Pale Analogies and Dead Metaphors: Some Recent Trends in Religious Language

HORIZONS 37/1 (2010): 25–51

PALE ANALOGIES AND DEAD METAPHORS: SOME RECENT TRENDS IN RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE

Francis J. Caponi , OSA Villanova University

ABSTRACT

In Christian tradition, accounts of religious language have com-monly centered on analogical predication arising from a created world that refl ects its Creator. Recent decades have witnessed a change: metaphor has gone into ascendance while analogy has suf-fered an eclipse. This essay critiques four trends in contemporary accounts of religious language: the ascription of universal range to metaphor; inadequate accounts of the nature of metaphor; insuffi -cient attention given to the nature of literal speech; and the conse-quent defi cient understandings of the relationship of metaphor and analogy. I then draw on Thomas Aquinas for an account of religious speech that defends the cognitive indispensability of metaphor while arguing for the logical primacy of analogy.

I. Introduction

In his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio , John Paul II charged Christian theology with the task of providing a contemporary explication of “the capacity of human language to speak in a true and meaningful way even of things which transcend all human experience.” 1 In the Christian tradi-tion, such explications commonly have centered on analogy, most theo-logians holding that “the good and affi rmative in the created order imperfectly mirrors something in God himself,” 2 though the mirror be dark, and the differences far exceed the similarities. Figurative forms of speech, especially metaphor, parable, and myth have been indispensable

1 Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio (14 September 1998) (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1998), §67.

2 John Macquarrie, Mary for All Christians , 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001), 16. See First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith ( Dei Filius ), chap. 4.

Francis J. Caponi, OSA, is an assistant professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, Villanova University (Villanova, PA 19085). He received his Th.D. from Harvard University in 2000. He taught at the Washington Theological Union from 1998 to 2005. He has published essays in The Thomist and International Journal of Systematic Theology, and authored the chapter on Karl Rahner in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Theosis/Deifi cation in the Christian Traditions (2007).

26 HORIZONS

in Christian prayer, preaching, and theology, but in general the logic of analogical predication has guided the systematic exposition of talk about God.

Recent decades have witnessed a change in this approach, as meta-phor has gone into ascendance and analogy has suffered an eclipse. Metaphor, having advanced beyond its humble rhetorical origins to claim a preeminent role in philosophy, is also lauded for its service in winning wars, nurturing true love, and setting the course of mighty commercial enterprises. 3 If this suggests an interdisciplinary “metaphor-mania,” 4 it is one to which Christian theology has not been immune, metaphor being frequently extolled as the only form of speech with the requisite power and unconventionality to verbalize the ways of God to man.

In the midst of this fervor, both literal speech in general and ana-logical talk in particular are misconstrued and neglected. Literal speech is depicted as the mummifi ed remains of metaphor, and theologians are warned not to seek among the linguistic dead for speech suited to the living God. Analogy fares slightly better. Sometimes it is accorded a veteran’s honor, sometimes excoriated as a presumptuous Babel, but most often derided as pale metaphor, the lifeblood of fi gurative indirec-tion almost gone—spiritless, if not yet in full rigor.

The hegemony of metaphor is not absolute. Many authors recog-nize its crucial place in religious language without succumbing to the trends outlined below. 5 But metaphor’s ascendance is suffi ciently per-vasive to warrant sustained consideration. In what follows, I identify and critique four trends which characterize a number of contemporary accounts of religious language: (1) the ascription of universal range to metaphor; (2) the presentation of inadequate or contradictory accounts

3 Mark Johnson, “Introduction: Metaphor in the Philosophical Tradition,” in Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 3–42; James M. McPherson, “How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors,” in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991), 93–112; Michael Radford et al ., Il Postino (Miramax, 1995); Geoff Lewis, “Metaphorical Mayhem,” Brill’s Content (Fall 2001): 65–69.

4 Johnson, Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, ix. 5 For example, Alister McGrath, A Scientifi c Theology , vol. 3, Theory (Grand Rapids,

MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 97–132; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology , vol. 3, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 621–22; W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 44–58; Colin Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality and the Christian Tradition (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 21–52; Caroline Franks Davis, The Evidential Force of Religious Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10–14; Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology , vol. 2, The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36–39, esp. 39 n. 41; and Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 299–303.

Caponi: Pale Analogies and Dead Metaphors 27

of the nature of metaphor; (3) the allied failure to give suffi cient atten-tion to the nature of literal speech; and (4) the mistreatment of analogy, with consequent defi cient understandings of the relationship of meta-phor and analogy. I then draw on Thomas Aquinas to frame a basic account of the working of metaphor and analogy in religious language, one which defends the indispensability of analogical predication while also drawing on contemporary refl ection on metaphor to provide an integrated account of religious speech. From a Thomistic perspective, analogical predication enjoys a logical priority rooted in metaphysics, but the dynamics of religious language indicate that neither analogy nor metaphor functions properly in isolation from the other.

II. Trends in Metaphor-Focused Accounts of Religious Language

A. Theological Panmetaphoricism

Although “panmetaphoricism” covers a mélange of linguistic, epis-temological, and theological theses, 6 all forms of it make two essential claims: (1) all theological language is metaphorical, and (2) metaphor is irreducible to literal speech. 7 However, because it is neither possible nor necessary for every theological text to provide a full-dress account of religious predication, and because theologians do not always pro-vide even a basic explanation of their terms, it is often not clear how committed some authors are to this view. 8 This trend can be called “casual panmetaphoricism,” in contradistinction to the “hard panmeta-phoricism” espoused and defended by others. Several examples of each will clarify these trends.

A number of recent works from different areas within religious studies and theology, though not primarily concerned with religious language, casually assert in the manner of received wisdom that all reli-gious language is metaphorical. Clark Pinnock’s defense of “open the-ism” includes this contention: “All language is anthropomorphic and metaphorical. . .” 9 Hans Boersma’s critique of the traditional forms of atonement theology is prefaced with the view that “ all language is

6 René van Woudenberg, “Panmetaphoricism Examined,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31/4 (1998): 231–47.

7 David K. Clark, To Know and Love God: Method for Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003), 405.

8 Justo González maintains that “all language about God is metaphorical” ( Essential Theological Terms [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005], 109), yet also asserts that “all language about God is analogical” (23), without explaining how these claims are related.

9 Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001), 63.

28 HORIZONS

metaphoric in character.” 10 While discussing the relationship of sci-ence and theology, John Haught avers that “our theological language is always tentative and metaphorical. . .” 11 Catherine LaCugna’s examina-tion of the doctrine of the Trinity includes this prescription: “The sys-tematic theologian needs to keep in mind that every concept, whether it be ‘substance’ or ‘relation,’ is fundamentally metaphorical, not a lit-eral description of what is.” 12 Roger Haight holds that “religious lan-guage is symbolic and metaphorical . . . predications about God should not be considered literal. . . .” 13

In these works, analogy is noteworthy mainly for its absence, poor showing, or confl ation with metaphor. Of course, all fi ve authors may be using “metaphor” as no more than shorthand for “non-literal predi-cation.” If so, it is signifi cant that “metaphor” and not “analogy” serves to convey this generality. More importantly, this view shapes their the-ses and conclusions. Pinnock’s discussion of the relationship between biblical metaphor and systematic theology, Boersma’s re-imaging of the language of salvation, LaCugna’s doxological reading of theology, Haight’s interpretation of the language of the councils as well as his, LaCugna’s doxological reading of theology, and Haught’s arguments for the compatibility of a scientifi c worldview and theistic belief could all be challenged by the contention that some religious language is ana-logical and literal. Whether this challenge would take the form of a demand for greater precision and clarity or engender more substantial renovations is not my chief concern here. Rather, I want to draw atten-tion to the trend of Christian theologians claiming that all religious lan-guage is metaphorical, 14 failing to give substance to this claim or to examine the nature of metaphorical predication, and yet depending upon “metaphor” to underwrite important aspects of their work.

10 Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 18; see also 48.

11 John F. Haught, Science and Religion: From Confl ict to Conversation (New York: Paulist, 1995), 43. In his earlier work, What is God? How to Think About the Divine (New York: Paulist, 1986), Haught treats “analogous” and “metaphorical” as synonymous (2), but in the bulk of the text, restricts “metaphor” to language about God (32–33, 46, 115, 130), and “analogy” to human actions (44).

12 Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 359. Elsewhere, LaCugna appears to attribute a form of this view to Aquinas. See “God in Communion with Us,” in Freeing Theology , ed. Catherine Mowry LaCugna (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 101.

13 Roger Haight, Jesus: Symbol of God (New York: Orbis, 1999), 11; see also idem, Dynamics of Theology (1990; reprint, Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), 144–45.

14 This must be distinguished from the claim that talk about God is mostly metaphor. The logical primacy of analogical speech (for which I argue below) is compatible with the obvious predominance of metaphor in religious predication. See Gerald Hughes, The Nature of God (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), 62–63, 187–88.


Another form of casual panmetaphoricism is found among authors who do not formally assert the universal range of metaphor in religion, yet effectively posit it through their failure to seriously consider (or sometimes even mention) any other form of speech. 15 For example, John Hick appears to limit the range of metaphor (“a great deal of reli-gious language is metaphorical”) but provides only one other category of predication, “literal.” 16 Since he is repeatedly at pains to point out that talk about God is never literal, there is no other kind it can be except metaphorical.

However, in a number of other works substantially concerned with religious predication, a hard form of panmetaphoricism is explicitly and seriously advocated. Paul Avis addresses the theological roles of metaphor, symbol, and myth in God and the Creative Imagination: “All the signifi cant assertions of theology are expressed in language that is irreducibly metaphorical.” 17 J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, in Theology and the Justifi cation of Faith , writes of the “metaphoric means that consti-tutes the structure of all religious language” and “the metaphoric nature of all religious language.” 18 Vincent Brümmer, in his defense of the cog-nitive intent of religious speech, puts forward the view that the tradi-tional proofs for the existence of God, “like all claims about God, are metaphorical.” 19 Sallie McFague, in Metaphorical Theology and other works, makes the most sustained and infl uential case that every word and phrase predicated of the divine is necessarily metaphorical. 20

B. The Nature of Metaphor

A respectable assertion of religious panmetaphoricism requires the support of a reasonably clear account of the dynamics of metaphor. Remarkably, the proponents of metaphor commonly provide only the

15 For example, Ruth C. Duck, Gender and the Name of God: The Trinitarian Baptismal Formula (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1991), 13, 22; Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning the Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 16.

16 John Hick, “Transcendence and Truth: A Response to D.Z. Phillips,” in Dialogues in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. John (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 103.

17 Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology (London/New York: Routledge, 1999,) 102.

18 J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justifi cation of Faith: Constructing Theories in Systematic Theology, trans. H.F. Snijders (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 133, 135.

19 Vincent Brümmer, “Metaphor and the Reality of God,” in Comparative Theology: Essays for Keith Ward, ed. T.W. Bartel (London: SPCK, 2003), 85.

20 Indeed, McFague ups the ante with the claims that metaphor is “the way language and, more basically, thought works” ( Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982], 37). Her most recent work, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), reaf-fi rms this (108–10). This claim is discussed in the following section.

30 HORIZONS

sketchiest refl ections on what metaphor is and how it works. Casual advocates often do not even defi ne it, and the hard panmetaphoricists make do with accounts of negligible substance and dubious coherency, replete with odd and unexamined ideas about the nature of cognition and speech.

In the camp of casual panmetaphoricism, John Hick argues that the traditional exposition of the Incarnation unnecessarily commits Christian theology to exclusivist claims. Titles such as “Son of God” were not used metaphysically by the early Christians, but functioned as devotional and liturgical metaphors. 21 Consequently, “incarnation” should be interpreted as a fi gurative expression of the extraordinary openness of Jesus of Nazareth to “the Real,” from which results his reli-ability as a guide to soteriological transformation. Yet despite the weight this proposal places upon it, metaphor receives scant consideration in Hick’s works. In An Interpretation of Religion , the preferred term for speech about the “Real an sich ” is “myth,” the main characteristics of which are value-truthfulness and non-literality; elsewhere, Hick calls myth “a much extended metaphor.” 22 In The Metaphor of God Incarnate , the longest sustained consideration of metaphor runs to three pages wherein Hick mentions, but does not survey, the contemporary litera-ture on the subject, choosing instead to draw from it the “broadly agreed” conclusion that “metaphorical speech is a use of language in which speaker-meaning differs from dictionary-meaning.” 23 Metaphor can be transposed into literal speech (Hick describes this as spelling out similarities or analogies), but not exhaustively, since the metaphor-ical transfer generates an irreducible aura of meaning. 24

These observations give insuffi cient support to Hick’s conclusions. Of course, we must grant that much of what the Scriptures say about Christ is fi gurative. But it is a questionable inference that because the inspired authors did not identify Christ with a baby sheep or a rock, they meant nothing about Christ in se but were only expressing a value-giving worldview and reinforcing particularly intense emotional states. 25 In this regard, Hick’s slender account leans towards an anti-cognitive view of metaphor. For example, he holds the assertion that

21 John Hick, The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993), 101; idem, A Christian Theology of Religions (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 93–95.

22 The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 105. 23 Ibid., 99. 24 But see “Literal and Metaphorical Christologies,” in Jesus Then and Now: Images

of Jesus in History and Christology, ed. Marvin W. Meyer and Charles Hughes (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001), 144–45, where Hick abandons this view.

25 See Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 26–31.


Christ’s death was a “ransom” to be metaphorical, and so asking the question “to whom is the ransom paid?” commits “the perennial theo-logical mistake of taking metaphorical language literally.” 26 But aside from the fact that it has been answered with accounts of atonement which Hick fi nds implausible and disagreeable, why is the question impermissible? If Homer declares “Achilles is a lion,” is it literalizing to ask, “Upon what does he prey?”

In the hard panmetaphoricism camp, few names are as prominent as Sallie McFague. 27 Yet she, too, gives a notably thin account of meta-phorical predication. As a prelude to the construction of more spiritu-ally relevant and eco-friendly models of God, she describes metaphorical thinking as “spotting a thread of similarity between two dissimilar objects, events, or whatever, one of which is better known than the other, and using the better-known one as a way of speaking about the lesser known.” 28 On the linguistic level, this perception of similarity underwrites the transference of a word from the familiar to the unfamil-iar. Metaphor holds affi rmation and negation in tension, forming a “grid” that enables one thing to be seen “indirectly,” as similar and dif-ferent from something else. 29 In saying “chess is war,” the listener who does not literalize the statement, but recognizes it as metaphor, can grasp the “is/is not” that it embodies. Chess is and is not war: like battle in involving strategy, unlike it in the absence of bloodshed. And although religious speech most conspicuously displays this dynamic, McFague asserts the illimitable sway of this metaphorical tension:

From the time we are infants we construct our world through meta-phor; that is, just as young children learn the meaning of the color red by fi nding the thread of similarity through many dissimilar objects (red ball, red apple, red cheeks), so we constantly ask when we do not know how to think about something, “What is it like?”. . . We often make distinctions between ordinary and poetic language,

26 John Hick, “Is the Doctrine of the Atonement a Mistake?,” in Philosophy and Theological Discourse, ed. Stephen T. Davis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 77.

27 Her views are adopted tout court by several thinkers. See Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–18; Elizabeth Johnson, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 2007), 18–21; Stephen C. Roy, How Much Does God Foreknow? A Comprehensive Biblical Study (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 159–62; Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross , 99–108.

28 Sallie McFague, Models of God : Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 15.

29 McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 46, 50, 125; idem, Models of God, 33; idem, Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 44; Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 59. For criticism of this view of metaphor, see Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 41–43, 88–90.

32 HORIZONS

assuming that the fi rst is direct and the second indirect, but actually both are indirect, for we always think by indirection. . . . Likewise, conceptual or abstract language is metaphorical in the sense that the ability to generalize depends upon seeing similarity within dissimi-larity: a concept is an abstraction of the similar from a sea of dissimi-lars. Thus, Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fi ttest is a high-level metaphorical exercise of recognizing a similar pattern amid an other-wise incredibly diverse set of phenomena. . . . 30

Two aspects of this account merit special attention. First, neither of the examples in this passage fi t McFague’s own defi nition of metaphor as indirection. “Red” is the sense , the meaning or content predicated of the various objects, and it is applied univocally to each. It does not mean something similar, but exactly the same thing in every case, free from tension and negation. It is the referents which are dissimilar, but the referents are not predicates. 31 A true metaphorical predication, on McFague’s defi nition, would be the conclusion of the series “red ball, red apple, red cheeks, red mood.” Customarily, red applies to the realm of the visible, and if transferred to the non-visible (a passion, or a social-ist outlook) it enacts the “is/is not” which McFague acclaims as the substance of metaphor. Adopting this account of religious metaphor results in the endorsement of univocal speech about God, which is surely not McFague’s intent.

Second, not only do these examples and others fail to support the view that metaphor is the form of all thought and speech, but they reveal the incoherence of this view. 32 A good deal of quotidian speech func-tions non-fi guratively. For example, there is a negation of scope, but not meaning, in the move from genus to species enacted by predicating “chair” of a desk chair, an arm chair, and a beach chair. “Chair” is broad enough directly to include different shapes, sizes, designs, and materi-als, and so nothing tensive and fi gurative takes place, as, for example, when one calls a tide pond “the chair of life.” To ask “what kind of chair?” or “what shade of red?” or “how many apples and oranges?” is not to enter the realm of the metaphorical. 33 Further, just such

30 Metaphorical Theology, 16–17. 31 So, too, Darwin’s theory means exactly the same thing whenever it is invoked as an

explanation. The theory does not claim to be describing a thread of similarity among dif-ferent things, but proposes a single explanation—natural selection—which, without any change in its meaning, applies to different referents, such as the evolutionary histories of mammals and reptiles.

32 E.g., McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 34: “Seeing the similar number among oth-erwise disparate entities is a metaphorical act, as in six apples, six moons, six ideas, six generous acts.” Where is the “is not” which makes these sixes metaphorical?

33 Nor the analogical, as Brümmer holds. See Speaking of a Personal God (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992), 45–46.


non-fi gurative predications are the direct speech logically demanded by the view that metaphor is “the detour of a description that belongs properly elsewhere.” 34 Unless we have some grasp of what it is for a predicate to “belong properly,” we are left with all detours and no des-tination. But McFague provides no such account, limiting herself to inchoate references to “dead metaphors,” 35 those once novel detours laid low by literalization.

Moreover, the idea that every concept is metaphorical leaves McFague’s analysis in the awkward position not just of failing to account for direct predication, but of denying the possibility of such speech. Though this outcome is extreme, it refl ects a common diffi culty in accounts of theological metaphor, one which is discussed in the next section.

C. Literality: The Status of Non-Figurative Speech

Regarding literal speech, metaphor-focused accounts are often strangely incurious, even refl exively dismissive. 36 Elizabeth Johnson speaks for many when she promulgates this rule: “[N]o expression for God can be taken literally. None.” 37 For those who hold it, this “antilit-erality thesis” 38 results directly from the divine nature: God is absolute mystery, completely unknowable in se , perfectly simple, utterly beyond created intellect, “that which transcends the literal scope of language.” 39 Clarifi cation of these varied claims is wanting; indeed, it seems an almost unbreached custom that contemporary accounts of theological metaphor neglect all but the most generic assertions of God’s unknow-ability. 40 Johnson is representative in this regard, confl ating the effort to

34 McFague, Models of God , 34. 35 McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 36. 36 Sometimes quite forcefully dismissive: “Metaphor is primary and embodies insight

into the real world. It is not metaphor that is the private language - it is in touch with real-ity - but literal speech, which is lazy, uninspired and unproductive.” (Avis, 168)

37 Johnson, Quest for the Living God , 18. Again, examples abound: see, e.g. Thomas Rausch, I Believe in God: A Refl ection on the Apostle’s Creed (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 49; Patricia Wilson-Kastner, “Where Do We Start?,” in Praising God: The Trinity in Christian Worship , ed. Ruth C. Duck and Patricia Wilson-Kastner (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999), 19.

38 William Alston, “Literal Talk of God: Its Possibility and Function,” in This is My Name Forever: The Trinity and Gender Language for God, ed. Alvin F. Kimel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 38. See also Alston, “Irreducible Metaphors in Theology,” in Experience, Reason and God , ed. Eugene Thomas Long (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1980), 129–48.

39 Hick, An Interpretation of Religion, 352. 40 It is worth noting that thinkers who do give careful attention to the rich tradition

regarding the unknowability of God tend to endorse the possibility of literal religious speech. See Harold Netland, Dissonant Voices: Religious Pluralism and the Question of Truth (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1999), 133–41; William Alston, “Two

34 HORIZONS

fi nd an adequate religious language with the effort to circumscribe God. 41 Thus construed, the claim to literal religious speech can only represent the impossible effort of catching the unknowable God in the net of language. 42 Analogical predicates like “person” and “one,” she writes without qualifi cation, “are not intended to denote anything posi-tive in God, but to remove something.” 43 Johnson does uphold the util-ity of conceptual yet non-literal religious speech, not in the sense that such concepts apply to God, but inasmuch as they somehow guide the believer in the right direction, so that the God who is beyond the intel-lect “is nonetheless deeply known in human love, as love itself.” 44

Such panmetaphoricism cannot be coherently upheld. If the essence of metaphor is a fusion of two perceptions, or the perception of similarity between two dissimilars, or the movement of predicates from a “source” to a “target,” 45 or “understanding one conceptual domain in terms of another,” 46 or “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” 47 then what logically precedes these transi-tive actions? 48 For instance, speaking of an expeditiously run meeting as “ploughing through the discussion” suggests that at some point the ploughing of a fi eld was perceived to be similar to, as well as an apt image for, other activities that demanded slow and steady effort in the face of resistance. Without such a literal grounding, theological pan-metaphoricism entails an infi nite regress of metaphorical perceptions, all working upon metaphors which are themselves the products of pre-vious metaphorical transfers.

Cheers for Mystery!,” in God and the Ethics of Belief: New Essays in Philosophy of Religion, ed. Andrew Dole and Andrew Chignell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 99–114; John H. Whittaker, “Literal and Figurative Language of God,” Religious Studies 17 (1981): 39–54; Andrew Moore, Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar, and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 66–72; and Keith Ward, Religion and Creation (Oxford: Oxford University, 2006), 129–155.

41 Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 105 (emphasis added); see also Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 25–26.

42 Quest for the Living God, 214. 43 She Who Is , 204. 44 Ibid., 108. 45 Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 214–23. 46 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University,

2001), 4. 47 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago, 1980), 4. 48 This question does not presume that the earliest human speech was entirely literal

and metaphor came later; but it does reject the idea that speech is, or ever could have been, solely metaphorical. See Owen Barfi eld, “The Meaning of the Word ‘Literal’,” in Metaphor and Symbol, ed. L.C. Knights and Basil Cottle (London: Butterworths, 1960), 48–63.


The unexamined assumption at work here is that “literal” is syn-onymous with “univocal.” 49 The failure both to provide a more nuanced consideration of literality than this, and to harvest the tradition of analogy for assistance in this aim, constitute major drawbacks in many metaphor-focused accounts of religious speech. 50

D. The Relationship of Analogy and Metaphor

If and when analogy is addressed by the advocates of metaphor, several trends are common: (a) a lack of clarity regarding the differ-ences between metaphor and analogy, (b) the slight attention given to their connections, (c) their confl ation, (d) the treatment of analogy as non-literal speech, (e) a false contrast between metaphor and analogy (in which the latter creates meaning solely through partial likeness, rather than through metaphor’s dynamic tension of likeness and unlike-ness), and (f) profound misinterpretations of Thomas Aquinas’ thought. Still, the undoubted kinship of metaphor and analogy, and their easy equivalence in everyday discourse, cautions against the specter of ped-antry. In what follows, then, I focus on broad, frequently seen defi -ciences, rather than picking out every example of an author’s ambiguous use of “analogy” and “metaphor.”

In The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence , 51 John Sanders explicitly rejects panmetaphoricism, yet gives no examples of Scriptural language about God which he takes to be literal. He affi rms Aquinas’ teaching that all our understanding and speech about God arise from within the created order, but restricts the application of this insight to metaphor. 52 His only address of analogy is the vague admoni-tion that “analogical predication is fraught with signifi cant problems.” 53

49 This assumption is common coin. See Dan Stiver, The Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol, and Story (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 11,21–22, passim; Tyron Inbody, The Faith of the Christian Church: An Introduction to Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 85; Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 262; Sandra Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture, 2nd ed. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), 139.

50 Even Eberhard Jüngel, who devotes no small attention to these matters, comes up short. He recognizes that answering the question “What is literally a literal use of lan-guage?” is crucial to understanding how metaphors work. (“Metaphorische Wahrheit. Erwägungen zur theologischen Relevanz der Metapher als Beitrag zur Hermeneutik einer narrativen Theologie,” in Entsprechungen, Gott-Wahrheit-Mensch: Theologische Erörter-ungen [München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1980], 105). In what follows, however, the word “literal” ( wörtlich ) disappears, to be replaced with the term “univocity” ( die Eindeutigkeit ).

51 John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove. IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

52 Ibid., 21–22. 53 Ibid., 293, n.8.

36 HORIZONS

Likewise, Rebecca Chopp’s The Power to Speak, 54 which deals at length with questions of religious language, speaks repeatedly of metaphor, and is critical of some of its theoretical discussions, but simply ignores analogy.

Van Huyssteen uses both terms, but gives no clear account of their difference. 55 Johnson holds that speech about God employs both anal-ogy and metaphor, but she merely lays these two alongside each other as examples of “the indirect play of God-language.” 56 Thus, it is unclear why she refers to “good” and “person” as examples of religious anal-ogy, but maintains that “God is love” is an instance of metaphor. 57 And Hick’s curt consideration of analogy in An Interpretation of Religion erroneously attributes to Aquinas the view that analogy does not permit us to say what God is “like,” 58 and also treats “analogical” and “literal” as antonyms. 59 Elsewhere, he states that analogy and metaphor are com-parable in that both “arise from similarities between different things”; yet, he does not explain why “incarnation” is “clearly a case of meta-phor rather than analogy.” 60

McFague offers the paradigmatic theological deployment of the stark contrast between the unique capacity of metaphor to effect sig-nifi cant cognitive advancement, and the “much of a sameness” served up by analogy. Analogical predications, she believes, are “identity statements,” in contrast with the “dissent” of metaphor. Analogy, although it “stresses the glory of difference,” still suppresses the neg-ative element in theological predication, because it traffi cs only in “surface dissimilarities” and “easy harmonies,” all the while depend-ing on a deeper, divinely fashioned similarity among all things. 61 Of this trend, Nicholas Lash writes, “[I]t has become increasingly com-mon to lay the emphasis, when speaking of analogy, on similar-ity , as if, along the way of analogy, ‘the different’ operated in spite of ‘the same.’ This is emphatically not the case with Aquinas’s use of analogy. . . .” 62

54 Rebecca S. Chopp, The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God (New York: Crossroad, 1991).

55 Van Huyssteen, Theology and the Justifi cation of Faith , 135–136; see also idem, Alone in the World? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 42.

56 Johnson, Quest for the Living God, 18. 57 Ibid., 17. 58 Hick, An Interpretation of Religion , 247; idem, The Philosophy of Religion , 4th ed.

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 84. 59 Ibid., 351. 60 The Metaphor of God Incarnate, 100, n.2. 61 McFague, Metaphorical Theology , 12–13. 62 Nicholas Lash, “Ideology, Metaphor, and Analogy,” in Why Narrative? Readings in

Narrative Theology , ed. Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 124.


If neither analogy nor metaphor are examined attentively, it is not diffi cult to confl ate the two. Catherine Keller writes of Scriptural images which signify “a metaphor or analogy, not a literal identity,” and para-bles which make “a comparison, an analogy, a metaphoric link.” 63 Brümmer thinks that metaphors “describe things in terms of their anal-ogies with other things,” and at one point endorses a decidedly analogical panmetaphoricism: “All our thinking about God remains metaphorical in the sense that we think and speak about (our relations with) God in terms derived from our thinking and speaking about (our relations with) each other.” 64 It is unsurprising when he affi rms “God is a rock” to be a metaphor, then observes that “the analogy between God and a rock does not go much further” than expressing God’s dependability and trustworthiness. 65

III. A Thomistic Framework

Most of the authors canvassed so far would concur that an analogi-cal approach to religious language, whatever its specifi cs and however well intended, lacks the fi gurative verve, semantic irreverence, and cognitive dissent which must stamp all discourse about the God who remains, even in his self-revelation, beyond the ken of literal speech. Furthermore, whenever analogy is addressed, religious speech comes out sounding like a zero-sum game: any concession to the value of ana-logical predication inevitably diminishes the value of metaphor, return-ing it to a rhetorical role as the chattel of literal speech, fi t only for fi ligree and fulmination. How much less, then, do their accounts coun-tenance the notion of an intimate relationship between metaphor and analogy, one in which their roles in religious speech remain broadly distinct yet inseparable, and in which the imaginative power and cog-nitive force of metaphor are secured only in a fi rm relationship with analogy.

A tonic for anemic analogy can be drawn from the work of Thomas Aquinas. When he asserts that God is “known as unknown” (ignotum cognoscere ), 66 he insists on both sides of this oft-abused precept. God is

63 Keller, On the Mystery , 137, 151. The situation is even more confused in Keller’s The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 98, 192.

64 Vincent Brümmer, Atonement, Christology and the Trinity: Making Sense of Christian Doctrine (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 5, 7.

65 Brümmer, The Model of Love, 14. 66 Super Boetium De Trinitate , 1.2, ad 1. All of the English texts of Thomas in this

essay, except for Summa Theologiae, are my translations from the editiones operum opti-mae provided by Enrique Alarcón of Universidad de Navarra at www.corpusthomisticum.org. For Summa Theologiae , the Latin and English texts come from the 60 volumes

38 HORIZONS

the subject of theological investigation and predication, 67 and this leads Thomas to confront many of the questions raised by religious speech. 68 His relatively few and comparatively brief expositions on these ques-tions have been well-ploughed, especially in the last half-century, and in what follows I wish to show that this Thomistic ground offers a fer-tile setting for the assimilation of many contemporary insights on the working of metaphorical predication into the tradition of analogy, while also providing an account of their relationship which helps redress the trends discussed earlier.

A. Literality

For a realist such as Thomas, knowing and naming do not mirror their objects; rather, they “cohere with” being. Thomas follows the Aristotelian dictum that words refer to concepts, and concepts refer to reality: “the idea expressed in a word is something the intellect con-ceives from things and expresses in speech” ( ST I.5.2, resp.). 69 Intellect achieves knowledge through concepts abstracted from the real. For example, “red” and “ball,” on their own, are conceptual, but not cogni-tive. They have sense, but they do not “mean” anything.

For St. Thomas, it is at the level of judgment, not abstraction, that the category of literality arises. The literal is the meaning, the “some-thing about something,” which the speaker or author wishes to commu-nicate: “the literal sense is that which the author intends” ( ST I.1.10, resp.). To ask if “red” is literal is nonsensical, for it is only when some-thing is said to be red—a ball, a piece of fruit, a mood—that the ques-tion of a speaker’s meaning (and its truth or falsity 70 ) appears. “Literal,” therefore, is neither a dictionary defi nition nor a type of predication, but speaks to the purpose of predication as the articulation of the judg-ments of the intellect. Thus, in what follows, I will not use “literal” as it was used in the fi rst part of this essay, in its traditional opposition to fi g-urative and metaphorical. Instead, I reserve it for the meaning intended by the speaker or author, and will use “proper” for the non-fi gurative types of predication used to communicate this meaning. 71 Therefore, in

of the Blackfriars edition (McGraw-Hill: New York, and Eyre and Spottiswoode: London, 1964–76), hereafter cited as ST .

67 Jean-Pierre Torrell, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas , vol. 2, Spiritual Master , trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 9–12.

68 For example, one of Thomas’ chief objections to the approach of Maimonides is that it cannot distinguish between analogy and metaphor ( De potentia , VII.5, resp.).

69 Also, inter alia , ST I.13.5, resp.; I.85.2, obj.3.; I.107.1; Expositio Peryermeneias , lib.1, l.3, n.7; Summa contra Gentiles , I.30.2 (hereafter ScG ).

70 Sententia Metaphysicae , V, l.22, n. 12; ScG I.59.3; ST I.16.2, resp. 71 My shift in usage is awkward, but makes for greater clarity. I note, however, that

proprie is often translated as “literally” (e.g., ST I.1.13).


what follows, “literal” and “metaphorical” are not opposed, since they reside on different linguistic levels.

B. Proper and Figurative Predications

“The fi rst intention of the words is the literal sense, whether this is spoken fi guratively or properly.” 72 Through customary use and/or explicit defi nition, a concept is expressed by a certain word, or syn-onymous words ( ST III.60.7, ad 2). This concept is the proper content of the word, its ratio propria ( ST I.13.5, resp.), the idea most com-petent speakers would associate with the word. Rather than literal-metaphorical, the major difference in predication is whether one makes proper or fi gurative use of this proper content. “Direct” and “indirect” can serve to characterize the two uses. 73 In proper speech, a word’s ratio propria directly fi ts the speaker’s meaning. This direct use is the “baseline” from which we operate linguistically: we take what a sen-tence plainly means to be what the speaker means, unless we have good reason not to, such as the suspicion that he is speaking sarcas-tically or in code. 74 For Thomas, the presence of a fi gure of speech does not signal the absence of literality. Rather, the traditional distinc-tion of literal-metaphorical, or my recasting of it as proper-fi gurative, is a matter of use , whose purpose is the expression of the speaker’s meaning. 75

Scripture speaks in both ways:

Something can be signifi ed by the literal sense in two ways: accord-ing to the proper way of speaking, as when I say “the man smiles,” or according to a likeness of metaphor, as when I say “the meadow smiles.” Both ways are used in sacred Scripture, as when we say

72 Super Iob , cap.1; also ST I.1.10, ad 3. I sidestep here the question of other senses besides the literal. Umberto Eco suggests that Thomas held only Scripture to have more than a literal sense, because the human authors, moved by the Holy Spirit, said more than they intended. “Poets, by contrast, know what they want to say and what they are saying. Poets therefore speak literally, even when they use rhetorical fi gures.” The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas , trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 154.

73 Peter W. Macky suggests the categories “independent” and “dependent.” A proper use does not depend on another usage, whereas a fi gurative use does. If I say “That ice cream is cold,” I am using the proper content of “cold,” and this is the only use my listen-ers need to know to take my meaning. If I say “That was a cold reception,” my audience needs some understanding of the independent use in order to take my full meaning. See The Centrality of Metaphors to Biblical Thought: A Method for Interpreting the Bible (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 32–39.

74 Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 191.

75 For a defense of the centrality of usage, and of the (much-maligned) idea of autho-rial intention, see Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference , ed. John McDowell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 67–73; also Wolterstorff, 193–201.

40 HORIZONS

(according to the fi rst) “Jesus ascended,” and when we say (according to the second) “he sits at the right hand of God.” And so under the literal sense the parabolic or metaphorical is included. 76

Thomas understands metaphor as the transference of the word proper to one concept to an object outside the customary range of the con-cept, as when a meadow is said to be smiling, or God is called a lion or a rock. Properly speaking it is humans who smile, but the concept “smiling” can be transferred to communicate the idea that a meadow appears to its best advantage at a particular time of day. Since it is rooted in Scripture, theology must also make use of metaphors, just as it makes uses of analogical concepts and methods of rational discourse ( ST I.1.8, ad 2).

C. Types of Proper Predication

Lest the similarity and contrast with metaphor remain unclear, as in the accounts considered in the fi rst part of this essay, proper speech requires due consideration. Thomas delineates three types of proper speech: univocal, equivocal, and analogical. Univocal speech predi-cates exactly the same content of multiple objects, e.g., “the ball is red” and “the apple is red.” The conceptual fi t is direct, even if further modi-fi ed by other concepts (e.g., shade, brightness). Because of the absolute transcendence and simplicity of God (this claim will be clarifi ed below), a religious predication is never univocal with a non-religious predica-tion. 77 Equivocal speech involves two completely different concepts which are customarily represented by the same word. To say that a dog has a loud bark and a tree has a rough bark is to use a single word equiv-ocally. Religious speech is not equivocation, else “we could never argue from statements about creatures to statements about God” ( ST I.13.5, resp.), which, on the basis of both natural reason and Scripture, Thomas takes to be possible. The third type of proper speech is analogical, in which something is spoken of with words whose meanings “are partly different and partly not” from their customary employment. 78 The con-cepts named by “beauty,” “power,” “goodness,” and “unity” have quite a bit of fl exibility, making the distinction between direct and indirect uses more complex. 79 The customary meaning of “blue,” for example,

76 Super Epistolam ad Galatas, cap.4, lect.7. See Ceslas Spicq, OP, Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse latine au moyen âge (Paris: J. Vrin, 1944), 274–76.

77 De potentia , VII.4, ad 3; ST I.13.5. 78 In libri Metaphysicae, IV.1.534–543. 79 W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being—God—Person (Notre Dame,

IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 128; idem, The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University, 1979), 52.


does not have the intrinsic fl exibility of “love.” “Mary’s been pretty blue lately,” intended as a reference to a bout of melancholy, 80 is a use which both varies from and depends upon the customary meaning of “blue.” No competent speaker of English, without good reason, would take the literal meaning to involve skin, clothes, a devotion to the Union cause, or a contemporary political allegiance (although these are all possible intended meanings). But the situation is not this clear when it comes to a statement like “God is love.” Is this proper or fi gurative speech—direct or indirect predication? To understand Thomas’ con-tention that it is proper predication, 81 we must look a little more closely into analogy.

Analogical predication is pluriform. 82 This variety has been sche-matized in several ways, but most basically Thomas holds that analogy can be extrinsic or intrinsic. A chef can call a dish of food “tasty,” and also point to a page in a cookbook and say, “That’s a tasty recipe.” The two predications are related extrinsically, through causality. Properly speaking, only the food is tasty, and the recipe is called tasty because it is a cause of tastiness in food. The chef could as easily call the recipe “healthy,” “rich,” or “inedible,” depending on the sort of meal to which the recipe gives rise ( ST I.13.5, resp.). “Tasty recipe” is clearly not equivocal; neither is it univocal, as in “tasty pie” and “tasty lunch,” since the chef’s meaning cannot be tested by chewing the page (just as the plain sense of “Mary is blue” cannot be validated by increasing the illumination in the room). Yet, neither is it metaphorical indirection. The customary meaning of “tasty” is not being fi guratively predicated of the paper or the recipe, whereas in the statement “The committee has issued some tasty suggestions for the next fund-raising campaign,” the intrinsic appeal of the suggestions is asserted, though the proper scope of “tasty” does not include things like suggestions.

Intrinsic analogical attribution is a common part of everyday speech. A song, a sunset, an infant, an idea, a painting, and a base-ball game can all be called “beautiful.” These are not causally linked predications. No one hearing the exclamation, “The third game of the Series was beautiful!”, would take this as a statement about the cumu-lative comeliness of the coaches and players, or about the aesthetic

80 This usage is listed as “fi gurative” in the Oxford English Dictionary (online ver-sion, http://www.oed.com/ [accessed 21 April 2010]). The paradox of an established fi gu-rative use does not invalidate my argument. In describing the dynamics of metaphor, the language of twist and clash, collision and collapse, popularized by Beardsley and Ricoeur, sets up the unreasonable expectation that “unlexicalizable” novelty will be characteristic of every metaphor. See McFague, Metaphorical Theology , 17, 24, 38, 48.

81 Thomas explicitly argues that love and joy are said of God proprie , as opposed to grief and desire ( ST I.20.2, ad 2).

82 Scriptum super Sententiis, I.19.5.2, ad 1.

42 HORIZONS

transformation the game effected in the crowd. Neither, however, does such a predication embody metaphorical indirection. “What a beauti-ful sunset!,” when said of a setting sun (and not, for example, of the fi nal days of an athletic or artistic career), might be met with “No, it’s rather unattractive,” but never with “Yes, I suppose so, but not in a lit-eral sense, of course”—as if “beautiful” were a word properly appli-cable to people or artworks but an odd choice for celestial phenomena. Competent speakers easily use “beautiful” of a considerable range of objects and experiences, fully aware that the specifi c qualities which make an infant’s face beautiful are not the same as those which make a sunset beautiful. From Thomas’ perspective, the difference among these examples is not correctly seen in terms of proper versus fi gura-tive usage, and their similarity is not univocal identity. Rather, all of the predications are proper because the concept “beauty” can be intrin-sically affi rmed of all the objects, even though they are not beautiful in the same way. The concept to which “beauty” corresponds, its cus-tomary meaning or ratio propria , possesses enough fl exibility to apply properly to all the examples.

With this brief review in mind, we can advance to the dynamics of specifi cally religious speech. St. Thomas constructs an argument in which he defends the use of metaphor in theology, while also insisting that we can speak analogically about God: “Not all words are used of God metaphorically; some are used literally [ proprie ]” ( ST I.13.3, s.c.). 83 The two parts of this argument are inextricably connected, as I hope to demonstrate.

D. The Metaphysics of Religious Language

“It is the knowledge we have of creatures that enables us to use words to refer to God. . .” ( ST I.13.1, resp.). Creatures resemble God not as members of a species or genus resemble one another “but only ana-logically, inasmuch as God exists by nature, and other things partake of existence” ( ST I.4.3, ad 3). God is absolute, unrestricted existence ( ipsum esse per se subsistens ), and he communicates limited existence ( esse commune ) to creatures. This communication establishes a “com-munity of analogy between God and the creature,” an existential resem-blance of every concrete existent ( ens ) to God. 84

83 Also Super Sent. , I.22.1.2. Thus, Thomas asserts that “Word” is a literal name ( pro-prium nomen ) for the Son ( ST I.34.2, resp.). Despite this, it is still put about that Thomas denied proper predication of God: for example, Gordon Kaufman, God, Mystery, Diversity: Christian Theology in a Pluralistic World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 146.

84 Super Sent ., I.24.1.1, ad 4., also Prol.1.2, ad 2; ScG I.31.2; De potentia , VII.6, resp.


Thomas articulates this existential resemblance through his meta-physics of participation. To exist by participation is to exist depend-ently and compositely, as a created synthesis of essence and existence, that is, of what a thing is and that a thing is ( ST I.44.1, resp.). Essence limits the act of existence, determining how and how much a thing par-ticipates in esse commune . Essence is, as it were, the gauge of a crea-ture’s existential likeness to God. Since different essences embody different modes of participation in existence, there arises a hierarchy of existential resemblance: “All things, in so far as they exist , are likened to God, who is the fi rst and greatest being.” 85

This metaphysical vision forms the indispensable context for Thomas’ view of religious speech as grounded in the analogical perfec-tions possessed essentially by God and through participation by crea-tures. 86 He takes it as axiomatic that all agents produce things like themselves, 87 and so creaturely perfections are applied to God not just as the cause of creation (we do not call God good simply because he causes created goodness), but as the exemplary cause of whatever lim-ited perfections fi nite reality presents. 88 Consequently, unlike the tasti-ness of the page, but like the beauties of the painting, poem, and pitch, one speaks both properly and intrinsically in calling God “beautiful”—indeed, more properly and intrinsically than in speaking of any crea-ture, since God is beauty itself. The speech which arises from these creaturely perfections is “analogically-proper.” Since none of God’s effects share his mode of existence, 89 there is no common form that God and creatures share, from which a ratio which is univocally propria to both creatures and God could be abstracted. 90

85 ScG I.80.5 (emphasis added). 86 Expositio libri Boetii De ebdomadibus , l.3; Super Hebraeos ., cap. 1, l. 2. See Klaus

Riesenhuber, “Partizipation als Strukturprinzip der Namen Gottes bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter, ed. Jan P. Beckmann (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), 969–82. This is not the same as claiming that all speech about God is justifi ed through the analogical similarity of things to their creator. Nevertheless, “however much we are raised by revelation to the knowledge of something which would otherwise be unknown to us, still we do not know this in any way except through sensible things” ( Super Boeth. De Trinitate , 6.3, resp.).

87 ScG I.29.2. 88 Super Sent ., I.22.1.2, ad 3; ST I.13.3, resp. and 13.6, resp. See John Wippel,

“Thomas Aquinas on Our Knowledge of God and the Axiom that Every Agent Produces Something Like Itself,” in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 152–71, esp. 155–61; and Jean Richard, “Analogie et symbolisme chez saint Thomas,” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 30 (October 1974): 379–406.

89 De potentia , VII.7, resp. 90 Super Boeth. De Trinitate , 6.4, ad 2. This ban includes “esse.” See Rudi A. Te

Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 188–94.

44 HORIZONS

How are we to decide which perfections are suitable for proper, intrinsic, and analogical talk about God? Thomas answers that it is “the perfections which in creatures are many and various [but] pre-exist in God as one” ( ST I.13.5, resp.) that give rise to appropriate predicates. Some creaturely perfections belong to every level of creation, and some only to certain kinds of fi nite being. The former perfections are the tran-scendentals: actuality, unity, intelligibility, goodness, and beauty. These belong to everything that is , but, again, not in the same degree (e.g., “things which exist more are more true”). 91 The latter perfections are possessed by angels and human beings, creatures that “are fuller beings than others” ( ST I.44.1, resp.): life, love, joy, freedom, and intellect. 92 All of these are “pure” perfections: there is nothing in the content of “love” or “good” that includes a limitation which would make it unsuited to God; whereas “God is a lion” does include such an imper-fection, since the strength it predicates is intrinsically bound up with matter, the essence of “lion” dictating a material participation in being ( ST I.13.3, ad 1; I.3.6, resp.).

E. The Logic of Negation

Unlike the metaphorical theorists, Thomas issues no indiscrimi-nate indictments of the inadequacy of all human speech to God. Rather, he articulates a careful logic of linguistic negation. Clearly there is no privileged vocabulary, no fund of words without roots in human expe-rience of the world, that is set aside solely for theological use. No sen-sible reality is simple and subsistent, so no concept or word abstracted from such reality can do full justice to God’s existence ( ST I.32.2, resp.), either univocally or analogically. But Thomas holds that there are types of inadequacy, arising from the different ways in which analogical per-fections can be predicated of God, and these dictate the nature of the negations which such speech requires.

Throughout his writings, Thomas distinguishes between the res sig-nifi cata and the modus signifi candi of a predication. 93 In predicating of God a perfection like beauty ( pulcher ), what is signifi ed by the term are the ideas of integrity ( integritas ), harmony ( proportio ), and brightness

91 De virtutibus , II.9, ad 1. 92 Stephen Holmes provides another useful schema, distinguishing several categories

of divine perfection: condescension, governance, goodness, self-suffi ciency, and glory. See “The Attributes of God,” in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Iain Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 69–70.

93 The centrality of this distinction to Thomas’ thought is laid out by Wippel, “Quidditative Knowledge of God,” Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 215–41.


( claritas ) ( ST I.39.8, resp.). In calling God beautiful, one asserts that he truly possesses these qualities: indeed, as noted earlier, God alone possesses them in their fullest sense, that is, the ratio propria of the term is fully found only in him: he alone is the true res signifi cata of “beauty.” 94 In the statement “God is beautiful,” what must be negated is not the perfection of beauty itself, but the inadequate mode of its signifi cation. In God alone is essence the same as existence ( ST I.44.1, resp.), so that whatever characterizes God is God, whereas language inevitably posits distinctions applicable only to creatures, in whom essence and existence are not identical. “Beautiful” is an adjective, and adjectives denominate accidents. Since there is nothing accidental in God, this mode of speaking—as if God were a substance characterized by accidents—must be rejected, so that the intellect “soars above the mode of its signifi cation, and ascribes to God the thing signifi ed, but not the mode of signifi cation.” 95 But if we say, “Bless the LORD, my soul! LORD, my God, you are great indeed! You are clothed with majesty and glory . . .” (Ps 104:1-2), the matter is somewhat different. God’s beauty is fi gured as clothing, which in its proper sense involves an intrinsic ref-erence to materiality. In such cases, the mode of the predication must be negated, and part of the meaning as well.

The key to analogical predication of the divine is Thomas’ insis-tence that a negated modus signifi candi and an analogical ratio do not destroy meaningful speech. Analogical predications denote God’s essence “indefi nitely.” 96 The meaning of the terms is “loose” ( incom-pactae ) or “vague” ( ST I.13.12, obj. 1), so that the res signifi cata “in some eminent way does befi t God.” 97 The words are proper, but not in the manner of the tight semantic fi t wrought by a univocal predication, in which the customary meanings of concepts are clearly defi ned and directly suitable to a speaker’s predicative intent. Rather, because the human mind “cannot grasp what God is in himself . . . the less determi-nate our names are and the more general and simple they are, the more appropriately they may be applied to God” ( ST I.13.11, resp.).

F. Talk about God

I can now sketch an understanding of the relationship between analogical and metaphorical predications in religious speech. This will

94 The relationship of ratio propria and res signifi cata is debated in scholars of Thomas. In order to avoid a rather technical discussion for which there is neither space nor necessity, I treat them as synonymous, which certainly simplifi es Thomas’ thought, but, I hope, does not falsify it.

95 De potentia , VII.2, ad 7. 96 Ibid., VII.5, ad 1. 97 ScG I.30.3; also De potentia , VII.5, ad 2.

46 HORIZONS

demonstrate the value of the distinctions Thomas provides, offer fur-ther clarifi cation of how religious metaphor functions, and indicate some points at which Thomas’ thought can assimilate the insights of contemporary metaphorical theory.

(1) Religious language, in the sense I have been considering, pos-sesses literal meaning. Those who use it are saying something about God. “God is good” and “Who struck down the fi rstborn of Egypt. . .and led Israel from their midst. . .with mighty hand and outstretched arm, God’s love endures forever” (Ps 136:1,10–12) are both genuinely pred-icative. In the former, God is said intrinsically to possess the quality of goodness; in the latter, he is said, inter alia , to be good, loving, and strong. “When Scripture speaks of the arm of God, the literal sense is not that he has a physical limb, but that he has what it signifi es, namely the power of doing and making” ( ST I.1.10, ad 3).

(2) Analogical speech is the proper predication of analogical per-fections of God, and metaphorical speech is the fi gurative presentation of analogical perfections of God. Metaphor and analogy are alike in the broad area of the something it is they intend to say about God. Both are concerned with perfections : “in no way are [metaphors] said properly of God; nevertheless they can be said metaphorically of God by reason of their perfection. . . .” 98

Metaphor is not a metaphysical category. It is a way of speaking about reality; but there is no metaphorical type of being. In claiming this, I am not attempting to subordinate metaphor to analogy as a mode of predication per se, nor does Thomas. Both are necessary for Christian discourse in general, and for any particular employment—worship, evangelization, catechesis, theological training, spiritual direction, pas-toral counseling—both will be used. 99 My point is that “an analogical heart” beats within all religious speech, proper or fi gurative. Were a religious metaphor, for all the inapplicability of its res signifi cata , not affi rming a real similarity, 100 it could have no true literal meaning.

(3) The primary difference between analogy and metaphor is not the fact of their inadequacy, but the kind. Thomas teaches that there are types of inadequacy corresponding to real differences in creation, differences

98 Super Sent ., I.22.1.2. 99 If Thomas is not always as explicit about this as might be desired, his actual prac-

tice refl ects it. For example, in the same article of the Summa Theologiae , he calls God’s manner of existence both “existence itself” and “an infi nite ocean of being” ( ST I.13.11, resp.).

100 “Even the most speculative diaphor must have some analogy in order to be under-stood as a metaphor, and it is this modicum of similarity that guarantees an expression of truth in metaphor” (Earl R. Mac Cormac, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985], 208). See also Israel Scheffl er, In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions (New York: Routledge, 1991), 45.


which the human intellect grasps through abstracted concepts and pred-icates in correspondingly different ways, some properly and some fi gu-ratively. The modus signifi candi of both types must be negated, for this always refl ects participative existence, whereas God simply is. In addi-tion, part of the res signifi cata of the metaphor must be negated.

(4) In comparison with contemporary theorists of metaphor, the Doctor Angelicus is no advocate of the heuristic indispensability and untranslatable semantic potential of metaphor. He apparently regards most metaphor as pleasant, affecting ornamentation. But nothing in St. Thomas’ thinking demands that metaphor can only be a fi gurative frill, easily converted into properly austere analogy as occasion demands. 101 His view of religious language as relying upon the analogia entis is open to the argument that calling God “my safeguard and my fortress, my stronghold, my deliverer, my shield” adds more than an optional tangibility to the assertion “God is strong and saves.” If Thomas’ view of metaphor as “proper to a lowly type of instruction” ( ST I.1.9, obj. 1.) such as poetry has lent weight to the disparagement of “mere meta-phor,” there is nothing in the dynamics of Thomas’ thought—where praise for the “indispensable usefulness” of metaphor fi nds a place ( ST I.1.9, resp.)—that makes this outcome inevitable.

First, Thomas observes that metaphor serves as a hedge against false univocity. Metaphors “cannot be taken in the proper sense of their words and crudely ascribed to divine things” ( ST I.1.9, ad 3), and this obvious inapplicability provides a needed brake on the tendency to for-get that nothing can be said of God just as it is said of creatures.

Second, there is no need to soft-pedal the emotional and imagina-tive engagement which metaphor sparks and fuels. The Scriptures are clear that fear, joy, shame, trembling, exaltation, contrition, adoration, and trust are entirely appropriate and necessary responses to God. Figure is the most natural language of these responses. For Thomas, who so strongly insists upon the sensible origins of human knowledge and speech, and who defends the use of fi gurative language by Scripture, there is nothing unacceptable in this.

Third, Thomas’ actual theological practice points to a genuine cog-nitive value in metaphor, though he does not make this explicit. This value may be approached through an anatomical fi gure: religious met-aphor puts “cognitive fl esh” on the bone of analogy. No physician, philosopher, or parent would assert, “When all is said and done, the human person is really bone. The rest is for show.” Of course, there are

101 Pace Gerald Hughes, “Aquinas and the Limits of Agnosticism,” in The Philosophical Assessment of Theology: Essays in Honour of Frederick C. Copleston , ed. Gerald J. Hughes (Kent: Search Press, 1987), 56–57.

48 HORIZONS

purposes for which one disregards fl eshly specifi cs—for example, in producing an x-ray. But absent our senses (as Thomas would hasten to observe), we would be deprived of the intrinsically human means of knowing reality. Similarly, to call God good is to say a great deal; yet “good” is abstract: true, but rather bland, just as we expect from a predi-cate that applies to absolutely everything. Like an x-ray, analogical pred-icates capture an important dimension of religious language, but also like an x-ray, this dimension is not the full picture. As Thomas teaches, propriety in religious predication is purchased at the cost of texture and fl avor, plot and drama, confl ict and exaltation, imaginative sweep and compelling detail. In this sense, metaphors neither merely clothe nor simply map analogical correspondences. From skeletal remains, a spe-cialist can conclude a great deal about a person: age, sex, height, certain diseases and injuries, some dietary information, possibly even a cause of death. But a police department rarely, if ever, tries to identify a set of remains by circulating a picture of the skull. Likewise, we do not encounter the world discretely, nor think and speak of it solely in gener-alities. As Thomas shows, the concept abstracted from the real becomes knowledge only when it is predicated of this or that real thing.

Consider this passage from Scripture:

The Egyptians followed in pursuit; all Pharaoh’s horses and chariots and charioteers went after them right into the midst of the sea. In the night watch just before dawn the LORD cast through the column of the fi ery cloud upon the Egyptian force a glance that threw it into a panic; and he so clogged their chariot wheels that they could hardly drive. With that the Egyptians sounded the retreat before Israel, because the LORD was fi ghting for them against the Egyptians. (Ex 14:23-25 NAB)

Thomas certainly does not think that this could be distilled to “the Lord is good, powerful, and faithful,” or “God preserves Israel,” with-out remainder. The loss incurred by such a reduction would not be simply a matter of diminished excitement, or a less memorable moral. Rather, the loss would be a falsifi cation of revelation. Lacking eyes and face, God is incapable of glancing in the manner of human beings; lack-ing a body, he cannot fi ght in the manner of a soldier or charioteer. Thomas would reject any attempt to interpret these as proper speech. Still, he does not regard the Scriptural language as the fi gurative enve-lope enclosing a single meaning of which it would be the task of sacra doctrina to give a normative, non-fi gurative re-presentation. 102 As a

102 Nicholas M. Healey, “Introduction,” in Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries, ed. Thomas Weinandy, OFM, Daniel A. Keating, and John P. Yocum (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 19.


magister in sacra pagina (or doctor sacrae scripturae ), whose primary academic labor was interpreting the Bible, 103 the focus of Thomas’ theo-logical work is the salvation history presented in the Bible. In terms of my metaphor, Thomas is in search of “orthopedic” wisdom, but does not treat the fl esh, blood, and organs either as expendable or as simply subordinate to the skeleton. To the contrary, the fi rst and best indication of the nature and function of the skeleton is the appearance and activity of the person. It is the Scriptural depiction of God’s free action in history which is authoritative, and which can not be antic-ipated by the development of any degree of analogical knowledge. Thomas questions, explores, debates, and expounds the literal mean-ing of the texts, but does not confuse his own exegetical efforts with revelation.

(5) How does metaphor effect knowledge? This question, even freed from the further complexities of specifi cally religious speech, has generated many complex answers. 104 To account exhaustively for the cognitive potential of religious metaphor is impossible here, but it can be illustrated by focusing on one especially important dimension: the ability of metaphor to deepen and integrate knowledge.

Douglas Berrgren argues that “metaphor constitutes the indispens-able principle for integrating diverse phenomena and perspectives without sacrifi cing their diversity.” 105 Drawing on the works of Philip Wheelwright, Colin Turbayne, and Monroe Beardsley, Berrgren posits a spectrum of metaphoricity, in which some metaphors are more creative of new meaning, and some more disclosive of existing meaning. “While metaphorical construing may act as a midwife, it may also function as a parent. In any case, the difference is for the most part one largely of degree.” 106 Original, complex metaphors will discover and express some analogies, simply express others, and implicitly suggest yet oth-ers; and a series of metaphors will involve multiple such analogies, allowing them to interact in a way which expands and deepens analogi-cal perception. Figurative predication can thereby offer a dynamic invi-tation to refl ective integration which analogy, because its terms are inherently more fl exible, may fail to stimulate.

103 Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas , vol. 1, The Person and His Work , trans. Robert Royal (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1996), 54–55.

104 See, e.g., Eva F. Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Zdravko Radman, ed., From a Metaphorical Point of View: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Cognitive Content of Metaphor (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996); and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., ed., The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

105 Douglas Berrgren, “The Use and Abuse of Metaphor, I,” The Review of Metaphysics 16 (1962): 237–58, at 237.

106 Ibid., 243.

50 HORIZONS

For example, let us return to the Exodus. The narrative speaks of God in metaphorical terms which deepen a believer’s knowledge of the Lord, presenting the historical response of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to a mortal threat against his chosen people. This response reveals God as good, but as more than “good,” since the conceptual broadness of this term leaves room for quite a bit of specifi cation. God is good in that he is the master of nature and history, unapologetically partisan, one who hears and answers, gets personally involved, fi ghts, has no rival, etc. In turn, this full-bodied portrait informs the rest of Israel’s experience, as the prophets explain military catastrophes and national exiles as also arising from God’s goodness, and the evangelists include the Cross in the saving plan of the Lord of the Exodus. Even further, these metaphors help integrate religious and profane knowl-edge. The narrative (and not any paraphrase or distillation) can forever change the way a believer interprets nature and history, community and personal struggle. A believer who looks at the sea and says, “Awesome, yet not so awesome that the Lord cannot command it,” knows something about those waters which others do not. In time of trial, the metaphors of drowning in a sea of troubles or being swamped by problems deliver real insight. A person pursued by “Egyptians” of some stripe may fi nd herself readily turning to God for aid “as you aided your people Israel.”

For anyone who has truly despaired of deliverance, this way of thinking is emotionally charged but not simply decorative. Rather, the knowledge of God as savior at the Red Sea engenders a commitment of faith which ramifi es through the total person. There is no tentative “as if” about this faith, no speculative caution about being too literal. Such faith arises from metaphor-shaped knowledge, which makes of a supportive friend a second Moses, and of a rekindled hope a dry path where before was only watery death. So, too, how one understands war, what one makes of trust and leadership, how one deals with the hour before dawn following a sleepless night, the ways one counsels a friend, the possibilities presented by several career choices, and in countless other directions, a large swath of the world is known more deeply and comprehensively through this narrative. Just as “H 2 O” addressees a very real aspect of water, while remaining silent about—yet in no way opposed to—the refreshment, healing, purifi cation, death, and new life which are the fuller story of water, so too “God is good” is absolutely true, yet simply does not do the cognitive work of metaphor.

(6) This understanding of metaphor follows a middle path. Excessive claims about metaphorical uniqueness are curbed. It is no slur on the good name of metaphor to hold that much of the knowledge


arising from it can be paraphrased in proper language, 107 and Thomas enables us to see the connections between analogy and metaphor which make this possible. As the thinkers discussed earlier make clear, metaphor has its own pretensions. Analogy helps prune the overgrown garden of fi gure.

From the other direction, the notion that metaphor is gaudy speech readily transmuted into shining propriety is rebuffed. An analogical perspective need not impugn the complex processes in which the human mind brings forth and employs metaphors by reducing them to the mechanics of substitution, as if the analogia entis had been roundly plotted and now required only a suitably engaging presentation. Metaphor can be recognized as the incisive, imaginative, and indis-pensable partner of analogical speech which it is. I do not think it does disservice to metaphor if it is thought of as revealing, investigating, and enriching the meaning of analogical predications. 108

IV. Conclusion

A great deal of primary color and subtle shading are absent from this sketch, which is less a map than a compass—with only the cardinal points, at that. I have addressed only the most rudimentary themes and questions to which even a modest account of Christian talk about God would need to attend. Scripture and theology speak of God in complex ways, in preaching and worship, narrative and systematic refl ection. The complexities of each, as well as their differences, similarities, and interactions, are formidable. Still, these shortcomings are not without some virtue. In giving a bare bones account of religious predication, it is possible to highlight and clarify just those dimensions which I have found to be so often absent or muddled in contemporary accounts.

Metaphor without analogy would have no mooring in the real, but analogy without metaphor would largely be mute. Following the guide-lines laid down by St. Thomas does not require—indeed, it disallows—treating metaphor as merely painted prose, even if his own way of speaking retains some of the dismissive ring that is characteristic of the tradition in which he thinks.

107 Elisabeth Camp, “Metaphor and that Certain ‘Je ne sais quoi’,” Philosophical Studies 129 (2006): 1–25.

108 As an example of a thinker who does see this view as a disservice to metaphor, see Roger Hazelton, “Theological Analogy and Metaphor,” Semeia 13 (1978): 155–76.

Pale Analogies and Dead Metaphors: Some Recent Trends in Religious Language

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