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Treating the doctrine of analogy in a theological sense leads us to a dilemma: on the one hand, we actually know God limited to the basis of sensible creatures. The knowledge of creatures is not enable us to see the essence of God through His effects, thus ruling out any univocal knowledge of God. On the other hand, a purely equivocal knowledge is not knowledge. Aquinas offers a way out of such a dilemma that is called the analogical way of predication. Insofar as God is the cause of creatures or material things there are some similarities between them like cause and effect that enable us not to know about what God is but at least whether God exists or not. However, inasmuch as there is an infinite inequality between God and creatures, we can predicate God from creatures only, particularly after removing the finite characteristics from the created things that properly belong to them. |
