Heller M, Woodin W.H. (eds.) Infinity. New research frontiers (CUP, 2011)(ISBN 1107003873)(O)(327s)_MAml_

294 a (partially) skeptical response to hart and russell“second-order” property of predications of Peter, not a first-order “attribute” of Peter,for “Peter is complex” is rather a remark about the list itself of first-order substantiveattributes, informing us, namely, that its members are not identical with one another,nor the whole list with Peter. It is not, of course, that “complex” tells you nothing aboutPeter: it certainly does, for it tells you that Peter is a creature, that Peter who is strongcan become weak, that Peter who is good can become bad, that Peter who is handsomecan become wrinkled and ugly. But what it tells you is something about how Peterpossesses the attributes we positively ascribe to him; it is not to add another attributeto the list logically on a par with the others. In the same way, “simple” is predicatedof God not in the way that “good” is predicated of God, but rather as governing theway in which “good” is predicated of God: namely, anything truly predicated of Godis God, God is his goodness. Equivalently the same, I propose, holds for “infinite” aspredicated of God. It is not a “positive attribute.”Now if we take the line that broadly – only “broadly,” because their accounts differ –is taken by Gregory of Nyssa and Thomas Aquinas, but also broadly proposed, likewisein different ways, by Hart and Russell, that positive attributes of God are predicated“by analogy” from creatures, we can see how and why it is precisely because that is sothat “infinite” cannot itself be a positive attribute of God, itself known “by analogy.”Following that line, we need to make a distinction concerning our attribution of names toGod, between the res significata and the modus significandi. As Thomas Aquinas says(Summa Theologiae, 1a q13 a3 corp.), what is signified by “good” (the res significata)belongs properly and primarily to God, because God is the source of all goodness increatures, and what belongs to the cause belongs to it in a manner prior to its mannerof existence in the effect. But so far as our understanding of goodness goes, and so faras the logic goes that governs our use of the word (our modus significandi), goodnessbelongs to creatures primarily. Hence, we have somehow to signify by means of ourlimited conceptions of goodness in creatures that goodness that in God is withoutcreaturely limitation.This account of how theological language works, that is, “by analogy,” is an attemptto hold together in tension the two features of (a) language as creaturely and (b) thereality of the Creator that lies unutterably beyond the reach of language. As we mightsay (a little simplistically), there are “positive” and “negative” elements involved, andRussell is exactly right to say (and Hart, too, in his extensive demonstration) that thesemust be seen as implying one another within a single structure of analogy: the vianegativa and the via affirmativa are not independent routes to God, and analogy isnothing but their conjunction. They do in this way reciprocally imply, again as Hartand Russell rightly emphasize, through the core Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo.For insofar as God is the creator of all things “out of nothing,” all things in some wayreflect their origin in the divine creative act; hence, our language descriptive of allcreated things becomes an inexhaustible repertoire of talk about God. Because Hartseems to think of infinity as in the same way predicated positively of God, and so byanalogy from creaturely infinity, it is thus, as he says, that the “finite infinities” of thecreated world participate in the absolute infinity of God. Likewise Russell, relying onan analogy with the way in which Cantor’s transfinites “participate” in, “reveal andveil,” Absolute Infinity construes created infinities as participating analogically in thedivine Infinity. It is precisely here that the need arises to distinguish between the way