On God and Grammar

Wayne Proudfoot (not to be confused with the Proudfeet hobbits in Tolkien’s Shire) makes the argument in Religious Experience that grammar constitutes our conception of God, specifically his attribute of ineffability. It is not uncommon among religious traditions to find the attribute of ineffability ascribed to deities or moral thingamabobs like, for example, the Tao. Anselm’s “God is that than which nothing greater can be thought” and Aquinas’ esse in his account of Divine Simplicity fall into this category. God used in this sense acts as what Proudfoot calls a ‘place-holder,’ since the very ineffability of “God-ness” fails to function as a pure referent.

Aquinas is particularly clear that we cannot actually talk about the essence of God. Our language is insufficient. At best we can only do one of two things: 1.) identify negative differentia and 2.) employ positive differentia, that is, analogous properties of what God might be like. Negative differentia are things which God is not. He is not a stone, a train, a story, a concept, an abstraction, etc. On the other hand, He is like some things. He is something like “Love,” something like our “Father,” something like “the Good.” Aquinas fears that to reduce God to anthropomorphic terms is to remove our sense of His otherness. (If my Aquinas is rusty, forgive me; it’s been 3 or so years.)

In other words, God as a symbol is not a referent to an actual object. There is no correspondence. Weird, right? Some religious theorists have taken issue with this characterization, saying that it is a form of intellectual laziness or simply bad logic. To refer to an object which cannot be referred to is nothing short of nonsense.

Proudfoot, however, makes an interesting play, positioning himself somewhere between Aquinas and these other religious theorist. In a sort of quasi-Wittgensteinian move, God in use has a function distinguishable from a referent and acquitted from being nonsensical. God’s very ineffability functions to produce a sense of otherness in His believers. How? Ineffability has a ritual and belief function determined by grammar. The grammatical backdrop inherent to theological paradigms provides the belief in God’s ineffability, and that ineffability functions as a catalyst for a belief in His mystery. In order to maintain a sense of the mysterious, theologians have included ineffability within their definition of God. Thus Aquinas says exactly what he means, and his characterization of God is not nonsensical.

Whether Proudfoot is right is beyond me. Much needs to be said about Proudfoot’s sneaky psychological evaluation of our theologian’s motives. Likewise, much needs to be said about whether grammar can produce the meaning of ineffability independent of religious experience, or whether, as another option, a priori categories of God might be determined by Calvin’s sensus divinitatis. Really, the question is whether the ineffability of God can be reduced to linguistic categories in the way Nietzsche construes the “leaf is the cause of leaf” problem. When does language constitute and create categories and when does it not? What I can say is that his approach is symptomatic of all things philosophy of language in the past century. Or to put it differently, his approach is nifty and I kinda like it.