"Because we cannot know what God is, but only what He is not, we cannot consider how He is but only how He is not"
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Aquinas is drawing a hard boundary around religious language, and the move is more radical than it sounds. He’s insisting that God is not an object in the world, not a super-sized creature whose features we can catalogue if we just think carefully enough. The sentence is a safety rail against the mind’s most stubborn habit: turning mystery into a mental picture and then mistaking the picture for the thing.
The intent is methodological. Medieval theology, especially in Aquinas’s scholastic world, prized disciplined reasoning; it also inherited a warning from earlier Christian and Neoplatonic thinkers (the “negative theology” tradition): God exceeds the categories that make knowledge possible. So Aquinas offers a kind of intellectual humility with teeth. If your concepts are built from finite experience, then applying them straightforwardly to an infinite source will distort. The only honest route is via negation: God is not changeable, not limited, not composite, not ignorant. Each “not” peels away a human projection.
The subtext is also political inside the academy and the church. This is Aquinas protecting doctrine from both naive literalism and overconfident speculation. If you can’t say what God “is” in the same way you describe a tree or a king, then you also can’t weaponize God as a convenient explanation for whatever you want to assert. The line disciplines rhetoric: it forces believers and theologians alike to admit that their certainty has a grammar, and that grammar is restraint.
The intent is methodological. Medieval theology, especially in Aquinas’s scholastic world, prized disciplined reasoning; it also inherited a warning from earlier Christian and Neoplatonic thinkers (the “negative theology” tradition): God exceeds the categories that make knowledge possible. So Aquinas offers a kind of intellectual humility with teeth. If your concepts are built from finite experience, then applying them straightforwardly to an infinite source will distort. The only honest route is via negation: God is not changeable, not limited, not composite, not ignorant. Each “not” peels away a human projection.
The subtext is also political inside the academy and the church. This is Aquinas protecting doctrine from both naive literalism and overconfident speculation. If you can’t say what God “is” in the same way you describe a tree or a king, then you also can’t weaponize God as a convenient explanation for whatever you want to assert. The line disciplines rhetoric: it forces believers and theologians alike to admit that their certainty has a grammar, and that grammar is restraint.
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| Topic | God |
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