Monday, April 10, 2006

Q13 A5: Whether what is said of God and of creatures is univocally predicated of them?

No. Univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures because no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.

For example, "wisdom" in creatures is a quality, but not in God.

Instead, some things are said of God and creatures analogically, and not in a purely equivocal nor in a purely univocal sense. For we can name God only from creatures (Q13 A1).

This mode of community of idea is a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation. For in analogies the idea is not, as it is in univocals, one and the same, yet it is not totally diverse as in equivocals; but a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing.

For an example of analogy, consider how "healthy" has multiple senses: when applied to urine, "healthy" signifies the sign of animal health; and when applied to medicine, "healthy" signifies the cause of the same health.