Religious language 1: OCR A* grade notes

OCR
Philosophy

Intro:

Talking meaningfully about something seems to require understanding it at least to some degree.
The problem of religious language is that most Christians agree that God is totally beyond our understanding.
In that case, how can Christians meaningfully talk about God?
The three theories in this topic each attempt to explain how it’s possible to meaningfully talk about God, despite God being beyond our understanding.
This topic is really about different views on the nature of the relationship between God and humans, and what follows from that about what we could know and say about God.
Via negativa claims the relationship is asymmetrical, so language must negate in order to purify.
Analogy claims the relationship includes participation/imago dei, so analogical language can refer imperfectly but accurately.
Symbol claims the relationship is existential/affective, so language functions to connect and transform.

AO1: Via Negativa (apophatic)

The Via Negaiva theory says we need to give up on saying what God is.
All we can meaningfully say is what God is not.
Negative language is meant to show us that God is beyond anything we could ever say.
By saying God is not darkness, we aren’t saying that God is light, since we can’t say or even imply anything about what God is.
We are saying that God is beyond the dark/light distinction completely.
Pseudo-Dionysius illustrates: voluntarily accepting our limitations through via negativa helps religious meaning like Moses ascending Mount Siani to receive the 10 commandments from God.
This represents voluntary transcending of our normal concepts, the clouds representing the obscuring of our perception/understanding.
Drawing closer to God inevitably requires letting go of our understanding, entering the ‘cloud of unknowing’.
Via Negativa helps us do this, to break free from our futile and inhibitory grasping for knowledge of God.
This causes an “inactivity of all knowledge” which leads one to be “supremely united to the completely unknown”.
By this, one “knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing”.
This is not knowledge in the sense of the mind understanding God, which is impossible.
The word Dionysius uses is “unity” (with God).

So for Dionysius, apophatic language is meaningful because it purifies and trains the soul into the right stance toward God.

AO2: Maimonides vs Brian Davies

Maimonides argues via negativa is superior to analogy.
He illustrates with two people being told what a ship is.
One hears positive analogies about what a ship is “like.”
But likeness cannot capture a thing’s distinctive form, risks anthropomorphic error, and does not bring them nearer to knowing what a ship essentially is.
The other hears negative descriptions; a ship is not mineral, plant, or spherical.
Such form-related negations progressively eliminate false essential possibilities and thus cumulatively advance understanding towards what a ship is.
Maimonides concludes accurate predicates of God function as negations.
We can progressively “come nearer” to the “knowledge and comprehension of God” – through process of elimination.

Counter

Brian Davies objects that negative language only yields knowledge when all possibilities are known.
E.g., for a human, negating left-handed and ambidextrous, leaves right-handed.
But, negating everything in the universe as predicates of God leaves no greater understanding.
The issue follows from Maimonides’ acceptance of Aristotelian epistemology, that knowledge requires grasping a thing’s essential form.
Negations can’t advance knowledge unless we know the possible options, yet God’s essence is unknowable.
Aquinas recognised developing Aristotle with a metaphysical link between us and God was needed.
Human qualities participate in God, granting the likeness required for analogy.
This gives indirect epistemic access to God, without claiming to grasp God’s essence.

Evaluation

However, Pseudo-Dionysius’ version of Via negativa is non-aristotelian and so avoids Davies’ critique.
He rejects conceptual knowledge altogether.
Negative language strips away our intellect’s arrogant and futile conceptualisations.
What remains is ‘unity’ with God.
We could call this mystical knowledge, involving direct but non-representational awareness.
In this sense, we can get ‘nearer’ to knowledge of God through negation.

AO2: Via Negativa vs the bible & Aquina

The Bible is not consistent with Via Negativa.
E.g., the Bible says “God is love” and “God is spirit”. In Exodus God even describes himself in positive terms, saying “I … am a jealous God.”
The Aphophatic way seems unbiblical.

Counter

Pseudo-Dionysius argues that scripture just refers to the effect of God’s actions in the world, not God’s essence.
God is called love because he is the cause and source of love in humans and spirit because he gives life.
Dionysius understands causation in a neoplatonist way, where it implies participation.
So humans have perfections like love due to causal participation in what flows from God.
Each affirmation must then be “unsaid,” since God transcends human mode of being.

Evaluation

Yet this solution unwittingly opens the door to analogy.
Participation entails a metaphysical dependence on God, in virtue of which we have perfections.
This implies some formal likeness, however minimal.
Aquinas recognised that this entails formal likeness, however minimal.
Once predicates are grounded causally rather than arbitrarily, they cannot be purely equivocal.
So, the participation necessary to explain biblical God language leads to analogy.
Aquinas noted that negative language is not what people “want” when talking about God
We can strengthen this beyond an appeal to popularity.
Theories of religious language are ultimately about correctly capturing the nature of the relationship between God and humans, and the sort of linguistic connection which follows accordingly.
This allows the phenomenology of religious language to support Aquinas’s claim that participation grounds analogy.
The greater spiritual resonance of analogy is some further evidence that it discloses the degree of participation Dionysius thought impossible.

AO1: Aquinas’ theory of analogy (cataphatic)

Aquinas identifies the difficulty for standard positive religious language:
Univocal language fails because we aren’t the same as God (so can’t use the same words).
Equivocal language fails because it gives words different meanings when applied to God, making them meaningless to us (since God is unknowable).
Aquinas proposes another option:
We aren’t the same as God, but nor are we totally different.
The middle ground is that we are like God (analogous to God), so our qualities are like God’s.
Analogical positive language takes something understood (e.g., our qualities) and communicates meaning through its likeness to something less understood (e.g., God’s qualities).
We understand our human qualities and can use them as analogies for God’s qualities.
Genesis supports that we are created in God’s image and likeness.
Analogy of attribution: we can meaningfully say that God has a quality of love analogous to human love.
Aquinas illustrates this: seeing healthy urine from a bull allows us to say its source (the bull) has the quality of health.
Human love is on a radically different scale to God’s omnibenevolence, but the difference is of degree, not kind.
Analogy of proportion: a being has a quality in proportion to its nature.
E.g., a virus has life, plants have life, humans have life, God has life.
God is infinite and thus has qualities infinitely.
So, we can say God has a quality of love analogous to ours, but proportionally greater.
This allows us to speak meaningfully about God while respecting that God is beyond our understanding.

AO2: Brummer’s critique of analogy

Brummer argues analogy only manages to express negative language.
He rejects proportion as a vehicle for meaning, since God’s infinite being makes all qualities beyond our understanding.
Attribution tries to resolve this.
If God’s love is analogous to human love, we can then meaningfully say that God has love proportional to his nature.
Brummer continues his objection; attribution only tells us God is the source of our qualities, not how God has those qualities.
E.g.,: asserting that water is ‘like’ electricity only seems meaningful because we know the two things on each side of the analogy and thus in what ways they are alike (current, flow, etc).
Brummer would say we can’t do that for God because we can’t know God..

Counter

However, Aquinas doesn’t ground analogy in empirical similarity, but in metaphysical relation.
Humans possess perfections as limited participations in the unlimited perfection of God.
The very perfection (e.g., of love) we know in ourselves on the human side of the analogy, is also in God on the other side, because God is its source and cause in us.
The quality we know in ourselves is a derivative and limited form of God’s quality.
So it’s not that God has a quality which has some unknowable likeness to ours.

Evaluation

So, Brummer fails to appreciate how analogy allows us to affirm that the very perfection signified by a term is truly present in God, in an infinite and non-human mode.
E.g., If love in humans means ‘willing the good’, Aquinas says God possesses this perfection infinitely.
Even if Aquinas’ participation metaphysics failed, leaving only a bare assertion that God is “somehow” like humans, that amounts to saying something positive about God.
This would still overcome Brummer’s critique.
Either way, although analogy cannot allow us to say much, it does achieve more than the via negativa while managing to respect God’s transcendent unknowability.

AO2: Barth vs Aquinas on natural theology

Aquinas justifies natural theology by reason’s source in the ‘imago dei’.
In Genesis, this distinguishes humans from animals.
We retain moral responsibility, which comes from reason.
In fact, we can’t coherently be sinful without responsibility.
So, we are still greater than animals, must retain God’s image, and with it something of reason’s essential integrity
Aquinas concludes human reason can know God’s existence (his 5 ways), God’s natural moral law and God’s attributes through analogy.

Counter:

Karl Barth critiqued natural theology as placing a dangerous overreliance on human reason.
Sin might not totally destroy reason, but it makes reason unreliable.
He said “The finite has no capacity for the infinite”.
Our finite minds cannot grasp God’s infinite nature.
It’s dangerous to use reason to know God. Mistakes will lead to a false view of God and worshipping the wrong thing, risking idolatry.
This can lead to the worship of human things like nations, fatherlands, which Barth argued contributed to Nazism.
Barth concluded we should solely rely on faith in the Bible.

Evaluation:

Barth is perceptive about reason’s downsides, but fails to balance this against the downsides of not using reason.
E.g., blind faith and superstition, which also risk error and idolatry.
Fallen humans have no risk-free approach.
Adam and Eve warn against the arrogance of total self-reliance, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t rely on our abilities at all.
Especially when they are the endurance of the divine image within us.
Aquinas shows appropriate humility in what he claims reason discovers:
Not the existence of the Christian God, merely an ‘unmoved mover’.
Not God’s eternal or divine moral law, just the natural law already within us.
Not God’s infinite nature, but some source of our qualities which holds them in an analogical and proportionally greater sense.
So, Aquinas represents an appropriate middle-ground between the extremes of avoiding reason verses overrelying on it.

AO1: Religious language as symbolic

Tillich claims that religious language is symbolic, not literal, so it does not try to say what God is.
Symbolic language connects a person’s mind to something.
Religious language connects a religious person’s mind to God, like a religious experience.
So, when someone hears ‘God be with you’, their mind feels connected to God, and that is how it is meaningful.
It is not a literal description of God, as that is impossible, but an emotional or spiritual connection.
Think of a Christian looking at a crucifix. They feel connected to God because it symbolises Jesus’ sacrifice.
Tillich says religious language works the same way. It connects the mind to God and creates a sense of closeness.
The words are not meant to describe God, but to connect our soul to God. That is their meaning.
Tillich’s theory of participation claims symbols point beyond themselves and participate in what they point to, creating a bridge for our soul to connect to that higher dimension of reality.
God is a symbol for the ‘ground of being’, and religion symbolises our ‘ultimate concern’.
As an existentialist, Tillich sees religion as about human experience, especially its most profound aspects.
Religious language is symbolic. It connects us to the mystery of existence, the ground of being, which is our ultimate concern.
Tillich’s insight is that we do not need to understand God to be connected to God.
Religious language is meaningful as symbols which participate in being itself, that is, in God.

AO2: How successfully symbols capture religious meaning

William Alston criticises Tillich for overlooking that religious language involves facts.
Religion is concerned with objective matters such as our salvation and afterlife.
Important Christian doctrines like heaven and hell have to be taken as factual truth claims, not as merely symbolic.
John Hick makes a similar point, that philosophical language about God (e.g., necessary being) is not symbolic.
We can add that Christians tend to think that when using religious language, they express beliefs about God which can be true or false. Cognitivism is a key element of religious meaning for many Christians. Tillich fails for not adequately accounting for the cognitive element of religious language.

Counter:

However, the strength of symbols compared to other approaches is their capture of the spiritual depth expressed by everyday religious language.
Tillich’s existentialism prioritizes religious experience over abstract doctrine and philosophising, which can be disconnected from genuine spirituality.
For a Christian looking at a crucifix, their spiritual feelings are often the most important thing to them.
The strength of Tillich’s theory is that it captures the most important element of religious language: the spiritual feelings it evokes, not cold factual beliefs.

Evaluation:

However, Tillich’s existentialism goes too far.
It’s a rightful corrective to the way spiritual experience was traditionally marginalised, due to fear of the Church losing its authority as the mediator between humanity and God.
However, like so many movements which are reactive, it goes too far in the other direction and fails to achieve a balanced synthesis.
What Tillich captures is only one important element.
Factual belief (e.g., in heaven and hell) is just as important to Christian believers.
In fact these beliefs entwine with spiritual feelings and orient their experience of hope, gratitude and love. These are not formless pure experiences but have intentionality, related to belief in God’s acting in history and promise of salvation in an afterlife.
Symbols thus fail to capture this cognitive element of religious language.

AO2: Issues around the subjectivity of symbols and ‘participation’

Tillich claims symbols are beyond the cognitive/non-nognitive distinction, neither factual nor emotive.
Though he also claims symbols open up levels of reality and participate in them.
This is an ontological claim about how symbols relate to reality.
To Hick this is incoherent, since ontological claims must be cognitive.
Tillich refuses explanation because he insists the divine is beyond literal description.
So Hick concludes participation is imprecise.
E.g., it is unclear how a flag participates in a nation’s power and dignity, nor how religious symbols participate in God.
Especially since if all beings participate in God, there is nothing special about religious symbols.

Counter:

Randall’s version avoids Hick’s critique by abandoning participation.
For him, religious symbols do not connect us to a transcendent reality, but regulate culture and community by evoking shared emotions, moral guidance, and sustaining identity.
By treating symbols as non cognitive, Randall avoids Hick’s demand for metaphysical explanation.
He maintains religious language can be meaningful without any objective divine reality.

Evaluation:

However, unanchoring symbols from reality collapses into theological anti realism.
Without reference beyond human practice religion makes no truth claims, contradicting most theists’ intentions.
Without transcendent reference, symbolic meaning becomes unstable, shifting with cultural changes, leaving no basis for distinguishing development from distortion.
The long-term coherence and motivational force of religion becomes harder to explain if symbols are merely cultural expressions rather than engagement with a transcendent source (E.g., Conversion, moral seriousness, and sacrifice)
Randall’s reductionism fails to capture the truth aiming, stability, and depth of religious language.
Tillich attempts to preserve truth through participation, which Hick exposes as vague.
Randall abandons truth, which only highlights how essential truth claims are to religious meaning.
The theory explains religious psychology, but fails to account for religious meaning as a whole.