The standard reply to everything before it is that words like *knows* or *good* were never meant to apply to God in the plain, ordinary sense: they apply by analogy, or only by negation. But even the gentlest analogy has to share *some* structure with the everyday meaning to count as analogy at all, and that shared structure is the very time, space, and substance the doctrine was trying to avoid. Negation and analogy relocate the problem; they do not dissolve it.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical tradition assembles several reinforcing positions on religious language. *Univocal* predication (the term means the same in *God is good* and *Socrates is good*) is rejected by Aquinas (*ST* I.13.5); Scotus (*Ordinatio* I.3) defends a restricted version. *Equivocal* predication (the term means something altogether different in the two cases) is rejected by both. *Analogical* predication, the middle path, holds that divine and creaturely predicates share content via a structured proportion: God's goodness stands to God as creaturely goodness stands to creature, with the *as* doing structural work the merely equivocal lacks *ST* I.13.5–6; with refinements by Cajetan 1498; (Ralph M. McInerny, 1996); for contemporary discussion (David B. Burrell, 1986); (Rocca, Gregory P., 2004); (Thomas Joseph White, 2016).

*Apophatic* or negative theology (we know what God is not, not what God is) was developed by Pseudo-Dionysius (*Mystical Theology* 1; *Divine Names* 1) into the central method of mystical-theological reflection, taken up by Maximus, Eriugena, and Eckhart, and continues in contemporary form (Jean-Luc Marion, 1991); (Denys Turner, 1995). The method's philosophical origin lies with Plotinus: *Enneads* V.3 (*On the Knowing Hypostases and That Which Is Beyond*) and VI.9 (*On the Good, or the One*) develop the ascent-through-negation procedure in its first systematic form: the One is beyond intellect, beyond being, beyond any predicate that would make it an object of thought; what can be said of the One is said by stripping away every determination, and the stripping terminates in silence. Pseudo-Dionysius transmits the Plotinian method into the Christian theological tradition; from Pseudo-Dionysius it passes to Maximus, Eriugena, Eckhart, and the contemporary apophatic forms Marion and Turner develop. The citation gap is not merely genealogical: what Plotinus names as *the One beyond being* is the philosophical ancestor of the Pseudo-Dionysian *cloud of unknowing*, and naming the ancestor changes the doctrinal assessment at Q5.

Maimonides's negative theology in the *Guide for the Perplexed* I.50–60; (Kenneth Seeskin, 2000); (Josef Stern, 2013) is the parallel Jewish-tradition development; the doctrine of attribute-by-attribute negation receives its sharpest classical form there. *Perfect-being theology* holds that God is the being than which none greater can be conceived (Anselm, *Proslogion* 2–3), with each attribute the perfection of its kind; it supplies the methodology for deriving the classical attributes (Thomas V. Morris, 1987); (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Jeff Speaks, 2018).

Each tradition tries to keep divine description from being either flat creaturely projection or empty piety. The meta-doctrine, at its most disciplined, asks for a register in which divine predicates are neither univocal projections from creaturely experience nor empty equivocations, and in which the apophatic, analogical, and perfect-being resources together preserve the believer's confession against both flattening and dissolution.

*What cannot be answered.* Seven questions ask of the meta-doctrine what it cannot answer once reduced to the form the analysis can engage. What surfaces beneath them is the reply this chapter has been deferring through eleven sections. Eleven sections of pressing the classical attributes have so far proceeded as if the predicates *exists*, *is one*, *is necessary*, *is eternal*, *is present*, *is aware*, *knows*, *can*, *acts*, *governs*, *relates* applied to God in the same sense they apply to anything else. The classical tradition itself has not made that assumption. Aquinas's doctrine of analogy (*ST* I.13.5) is one of the most carefully developed theories of religious language in the history of philosophy, and the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition of apophasis is older still. The believer who confesses that God is good is not, on the classical position, predicating goodness of God univocally with the goodness of a friend or a deed; nor is the predication merely equivocal, with no shared content between the divine and creaturely cases. The third option, *analogy*, has done the work of making divine description intelligible for the better part of a millennium. The full reply is that every structural pressure the chapter has registered concerns the predicates read univocally, and the classical tradition has been telling its readers since at least Aquinas not to read them that way. The concern is not whether analogy and apophasis are coherent doctrines of religious language; they are. The concern is what they preserve when their preservations are added up. The eleven preceding sections have argued that the classical attributes, taken at face value, presuppose structural conditions T, S, and Φ the doctrine has placed beyond divine being. The doctrine of analogy responds: the predicates were never meant to apply at face value. The doctrine of apophasis responds: the predicates negate creaturely limitations rather than affirm divine features. The doctrine of perfect-being theology responds: the predicates are derived from the very property of being maximally great, which neither structural analysis nor creaturely experience constrains. Each reply preserves the doctrine by relocating where its content is carried. The seven pressures ask what is left when the relocations are taken seriously and the structural conditions the predicates have shed are tallied up: one at the level of the doctrine of analogy (Q1), four at the level of the conditions divine description runs on (Q2–Q5), and two at the level of competing doctrines of religious language (Q6 univocity, Q7 revelation).

**Q1.** *How is God's goodness like ours, if in God there is nothing for goodness to belong to?* Aquinas's doctrine of analogy (*ST* I.13.5–6) holds that divine and creaturely predicates share content via a structured proportion: God's wisdom stands to God as creaturely wisdom stands to creature. The doctrine is one of the most carefully developed theories of religious language in the history of philosophy. The concern here is what the proportion preserves. For *as* to do structural work, the two sides must share something the proportion can be a proportion *of*. The doctrine of *analogy of proper proportionality* (Cajetan 1498) holds that the shared content is the constitutive relation between attribute and bearer; the doctrine of *analogy of attribution* holds that creaturely attributes are derivative from divine ones. McInerny -(Ralph M. McInerny, 1996) and Rocca -(Rocca, Gregory P., 2004) develop contemporary refinements. The concern here is that the doctrine of strong divine simplicity (*ST* I.3) entails that there is no real distinction in God between the attribute and the bearer, and the *as* of the proportion requires precisely that distinction on the divine side. The doctrine of analogy preserves the predicates by appealing to a constitutive relation that the doctrine of simplicity has eliminated at the divine pole. White -(Thomas Joseph White, 2016) acknowledges the difficulty and develops the most careful contemporary defense; the present reading registers the defense and presses the cost. Feser's act/potency grounding *Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide*, -(Feser, Edward, 2009), ch. 4 offers the most rigorous contemporary defense of the causal-grounding side of Q1's second pressure. On Feser's account, the analogical proportion is primarily a metaphysical grounding relation rather than a semantic proportion between predicate-tokens: creaturely perfections are *participated* forms of an act that God, as *ipsum esse subsistens*, subsistent esse (the act of being) itself, possesses without any act/potency composition. The esse/essence distinction in creatures (esse is real and distinct from essentia) grounds the asymmetry: in God esse and essentia are identical, so God's perfections are possessed eminently and without restriction, and the proportion tracks metaphysical participation rather than linguistic similarity. The concern for Feser's grounding is that *participation* is itself a structural relation: for the creature's participated act to be grounded in God's subsistent act, the creature must stand in the reception-relation to a source, and that relation is a directed, asymmetric, structural dependence (T, S, Φ) of the participated in the subsisting source. Feser's reply is that esse is not a temporal-causal relation but the metaphysical grounding of participated-being in being-itself; the concern here is whether the grounding relation (*creature receives esse from God*) requires the structural conditions of any reception, including those of direction, distinction, and substantial bearer.

A second pressure on the analogy doctrine runs through its grounding rather than its compatibility with simplicity. Aquinas's own grounding of analogical predication (*De Potentia* q.7 a.7; *Summa Contra Gentiles* I.34) takes the semantic fact of analogy to rest on a metaphysical fact: a real causal relation between Creator and creature, in which creatures derive their perfections from God as effects from their source. That causal relation is structurally constituted. Production is asymmetric (T), cause and effect are distinct relata (S), and the productive act is carried across the distinction it spans (Φ). These are the structural roles, and they carry to Time, Space, and Substance in type by the upgrade earned at [§3.5.3](<3. Convergence.md>) (on the realizer biconditionals whose anti-Finean necessity is discharged at [§4.1.10](<4.1.10 The Source of Possibility.md>)). The doctrine that was supposed to insulate divine predicates from the structural conditions enlists those conditions at the level of grounding. The two analogy concerns are complementary: the first locates the cost at the divine-pole side of the proportion; the second locates it at the metaphysical grounding the proportion rests on. Both press in the same direction.

A third resource within the analogy family locates the shared content not in the proportion but in the manner of signifying. Aquinas's distinction between the *res significata* and the *modus significandi* (*ST* I.13.3) holds that a perfection-term (*good*, *wise*, *living*) said of God signifies a perfection, the thing signified, that belongs to God properly and indeed pre-eminently, while the creaturely *mode* of signifying it (the way the perfection is held by a composite, dependent, time-bound knower) is what falls short and is not affirmed of God. On this account the predicate's determinate content survives on the side of the *res significata* even as its creaturely mode is set aside; the difficulty is supposed to lie only in the mode, not in the thing signified. The concern is what the *res significata* retains once the *modus* is subtracted. The perfections the believer predicates are given as determinate only in a mode: goodness as a settled orientation among alternatives, wisdom as the holding-together of a differentiated manifold, life as a duration. Subtract the mode and the move forks. Either the thing signified keeps a determinate content (in which case it keeps the structural conditions the mode was carrying, the orientation, the manifold, the duration, and the perfection lands on a subject that instantiates T, S, and Φ after all) or the subtraction takes the content with the mode, and the *res significata* thins to the bare *is* that [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) finds without individuating content and that Q2 and Q5 below reach as the apophatic terminus. The distinction draws the line in the right place; it does not relieve the pressure, because the conditions that made the perfection determinate are exactly what the *modus significandi* supplied and the divine pole is required to shed.

**Q2.** *What is left to confess, once every word for God has been negated?* The Pseudo-Dionysian tradition of negative theology (*Mystical Theology* 1; *Divine Names* 1) holds that we know what God is not, not what God is. The doctrine has been the central resource of mystical theology for fifteen centuries Maximus, *Ambigua*; Eriugena, *Periphyseon*; Eckhart, *Sermons*; for contemporary form (Jean-Luc Marion, 1991); (Denys Turner, 1995); (Davies, Oliver, and Denys Turner (eds.), 2008). The concern here is what the negations leave for the believer's confession. *God is not finite*, *God is not temporal*, *God is not embodied*, *God is not changeable*: each negation rules out one structural condition the corresponding affirmative predicate would have required. When the negations are summed, what remains is a being defined by the absence of every structural condition affirmative predication has been found to require. The Pseudo-Dionysian tradition is honest about this: the *via negativa* terminates in the *cloud of unknowing*, in silence, in the surrender of every conceptual handle on the divine. The present reading agrees that the apophatic tradition has been more honest about its terminus than the cataphatic (affirmative) refinements that build atop it. The question this section adds is what *God exists* affirms when every structural condition for existence has been negated. The honest answer the apophatic tradition itself gives is: not what *exists* affirms in any case the structural analysis examines.

**Q3.** *What is the greatest possible power, if it has no conditions left to be powerful within?* Anselm's perfect-being methodology (*Proslogion* 2–3) derives the classical attributes by taking each attribute as the perfection of its kind: God is most powerful, most knowing, most good, with each *most* taken to its limit. Morris -(Thomas V. Morris, 1987), Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 2012), and Speaks -(Jeff Speaks, 2018) develop contemporary versions. The concern here is the projection. To project an attribute to its limit is to extend a creaturely scale beyond any creaturely instance. The scale extends within the structural conditions of the attribute: powerful-within-T, knowing-within-T-and-S, good-within-relations-with-other-bearers. To extend the scale beyond any creaturely instance while removing the structural conditions of the scale is not to find a maximal point on the scale; it is to leave the scale. The doctrine projects the predicate beyond the modal structure the predicate is intelligible within. The result is not the predicate at its maximum but a being defined by the predicate's having no modal structure to be at any value within. The methodological reply is that perfection just means *unlimited by structural conditions*. The present reading registers the reply and presses what is left of the predicate when its structural conditions are *the limitation* perfection negates.

**Q4.** *How does calling something a mystery make a contradiction cohere?* The classical tradition has long held that the divine nature exceeds creaturely comprehension and that the limits of creaturely comprehension entail no limit on divine being. The doctrine of *mystery*, properly understood, is not the surrender of reason but its acknowledgment of the bounds of analogical predication Pseudo-Dionysius, *Mystical Theology*; Aquinas, *ST* I.12.7; (Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1921) 1961); for contemporary defense (Plantinga, A., 2000); (Stump, Eleonore, 2010). The concern here is what mystery accommodates and what it excludes. A doctrine that contains apparently incompatible commitments (say, divine immutability and divine response to prayer) can preserve coherence by appeal to mystery: the apparent incompatibility holds only at the level of creaturely understanding, not at the level of divine being. The reply is genuinely available; the structural reading does not exclude it. The question this section presses is what mystery is positioned to do. Mystery, properly understood, is the recognition that creaturely concepts may not capture divine reality. It is not the recognition that contradictions cease to be contradictions when applied to a sufficiently elevated subject. The concern here is that the eleven preceding sections have not turned on creaturely conceptual limits; they have turned on structural conditions the doctrine has placed beyond divine being. Whatever mystery accommodates, it does not accommodate the running-of-predicates outside the constitutive modal structure the predicates require for application.

**Q5.** *If God is beyond every word, what have the words been describing all along?* The deepest version of apophasis Eckhart, *Sermons* 22, 52; (Jean-Luc Marion, 1991) takes the negations to their limit: God is beyond being, beyond goodness, beyond every category, beyond beyond. The position is not nihilism but the most rigorous form of theological humility. The present reading registers the position and notes its symmetry with the conclusion the chapter has been pressing. To say of God *exists*, *is one*, *is necessary*, *is eternal*, *is present*, *is aware*, *knows*, *can*, *acts*, *governs*, *relates* (with every predicate qualified to remove the structural conditions of its application) is to terminate at the same point as Eckhart's *abyss beyond God*: a referent for which no predicate the believer would recognize has determinate content. The mystical tradition arrives at this terminus by faithfulness to the apophatic method; the present chapter has arrived at it by faithfulness to the structural conditions of predicate application. The two paths converge. The Plotinian origin makes the convergence structurally intelligible. In *Enneads* VI.9, Plotinus's ascent terminates in the One *epekeina tēs ousias* (beyond being) which is beyond intellect, beyond goodness as a property, beyond every predicate that would make it an object of thought. The present chapter arrives at the same terminus from the structural side: the predicates applied to God, when their structural conditions are removed, no longer have determinate content. The Plotinian mystic arrives there by faithfully stripping predicates; the structural analysis arrives there by faithfully examining what makes predicates contentful. The question the convergence raises is which path has been tracing the right referent: the Plotinian One-beyond-being, or the structural conditions whose removal the negations name. The question is what the convergence shows. On the apophatic reading, what the predicates have been reaching for is the divine being itself, beyond all categories. On the present reading, what the predicates have been reaching for is the structural conditions of any reaching at all.

The convergence does not leave the two readings symmetrically poised. The Plotinian One is the honest terminus of *refusing to predicate*: the ascent ends in silence, and silence is consistent with the One-beyond-being precisely because no predicate is asserted of it. But the believer's God is not silent. The tradition does not stop at the *cloud of unknowing*; it goes on to confess a God who creates, knows, loves, judges, and answers. Every such confession is an act of predication, and an act of predication is governed by the conditions of predication this section has been tracing. The apophatic terminus is therefore available only to a theology willing to follow it all the way down into silence: to surrender the acting, relating, worshipped God along with the predicates. The theology that keeps predicating has already declined the One-beyond-being; what it is left reaching for, every time it predicates, is the structural conditions any predicate requires. The referent the *continuing* predications track is Nature, not the silence beyond being. The One-beyond-being is what is left when predication stops; Nature is what predication, when it goes on, has been about.

**Q6.** *If "being" means the same for God as for us, how is God's being not structured like ours?* Duns Scotus, against Aquinas, holds that *being* (*ens*) applies univocally to God and creatures: the same concept of being, with the same content, predicated in the same sense across the Creator–creature divide *Ordinatio* I.3; (Richard Cross, 2005); (Thomas Williams, 2005). The semantic motivation is sharp: if creaturely concepts shifted in meaning when applied to God, theological speech could not refer at all. Univocity of being is what makes theological discourse contentful. Grant the position in full. Univocity does not flatten God into a being among beings; the formal distinction (Richard Cross, 2005), ch. 4 preserves the qualitative gap between infinite and finite being while keeping the concept of being itself constant across the divide. The Scotist Creator is still uniquely sovereign, uniquely necessary, uniquely the source. The cost surfaces at the level of what the constant concept *is*. If *being* applies univocally to God and creatures, then whatever being is for creatures it is also for God. Creaturely being is structured being — being-in-Time, being-extended-in-Space, being-as-what-bears-its-own-persistence. Univocity preserves theological speech by paying for it in the coin of structural commitment: the feature that makes God-talk contentful for Scotus is the feature that places God within structure. The Scotist Creator–creature distinction is real, but it is now a distinction *within* structure, not a distinction between structured being and something outside it.

Scotus's is the medieval form of the position; its most developed contemporary form is Swinburne's *The Coherence of Theism*, -(Richard Swinburne, 1977), ch. 4, "The Words of Theology". Swinburne grants neither full univocity nor analogy but a controlled stretching of ordinary-language terms: a word keeps its ordinary meaning while the conditions of its application are loosened just far enough to reach the divine case without importing the creaturely limitations. The motivation is Scotus's (speech that does not refer is not speech) but the mechanism is meant to preserve reference at lower structural cost than univocity of being. The concern here is what the stretching can loosen without losing the term. Either the loosened conditions still include the structural frame the predicate runs on, in which case the controlled stretch imports T, S, and Φ exactly as univocity did, only less visibly; or the stretching loosens the structural conditions themselves, in which case it has not stretched the term's content but cut it loose from what gave the term determinate application, sliding toward the equivocity Swinburne means to avoid and the apophasis Q2 has already weighed. Controlled meaning-stretching preserves reference only on the first branch, and the first branch is univocity's structural commitment under a softer name.

**Q7.** *How does the hidden God become the disclosed God without changing?* Karl Barth -(Barth, Karl, (1932) 1975), I/1; cf. (McCormack, Bruce L., 1995); (Hunsinger, George, 1991); (Webster, John, 2004) refuses analogy in favor of revelation: we know God not by extending creaturely concepts upward, but only in the act in which God reveals Godself. That act is dialectical (*Realdialektik*): in revealing Godself, God remains hidden, disclosed as the One who is not exhausted by what is disclosed. Barthians press this as the move that protects God's transcendence without giving up theological speech. A dialectic between hiddenness and disclosure that is *real*, and not just a conceptual contrast, requires three things: a distinction between what is hidden and what is disclosed (S), an act in which the one becomes the other (T), and one and the same God who is both the hidden one and the disclosed one (Φ). The Barthian rejoinder (that revelation is not a worldly event but God's eternity breaking into time) restates the point in stronger language without removing it. Eternity that breaks *into* time still has direction. Hiddenness that endures *through* disclosure still has a being. Transcendence revealed *as* immanent still has relational structure. The *Realdialektik* is the act in which T, S, and Φ operate at maximum intensity, not the act in which they are left behind. Between univocity (Q6), equivocation (rejected by both Aquinas and Scotus), and analogy (Q1), no semantic option preserves a Creator outside structure. Revelation as the alternative to analogical predication preserves it by *enacting* T, S, and Φ rather than predicating them.

*What is required.* The seven pressures register the structural conditions divine description depends on. Analogy requires a constitutive relation between attribute and bearer on the divine side for the proportion to be a proportion *of*; the doctrine of strong simplicity has factored that relation out at the divine pole. The causal grounding the analogy rests on is itself structurally constituted (production asymmetric in T, cause and effect distinct in S, productive act carried across the distinction in Φ) so analogy preserves the predicates by enlisting at the level of grounding the very structure it tries to set aside at the level of the proportion. Apophasis, summed, removes every condition affirmative predication has been found to require, and the tradition's terminus in *cloud of unknowing* and *abyss beyond God* is honest about what its method leaves standing. Perfect-being theology projects creaturely scales past the limit of their own modal structure; extending an attribute beyond any creaturely instance while removing the structural conditions of the scale is leaving the scale, not finding a maximal point on it. Mystery accommodates conceptual humility, but it does not accommodate predicates running outside the structural frame their application requires: the eleven preceding sections turned on structural conditions, not on creaturely conceptual limits. Mystical apophasis and the present chapter's structural reading converge on the same referent for which no recognizable predicate retains determinate content; the question is which referent the predicates have been reaching for. Univocity preserves theological-speech content but pays for it in the coin of structural commitment: if *being* applies univocally to God and creatures, whatever being is for creatures it is for God, and creaturely being is structured being. Revelation as the alternative to predication enacts T, S, and Φ at maximum intensity rather than transcending them: hiddenness through disclosure has direction, hidden-and-disclosed needs a being, and *Realdialektik* is the act in which the structural conditions operate at full force, not the act in which they are left behind. What divine description names, when its referent is examined, is the activity of marking out a contour Nature supplies.

*What is inverted.* Description is the marking of a contour the description follows, and the contour requires Nature. The English *describe* descends through Latin *describere*, *to write down, to copy, to mark out*. To describe is to mark a contour the description follows. The contour requires a subject of contouring: something the marking is *of*. The classical doctrine of analogy, apophasis, and perfect-being theology, in each of its formulations, has worked to preserve the marking while qualifying it past the conditions of contouring it would otherwise require. The qualifications have been carried out with extraordinary care over fifteen centuries; the concern this chapter presses is not that the qualifications fail at what they were designed to do, but what they leave standing for the believer to hold onto. That question does not turn on a univocal reading the classical tradition has not endorsed; the eleven preceding sections depend instead on the predicates retaining enough determinate content for the believer's confession to mean what it has been taken to mean. Analogy, apophasis, and perfect-being theology each preserve the predicates' grammatical role in the believer's confession by qualifying their structural content past the point where the structural conditions of application obtain. What the doctrines preserve, when their preservations are added up, is the inheritance of the verbal forms; what they have qualified away, in the same accumulation, is the structure that gave the forms determinate content. The chapter does not press an argument against the doctrines; it presses an account of the cost. The cost is what this section names. In ordinary terms: silence may be a coherent religious posture, but it cannot also supply the positive claims that God knows, acts, loves, creates, or relates.


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← [6.8.2 Relatability](<6.8.2 Relatability.md>) | [6.8.4 Revelation](<6.8.4 Revelation.md>) →
