Univocity: Scotus, Aquinas, and the Analogy of Being
Univocity is the use of a word in exactly the same sense of two different things, and in theology it names the claim that some words mean the same when said of God and of creatures. The univocity of being is John Duns Scotus's thesis that "being" is one concept for God and for us, and the followers of Thomas Aquinas have answered it with the analogy of being for seven centuries. The quarrel dissolves once we can say, before any argument begins, which words keep one sense across the Creator and the creature, which cannot, and what settles the difference.
Key takeaways
- Univocity means one sense. A univocal word means the same in two uses, an equivocal word something unrelated, and an analogical word related senses.
- Scotus argued from the origin of our concepts. If our concepts come from creatures, those we apply to God must be the same concepts.
- The dispute is live. Thomas Williams argues that analogy reduces to "either unintelligibility or univocity," and Radical Orthodoxy traces modernity to Scotus.
- Frame-Indexed Classical Theism grants each side its ground. Against Scotist univocity and Thomist analogy taken wholesale, it keeps logic in one sense, indexes terms of possibility, time, agency and value to natures, and refers both senses to one reality.
What is univocity?
Univocity is sameness of sense. A word is univocal when it carries one meaning across its uses, so that "mammal" said of a dog and of a cat names the same thing in both. Aquinas set the three possibilities side by side in the Summa Theologiae: "Univocal terms mean absolutely the same thing, but equivocal terms absolutely different; whereas in analogical terms a word taken in one signification must be placed in the definition of the same word taken in other senses." An equivocal word is a pun, like "bank" for a river's edge and for a lender. An analogical word holds related senses together, as "healthy" does of an animal and of its medicine, and analogical language about God claims that middle ground.
Thomas Williams frames the theological question with two sentences: God is wise, and Socrates is wise. "Wise" has an altogether different sense in the first, or a different but related sense, or exactly the same sense. If the word means the same, the Creator risks becoming one more wise thing among wise things. If it means something wholly different, we no longer understand what we have said.
The univocity of being is Scotus's answer for the most basic word we have. He held that the concept of being is one concept said of God and of creatures, though in two radically distinct modes, infinite in God and finite in us. Aquinas held that "being" is said analogically, and Thomism is the system that follows from that choice.
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What did Duns Scotus argue for the univocity of being?
The Scholastic theologian John Duns Scotus argued for the univocity of being from three directions, and each began on ground he shared with Aquinas. Both held that our knowledge of God starts from creatures and that we cannot know God's essence in this life. From that premise Scotus built his first argument: if our concepts come from creatures, the concepts we apply to God come from creatures too, and as Thomas Williams puts it in the Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Scotus, they "will have to be the very same concepts." A concept merely like the creaturely one would need a source, and Scotus finds none.
The second is the argument from a certain and a doubtful concept. We can be certain that something is a being while we still doubt whether it is a substance or an accident, and that certainty requires a concept of being simple enough to hold while the other question stays open. Scotus paired it with a test: a term is univocal when affirming and denying it of the same thing would be a contradiction. On that basis he argued, as the Stanford entry on medieval theories of analogy reports, that "without a unified concept of being neither metaphysics nor theology would be possible."
The third borrows Anselm's test. A pure perfection is a predicate that implies no limitation, and we ascribe such perfections to God. The test works only if the concept of goodness we tested is the concept we then apply, or we tested one thing and ascribed another.
What the doctrine does not claim matters as much. Williams insists that "the doctrine of univocity is a semantic doctrine," a thesis about concepts and meanings. Holding a concept under which God and creatures both fall "does not imply that there is any feature at all in extramental reality that is a common component of both God and creatures." Scotus's early followers found this hard to hold together, and the Stanford entry records their struggle to join one concept of being to God and creatures as "entirely diverse realities with no real commonality."
The objector in Aquinas's own article presses the same case from Scripture:
Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." (Genesis 1:26, NIV)
Where there is likeness, the objector reasons, something can be said of both in one sense.
How did Aquinas and the Thomists answer?
Aquinas answers with a reason drawn from how our words work. When we call a man wise, he writes, we "signify some perfection distinct from a man's essence, and distinct from his power and existence." Wisdom is one quality among a man's others, and the word marks its edges. Said of God, "wise" does not signify anything distinct from His essence, power or existence, and so the word "leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name." From this Aquinas concludes, in the Summa's Question 13, that "no name is predicated univocally of God and of creatures."
He refuses the opposite extreme as firmly. If the names were purely equivocal, "from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all." What remains is analogy, which he calls "a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation." In his reply to the first objection he states the thesis Scotus would later reverse: "all univocal predications are reduced to one first non-univocal analogical predication, which is being." Scotus makes being the single concept that analogy presupposes. Aquinas makes being the first analogy, on which the other shared names depend.
Against the idols a metalworker casts and a goldsmith overlays, the prophet asks a question the Thomist hears guarding the same boundary:
"With whom, then, will you compare God? To what image will you liken him?" (Isaiah 40:18, NIV)
The question is aimed at the made likeness, and the Thomist hears in it a warning about any word that would place God in a row of things to be compared.
From the fourteenth century onward, the quarrel between Thomism and Scotism dominated Thomist discussion of analogy. Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, gave the standard reply in the analogy of proper proportionality: God's wisdom stands to God as a man's wisdom stands to a man. He also made a concession. Names said by proper proportionality, Cajetan claimed, meet Scotus's own conditions for univocity, with enough unity to ground a contradiction and to serve as the middle term of a syllogism. Modern scholars still dispute whether Cajetan read Aquinas rightly. Either way, the classic Thomist answer to Scotus accepted Scotus's test.
Is the doctrine of univocity true?
Thomas Williams argued that it is in 2005, in "The Doctrine of Univocity Is True and Salutary," published in Modern Theology. His argument runs through the three options for "God is wise." Either we can state the different sense "wise" has when said of God, or we cannot. If we cannot, we do not know what we are saying. If we can, we have replaced "wise" with another expression drawn from our talk about creatures, and the same question arises about that expression. Such a regress, he holds, "must terminate in univocal predication."
Analogy fares no better. Can we state either the sense "wise" has of God or the relation between that sense and its sense of Socrates? "If we can do neither, then we have in fact fallen into equivocation." If we can state the relation, we can rewrite the sentence with the creaturely sense plus a relational expression, and either that expression keeps its ordinary sense or the regress begins again. To know only that the two senses are not identical, Williams adds, "is not to know what the sense" of the word said of God "actually is." The three options "in fact reduce to two: either unintelligibility or univocity."
The same issue of Modern Theology carried Catherine Pickstock's "Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance." Pickstock writes from Radical Orthodoxy, the movement that grew from John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory (1990) and took its name from Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (1999). The movement reads Scotus's doctrine as the precursor of modernity. In the passage Williams quotes, Pickstock holds that univocity "requires that God and creatures 'are' in the same albeit spectral ontic fashion." The worry has real force. A doctrine that set God and creatures on one level of being would lose the Creator Aquinas was guarding.
Williams answers that Radical Orthodoxy treats a semantic doctrine as an ontology Scotus explicitly disavowed. Richard Cross had argued at length in Antonianum (2001) that the genealogy misreads Scotus, and Daniel Horan has pressed the same objection. Cross also offers a constructive reading, reported in the Stanford entry, on which the semantics of analogy "reduce to or depend upon a more fundamental core of univocity." The Scotist Bartholomaeus Mastrius had held something close: analogy reduces logically to equivocation or to univocation.
William Alston came at the question from analytic philosophy of religion. In "Functionalism and Theological Language" (1985) he argued that God's radical otherness is "compatible with a degree of univocity," because two beings can share an abstract feature that each realizes in a very different way.
Reformed theology fought its own round in the 1940s. The Clark–Van Til controversy over God's incomprehensibility was fought out in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. A Complaint that Cornelius Van Til signed in the dispute declared, as Robert Reymond quotes the 1945 minutes, "We dare not maintain that [God's] knowledge and our knowledge coincide at any single point." Clark, by Reymond's account, argued that Thomist analogy is equivocation under another name. Readers of TULIP Calvinism will recognize the stakes.
Where each side is strong, and where the difficulty lies
Scotus is strong where reasoning is at stake. An argument about God has to carry its terms from premise to conclusion in one sense, or it commits the fallacy of equivocation, and Aquinas grants as much when he rejects pure equivocity. Our concepts do come from creatures. Williams's regress presses hardest against any account of analogy that cannot say what relation holds between the two senses, since knowing that they differ is not knowing what either means.
Aquinas is strong where God is at stake. Wisdom in Socrates is a quality he acquired and could lose, distinct from what he is, and wisdom in God is no addition to His essence. A word that carried the first sense unchanged into the second would make the Creator one more wise thing, differing from Socrates in degree, and Isaiah's question would have an answer. The Thomist refusal protects the difference between God and any created likeness.
The two sides stand closer than the dispute suggests. Cajetan granted Scotus's test. Scotus placed the difference between God and creatures in the mode, infinite and finite, and denied that the shared concept names a common feature in reality. Each had made room for the other's main concern.
The difficulty lies in how both answered. Scotus and Aquinas each settled the question wholesale, as though a word kept its sense or lost it simply by being said of God. Scotus's answer secures reasoning and puts the Creator's difference at risk. Aquinas's answer protects the difference and struggles to state the sense. Neither supplies a rule that says in advance which words must keep one sense, which words cannot, and what decides the matter. Without that rule, analogy can absorb any objection brought against it, and a defense that cannot fail has not yet been tested.
Volume One derives that rule from two axioms before it takes up a single dilemma, and the download is free.
How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism dissolve the univocity debate?
Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error, and it is the position of the Many Beings Framework. With Scotist univocity, FICT holds that some terms must keep one sense across Creator and creature, or we cannot reason about God. With Thomist analogy, it holds that many of our words cannot keep one sense across that divide without making the Creator a creature. It adds the rule that tells the two groups apart.
The framework begins from two axioms. A being's nature is the fusion of its essential qualities. A conscious being's mode of existence determines its mode of apprehension. Beings whose natures differ in kind therefore apprehend reality in perceptual frames that differ in kind.
In God's own mode of knowing, the Absolute Metaphysical Frame, there is one unified reality, known whole and without succession. In the Human Finite Frame, the sequential mode proper to human nature, that same reality is received in parts and in order, because a finite mind cannot hold the infinite in a single act. There is one reality and two modes of access to it. We know God truly by reasoning, testimony and revelation, and we cannot apprehend Him as He apprehends Himself. Paul marks the limit and its end:
"For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." (1 Corinthians 13:12, NIV)
Some terms keep one sense in both frames. Identity, non-contradiction, arithmetic and stipulated definitions mean the same from God's frame and from ours. Here Scotus's demand is met, and his contradiction test holds.
Some terms are analogically non-univocal. Terms whose content involves possibility, time, agency or value, such as free, good, now and able, carry the frame they are said from. Both senses refer to the one reality God's frame grounds and sustains, so the reference is shared while the sense is not, and neither sense may stand in for the other without marking its frame. Here Aquinas's difference is kept.
Natures set the index. The line between the two groups was drawn from the natures of the knowers before any dilemma was on the table, so an author may not attach the index where an argument is going badly, and a misuse can be caught.
Williams's regress ends here. He is right to ask analogy for the relation between the two senses, and the framework states it: both refer to one reality, God's frame grounds that reality, and the natures of the knowers fix the difference. The logical terms that carry the statement keep one sense, and the reference of both senses to the one reality is shared, so the regress ends where Williams requires, and "good" need not mean in God exactly what it means in us.
At being, the framework parts from Scotus. It rejects his univocity of being at its foundation, because the Creator and the creature differ in kind, aseity against contingency. Scotus was right that something must keep one sense. He placed being there, where the framework places the terms of logic and secures the rest by shared reference to the one reality. Volume Four takes up his formal distinction alongside divine simplicity.
Carrying a frame-sensitive term across the divide unchanged is the error the framework names the Many Beings Fallacy. FICT is the most immediate contemporary heir of Thomistic analogical predication, and it grants Scotist univocity its demand. The statement of the framework sets out its axioms and rule together.
Volume One walks the derivation step by step, and you can get your copy free.
How the positions compare
Each position gets something right, and each leaves something unsettled.
| Position | How words apply to God | What it gets right | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thomist analogy (Aquinas, Cajetan) | In related senses, by proportion; being is the first analogy | God stays distinct from created likeness, and God-talk is not equivocal | A relation stated in terms Williams's regress can accept |
| Scotist univocity (Scotus, Williams) | Core concepts in one sense, with God and creatures differing in mode, infinite and finite | Reasoning about God needs terms that keep one sense | Makes being itself univocal |
| Barth's analogy of faith | Likeness known through God's self-revelation in Christ | Grace and revelation guarded against natural theology | How words learned from creatures keep their meaning of God |
| Frame-Indexed Classical Theism | Logic in one sense; terms of possibility, time, agency and value indexed to their frame; both senses referring to one reality | Grants Scotus his fixed terms and Aquinas his difference, with the rule stated in advance | Fails if a frame-sensitive term is shown to keep one sense across the divide |
Frequently asked questions
What does univocal mean?
A word has a univocal meaning when it keeps one sense across its uses, as "triangle" does of any two triangles. An equivocal word shifts to an unrelated sense, as "bat" does between the animal and the club. An analogical word shifts to a related sense, as "healthy" does between an animal and its diet. Scotus claimed that "being," said of God and of creatures, belongs in the first group, and Aquinas placed it in the third.
Did Duns Scotus think God and creatures are the same kind of being?
No. Scotus held that the concept of being is one concept said of God and of creatures, and that God and creatures differ radically in what they are, infinite and finite. Thomas Williams stresses that the doctrine concerns meaning. A concept covering both "does not imply that there is any feature at all in extramental reality" shared by God and creatures.
What is the analogia entis, and why did Barth reject it?
The analogia entis, or analogy of being, names the Thomist conviction that being and its perfections are said of God and creatures in related senses. Karl Barth, answering Erich Przywara, wrote in the preface to Church Dogmatics: "I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and I believe that because of it it is impossible ever to become a Catholic." He saw in it a natural theology that bypassed grace. He developed an analogy of faith in its place, and he later conditionally withdrew the charge for a version framed as God making Himself known.
Did the univocity of being cause modernity?
Radical Orthodoxy argues that it helped to. Milbank and Pickstock read Scotus as the precursor of a secular picture in which God and creatures "are" in the same fashion. Richard Cross, Thomas Williams and Daniel Horan reply that this treats a semantic doctrine as an ontology Scotus rejected. Williams adds that if people drew false inferences from univocity, "the proper remedy is to correct their inferences, not to reject univocity."
Isn't frame-indexing just equivocation with a label?
Equivocation leaves two senses unconnected. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism ties them in three ways: logic keeps one sense across both frames, both indexed senses refer to the one reality God's frame grounds, and the natures of the knowers set the index before any argument uses it. So the framework keeps Scotist univocity's demand for fixed terms and Thomist analogy's refusal to make God a creature.
Where to go from here
Scotus and Aquinas were each right about the words they were watching. Scotus watched the terms an argument has to carry, which must keep one sense. Aquinas watched the words that name what God is, which cannot keep the sense they have in us. The dispute has lasted seven centuries because each read the other's claim as a claim about words in general. The Many Beings Framework states which words belong to which group.
Volume One sets out the two axioms, derives the rule and names the fallacy, and it is free to download. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, takes up Scotus's formal distinction and divine simplicity, and it is available now in every format. The rest of the series carries the rule into time, evil, infinity and providence.
