چکیده:
In sacred texts and ordinary language, we describe God using certain attributes. One of the long-standing problems in establishing theology is how to understand and analyze the meaning of these attributes (especially those shared between humans and God). Do these attributes carry the same ordinary and conventional meaning when applied to God? Or do they possess a different meaning? What is the relationship between this other meaning and the ordinary and conventional meaning of these attributes? In this article, an attempt is made to critique and examine the famous solution of analogy presented by Thomas Aquinas, which contains new insights. The theory of analogy seeks to demonstrate a type of 'identity in difference' and 'difference in identity' in the meanings of these attributes by denying both verbal equivocation and semantic identity.
خلاصه ماشینی:
To escape this problem, Thomas utilizes the principle of the analogy of cause and effect and says: Although according to the analogy of attributes, describing God with knowledge and wisdom only expresses that He is the creator of the wisdom and knowledge of humans, by relying on the fact that the creator and cause of knowledge in humans must Himself be knowing, and without possessing this perfection He cannot grant it to another, He is liberated from the danger of God not being truly characterized (and only being metaphorically characterized).
As Gilson has also addressed, to avoid falling into such a trap, Thomas proposes an important qualification to distinguish his way from the theory of mere equivocation: we have equivocal terms that do not belong to a specific genus or type, and beyond this, there is no relationship between their referents; a prominent example is the word dog, which is applied to a specific type of animal but is applied completely accidentally to falls, and besides the aspect of distinction and difference, there exists a common semantic core between them, which validates the predication, application, and meaningfulness of these shared attributes; this is the same path that was first developed by Muslim thinkers and subsequently expanded by Thomas Aquinas under the theory of analogy.
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