Abstract

There is a dilemma for all God-talk: either the predicates retain their familiar connotation , but then they are unsuitable for God; or they measure up to God, but then we no longer know what they mean. As a way out of the dilemma tradition has appealed to analogy. For Aristotle analogy is what is later called proportionality, i.e. a similarity between relations. It is shown that this analogy, by itself, cannot solve the problem. Aristotle, however, has another ontologico-semantic device, namely 'to be or to be named from one or towards one' , which looks more promising. This is the later so called analogy of proportion or of attribution. Thus an accident, f.i. a quality, is called 'being' from the substance, the primary being, because it is directed towards the substance and depends on it. For Thomas this is the kind of analogy that makes God-talk possible. It implies a twofold dynamic: the three ways of Dionysius and the strategy of seeing creatures as traces of or pointers towards God. I.T. Ramsey's theory of qualified models leading to a disclosure makes this dynamic more explicit. Far from being old-fashioned, the theories of analogy and of qualified models have everything to do with what J.-F. Lyotard sees as the concern of both avant-garde art and postmodern philosophy: to make allusions to the Sublime, to point towards the Transcendent, which as transcending the observable cannot be represented