The heart of St Thomas Aquinas's views on the nature of language about God is his thesis that all assertions about God are to be construed analogically. Aquinas offers this as one thesis, but it is fruitful to regard it as consisting of two separate claims: a linguistic subthesis, which provides for the formulation of analogy rules governing the meaning derivations of terms in natural language; and a metaphysical subthesis, designed to facilitate the application of these rules to theistic language, by expressing the truth (as Aquinas saw it) of the cosmological relation that exists between God and the objects of creation. One of the main purposes of this essay will be to argue that the theology of revelation requires us to construe this relation between God and the world as an ontic (or ontological), and not a cosmological, relation. That is, the theology of revelation behoves us to construe the relation between God and the world as an ‘isomorphism’ of being, antecedent to any act of divine creation, and not as something which is the mere consequence of God's creative act (as would be the case in a cosmological relation).

Aquinas's two subtheses

(AL) Natural language has two analogy rules, one for ‘attribution’ and the other for ‘proper proportionality’, which specify that the instances of a term are analogues if they instantiate a semantic property (of the term in question) which conforms in its use to either or both of these rules.