Doubting the Answers 57
beautiful, but is instead absolute Beauty; or that he is not a
discrete unified thing, but is rather the transcendent Unity
in which all reality subsists; or that he is not a discrete being
among other beings, but is himself infinite subsistent Being as
such, whereon all things depend.
Far from constituting an obstacle to analogical state-
ments about God, it is precisely this difference between the
finite and the infinite, or between the immanent and the tran-
scendent, that secures the rational basis of all such statements.
Because God is infinitely transcendent of what we are, we can-
not "univocally" predicate anything of him as we would predi-
cate it of finite things; but, since he is himself the infinite full-
ness of those transcendental perfections in which creatures
participate ( as various modes and reflections of their divine
source), neither are we limited to purely "equivocal" predica-
tions. It is not the case that the words we use have no conti-
nuity of meaning whatsoever between the senses with which
they are applied to worldly things and the ways in which they
point toward the transcendent mystery of God. So, yes, God is
not a moral agent, but only because he is transcendent Moral
Agency as such. That is to say, we are moral agents as a result of
privation, because we are not in ourselves goodness in itself-
goodness is not analytically convertible with our essence, that
is to say- and so we have a necessarily synthetic relation to the
transcendent Good. We can achieve some degree of goodness,
and thereby participate more deeply in real being, or we can
fail to do so and gravitate instead toward nothingness, moral
and ontological. God is not like that, obviously. He is, accord-
ing to Christian tradition, the Good as such. At the same
time, Christian doctrine proclaims him to be a living God; he
is himself an infinite intentionality toward the fullness of his
own essence, the infinite procession of omnipotent and omni-