Veneration I: Analogical Predication

How basic doctrine of God unties worries about giving too much honor to creatures

Allow me to express my deepest regrets for choosing such an arcane title. It will be my goal to justify this choice in what follows. By the end, I hope you will see why anyone who understands basic doctrine of God should be unworried about the veneration of the saints.

There are three ways to understand the relationship between human speech and the reality of God’s own being. The first way, univocity, says that when we predicate things of God, when we say that something is true about Him, we are doing the exact same thing we’re usually doing with predicates. So when we say that God is good, we mean just the same sort of things when we say anything is good. A version of this view was held by Blessed Duns Scotus, aptly named “The Subtle Doctor” for his extraordinarily nuanced philosophical work. The second way, equivocity, says that when we predicate things of God, nothing at all in our definition of the word maps onto the reality of God’s nature. So when we say that God is good, the word “good” is so limited by our creaturely understanding that it fails to say anything at all about God. This view was advocated by William of Occam, most known for his Razor, and second most known for ruining the West (more on that another time). Neither of these, however, are what ended up winning in the history of theology. 

Predictably, the Church went with St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas argued that we predicate things of God analogously. There is a likeness between our word and the reality of God’s being in one way, and an unlikeness in another way. This is not simply a pared-down kernel of univocity sneaking in, but a genuinely distinct view. While there is something shared in the content between “goodness” for us and “goodness” for God, the relationship of each to “goodness” is utterly different. Let me put it this way: I am good, God is goodness. I know things, God is His knowledge. This, admittedly, is getting pretty esoteric, but the payoff is important. 

The predication debate is fueled by a desire to understand what it means to say that God is the utterly transcendent, self-sufficient Creator, while we are His entirely dependent, radically self-insufficient creatures. There is a puzzle about how we could talk about God in this picture. All our knowledge comes to us ultimately from the senses and reasoning based on them. It is a standard Thomistic catchphrase: “Nothing in the mind that’s not first in the senses.” Just how, then, are we supposed to talk about God? The one thing we’re supposed to know with confidence is that He’s not just another created being. He’s totally outside the order of the world. We thus have to be careful to avoid the twin dangers of either making God a creature or making Him totally unknowable. Either our words apply to God, in which case He can be subjected to categories that measure and define Him, reducing God to a dependent creature, or there is no way to talk about Him, and man is locked away from his Maker. Analogy is an elegant way out: you can talk about God using what you learn from the created world, but the words will work in a special way, they will apply analogously. 

Again, this may sound pedantic and esoteric, but it is no fringe view. So far as I know, it is ubiquitous in the Catholic tradition after Thomism rose to ascendency, and all the Reformed and Lutheran scholastics follow Thomas more or less exactly. This is standard Christian theology. And here’s the relevance to the veneration of the saints. 

When we talk about the saints, Mary included, we are always talking about creatures. This is absolutely vital to understanding Catholic language. Because all our talk about God is analogical while our talk about man is univocal, it is possible to use extremely exultant language to describe a creature. When we say Mary is Queen of Heaven, we do not mean that in the same way we mean that God is King. When we ask St. Michael, the Archangel, to “be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the Devil,” we do not mean that how we mean God is a “bulwark never failing.” Even when the Salva Regina calls Mary “our life, our sweetness, our hope,” Catholics would feel no cognitive dissonance if the next song were Kings Kaleidoscope’s excellent “All Glory Be To Christ.”¹ I recently heard a group of Episcopalians perform a gorgeous English carol, “A Hymn to the Virgin.” It includes phrases like “Brighter than the day is light…I cry to thee…Lady pray they Son for me…That I may come to thee, Maria!” and “The well [of salvation] springeth out of thee…Lady flower of everything.” What explains this pre-Reformation hymn? Had merry old England really fallen into idol worship? No, and analogical predication is the key to seeing why. Having the higher truths straight gives you greater freedom on the lower truths. If you understand the Trinity (insofar as any created being can), then you are free to employ all the imperfect analogies you want to try and communicate the concept to another. 

To a Catholic, the worry that we’re paying too much attention to Mary or the rest of the saints sounds roughly the same as worrying that if someone likes a song too much they’ll forget about the artist. What a strange thought, as if an artist would counsel you to listen to her songs less because she’s afraid they’d compete with her for fame. It’s just the opposite: the artist is revealed in her work. And when someone says, “This song is the best ever!!” no one would counter, “Best ever? Isn’t the artist who made it even better?” because we know that “best song ever” was baked into the original statement. To the fully Christianized mind the saints are God’s songs, living to spread His fame and tell of His love. The doctrine of analogous predication helps clarify this, and puts an absolute limit on how strongly you are permitted to interpret Catholic language about the saints. No matter how it sounds, language about the saints quite literally cannot work the same way as language applied to the Creator.

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1. I’ve commented on this line from the Salve Regina elsewhere. Click here to read it.