Abstract
Idolatry is vehemently rejected by the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and closely connected with idolatry are certain varieties of anthropomorphism, which involve the attribution of a human form or personality to God. The question investigated in this paper is whether a highly anthropomorphic conception of God, one that commits the sin of idolatry, is entailed by a particular theory of religious language. This theory is the 'univocity thesis', the view that, for some substitutions for 'F', the sense of '___ is F' as applied to God and its sense as applied to human creatures is exactly or substantially the same. My claim is that the univocity thesis entails a strong form of anthropomorphism that in effect reduces God to creaturely status and thus succumbs to idolatry (albeit a conceptual form of idolatry). In the course of my argument, a comparison is made between, on the one hand, the methods of Duns Scotus and modern proponents of perfect-being theology in arriving at a concept of God as maximally perfect, and on the other hand the work of Thomistic philosophers (especially Barry Miller) in showing how a more adequate conception of divinity can be reached by dispensing with some of the methods and assumptions of perfect-being theology, particularly the assumption of univocity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Sections 86-93 of the So-Called ‘Big Typescript’”, Synthese 87 (1991): 9.
Paul Gwynne, World Religions in Practice: A Comparative Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009), p. 33.
A similar impulse against idolatry can be detected in the Marxist attempt to problematic any discursive determination of the end, as evidenced by Marx’s critique of utopian socialism, with his refusal to “write recipes for the cookshops of the future” (afterword to Capital). This emphasis on the critical gap or discontinuity between finite being and the absolute also looms large in Derrida’s refusal to delimit in advance the content and parameters of concepts such as ‘democracy’, ‘justice’ and ‘hospitality’, talking instead of ‘the democracy (justice, etc.) to come’. On the critique of idolatry in contemporary Continental thought, see Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).
Wittgenstein, “Lectures on Religious Belief”, in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, edited by Cyril Barrett (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), p. 71.
Aristotle, Politics 1,2 (trans. B. Jowett), in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1987.
Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, A Text and Translation with a Commentary by J.H. Lesher(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), fragment 15, p. 25.
Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, fragment 16, p. 25.
James Lesher has noted that in making such a claim Xenophanes was not necessarily rejecting as false all anthropomorphic aspects of religion. Indeed, Xenophanes is thought to have accepted belief in a god who is capable of perceiving and thinking, and is morally perfect. See Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments, fragments 11 (p. 23), 24 (p. 31), 25 (p. 33). Rather, according to Lesher, Xenophanes was putting forward an explanation, not a refutation, and the explanation was a genetic one, identifying the origins and causes of religious belief: believers conceive of the gods as having certain attributes because the believers themselves have these attributes. In this respect, as Lesher states, “Xenophanes was an ancient forerunner to modern thinkers such as Feuerbach and Freud who found the root causes of religious belief in certain features of the human psyche” (Lesher, “Xenophanes”, in Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis (eds), The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Durham: Acumen, 2009, vol. 1, p. 46). Lesher, however, points out that Xenophanes had not succumbed to the ‘genetic fallacy’ of rejecting a belief as false merely in virtue of the origins of the belief. (This is a fallacy because how a belief originated may be irrelevant to its truth-value: e.g., the fact that I came to believe in atoms because I was taught this by my physics teacher does not, by itself, discredit or validate the belief.) But at the same time Xenophanes’ genetic account is not entirely irrelevant to the issue of the truth or reasonableness of religious belief. For if the origins of religious belief lie purely in psychological factors that have no connection to the truth of such beliefs (such as the wish for a protective father-figure), then the credibility of such beliefs is surely diminished (for beliefs that originate in this way are more often than not false). This, I take it, is the real point of the Freudian critique: if we see how our commitment to religion arose, it would lose at least some of the authority it has over us.
Gordon D. Kaufman, In Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 313-14, emphasis in the original.
The quote is from Francis Bacon, Essays (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972), Essay XVI: “Of Atheism”, p. 50, and is a paraphrase from a Latin translation of Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Epicurus. In the Loeb edition, the passage is translated as: “Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them is truly impious” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, trans. R.D. Hicks, London: Heinemann, 1925, pp. 649-51).
Ferré, “In Praise of Anthropomorphism”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 16 (1984): 210, emphasis in the original.
See the arresting image of analogical talk about God as “hovering dangerously between the Cliffs of Equivocity and Univocity while peering and pointing below toward the Dark Luminosity at the heart of the world”, in the introductory section of Gregory Rocca’s “Aquinas on God-Talk: Hovering Over the Abyss”, Theological Studies 54 (1993): 641-61.
For Scotus, a concept is univocal if it “possesses sufficient unity in itself, so that to affirm and deny it of one and the same thing would be a contradiction. It also has sufficient unity to serve as the middle term of a syllogism, so that wherever two extremes are united by a middle term that is one in this way, we may conclude to the union of the two extremes among themselves” (Ordinatio I, d.3 n.25; in John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, trans. Allan Wolter, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, p. 20). Scotus therefore defines univocity in two ways. Firstly, a univocal concept refers to a concept the unity of which is sufficient to involve a contradiction if one affirms and denies the idea of the same subject at the same time. Secondly, a univocal concept is a concept that, when employed as a middle term in a syllogism, has a meaning sufficiently the same in both premises to prevent the fallacy of equivocation being committed.
For Scotus’ arguments in support of univocity, see Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, pp. 20-25. These arguments are summarised in Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer, The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004), pp. 41-47, where Scotus’ case is nicely encapsulated as the view that univocity is “the condition for the possibility of any metaphysics as well as of any theology” (p. 47).
The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 631.
Edward M. Curtis, “Idol, Idolatry” in David Noel Freedman (editor-in-chief), The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), p. 376. Etymologically, ‘idolatry’ means ‘the adoration (latreia) of an image (eidōlon)’.
See Curtis, “Idol, Idolatry”, p. 377. See also José Faur, “The Biblical Idea of Idolatry”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 69 (1978): 1-15, esp. 5-12.
However, see Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margalit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. ch. 1, who argue that idolatry in the Hebrew Bible is associated more with betrayal than with false belief (and that the metaphors of betrayal and faithlessness are understood in the context of the relationship between husband and wife). As Halbertal and Margalit note, in relation to the Hebrew Bible, “even if the existence of other gods is denied, the sin of idolatry is not identified with the cognitive error of believing that other gods exist. The error in such a case is not the sin, but only the cause of the sin, which is the worship of and following after these gods” (Idolatry, p. 22).
Mark Johnston, in his recent book Saving God: Religion after Idolatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), sees the biblical ban on idolatry in a slightly different way as proscribing perverse worship (relying on the Hebrew equivalent for ‘idolatry’, avodah zarah, meaning strange, perverse, or alien worship). For Johnston, the perversity in question does not reside solely in acts of reverence towards an image, or the crude identification of the image with a god (something that a polytheist would rarely have done in any case). Rather, idolatry is perverse worship in that it crucially assumes that the god is under human control or influence, for if the idol or image is an embodiment of the god then we, as craftsmen of the idols, would have control over when and where the god is embodied (see esp. pp. 20-24). Interestingly, also, Johnston goes on to argue in the book that idolatry is not only a feature of polytheistic religion, but also of the major monotheisms (his key and contentious claim, in this instance, is that supernaturalism is idolatrous).
The Oxford English Dictionary, p. 631.
This prohibition is repeated in Ex 20:23, 34:17; Lev 19:4, 26:1; Deut 4:15-19, 25-26, 5: 8.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 13.
Though exceptions can often be found – as in the images of the cherubim in the Jewish temple.
This is evidenced by the interesting fact that, as one scholar of ancient Israel has stated, “No monumental Israelite art survives. No Israelite statuary or sculpture, large-scale iconographic representation, or paintings are known save two 10th-century cultic stands” (W.G. Dever, quoted in Curtis, “Idol, Idolatry”, p. 380).
As Alan J. Avery-Peck puts it, “The [Israelite] people’s experience at Sinai of a God who speaks but is not seen is paradigmatic of the way in which God was always to be known to the people: through a revelation in words rather than in a corporeal form or image” [“Idolatry in Judaism”, in Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck and William Scott Green (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Judaism, second edition, vol. 2, Leiden: Brill, 2005, p. 1080]. An interesting question is why linguistic representations of God are treated more permissively than pictorial representations. For discussion of this problem, see Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, pp. 50-66.
Indeed, it is not unusual to find a ban on anthropomorphic images co-existing in the same religion with a highly anthropomorphic theology. As R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, in his entry on Anthropomorphism in Mircea Eliade’s The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 316-20, points out: “Shintō mythology…is as anthropomorphic as can be, but a Shintō shrine (at least if uncontaminated by Buddhist influence) is as empty of statues and images as a mosque or a synagogue” (p. 317).
Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, p. 2.
See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.13.5, where he rejects univocity on the grounds that it compromises God’s unity and simplicity. Divine simplicity is, I would say, the cornerstone of the Thomist opposition to univocity, particularly when the theory of divine simplicity is understood as not so much a doctrine spelling out a characteristic of God but as an account of the logic or grammar of talk about God. On this point, see David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008), ch. 2.
Andrew Gleeson, A Frightening Love: Recasting the Problem of Evil (unpublished ms.), ch. 1.
David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 220.
What Scotus actually said was: “Masters who write of God and of those things that are known of God, observe the univocity of being in the way in which they speak, even though they deny it with their words” (Reportatio Parisiensis 1.3.1, n. 7).
Duns Scotus, 1 Lectura d.3 n.105; quoted in Stephen Dumont, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus”, in John Marenbon (ed.), Medieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 314.
Henry of Ghent, Summa: The Questions on God’s Existence and Essence (Articles 21-24), trans. Jos Decorte and Roland J. Teske (Paris: Peeters, 2005), article 21, question 2, p. 49.
See Henry of Ghent, Summa, p.51.
See Cross, “Univocity and Mystery”, in Roberto Hofmeister Pich (ed.), New Essays on Metaphysics as Scientia Transcendens (Porto: Louvain-La-Neuve, 2007), p. 120. See also Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 54, where he notes that “if we do say that such a word as ‘good’ is being used in the same sense in ‘God is good’ and in ‘Florence Nightingale was good’, that does not mean that God’s goodness is not very different from Florence Nightingale’s”.
William P. Alston, “Religious Language”, in William J. Wainwright (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 235.
Alston, “Religious Language”, p. 236.
See Thomas V. Morris, “Perfect Being Theology”, Noûs 21 (1987): 19-30, and Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991).
Recent attempts to put this method into practice, apart from Morris, include George N. Schlesinger, New Perspectives on Old-time Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), ch. 1, esp. pp. 16-21; Katherin A. Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), esp. chs. 1 and 2; Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and Daniel J. Hill, Divinity and Maximal Greatness (London: Routledge, 2005).
See Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, pp. 24-25. On Scotus’ use of the Anselmian method, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 31-32, 38. See also Cross, Duns Scotus on God (Albershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 49-52, for some of Scotus’ reservations about this methodology.
There is a complication, however, given that the perfections of God, in Scotus’ view, are not merely quantitative improvements upon the same qualities found in creatures, so that divine omnipotence is not simply the same kind of power found in humans but just infinitely more of it. For Scotus rejects the negative and relational conception of infinity one finds in Aquinas, for whom the infinite is simply that which is not bounded by something else. Scotus, by contrast, thinks we can have a positive conception of infinity and not merely a negative, relational one. On Scotus’ view of God’s goodness, for example, God’s goodness is infinite in a positive, and specifically intrinsic, non-quantitative sense – that is to say, the degree of goodness found in God is not something that can be measured or quantified, for it is not something composed of (an infinite number of) discrete goodness-parts. Rather, God’s infinite goodness is a qualitative feature of God, or in Scotus’ language, an “intrinsic mode of God’s being”.
I borrow the term ‘infinity function’ from Christopher Insole, who in “Anthropomorphism and the Apophatic God” (Modern Theology 17 (2001): 475-83) lucidly shows how modern forms of apophaticism are just as (crassly) anthropomorphic as some philosophical forms of theism.
Barry Miller, A Most Unlikely God: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Nature of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 7. See also Miller, The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 137.
These examples are introduced in Miller, The Fullness of Being, pp. 137-39.
Miller, The Fullness of Being, p. 140.
Miller, The Fullness of Being, p. 138, emphasis in the original.
Prior to Miller, Ian Ramsey made a similar point when stating that, in calling God infinitely good, we are not simply placing him further along the scale of Stalin (who is hardly good), Long John Silver (who is fairly good), David (who was very good), Saint Francis (who was intensely good), and then at the very end God (who is infinitely good). Rather, the qualifier ‘infinite’ has the logical function of placing God outside the series altogether, evoking (as he puts it) the ‘disclosure’ of a characteristically religious situation. See Ian T. Ramsey, Religious Language: An Empirical Placing of Theological Phrases (London: SCM Press, 1957), ch. 2.
See Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 10.
See Bruce Langtry, “Metaphysics and a Personal God”, Pacifica 14 (2001): 25-26. Langtry had earlier published the same objection in his review of Miller’s A Most Unlikely God, in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (1999): 515-16.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 87.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 87, emphasis in the original.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 87, emphasis in the original.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 89, emphasis in the original.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 88.
See, for example, Langtry’s analysis of psychological predicates such as ‘believes’ and ‘intends’ as applied to God, in “Metaphysics and a Personal God”, pp. 18-20.
Katherin A. Rogers, “Review of Miller, A Most Unlikely God”, Religious Studies 34 (1998): 361.
Cross, Duns Scotus, pp. 34-35. Henry’s attempt to resolve this problem involved the notion of ‘analogously common’ concepts. The concept of goodness, on this view, is ‘analogously common’ in that it is applicable to both of its instances (i.e., to both Creator and creature), but not in such a way that it is univocal. Rather, the concept includes the concepts of both divine goodness and creaturely goodness in a confused way as one, so as to give the misleading impression of univocity. See Dumont, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus”, p. 306.
Miller, A Most Unlikely God, p. 10.
Rogers, “Review of Miller, A Most Unlikely God”, p. 361, emphasis in the original.
W. Norris Clarke raises this difficulty in his review of Miller’s A Most Unlikely God, in the International Philosophical Quarterly 38 (1998): 215.
This, of course, is the notion of ‘theosis’ or deification. For an excellent and comprehensive study of theosis, see Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Centenary Conference of the Melbourne College of Divinity, and at the Third International Conference of the Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association, both in July 2010. I am grateful to audiences for their comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Trakakis, N.N. Does Univocity Entail Idolatry?. SOPHIA 49, 535–555 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0222-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0222-4