Speaking of God in Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart

Beyond Analogy

Anastasia Wendlinder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138269668
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317051398
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Medieval masters Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart considered problems inherent to speaking of God, exploring how religious language might compromise God's transcendence or God's immanence ultimately hindering believers in their journey of faith seeking understanding. Going beyond ordinary readings of Aquinas and building a foundation for further insights into the works of both theologians, this book draws out the implications of the thought of Eckhart and Aquinas for contemporary issues, including ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, liturgy and prayer, and religious inclusivity. Reading Aquinas and Eckhart in light of each other reveals the profound depth and orthodoxy of both of these scholars and provides a novel approach to many theological and practical religious issues.

1 Introduction: The Problems and Possibilities of Speaking About God

DOI: 10.4324/9781315610313-1

Grant me, Lord, to know and understand what I ought first to do, whether call upon thee, or praise thee? And which ought to be first, to know thee, or to call upon thee? But who can rightly call upon thee, that is yet ignorant of thee? … Or art thou rather first called upon, that thou mayest so come to be known? But how then shall they call on him, in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe without a preacher? And again, they shall praise the Lord that seek after him_ for, they that seek shall find; and finding they shall praise him. Thee will I seek, O Lord, calling upon thee; and I will call upon thee, believing in thee: for thou hast been declared unto us. My faith, O Lord, calls upon thee, which thou hast given me, which thou hast inspired into me; even by the humanity of thy Son, and by the ministry of thy preacher.

St. Augustine, Confessions¹

¹ Augustine, Confessions, I.I., trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912 reprint, 1995), 3.

In this well-known reflection from the Confessions, Saint Augustine penetrates to the core of Christian discourse, and ultimately to the heart of the Christian journey itself: “faith seeking understanding.” He ponders the inherent relationship between knowing God and speaking to and about God. Which comes first, knowing God or calling upon God? And, what is the significance of speaking of God to others who seek to know God? For Augustine, the relationship is interdependent, because the believer, whose faith has been divinely inspired by preaching and concrete examples of Christian life, seeks to know God further, and is moved to praise the God who comes to be known. The journey is spiral; the process is unending. To know God is to desire to know God more deeply.

Beginning with Augustine is only a slight, but important, detour to better understanding Thomas Aquinas’ and Meister Eckhart’s shared concern for articulating, as accurately as possible, a Creator God who is at once uniquely distinct yet intimately present to creatures. In his reflection on the nature of God, Augustine lays bare the fundamental questions and interrelations with which the two medieval Dominican masters would later struggle, and these issues lie at the center of their work: the relationship between speaking about God and speaking to God, the relationship between knowing God and speaking about God, and, most significantly, the relationship between the speaker and God—between the human creature and its Creator. Rooted in Augustine’s contemplation, Aquinas and Eckhart together exemplify the profound breadth and depth of religious language-use as it relates to the Christian faith journey.

In his opening reflection Augustine implies that speaking “about” God and speaking “to” God are intimately connected. The Christian comes to have faith in God, initially at least, through the humanity of Christ and the ministry of preachers—means deriving their innermost inspiration from God. Hearing God spoken of provokes me to call upon God; conversely, speaking to God compels me to contemplate God and to articulate that reflection in spoken or in written word, whether in the form of prayer, sermon, or even theological treatise. This insight should not be undervalued: it is the ceaseless interplay between speaking “about” God and speaking “to” God that propels the believer forward on her journey of faith.

While the distinction between speaking to God and speaking about God might seem more implicit in his opening passage, Augustine begins his Confessions by explicitly pondering whether, and if so, how, speaking to (and by implication, about) God leads to knowing God. He inquires, “which ought to be first, to know thee, or to call upon thee? But who can rightly call upon thee, that is yet ignorant of thee? … Or art thou rather first called upon, that thou mayest so come to be known?”² He answers his own question in the same paragraph, even though at first glance it may appear circular: his search for God begins with faith in God, which compels him to call out to God. “Thee will I seek, O Lord, calling upon thee; and I will call upon thee, believing in thee.” And so it seems that faith seeks faith. But it is God who has given him the faith in which to seek. Does this not imply that someone first must have some knowledge about God before seeking God?

² Ibid.

Augustine’s primary intent, though, is not to acquire knowledge about God, but to know God. This qualification highlights the contrast—as well as the relation—between speaking about God and speaking to God. Someone speaks to another; it is a personal address. Someone can know many things about another, but we can truly profess to know another only through personal encounter. It follows that knowing something or someone personally is a type of knowledge that cannot be completely or even adequately put into words, because such a relationship is expressed non-verbally as well as vocally, and in fact, the deepest facets of an intimate relationship are primarily unvoiceable. The insufficiency of vocal expression is especially true with regard to our articulations of God, since in our encounters with God, God does not converse with us as do other persons—a reality that suggests an apparently unbridgeable chasm between this kind of knowing and speaking about it.

On the other hand, whether someone speaks about God or to God is determined not only by what kind of “knowledge” is being considered, but why. What is the purpose of speaking about God? Is it to inform or to convince? And when we speak to God, is it to implore or to praise? Augustine suggests these questions are intrinsically interconnected in the faith process: the preacher’s vocation is to convert; the converted believer now continues her journey towards God in personal conversation with God and with her own questioning and contemplation—a journey that takes place together with other believers and in the deep silence of her own heart.

Finally, Augustine’s reflection gives rise to the question of the relationship between the speaker and the one upon whom the speaker calls or to whom she gives praise. Again, the answer is proposed by Augustine himself: The Person invoked is the Creator of the one who seeks. As Augustine expresses it, “this man, this part of what thou hast created, is desirous to praise thee; thou so provokest him, that he even delighteth to praise thee. For thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it may find repose in thee.”³

³ Ibid.

Augustine’s image of the restless heart speaks of a most profound union between the Creator and the human creature. It says something not only about who we are to God, but who God is to us. We are created for God; God is the one in whom we have our end. Once recognized, this intimacy affects us so deeply, we are unable to keep quiet, no matter how inadequate our speech. Speaking to and about God is as necessary to our life as is our very breath. Indeed, the praise issuing forth is not only directed towards the One addressed, but to anyone who is within the range of hearing it. Even private prayer issues forth in theological reflection, the process of rendering explicit our unconscious conceptions of God. Speaking to God is, inevitably, speaking about God as well.

This recognition and proclamation of who God is compels the believer to seek further knowledge of humanity’s Creator and End. The believer now must ask, “What is therefore my God?,”⁴ an inquiry moving from immediate personal “knowledge” of God⁵ to questions of knowledge about God. This type of knowledge calls for a distinct type of expression. We soon learn from Augustine that it is not enough to speak of God as “most excellent,” “most mighty,” “most merciful and most just.”⁶ We must, in the same breath, also speak of God as “immutable, yet changing all things,” and “never new, and never old.”⁷

⁴ Ibid., 9 (emphasis mine). ⁵ When saying “knowing God” is awkward, “knowledge of God” is substituted; however, the distinction between “knowing” and “knowledge about” is still implied, as is the contention we cannot know anything about what God is, despite compulsory attempts to do so. ⁶ Augustine, Confessions, 9. ⁷ Ibid.

Augustine seems to be pressing us into deeper contemplation, as this second type of articulation requires us to push against the limits of our imagination. While we might imagine something as the “most” of its kind, because there are other things like it with which we can compare, we are unable to comprehend something in which two seemingly contradictory qualities exist simultaneously: immutable and changing; never new or old. In order to grasp such a thing, we should have some other similar thing with which to compare it; however, Christians, and other monotheistic believers, proclaim there is no other God but this One Creator. The Creator about whom we seek to know is at once intimately present to us, yet completely distinct from us—in fact, distinct from anything in our creaturely experience.

Augustine’s answer to this quandary is to articulate God in the only way he can: autobiographically. He does not propose to speak about God in his Confessions through logical propositions, but through narrative. For Augustine, speaking about God means speaking about his own encounter with and journey towards God. The two are inseparable.

Reflection on how to understand and articulate the relationship between the Creator and creature in light of the Christian journey of faith continued to occupy the minds of theologians after Augustine—and it still does today. But in no period of history was this reflection more creative, and enduring, than in the Middle Ages—in no small measure (at least in the West) due to Augustine. As the following chapter explains, the Order of Preachers established in the Middle Ages was specifically modeled on Augustine’s contemplative character; its friars were well-versed in his meditations.

Among these Dominicans, Thomas Aquinas has come to epitomize the medieval Dominicans, especially with his many well-known theological treatises. In his Summa theologiae, Aquinas introduces the subject of God—treating specifically in the first part of this work what we can know about God.⁸ He determines we cannot know what God is, only what God is not. Over the span of the next eleven questions, he proceeds from this assertion to the ways in which we describe God, or, how we speak about God. The culmination of this development is Question 13, which asserts the most proper way of describing God, if there is one, is by analogy, a concept he takes great pains to qualify for the unique case of the relationship between creatures and their Creator.

⁸ Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I.3 (hereafter STh). The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Texas: Thomas More, 1981) translation will be used throughout this book, as well as consultation with the English translation and original Latin provided by Blackfriars (New York and London: Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill, Eyre&Spottiswoode, 1964).

If we consider not only his academic training, but also the discipline of his religious life as a Dominican friar, we discover within Aquinas an underlying narrative echoing Augustine’s opening reflection on the problems inherent to articulating God. From this perspective, Aquinas’ analysis in these questions amounts to much more than a speculative treatise on the doctrine of God; it is an exercise designed to increase his reader’s flexibility in extending limited human speech about God, without compromising either God’s transcendence or immanence, as students work their way through the text. More importantly, this linguistic exercise is not supposed to be an end in itself, because the ultimate purpose of theology is salvific: the goal of sacra doctrina is to attain the knowledge necessary for salvation.⁹ So we begin to glimpse a subtle alliance between speaking about God and knowing God. Learning how to speak about God is integral to the faith journey—on the part of both the speaker and the listener.

⁹ STh, I.1.

For Aquinas, the common point of origin for this connection is Scripture. On the one hand, Scripture contains God’s Revelation, from which all theological principles are derived; on the other hand, it contains the deepest expressions of personal encounter with God: prayer, which is human speech addressed to God—that is, addressed to our Creator whose distinct presence remains ever an incomprehensible mystery, beyond adequate description. Yet Scripture is the primary discourse mediating both knowledge about God (if perhaps only by negation) and knowing God. Thus, Scripture offers the exemplar of analogical language that animates the reader’s lifelong journey of faith.

On the surface, however, Aquinas’ Summa can easily appear too pedantic to move his readers from speaking about God to knowing God, because it is structured as a textbook with highly academic language, despite his assertion in the first question of the primary place of Scripture—filled with poetical language—as a source for theology. But if Aquinas’ treatise seems too theoretical, we should draw upon another medieval Dominican, Meister Eckhart, for more “...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: The Problems and Possibilities of Speaking About God
• 2 Study as Contemplation: The Mutual Contexts of Aquinas and Eckhart
• 3 Thomas Aquinas: A Pedagogy for Speaking About God
• 4 Thomas Aquinas: From “Proof” to Analogy
• 5 Meister Eckhart: From Analogy to Silence
• 6 Conclusion: Living Without a Why and the Christian Forms of Life
• Bibliography
• Index