Cataphatic Way

What is the Cataphatic Way?

Idea that God can be spoken of in positive terms

What did Aquinas argue on Analogy?

argues that language applied to God is not literal but is analogical

• analogies are used in everyday speech to help people understand something they are unfamiliar with, by comparing it with something they are familiar with

What is the Analogy of Attribution?

the words that we apply the human beings are related to how words are applied to God because there is a casual relationship between two sets of qualities

• qualities such as love and wisdom are reflections of those of God (St Catherine of Siena also suggests this)

e.g. Bull Analogy

What is the Bull Analogy?

In medieval times, it was believed that if a creature’s urine was healthy then the creature that produced the urine must also be healthy; “if the urine is good, then the bull is good”

• the bull is the cause of the urine!

What does the Bull Analogy suggest?

By examining human life, wisdom or power we may see a pale reflection of these divine attributes

What is the Analogy of Proper Proportion?

a being has a quality in a degree relative to its being

• e.g. virus has life, plants have life, humans have life, God has life - illustrates that different being have a quality of life to different degrees in proportion to their being

What does the Analogy of Proper Proportion suggest?

God is the greatest being and thus has qualities to a greater degree of proportion than humans

• thus, we can now add to our statement that God has qualities analogous to ours that he has them in a greater proportion

God’s love/knowledge/power is like ours but proportionally greater

What is Aquinas’ natural theology?

view that human reason is capable of knowing something of God

• what his qualities are analogous to

How does Aquinas’ natural theology strengthen his argument?

Accepted that human reason could never know or understand God’s infinite divine nature

• however, argued that human reason can gain lesser knowledge of God, including God’s nature by analogy, through the analogies of attribution and proportion

Concluded that we can meaningfully talk about God’s qualities by analogy

How does Aquinas’ natural theology weaken his argument?

places a dangerous overreliance on human reason

• our finite minds cannot grasp God’s infinite being! - whatever humans discover through reason is not divine: to think it is divine is idolatry

• after corruption of the fall, human reason cannot teach God or God’s morality - not our telos, any faith in God’s revelation in the Bible is valid

What does Barth say about human’s finite minds?

“the finite has no capacity for the infinite”

How does Hick successfully develop Aquinas’ analogy?

Develops Aquinas’ example of analogy of Proper Proportion using the example of the term ‘faithfulness’

• just as we see a dog’s faithfulness as smaller or more limited than human faithfulness - faithfulness is vastly smaller when compared to the faithfulness of God

What are the two key errors in religious language that the Cataphatic Way avoids?

• it is not univocal so avoids speaking anthropomorphically

• it is not equivocal so avoids the agnosticism that comes with this approach

What is a strength of Aquinas’ Analogy?

Invites us to describe God in visual terms - not dissimilar to the method that Jesus used when describing the kingdom of God

• ‘Kingdom of God is like...’ parables

How is partiality a issue with the Cataphatic Way?

not always easy to know how far that meaning is stretched - circular

• analogy tell us that ‘God is love’, not truly the same as human love, but is not completely different

How can the Cataphatic Way lead to the danger of ‘picturing’?

danger of ‘picturing’ an aspect of God we are interpreting on an individual level

• ‘God is my Shepherd’ may be imagined and understood differently by different people

Why are some critics concerned with the Cataphatic Way and language?

in order to understand the word that is being applied to God - we have to translate that word into univocal language first

How does Swinburne criticise the Cataphatic Way?

Religious statements are not analogical, but univocal

• meaning remains in contrast with the everyday meaning but is stretched