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Speaking the Incomprehensible God: Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology

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The question addressed in this magisterial volume is: "How can we speak of God, who transcends all human thought and speech?" In this remarkably well-written book, Rocca, a Dominican philosopher at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, gives us a comprehensive retrieval of Aquinas' answer to this question. No comparable work demonstrates such a complete mastery of Aquinas' writings and of the secondary literature on the subject. Although Aquinas's theological epistemology has often been read in ways that detach it from its properly theological moorings, Rocca avoids this pitfall. Through careful exegesis, he shows how Aquinas tempers the agnosticism of his negative theology, respectful of God's incomprehensibility, with his positive theology of analogical judgments about God, grounded in the theological truth of God's infinite perfection as self-subsistent Creator. Responding to those, such as Karl Barth and Wolfhart Pannenberg, who reject Aquinas' theory of analogy on the ground that it allegedly assumes a tacit univocity of conceptual meaning (a view stemming from Scotus and Cajetan), Rocca argues that analogy is more a matter of judgment and truth than concept and meaning, and that Aquinas bases his theological analogy more on the insights of faith than those of reason alone. If you want a masterful review of Aquinas' theological epistemology, get this book.

A recurring problem in the Philosophy of Religion is how do we talk about God or Transcendant Reality? If God/Transcendant Reality are ineffable, incomprehensible and unknowable as they are in their own essence, how is it possible to talk about God at all? After all, don't holy scriptures often liken God to a human being with a body and emotions and a mind that changes? Doesn't this make religious belief (as atheists such as Richard Dawkins or Bertrand Russell have argued) nonsensical and meaningless?

Aquinas considered these sorts of questions in great depth and subtlety. Rocca, a Dominican with a Doctorate in Philosophy, outlines how Aquinas believed it was possible to talk about God in a way that made sense, without compromising God's mystery and inscrutability. The most interesting sections of the book deal with Aquinas's apophatic theology (which traditionally has been neglected by philosophers examining the God question) and also how we can apply concepts and language in discussing God and his attributes and our relations to us.

This book is a must read for any theologian or philosopher of religion interested in how humans can talk meaningfully and clearly about God in an age when members of religions are often faced with biting criticisms from skeptics and atheists, who often have very brilliant arguments and minds.

I just started this book, and it appears to be a genuine scholarly tour-de-force. This is not a layperson's book, but it may just be the most complete book on the subject of the Unknowable God in the Christian tradition. The footnotes thick and frequent. Just in the introduction, I already leaned quite a bit about the origins of this concept in Greek and early Christian thought. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.

I am somewhat bothered that there appears to be no mention of Maimonides, (at least his name is omitted from the Index). I realize that this book is written by a Christian clergyman about the Christian conception of God, but is it really possible to completely avoid even a comparison with the negative theology of Maimonides, who worked just a generation prior to Aquinas? This perplexes me, since the author did devote some (minimal) space to Philo. I hope it's not the usual case of neglecting the "primitive theology" of the Jews, because, frankly, I don't think Maimonides or Gersonides are any more primitive than Aquinas. Hopefully this is not the reason.