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

a (partially) skeptical response to hart and russell 295in which positive attributes are predicated of God – namely, by analogy – and theway in which regulative attributes are predicated – namely, by negation. Both forms ofutterance, we may say, “fail” of God, but they fail differently.As for the positive attributes, we can truly predicate goodness of God, because allcreaturely realities reflect God, their Creator. But just because of that, just insofar aswhat creatures reflect is the Creator of all things out of nothing, and just insofar asthat notion of creatio ex nihilo utterly defeats our powers of comprehension, all thatpositive talk fails, and is known to fail, of God. It fails, that is to say, not because weare short of things to say about God, for we are far from being short of affirmativetheological utterance if all creation in some way speaks God: theology is notoriouslyand rightly garrulous. Nor does our speech about God fail because we are short of theepistemological instruments for dissecting true from false propositions about God, forwe are not. Our speech about God fails because all of what we can say about God,even truly, falls short of him – infinitely. And that is precisely the point of differencebetween the predication of positive attributes, which by analogy affirm some positivecontent of God, and the predication of infinity. The predication of infinity is simplythe measure of the shortfall of the positive predications; or perhaps it would be moreproper to say that the predication of the infinity of God is required because there is nomeasure of that shortfall. The falling short is infinite, because God is without limit, andlanguage is essentially limited, designed for the discrimination of the limits of a “this”that mark it out from a “that.”Coming to see that God is infinite is not, then, to acquire some new piece ofinformation about God further to our knowledge of God’s goodness, or beauty, ortruth, or whatever. God’s infinity refers to the manner in which these positive attributeshold true of God; hence, secondly, it refers to the failure of thought and speech to capturethe how of their existence in God. So within this “affirmative/negative” complex thatis theological language, it would seem that the “infinity” of God functions somewhatin the manner of an operator in mathematics and logic. The operator “square of x” isan incomplete expression governing a mathematical procedure, whose “content” canbe known only when a value is substituted for the variable x. The operator is not, ofcourse, itself a number, but if you know how to conduct the operation of squaring anumber, then you know what value the whole expression “square of x” has when youknow what value to substitute for x. It is in the same way that God’s infinity is not asubstantive attribute of God, as are “goodness” and “wisdom”; instead, it functions inrelation to such substantive attributes in the manner in which an operator does overthe values of its variables. More simply, the concept of the “infinite” itself has only“negative” meaning, as the denial of all creaturely limitation: if, indeed, it is the natureof the creaturely existence to be limited, then the denial of all creaturely limitationcould not possibly have any “content” of its own; at any rate, it could not have anycontent if, as the doctrine of analogy supposes, language about God gets its contentfrom its creaturely reference. For, again, language is essentially thus limited, finite,in its modus significandi. Nonetheless, combined with a substantive attribute, suchcomplete expressions as “God is infinitely good, wise ...”yield just that conjunctionof affirmativity and negativity that, as both Hart and Russell rightly say, characterizesour language about God. Furthermore, that conjunction is what we call “analogy.” Asfor “infinite,” that we do not know “by analogy,” but only by negation.