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sists on the importance of the meaning of scripture, he means the literal meaning, per voces (54-55): "Thomas explicitly states (ST I.1.10) that the true sense of the scripture, quem auctor intendit, is not the spiritual but the literal sense of the passage." (55) While this does not indicate a total rejection of the medieval notion of the four-fold meaning of scripture, it does remind us of how rigorously Aquinas intends to root theology in scripture; in principle, it remains always prior to theology's ancillary components, such as philosophy. See also Corbin 1974, pp. 869-72. Aquinas insists that theology is a science, that its principles are beyond it, and that it is superior to all other sciences (ST I.1.2, 5.) Burrell (1979) has brought our attention to the specific, grammatical purposes of the initial questions on God in the Summa Theologiae, and how it is unwarranted to read into these a complete, prior-to-scripture "natural theology" of God. He calls into question the common view that Aquinas had a theory of analogy, and argues that Aquinas refused to systematize his strategies on the analogous use of language and that the failure of the efforts of his disciples (ancient and modern) to do so vindicate Aquinas' reluctance to achieve that kind of synthesis. Particularly in the opening sections of his Aquinas: God and Action, Burrell indicates how to locate properly within Aquinas' overall theological project the construction of a proper way of speaking about God. He notes that in the medieval world the notion of "philosophical grammar" was operative and crucial: "The medievals' way of doing grammar is philosophical, since it reflects the background conviction that the form of one's discourse reveals something of the structure of the world." (Burrell 1979, p. 4) Consonantly, Aquinas' introductory discourse on ''God" seeks to structure our use of language without giving the impression that "God-as-referent" is thereby understood. The reflective use of language affords us not with a scientific demonstration of first principles, but a manuductio, "an appropriately intellectual therapy in the pursuit of religious questions, rather than . . . an explanatory framework." (Burrell 1979, p. 14) Throughout the first quaestiones,Aquinas is not describing the nature of God per se, nor the God to whom we relate in worship. Rather, "he is engaged in the metalinguistic project of mapping out the grammar appropriate in divinis. He is proposing the logic proper to discourse about God." (Burrell 1979, p. 17) "The upshot of this exercise in transcendent logic is to announce concertedly the distinct ways in which any expression offered to characterize Godlike 'wise and all-knowing'will misrepresent its subject. In that indirect and reflexive fashion, something is conveyed to us of the nature of God. Grammar, after all, does give the nature of a thing, but never straightforwardly as people expect of a doctrine of God." (Burrell 1979, p. 17) An understanding of the grammar of religious language is reducible to neither the simple practice of religion nor a positive Christian theology expressive of revelation (Burrell 1979, p. 13), but is a significant aid |
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