predicating ‘good’ between the two instances. In demonstrating the existence of God from first principles as the primary efficient cause of all natures, it can be said that God is good, essentially/existentially. This is where the analogy of being comes into play. While finite being can have ‘goodness’ intrinsic to them, God just is His own ‘goodness’ essentially/existentially, as cause is to effect, or creator to created. As such, there is an analogy acquired through a judgement, and such predications are neither reducible to purely univocal terms, nor are they aloof metaphors without any substantial meaning. As such, Craig’s accusation that analogical predication is identical to common metaphor, and as such is not meaningful, is simply mistaken.
The final objection from Craig that requires an explanation is in regard to his perception that analogical predication leads to a deep agnosticism about the nature of God. In response, the following brief analysis of Aquinas’s analogical predication of God is necessary.
The Threefold Way: Transcendence and Immanence
The mode of predication of God put forward by Aquinas, and echoed in the work of Gilson, Owens, and Rocca, can be summarized with the MJAP acronym, i.e., Metaphysical Judgment with Analogical Predication.33 This mode of predication of God begins with a number of antecedent truths stemming from Aquinas’s system of thought, which are implied in the notion of metaphysical judgment prior to the final analogical predication: (1) Language is an expression of knowledge. If quidditative knowledge is anchored to conceptual abstraction from sensible particulars, and God is not a sensible particular, then no quidditative knowledge of God is possible, and thereby not linguistically expressible through concepts. (2) Knowledge of God from first principles, demonstrating that He is, is possible, and as such all linguistic expressions of that knowledge must be predicated through the same act of judgment, namely that, and not what. (3) All particulars are effects of the primary efficient cause, providing their composition of participated being and essence. (4) Since the human intellect knows through the process of abstracting universals from the essences of particulars, it can have no concept of the absolute simplicity of Pure Act, namely God, and thus why concepts cannot be predicated of God without entailing delimitation, i.e. finitely circumscribed. (5) Since a cause cannot give what it does not in some way have, there is an analogical similitude between cause and effect rooted in (2), constituting linguistically expressible knowledge. (6) Given (1)-(5), the threefold way provides a necessary process as a final set of judgments ensuring that analogical predications of God do not entail conceptual delimitation. These are: causality, negation, and supereminence, which will be discussed shortly.
MJAP then, represents the consistent and systematic outworking of the role of judgment over concept in the process of a declaration of God, and these metaphysical judgments, while they may ultimately begin with a knowledge of the way in which the human intellect conceives of things, which is the normative mode of human knowing, it denies this composite way of being in its analogical judgment of God’s modelessness. Judgments (5) and (6) warrant further elucidation. (5) is the outworking of the Principle of Proportionate Causality, a corollary of the Principle of Causality. Edward Feser defines this well in stating: “The PPC holds that whatever is in an effect must be in its total cause in some way or other, whether formally, virtually, or eminently.”34 Since Pure Act is not composed of essence and existence, and neither is the sum total of all conceivable formal perfections, the proportion is not one of intrinsic form, but rather eminence, since the former would entail genus and conceptual whatness, or quiddity. As Aquinas states: “The divine essence itself is the supereminent likeness of all realities but not a likeness of one notion with them. . . . for when we say, ‘God is good,’ this is not the notion of God, since one is understanding the creature’s goodness.”35 And further that, “we do not say that God is like his creatures, but vice versa.”36 Rather, since God is not delimited by a form, supereminence is better understood as exemplar causality through an act of the divine intellect freely actualizing potential being. Feser eludes to this in stating: “What exists in the things that the purely actual cause is the cause of preexists in that cause in something like the way the things we make preexist as ideas or plans in our minds before we make them. These things thereby exist in that purely actual cause eminently.”37 The PPC as a first principle of being enables an affirmative positive judgment to surface, one which ensures that predication of God is not limited to mere causality and negation, but yet remains a judgment rooted in a that, and not a what God is. Examples of the process of the threefold way will further assist explanatorily.
Since intellectual abstraction and judgment of God as an analogate is not possible, i.e., we only know God through effects, the threefold way (6) is necessary in order to promote the richness of theological predication while at the same time preserving God’s modeless perfection. First is the way of causality, affirming that God is the cause of what is known in creatures, including qualitative perfections like goodness and wisdom. In this first way the concept of goodness and wisdom is that of an abstraction from creatures, and the causal conclusion is rooted in the antecedent demonstration of the second of the Five Ways of Aquinas. Second is the way of remotion, or removal, any and all composition understood conceptually in the mode of signification, or the word/name. In order to signify a true judgment of Being itself, i.e. God, a predicate must not imply any delimitation for the non-composite modelessness of the reality signified by the name. Third is the way of supereminence, reaffirming God as the supereminent perfection of goodness and wisdom, without knowing what that is in Him, and this follows because what is known in the effect must in some way be in the cause via the PPC. Moreover, the way of supereminence focuses on the true judgment that God is not good or wise because he causes goodness or wisdom, rather God causes goodness and wisdom because He himself is good and wise supereminently. The way of eminence also points to the conclusion in the fourth demonstration of the Five Ways. The gradation of being in things to varying degrees implies “something which is uttermost being. . . . something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”38
As demonstrated in the example, the work of the distinction between the reality signified and the mode of signification becomes evident in the process of the threefold way as they combine together as analogy of intrinsic attribution in predication of God. In stating that God is good, one first sees that there is at its core an analogy of priority and posteriority, since whatever is known in creatures proceeds from God as cause is to effect, thereby the mode of analogy and the way of causality. The way of supereminence is at work in the reality signified, since whatever a cause gives it must in some way have, given the PPC. Finally, the way of removal is at work in the mode of signification, ensuring that whatever one conceives in the signification of the name is denied, since such concepts are anchored to the delimited acts of existence from whence they were abstracted.39
This interplay of cataphatic and apophatic predication ensures a purification of the creaturely modes of being, while permitting true positive affirmations for philosophical and theological language through judgment rather than concept. But it cannot be stressed enough that no concept is immune to the need for purification through the threefold way. What remains in the intellect’s understanding of what this is in God is not but a token signifying the reality that such a predicative judgment points to as the cause and supereminent perfection of what is found in things. What God is in Himself remains indistinct and unknown. We simply know that whatever is in Him is Himself, and is it in His absolute simplicity and unity. Apart from such analogical judgments in the threefold way, positive predications of God amount to either the finitude of univocity, which does not rise above and implies the created order, or utter agnosticism.
What then is the proper role of concepts in MJAP? Concepts are what are known from and through things by way of sense perception and abstraction. Concepts are necessary in knowing the quiddities and qualities of beings as effects. As predicates of effects, one knows that there is a cause of such notions, which itself must in some way have what it gives, inasmuch as He is supereminent. But the way He is in Himself is not the way of anything conceived in creatures to any degree. This is why the mode of signifying a perfection of God is denied. The predication, however, remains true and positive, but with the admission that the way it is in the cause is unknown by human intellectual conceptualization. Aquinas never tires of affirming this: “Man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows him not, inasmuch as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of him.”40
There is no question that Aquinas freely discusses analogical predication of God in a variety of ways in different contexts, some with more or less contextual detail. An inadequate systematic interpretation of his foundational notions as core metaphysical truths leading to the necessity of the threefold way has unfortunately led some to think that Aquinas uses concepts without the necessary purification. This is unfortunate, and it is the hope that this error has become more apparent for the purpose of refining and promoting a consistent Existential Thomistic position on analogical predication of God.
Human nature has a natural desire to know, and that desire used inordinately, can lead to the insistence on there being a more substantial knowledge than what the judgment that God is and its corollaries can provide through MJAP. Though this knowledge is minimal, non-conceptual, and as such not quidditative, it yet signifies a reality that must be beyond the intellectual capabilities of creaturely modes of existence in order to be the termination and explanation for all that is known, as the Five Ways demonstrate. Immunity to the infinite regress of composite ways of being entails existence that remains unknown in its modeless perfection. What is known, namely that there is such a being, is enshrouded in mystery and darkness, a veritable darkness of ignorance. But this darkness is in regard to quiddity, not existence and its necessary corollaries. The rejection of conceptualization and quiddity does not result in pure darkness or agnosticism. Even pure negations like infinity, immutability, and impassibility are true judgments which say something as a means of refinement. Analogical predications, being either positive perfections affirmed through the mode of priority/posteriority or as improper proportionality in metaphor, cannot escape the necessary interplay between affirmation and negation in the threefold way. As such, the modeless Pure Act of Being Itself Subsisting, i.e. God, the “I AM,” signifies a knowledge through a glass darkly. The spectrum of rays of color that are seen throughout the creaturely order point to the undifferentiated perfect and pure white light that Is God Himself as cause, though remains unseen, i.e. 1 Timothy 6:15b-16. All predications are ultimately absorbed in the Infinite ocean of substance that God is, and what He Who Is signifies most properly. And though such a name signifies not what, but that, even the notion of being that such a predicate seems to signify must be purified of all its composite comprehension, thereby leaving a mystery enshrouded in darkness. Owens call this a “darkness of ignorance in which the nature of being is attained only by way of a conclusion to something beyond the human intellect’s power to intuit or conceive.”41 Similarly Gilson states that “the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas on this crucial point is to invite us to a sort of intellectual asceticism calculated to rid our intellects of the delusion that we know what God is.”42
The focus on the role of metaphysical judgment against the tendency to try and conceptualize God’s quiddity is what leads to this state of darkness and mystery. The tools of the metaphysician are provided in order to demonstrate He Who Is, but “he cannot conceive either its nature or any of its perfections as they are in themselves, and he cannot intuit its existence. . . . Yet in this darkness the whole positive metaphysics about subsistent existence, in all its richness, attains its best development.”43 This development is what is concluded from Aquinas’s foundational notions and the threefold way, and Owens emphatically insists upon the full extent of the use of Aquinas’s way of remotion from Sententiarum I. 8. 1. 1 in order to purge the intellect of all of its conceptualizations, which never rise above the composite natures of creaturely modes of being. Gregory P. Rocca, in concluding his thorough analysis of Aquinas’s theological epistemology, advocates for the consistent application of the threefold way in analogical predication of God and does not shy away from the implications of the way of remotion. He states: “Even analogy, that specially appointed guardian of positive theology, has its own internal moment of negation.”44 Further, it is imperative that the work and implications of Aquinas’s system of metaphysical judgments and the threefold way remain united in their application. Rocca notes that his system is “a study in contrasts as it strives to interweave positive and negative theology and preserve their close relationship from unraveling.”45 And it is precisely this consistent outworking that prevents a “slide into either purely positive or purely negative theology, into univocity or equivocity.”46 However, even given this systematic consistency and the protective guardrails against the collapse back into finitude or the decent into an abyss of utter darkness, Rocca reminds his readers that “the searchlight of truth, with analogy and metaphor as its rays, can play only lightly upon the thick darkness of God enveloping Mt. Sinai, illumining its tenebrous presence but never penetrating and irradiating its core.”47
Conclusion: Wonder and Desire
A final point of import for the outworking of MJAP is the role it plays in maintaining a proper way of understanding the end to which the intellect and human nature are drawn. As Aristotle states, “all men desire knowledge,”48 and such desire is fulfilled in the simple apprehension and abstraction of sensible reality, culminating in judgments. Such knowledge is directed to further inquiry in understanding the relations between effects and their causes through reasoning. When the essences of such causes are known, the intellect attains some inkling of rest. Aquinas states, “Man has a natural desire to know the causes of whatever he sees. Hence, through wondering at things with hidden causes, men first began to philosophize, and when they had discovered the cause they were at rest. Nor do they cease inquiring until they come to the first cause; and then we consider ourselves to know perfectly when we know the first cause.”49
Now some measure of satisfaction or happiness is attained in the knowledge and contemplation of principles and the nature of cause and effect, which Aquinas calls felicitas. However, he is clear that “it is not possible that man’s ultimate happiness consist in contemplation based on the understanding of first principles: for this is most imperfect.”50 He further emphasizes that none of the things known quidditatively through natural reason are possible candidates for ultimate happiness, but rather only that end to which the human nature is directed through wonder and desire as an inquiry into the first cause is, namely God. Aquinas states: “The last end of man and of any intelligent substance is called happiness or beatitude: it is this that every intelligent substance desires as its last end, and for its own sake alone. Therefore, the last beatitude or happiness of any intelligent substance is to know God.”51
The problem, as the MJAP mode of knowledge and predication has demonstrated, is that this perfect happiness, or beatitudo, is not naturally attainable, since “no created intellect, utilizing only its own power, attains to a knowledge of what God is: the reason being that no cognitive faculty can transcend its object, just as sight cannot go beyond seeing color.”52 Rather, it can know only that the cause is and that which necessarily belongs to it. However, when the quiddity of the first cause is realized to be unattainable because of the natural limitations of human intellection, the result is not a hopeless futility in such a pursuit, but rather a perpetually sustained desire to know it, being drawn in wonder of the ultimate end and the happiness to be achieved in union with God. Though the ultimate end is not naturally attainable and perfect happiness not yet realized, an imperfect happiness, or felicitas, exists through what natural reason can arrive at regarding the first cause, namely the certitude in the judgment that He is and the predications constrained by MJAP. However, this is a knowledge through a glass darkly. This happiness is but a glimpse or inkling of beatitudo, and that which serves as the perpetual draw of wonder toward perfect happiness, i.e., the receiving of the knowledge of the divine essence in the gift of the beatific vision.
As the guardian against the conclusion that quidditative knowledge of God can be naturally achieved, and in support of divine simplicity, MJAP also supports the role of wonder and desire in ensuring that the end to which the intellect and nature of man is drawn is not deceived through concepts anchored by delimited acts of existence incapable of providing perfect happiness. As Aquinas states: “One has not attained to one’s last end until the natural desire is at rest. Therefore, the knowledge of any intelligible object is not enough for man’s happiness, which is his last end, unless he know God also, which knowledge, as his last end, terminates his natural desire.”53 And since this natural desire cannot be at rest without a knowledge that no intelligible object can provide, it follows that only the incomprehensible divine essence itself can bestow this knowledge to the intellect in the beatific vision, which is perfect happiness. Without this divine gift, the knowledge of God through MJAP, while providing the necessary truths of judgement to attain a certain felicitas, would remain incomplete. Put simply, such knowledge would culminate in drawing the intellect in wonder and desire toward a darkness of ignorance of He Who Is. Such knowledge, without divine aid, would leave the human intellect unsatiated.
In conclusion, it is the hope of this article that it provides further illumination on the problem of concepts in predication of God and insight into the role that MJAP, which itself is a referent to the consistent outworking of Aquinas’s work, plays in elucidating Truth’s Light and Supereminent Darkness. As Rocca states: “Truth’s light, however feeble its beam, is aimed at the gracious, infinite, and creative mystery of God, not simply at our concepts or ideas about God.”54 The mechanism of purification at the core of MJAP is the threefold way, ensuring that “only a
fruitful interplay of positive and negative theology can ever do justice to the Elusive One who always evades epistemic and linguistic capture.”55 The human intellect is constrained to the mode of delimited acts of existence, i.e., beings–in-act, not the modeless Pure Act of Being Itself Subsisting. Conceptualization remains an intellectual act anchored to the sensible composite particulars from whence they were abstracted. And though they may enable the intellect to conclude that God exists, and signify a judgment of a supereminent reality through knowing the formal perfections of effects, the composite ways of being are unavoidable. What follows is the necessity of the application of the way of remotion, extending to all three stages, corporeal, intellectual, and even being, inasmuch as it is in creatures. By way of conclusory summary, Étienne Gilson’s final remarks from his classic work, God and Philosophy, are most appropriate:
If such be the God of natural theology, true metaphysics does not culminate in a concept, be it that of Thought, of Good, of One, or of Substance. It does not even culminate in an essence, be it that of Being itself. Its last word is not ens, but esse; not being, but is. The ultimate effort of true metaphysics is to posit an Act by an act, that is, to posit by an act of judging the supreme Act of existing whose very essence, because it is to be, passes human understanding. Where a man’s metaphysics comes to an end, his religion begins. But the only path which can lead him to the point where the true religion begins must of necessity lead him beyond the contemplation of essences, up to the very mystery of existence. This path is not very hard to find, but few are those who dare to follow it to the end.56
1 See Romans 11:36, Acts 17:28, 1 Timothy 6:15b-16, Exodus 3:14, John 8:58.
2 Charles Journet. The Dark Knowledge of God, trans., James F. Anderson (Providence, RI: Cluny Media edition, 2020), iii.
3 For a more technical and thorough treatment see: Matthew J. Coté, Truth’s Light and Supereminent Darkness: The Problem of Concepts in Analogical Predication of God. Dissertation, 2024
4 Bernard Wuellner, A Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy. 2nd ed. (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce
Publishing Company, 1966), s.v. ‘univocal’.
5 Ibid., s.v. ‘univocal’.
6 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans., Fr. Laurence Shapcote, O.P. (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012). I. 44. 3.
7 Craig, Question of the Week #282 “Proof of Divine Simplicity” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/proof-of-divine-simplicity/ (accessed November 2025).
8 Craig, God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing AG, 2017), 145.
9 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans., Fr. Laurence Shapcote, O.P. (Green Bay, WI: The
Aquinas Institute, 2018), 1. 22. 9.
10 James Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 29.
11 Joseph Owens. “Immobility and Existence” St. Thomas Aquinas On The Existence of God: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980), 218-219.
12 Owens. “Immobility and Existence,” 219; Emphasis added.
13 Owens, “Darkness of Ignorance in the Most Refined Notion of God,”Towards a Christian
Philosophy. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. vol. 21. (Washington D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1990), 219.
14 Étienne Gilson, Elements of Christian Philosophy (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), 143; Emphasis added.
15 Wuellner, s.v. ‘equivocal’.
16 Peter Kreeft, Socratic Logic. 3.1 ed. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010), 71.
17 Ibid.; Emphasis in original.
18 Wuellner, s.v. ‘analogy’.
19 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. 13. 5.
20 Kreeft, 49; Emphasis in original.
21 Owens, “Darkness of Ignorance in the Most Refined Notion of God,” 223-224.
22 Craig, Question of the Week #276 “Is God a Being in the Same Sense that We Are?” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-god-a-being-in-the-same-sense-that-we-are (accessed November 2025).
23 J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 524.
24 Craig, “Is it Possible God is Not Personal?” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/is-it-possible-god-is-not-personal/ (accessed November 2025).
25 Craig, Question of the Week #276 “Is God a Being in the Same Sense that We Are?” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-god-a-being-in-the-same-sense-that-we-are (accessed November 2025).
26 Craig, Question of the Week #276 “Is God a Being in the Same Sense that We Are?” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-god-a-being-in-the-same-sense-that-we-are (accessed on April 28, 2018).
27 Kreeft, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The Modern Scholar Course Guide. (Recorded Books, LLC., 2009), 18.
28 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1. 12. 12.
29 Gregory P. Rocca, O.P. Speaking the Incomprehensible God. (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 175-176.
30 Craig, “The Eternal Present and Stump-Kretzmann Eternity.” https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/divine-eternity/the-eternal-present-and-stump-kretzmann-eternity/ (accessed November 2025).
31 Nicholas Bunnin, and Jiyuan Yu. The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, s.v. “metaphor” (West Sussex, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 427.
32 Wuellner, s.v. ‘analogy’.
33 For a more detailed accounting of Aquinas and MJAP, as well as a deeper analysis and response to Scotus, Cajetan, Mondin, and Geisler, see: Matthew J. Coté, Truth’s Light and Supereminent Darkness: The Problem of Concepts in Analogical Predication of God. Dissertation, 2024
34 Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2017), 170; Emphasis in original.
35 Aquinas, De Potentia, 7. 7.
36 Ibid.
37 Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 34; Emphasis in original. For further treatment on this notion, see Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 156-190.
38 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I. 2. 3.
39 Brian J. Shanley provides a good example of the triplex via at work in The Thomist Tradition (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2002), 54-55.
40 Aquinas, De Potentia, 7. 5. 14.
41 Owens, “Darkness of Ignorance in the Most Refined Notion of God,” 223.
42 Gilson, Elements, 110.
43 Owens, “Darkness of Ignorance in the Most Refined Notion of God,” 222.
44 Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 355.
45 Ibid., 356.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Aristotle, Metaphysics I.1, 980a22.
49 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3. 25. 13.
50 Ibid., 3. 37. 8.
51 Ibid., 3. 25. 16.
52 Aquinas, Expositio et Lectura super Epistolas Pauli Apostoli: Super I ad Timotheum, 6. 3. 269.
53 Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 3. 25. 12.
54 Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 356.
55 Ibid.
56 Gilson, God and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1969), 143-144; Emphasis in original.
Editor’s Note: It may be helpful to further subdivide views of analogical predication of God inside the Neo-Thomistic spectrum into: UCAP (Univocal Concept with Analogical Predication), where a univocal concept is utilized and predicated analogically, and MJAP (Metaphysical Judgment in Analogical Predication), where the predicate is a metaphysical judgment of analogy, rather than a focus on the problems inherent in finite conceptualization. Blending Aquinas, Battista Mondin, and Scotus (to build the analogical predication), Dr. Geisler’s view of analogical language is UCAP (Norman Geisler, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd Edition, 269). Some Thomists find additional protection from the charge of agnosticism in the MJAP view. For more information, see Matthew J Coté’s Ph.D. dissertation: Truth’s Light and Supereminent Darkness: The Problem of Concepts in Analogical Predication of God and see Gregory Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004).
