Peculiarities of the Naming of God as a Non-Univocal Agent According to Aquinas

This article examines the Thomistic doctrine of the analogical naming of God with particular attention to affirmative and absolute names such as “good,” “wise,” and “living.” These names raise a distinctive philosophical difficulty: although they signify the divine substance, they are drawn from creaturely experience and therefore account for the infinite ontological distance between God and creatures. The study argues that Aquinas resolves this problem through the convergence of three internally connected dimensions. First, a causal dimension, according to which divine agency is neither univocal nor purely equivocal but analogical, producing effects that bear a deficient likeness to their cause. Second, a perfectional dimension—grounded in the concept of quantitas virtutis—which enables the comparison of perfections across beings that share no common genus. Third, a semantic dimension, articulated through Aquinas’ distinction between ratio nominis and modus significandi and expressed in the Dionysian dialectic of affirmation, negation, and eminent re-affirmation. By integrating these three dimensions, the article proposes that the longstanding debate between analogy of attribution and analogy of proportionality can be reconsidered: attribution captures the causal reference of creaturely perfections to God as their principle, while proportionality expresses the graded participation of those perfections across beings. Analogical naming thus emerges as the linguistic expression of the metaphysical relation between Creator and creature.