in Summa Contra Gentiles. “As to the mode of signification, every name is defective”
(1955, pt. I, ch. 30).
The other main source of an emphasis on divine otherness is extreme mystical experience
as the main clue to the divine nature. This is experience in which all distinctions, even the
distinction between subject and object, are blotted out in an absolutely undifferentiated
unity. If one's take on God stems primarily from such an experience, one comes, by a
different route, to a view of God strikingly similar to Aquinas's doctrine of simplicity.
God is construed as so void of distinctions that none of our concepts (each of which
represents certain features rather than others) can be true of him. Mystics are naturally
drawn to the via negativa. Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, the sixth-century mystic
who is the major fountainhead of medieval mystical theology, writes, “It [the Divine] is
not soul, not intellectnot greatness, not smallnessnot moved, not at restnot powerful, not
powernot living, not lifenot one, not unity, not divinity, not goodnessnot something
among what is not, not something among what is” (1980, 221–22). One can hardly get
more negative than that! This approach too is incompatible with partial univocity.
If even partial univocity will not do, what alternatives are open? An obvious one is
metaphor. It is as obvious as anything can be that much talk of God uses terms
metaphorically. “His hands prepared the dry land.” “The Lord is my rock and my
fortress.” “The Lord is my shepherd.” No one wishes to maintain that God literally has
hands, herds sheep, or is a rock or a fortress. In saying things like this we are using what
is literally denoted by these terms as an imaginative, vivid way of bringing out certain
features of God. God is like a shepherd in caring for the well-being of his creatures. He is
like a rock in being constant and unchangeable in his basic purposes. In creating he does
the sort of thing human agents do with their hands. These points about God can be
brought out forcefully by expressing them metaphorically.
But is metaphor used in religion only for a rhetorically more effective way of saying what
could have been said literally? Or is (all or some) metaphorical speech about God
ineliminable, irreplaceable by literal speech? I will not try to decide this question here
(for a discussion, see Alston 1989, ch. 1). Instead, I will consider an even more radical
position, that all (intelligible) talk of God is metaphorical (McFague 1982). This implies
that there is no literal speech about God, though it is not equivalent to that, since
metaphor is not the only alternative to the literal.
Before continuing the discussion of this issue it will be useful to examine the concepts of
metaphorical and literal speech, especially since these notions are roughed up quite a bit
by philosophers and others.
When I make a literal use of a predicate, I make the claim that the property signified by
that predicate in the language (or one of such properties) is possessed by what is referred
to by the subject of the statement. If I am using “player” literally, in one of its senses, in
saying “He's one of the players,” I claim, let's say,
end p.237
that he is one of the actors. But what are we doing if we use the term metaphorically, as
Shakespeare has Macbeth do when he says “Life's a poor player that struts and frets his
hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”? It's clear that life is not really an actor.
Macbeth is “presenting” his hearers with the sort of thing of which the term is literally