The Analogy of Being and How Thomism Talks About God

Thomism's central grammatical problem is how any word applied to both God and creatures can mean anything coherent at all. If wise means exactly the same thing said of a human being and said of God, univocal predication, then God is simply a very large instance of a category creatures also belong to, flattening the difference Thomism insists on between an infinite creator and a finite creation. If the word means something entirely unrelated in each case, equivocal predication, then nothing true is actually being said about God at all, and theology collapses into silence. Aquinas's answer, analogical predication, holds a middle position: wisdom said of God names a real perfection possessed in a manner appropriate to infinite, uncaused being, and the same word said of a human names a related but genuinely different way of possessing a similar perfection, related by a real proportion rather than by simple sameness or sheer unrelatedness. The doctrine does real work beyond semantics. It licenses Aquinas's Five Ways, the arguments from motion, causation, contingency, gradation and design that reason from features of the created order to a creator, since those arguments depend on cause and effect sharing something real in common without the effect being simply a smaller copy of the cause. Later Thomists, Cajetan most influentially in the sixteenth century, spent lifetimes working out how analogy avoids collapsing into either position it sits between, a technical dispute that never fully closed.