From the Tree to the Labyrinth (28 page)

The same can be said of light, and of the sun as the source of light, to which Dionysius devotes a number of fine pages in the
Divine Names
(trans. Luibheid, p. 74), pages that will inspire many medieval theorists of the aesthetics of light (see Eco 1956, 1987).

The pages of the
Divine Names
in which Dionysius says that God can be called Good, Beauty, or Being belong to a different register. In this case he is not talking about earthly entities, animals, objects, natural phenomena capable of becoming images, or metaphors of divine things. Here he is talking about what the Scholastics will call the transcendental properties of Being. The problem is that we, knowing the moth from experience, can compare it to God, but we are able to say that something is good or beautiful only insofar as we are able to see that certain things in our experience participate in a reflected fashion in the properties of the divinity. “For we recognize the difference in intelligible beings between qualities that are shared and the objects which share them. We call ‘beautiful’ that which has a share in beauty, and we give the name of ‘beauty’ to that ingredient which is the cause of beauty in everything. But the ‘beautiful’ which is beyond individual being is called ‘beauty’ because of that beauty bestowed by it on all things, each in accordance with what it is” (
The Divine Names,
trans. Luibheid, p. 76).
³²

Likewise, what is suprasubstantially Good and Beauty is “that which truly is and which gives being to everything else” (
The Divine Names,
trans. Luibheid, p. 98). “Every being and all the ages derive their existence from the Preexistent. All eternity and time are from Him. The Preexistent is the source and is the cause of all eternity, of time and of every kind of being” (
The Divine Names,
V, 5, trans. Luibheid, pp. 98–99).

What we have here is a leap. Here the trajectory is no longer
upward
(from the moth to God) but
downward,
from God to whatever is good and beautiful. The divine names belong strictly speaking to the divinity, and only at a subordinate level to things. This subordination, however, is not of a metaphorical order, but of a metaphysical one. If the properties of the moth are similar to those of God, it is because of a defect of our imagination. This is the only way can imagine the implacability of God’s wrath (which is obviously something quite different). The simile is couched
in verbis,
and the
verba
are clearly inadequate to express an object so sublime. Therefore the metaphor from low to high appears capable of making us know, by putting the thing before our eyes; but it makes us know in an extremely pallid fashion what is by definition unknowable. The properties of beautiful things on the other hand are what they are because they participate in the beauty of the divinity. The similitude is not
in verbis
but
in re.
The sharing of transcendental properties by creatures is always a pallid sharing, but it is not a pallor of the imagination (or of language); instead the pallor is ontological.

This is tantamount to saying that in the symbolic theology of Dionysius there is no room for a coherent theory of metaphor, and so be it. But this position implies a fine cognitive dilemma. In fact we have it on faith that God is Goodness and Beauty, but in what precise way He suprasubstantially possesses these properties we do not know. Or rather, either we know it by illumination or arcane knowledge, or we must imagine it in a pallid fashion taking the properties of things as our point of departure. A problem of which Thomas Aquinas (who is not a cultivator of any hidden or mysteriosophic science of the divinity) is fully aware when, from these very same pages of Dionysius, he derives the idea of knowledge
by analogy:
somehow or other, “prout possumus,” to the best of our abilities, we must elevate ourselves from earthly things to knowledge of the First Cause (
Expositio Sancti Thomae
V, 3, n. 668). Are we justified in saying, then, that such knowledge is merely metaphorical?

Rosier-Catach (1997: 167–173) cites a number of cases in which the canonical example of
prata rident
serves to highlight the difference between metaphor and
translatio in divinis.
Boethius (
De Trinitate
IV, 1, 5, 21) had already remarked that when predications had to do with God, the things predicated are thereby modified. Gilbert of Poitiers
(Dialogus Everardi et Ratii)
will say, apropos of the ten categories of Aristotle
(praedicamenta),
that “si quis ad divinam verterit praedicationem, cuncta [praedicamenta] mutantur” (“if one proceeds to the predication of divine things, all the [categories] change”). Theodoric of Chartres follows the dictum of Dionysius, according to which a substantial predicate does not mean that God is a substance, but that he is beyond all substance.

So, in the case of predication
in divinis,
it is not the thing that is predicated, only the name. At the same time, the idea makes headway that, despite this difference, the predicate “quodam modo innuit nobis substantiam” (“in a certain way suggests the substance to us”). As a result, what we have is not an unbridgeable divarication, and predication by pure negation, but instead some form of
connotation.

To what extent the difference between univocal predication and predication
in divinis
posed an insurmountable problem is confirmed by the
Regulae theologicae
of Alain of Lille, in which a distinction is made (somewhat obscurely) between: (i) the transfer of the name and the thing, as in “linea est longa,” where length, which is the property of the body, is said of the line that distinguishes it and makes it possible to call it “long”; (ii) the transfer of the thing, as in “seges est laeta,” where the thing (in this case
laetitia
or gladness) is attributed to the subject, the cornfield; (iii) the transfer of the name alone, as in “monachus est albus”—in which the white monk is not himself white (we are talking about a white-robed Cistercian). But this is precisely the way we say “Deus est iustus.”

Later in the text, however, Alain admits that God is called just “a causa quia efficit iustum” (“rightly, since he brings about justice”). Here we are close to the position taken by Dionysius, for whom Goodness and Beauty really are divine properties and may be applied to earthly things only insofar as, through participation, they cause something very similar in them. In that case it is not simply a question of transferring the name: indeed it would not even be a metaphor (judging by the above-cited classification).

Since this is not the place to venture into the boundless territory of the discussions on the
analogia entis
(pointing out the frequently subtle differences between one author and another, right down to the Second Scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation, from Cajetanus to Suarez, we will simply attempt to see what were the basic models for univocal and equivocal discourse that inspired the whole of Scholastic debate. And the fundamental model is always the one derived from Aristotle (see Owens 1951) and from Boethius’s commentary.

The discourse on equivocity is already present in the
Metaphysics,
where Aristotle discusses how being can be “said in many ways.” After saying that there is a science that considers being in and of itself, when we might have expected his first tentative definition of the object of this science, he repeats as the only possible definition what had appeared in his first book (992b 18) only as a parenthetical observation: “being is said in many ways” (“to de on leghetai men pollachos”)—according to multiple meanings (1003a 33).

In fact, Aristotle reduces these many ways to four. Being is said: (i) as accidental being (this is the being predicated by the copula, whereby we say that a man is white or standing); (ii) as true—it may be true or false that the man is white, or that man is an animal; (iii) as potentiality and act, whereby, while it may not be true that this healthy man is ill right now, he could become ill, and (as we might say today) we can think of a possible world in which it is true that this man is ill; and finally (iv) as
ens per se
or as
substance.
However we speak of being, we say it “with reference to a single principle” (1003b 5–6), that is, to the substances: “The first meaning of being is the essence that signifies the substance (semainei ten ousian)” (1028a 14–15).

Is this saying in a number of ways an equivocal way of saying? Aristotle is unclear on this point. In the
Categories
(1, 1a) he says that we have
homonymy
or
equivocity
when entities that require a different definition have a single name in common. The classical example is
zoon,
used both for an animal and a painting, a homonymy that exists in Greek. It should be said that medieval thinkers, who did not know Greek, failed to grasp this homonymy, thinking that the word animal was used both for the animal and the image of the animal, and that Aristotle gave a broader meaning to equivocity than they did. See, for example, Thomas Aquinas: “Philosophus largo modo accipit aequivoca, secundum quod includant in se analoga” (“The philosopher takes equivocal terms in a broad sense, so they include analogous terms”) (
Summa Theologiae
I, 13, 10 ad 4).

As Aristotle sees it, we find ourselves faced with an example of accidental
equivocation
(in the Middle Ages they would have said it was due to
penuria nominum
). We have
synonymity
or
univocality
when the term corresponds to a single definition (when, that is,
zoon
is said of a man or an ox). And finally, we have
paronymity
when things are designated by the same term but with a different grammatical ending (“the grammarian” [
grammatico
] when it stands for “grammar” [
grammatica
]). Owen (1951) makes it clear that Aristotle considers equivocity or univocality to be properties, not of the term itself, but of the things for which a single term is used.
³³
Thus, we have univocality when a single term is used for what is expressed by a single definition, and equivocity when we have a single term for two things that correspond to two different definitions.

Different uses of a term are broadly discussed in the
Topics
(I, 15, 106a 1–8), where Aristotle takes on for the first time the question of a twofold way of employing terms: it is one thing to say that justice and courage are called “good” univocally (because goodness is part of the definition of both) and it is another to say in various ways that what is conducive to health is good. The allusion here is to the original Aristotelian example, widely discussed in the Middle Ages, according to which both people in good health and the medicine conducive to good health, not to mention urine as a sign of good health, are dubbed “healthy.”

In the
Nicomachean Ethics
(I, 6, 1096b 23–29) the question of why honor, wisdom, and pleasure are called “goods” comes up again. The three things are different, and yet the use of the term is not an example of casual equivocation. Are they called “good” because they depend upon a single cause (“aph’enos”) or because they are directed toward the same end or good (“pros hen”)? Or is it by analogy, following the example of sight that is good for the body just as the intellect is for the soul? Here Aristotle clearly distinguishes the first case from true analogy, which sets up a proportion among four terms.
³⁴

In Boethius’s Latin translation of Porphyry’s
Isagoge, “
aph’enos” and “pros hen” are rendered respectively as “ab uno” (the term “medical” used both for the doctor himself and for the doctor’s potions and instruments) and “ad unum” (the classical example of “healthy” said of the body, the medicine, and the urine). Clearly, however, the first example is a relatively weak one, since it could be reduced to a case of paronymy. In fact the concept that remains central in Aristotle is that of
pros hen.
Briefly put, to be named for the cause one proceeds from or for the end toward which one tends is to all intents and purposes the same thing (we could say that the relationship is based on a common cause, whether it be efficient or final). What we have, then, are two forms of equivocity,
pros hen,
which the scholastic tradition will dub
analogy of proportion
(and, in the case of Cajetanus, of
attribution
), and that by analogy, which the scholastic tradition will dub
analogy of proportionality.
For convenience sake, from now on we will use the two terms
attribution,
which for Aristotle was not a form of analogy, and
proportionality,
which for Aristotle was the only form of analogy.

Aristotle explains the attribution in the
Metaphysics
(K. 3, 1060b 36–1061a 7) where he takes as examples of speaking “in several ways” the adjectives
medical
and
healthy:
they are used in reference to
(pros)
the same thing: a medical discourse and an instrument are both called “medical” because the medical discourse proceeds from medical science and the instrument is useful to that science; in like manner, things that are signs or causes of health are termed “healthy.” Now, health is something that is only found in a body and is not present in the color of the urine or that of the medicine (we ought to speak, then, of a patently equivocal situation in which a single term is referred to things that have different definitions). Both the urine and the medicine, however, refer to health. Just as the term
being
is used in various senses but with reference to one central idea
(pros hen),
and is therefore not equivocal, the same goes for the term “healthy.” Both express a common notion
(legonthai kath’en).