The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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What does it mean to say, as has again and again been said traditionally, that "God does not have but is his being or goodness," or that "God transcends the categories," in that they neither do nor can apply to God "univocally"?

What it means to say such things, I suggest, is that the unique excellence of God as the one strictly universal individual implies a logical/ontological type-difference from all other individuals, actual or possible (cf. AD: 74, 76). In other words, the point of such statements is that God is by definition an infinite exception. And this is so even if it is and must be true, also, that God cannot simply violate logical/ontological rules if there is to be any rational approach at all to God's existence and nature. Either there is some sense in which what is meant by "God" fulfills rather than violates logical/ontological rules, or the term, as the positivist contends, expresses only nonsense.

But while God must in a way fulfill rather than violate logical/ontological rules, God cannot be coherently conceived simply as one more case under the categories applicable to everything else, because deity must itself be a sort of category, indeed, the supreme category. This means that inherent in theism simply as such is the pretension that every category other than God has two levels of possible meaning—the ordinary one, on which it is applicable to everything other than God, and the extraordinary one, on which it can be applied to God alone. 

Of course, "category" is hardly the right word here; "transcendental" would be more appropriate. But, then, we may say that God transcends the other transcendentals because God Godself is a transcendental; and all of the others have two levels of possible meaning, on only one of which do they apply to God. Thus, for example, God may be said to be an individual. But since God transcends all other transcendentals, God is the extraordinary individual and so may be said to be an individual in a sense only "analogically," not "univocally," related to that in which any other (ordinary) individual may be said to be such.

December 1991; rev. 14 December 1993

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