Five Ways Of St. Thomas Aquinas: Language And God

Aquinas: Language and God At the beginning of class this week, we reviewed the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, focusing especially on the fourth way, which involves degrees of perfection. Since it was discussed previously, I only took a few notes regarding things that had not been touched on before. Basically, no one can live in a way which denies degrees of perfection. There must be an objective gradation system in order to even simply say that one thing is colder then another. Something must be the essence of cold in order for a meaure of cold to exist. We look into the world and see things that need an explanation. Logically, God is explanation. Therefore, our knowledge of God is secondary. In contrast, Anselm would argue that God
This does create some problems, since God is beyond our sensible knowledge. How does can one apply language, which is rooted in sensation, to God, who is beyond the senses? Wouldn't it be meaningless? There are a few different ideas to answer this. The via negativa (way of negation) is the view that all language of God, even positive statements, are disguised negatives, since the best way to understand God is to say what he's not. “God is alive” would simply mean that “God is not an inanimate object.” Moses Maimonides, a Jewish philosopher, who lived in the generation before Aquinas, developed on this idea. When one applies language (names) to God, can say what God is not, and that God is the causes of things in relation to nature (i.e. God is the cause of goodness in
He believed that there must be a way of affirmation in speaking of God. If there is no positive langauge, then there is no reason to call God one thing before another. There must be both positive and negative language or else one is not spekaing of God. Although God is not sensible, he leaves clues in nature so that we can apply affirmative language to him. Words are signs that resemble real things. They signify the things that they mean by appealing to concepts that are already known. So, one can use language to describe God as much as one understands his essence through knowledge of the created world. Creatures have perfections; God has the same perfections in a more excellent way. If one can say that a tree is beautiful, one can know that God is, like the tree, beautiful just in a more perfect