James Chastek, What a consideration of the divine names tells us about what is logical, knowable, conceivable, etc.

In his discussion of the divine names in the Scriptum (at the beginning of book I, d. 22), St. Thomas quotes Dionysius approvingly saying that when we speak of God, we can affirm the same thing we deny. This is particularly striking since St. Thomas defines a contradiction as affirming and denying the same thing. The saving distinction in the divine names is (as it always is in St. Thomas) the distinction between the way of signifying and the thing signified (the modus significandi and the res significativa). When we affirm the thing signified, we still must deny the mode of signifying. When said like this, however, we can easily lose sight of just how close to contradiction our speech about God is. While there is nothing odd or remarkable about our concepts grasping a thing imperfectly (to say “a platypus is an animal” is certainly a very imperfect grasp of what it is), when we affirm something of God, or concepts are so imperfect that we must then also turn around and show how we could deny it.

One of St. Thomas’s preferred objections to the possibility of naming God (and therefore knowing God in this life) is an enumeration of the deficiencies of possible names. Nouns signify a supposit with a formal quality ( a “this” that is such and such) but God is not such that there is some supposit modified by a formal quality; verbs and participles signify with time, but God is not a temporal being; pronouns either stand for something we can point to (“this” or “that”) or for some noun, but the deficiencies of nouns have already been spoken of, and the divine nature is not something one points to. On the one hand, St. Thomas has an easy solution to all these problems: the mode of signifying is not the same as the mode of existing. What the sign requires will not always be the same on the side of the thing. One example that makes this distinction particularly clear occurs when St. Thomas responds to a claim that a noun names “what subsists in itself”. He responds saying that the noun signifies what subsists in itself so far as it is a subject of predication. So taken, logical second intentions or even the noun “nothing” signify something that subsists. Obviously, to subsist in the order of signs does not require subsistence in reality; and so neither does composition in the order of signs, nor temporal existence in the order of signs, nor being pointed to in the order of signs require an identical reality on the side of the thing. St. Thomas will also go through each of the given parts of speech and explain how they can be understood to speak of divine reality: while a noun cannot name a composition of supposit and form composed in God, it can name a supposit with a form so far as form is taken a principle of knowledge. Again, while a pronoun cannot name what is pointed to by the finger, it can name what is pointed to by argument.

That said, composition, temporality, and being pointed to all “come along with” the word we are using. They reflect the sort of existence that our speech is proportioned to. Just as we must reject the sort of existence proportionate to our minds when we think of God, we must negate something that always comes along with the speech we use to speak of him. In this sense, we must always deny what we affirm of God (though we need not always affirm what we deny: if we say “God is not a body”, we don’t have to turn around and look for a way in which he is one.) This happens in a particularly remarkable way when we consider the division of certain words into the concrete and the abstract. A concrete term like “wise” is proportioned to speaking of something that is diverse from and composed with a subject that differs from it. So far as it involves this proportion, we must negate that God is wise; but we must also affirm the simple (and therefore abstract) quality “wisdom”. God is wisdom so far as wisdom bespeaks sheer simplicity- and even so far as wisdom bespeaks something that cannot be pointed out by the finger. One can pray to wisdom, if taken in this way.

Given St. Thomas’s principles, in the measure that we speak about anything that is not proportioned to what we understand first, we will have to make distinctions between what we are led to by the mode of signifying and knowing, and what is really the case for the reality in question. This bandwidth of things we are attuned to is vanishingly small. There is really no proportion at all between the sense-intelligible reality that we are proportioned to and the intelligible reality we are only faintly aware of in this life. We must begin, of course, with sense-intelligible reality, but the more we attain to the principles of this reality, both in natural science and metaphysics, the more we become aware of the need to make distinctions in our speech and thinking in order to accurately describe the principles we attain to. How can God act in time without being temporal? How can a light wave wave though nothing is waving? What is the aether of magnetic fields? All these difficulties are created by the way we think and signify.

The more we want to speak of the principles of things, the more we need to be very wary of what it means for them to be “logical”. Whether we are talking about God, subatomic particles, prime matter, the fourth dimension, or the human intellect, we need to be clear that “to be logical” will involve, at some point, negating what we have just affirmed. If “logical” means “what is proportioned to our intellect”, then the whole point of science (which reaches to profound and foundational causes) is to get to non-logical reality. As science and learning advances, we need to turn to our very tools of knowing and explain precisely how they are not adequate, and how they can be used to speak of and understand what exceeds the bandwidth of reality we are attuned to. Notice that this is the opposite of throwing up our hands and shouting “mystery!” The whole point is to give a precise account of how the conceptswe first form can be used as principles to explain what is not proportioned to them. This is particularly important, since so far as “mystery” means whatever exceeds what our minds are proportioned to, then the portion of reality that is not mysterious is so small that it could be ignored, just as we could ignore the amount of mass that a mountain loses when a bird’s wing brushes against it. If we want to get to what is most of all real, “being logical” will have to involve a negation of what is first of all logical to us. This does not mean we need to start saying random things, or writing poetry, or meditating in order to attain the real, it means that we have to recognize what our concepts are proportioned to in order to see more clearly how they can be used to speak of what exceeds them or falls short of their reality. All that we have said here about “logical” can be equally said of “to be conceivable” or “to be knowable” or “to be coherent” or “to be verifiable”.

So the question of the divine names awakens us to the need to understand how our knowing is first of all proportioned to something, and that this is what we first mean by logical, conceivable, knowable, verifiable. Science advances by breaking outside of these proportionate limits to things that at first blush might be called “illogical” (though this is a poor name, since it bespeaks a lack). The tool by which we mark these breaks is analogous naming. We call time a fourth dimension though it is certainly not what we first mean by a dimension; we say God exists and is intelligent though he does not have what we first call existence or intelligence. The methods of going past what is proportionate to us are not the same in both cases, but our need to mark an advance by analogous naming is the same in both cases.

At the limit of what is disproportionate to our intellect, one finds the mysteries of the faith: the Trinity and Incarnation. It must be stressed that these are limiting cases- they are not the first such cases. Speaking about the mysteries of the faith requires us to make some new distinctions in the tools which we use to know, but they are not the first times we need to make such distinctions. The logical problem of the Trinity, or the problem of its conceivability, is the clearest and most preeminent problem of knowability and conceivability, but it is not the only such problem. Speaking of God existing, or light waving, or the soul knowing presents small-scale versions of the same sort of problem. In all these, the words or concepts themselves will exert a distorting influence on the reality itself, and this distorting influence must be taken into account and corrected against. If we ask whether any of these things are knowable or conceivable without taking this need for correction into account, or as though there was only one concept involved here, we will do a great deal of damage.