The Univocal and Equivocal Interpretations of Religious Language

When someone says “God is good,” do they mean the same kind of goodness we see in a generous person? Or is divine goodness something so far beyond human experience that the word barely applies at all? This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of one of philosophy’s oldest problems – the problem of religious language. Two contrasting approaches, the univocal and equivocal interpretations, offer fundamentally different answers, and the tension between them has shaped theological and philosophical debate for centuries.

The core problem: Can human words describe God? 🔗

The problem of religious language asks whether it is possible to speak meaningfully about God given the traditional theological belief that God is incorporeal, infinite, and timeless. Since the words available to us are derived from finite, creaturely experience, applying them to a transcendent divine being raises an immediate difficulty: either the words mean the same thing in both contexts, or they mean something entirely different. Neither option, at first glance, seems fully satisfying. The first risks reducing God to a human scale; the second risks making theological statements empty of any shared meaning.

This problem is especially pressing within the Abrahamic traditions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – where speech about God is essential to both personal practice and organized religion. Sacred texts, doctrines, and prayers all depend on the assumption that something meaningful is being communicated about the divine. Without a solution to the problem of religious language, those traditions face the unsettling possibility that their central claims are unintelligible.

What is univocal language? 🔗

A term is used univocally when it carries exactly the same meaning across different contexts. Univocal language applies a word to God and to creatures in precisely the same sense. So when we say “God is wise” and “Solomon is wise,” the word “wise” means the same thing in both statements – it picks out the same quality, differing only in degree or scale.

The appeal of this approach is clarity. If words about God mean exactly what they mean in ordinary use, then theological language is straightforward and communicable. Believers can actually understand what they are affirming when they say God is just, loving, or powerful. The risk, however, is what philosophers call anthropomorphism – projecting distinctly human qualities onto a being whose nature is supposed to be radically different from anything in the created order.

John Duns Scotus and the case for univocity 🔗

John Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308), the medieval Franciscan philosopher known as the “Subtle Doctor,” is the most influential defender of univocal religious language. His argument is both logical and metaphysical. Scotus believed that certain predicates – particularly what he called “pure perfections” such as goodness, wisdom, and being – can be applied with exactly the same meaning to both God and creatures. God possesses these perfections infinitely; creatures possess them in a limited, finite way. But the concept itself – what “good” means – is the same.

Scotus offered a precise logical criterion for univocity: a term is univocal if affirming and denying it of the same subject in the same sense produces a genuine contradiction, and if it can serve as the middle term of a valid syllogism without equivocation. He argued that unless the concept of being is univocal, both philosophy and natural theology collapse – a strikingly bold claim given that the dominant medieval view before him held exactly the opposite.

His central worry was this: if the terms we apply to God mean something entirely different from what they mean when applied to creatures, then we have no real grip on what we are saying about God at all. For Scotus, if we follow Anselm in attributing every pure perfection to God, the test only works if the same concept is being applied in both cases – to God and to creatures. Otherwise, we are just using the same words for two entirely unrelated ideas.

Scotus was careful to clarify that this was a logical claim, not a metaphysical one. God and creatures share no metaphysical reality in common; God’s perfections, being infinite, are utterly diverse from the finite perfections of creatures. The univocity is in the concept – in how we think and speak – not in the underlying nature of things. This distinction was Scotus’s way of defending divine transcendence while still insisting on meaningful theological discourse.

What is equivocal language? 🔗

A term is used equivocally when the same word carries different, unrelated meanings in different contexts. The classic example is the word “bank,” which can mean a financial institution or the edge of a river. Equivocal language, when applied to God, suggests that words like “good” or “wise” have a completely different meaning when predicated of God than when predicated of a human being.

This position takes divine transcendence with radical seriousness. If God is truly beyond all human categories – infinite, simple, eternal – then perhaps it is simply a mistake to assume that our limited vocabulary can reach across the gap. The word “loving” as applied to God, on this view, does not describe the same quality we recognize in a devoted parent. It points toward something categorically other.

Maimonides and the equivocal tradition 🔗

Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the great Jewish philosopher and author of The Guide for the Perplexed, is the most prominent defender of the equivocal approach. For Maimonides, religious language is fundamentally equivocal – it carries a different meaning when applied to God, and he concluded that when it came to directly describing God’s nature, silence is the best praise. Rather than speaking positively about what God is, Maimonides advocated the via negativa (the negative way): we can say what God is not, and through the accumulation of negations – God is not mortal, not limited, not composite – we approach a more honest account of divine nature.

The force of this position comes from its intellectual humility. Maimonides held that God lies outside any human measure, and that to say God is “powerful” means only that God’s power is beyond any worldly comparison. Using the same words for God and creatures risks pulling God down to a creaturely level, turning the infinite into merely a larger version of the finite.

Thomas Aquinas, however, argued that an equivocal approach to God would undermine religious practice entirely. Any demonstration about God would be formally invalid, and communication about God would be severely limited, since no affirmative claims about God’s nature could be made. If the words we use for God share no meaning with ordinary usage, how can believers know what they worship, how to act, or how to interpret scripture?

The Aquinas middle ground: Analogy 🔗

Recognising the failures of both extremes, Thomas Aquinas proposed a third way: analogical language. For Aquinas, terms applied to God are neither purely univocal nor purely equivocal. They carry a related, but not identical, meaning. An analogous term is partly univocal and partly equivocal – it is in some ways the same and in some ways different.

Aquinas described two forms of analogy. In the analogy of attribution, goodness in creatures is derived from God as its cause – just as medicine is called “healthy” not because it feels well, but because it causes health in the patient. God is the source of all creaturely qualities, so those qualities can be attributed back to God, though in a higher, causally prior sense. In the analogy of proportionality, divine goodness relates to God’s nature in the same way that human goodness relates to human nature – proportionally similar, but not identical in content.

For Aquinas, God’s difference from creatures does not entirely revoke likeness to the divine. Analogy is never complete, yet its language is not equivocal. It offers a middle position that preserves both the meaningfulness of theological discourse and the irreducible transcendence of God.

Why the debate still matters 🔗

The univocal/equivocal distinction is not a dusty medieval curiosity – it has real consequences for how religious claims are understood and evaluated. If there is no adequate solution to the problem of religious language, large discussions in philosophy of religion – about divine foreknowledge, free will, moral attributes of God – are rendered unintelligible. These are not merely semantic quibbles; they determine whether theological propositions can be evaluated for truth at all.

The univocal approach, as defended by Scotus, enables coherent philosophical theology. It grounds the possibility of saying something genuinely true about God, using concepts that retain stable content. Without it, as Scotus warned, analogy collapses into a form of equivocity – words connected in name only, with no shared conceptual core. The equivocal approach, meanwhile, serves as a corrective to overconfidence. The equivocal tradition reminds us, especially the univocal way, that language is notoriously unstable when applied to God – we are stretching it to its breaking point, and perhaps beyond.

A more recent development, termed “Complete Univocity,” has been proposed by philosopher Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, arguing that for predicates like “knowledge” or “power” to be applied to God with a single meaning, there must be some fundamental ontological commonality – while attributes are understood as “gradational concepts” realized differently in God and creatures. This shows the debate is still very much alive in contemporary philosophy of religion.

Whether one finds Scotus’s logical precision compelling, Maimonides’s radical humility honest, or Aquinas’s analogical middle path most defensible, the question underneath all three positions is the same: is human language – forged in the experience of finite, embodied, time-bound creatures – capable of reaching toward something infinite and unconditioned? The answer shapes not just academic theology but the very language of prayer, scripture, and religious life.

What do you think? If the words we use for God carry the same meaning as their everyday use, does that risk making God too human – or does it make faith more coherent and meaningful? And if religious language is fundamentally equivocal, how can believers meaningfully communicate what they believe about the divine?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/rel-lang/
2. https://iep.utm.edu/john-duns-scotus/
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/
4. https://www.philosophyzer.com/via-negativa/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_religious_language
6. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analogy-medieval/
7. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/challenging-analogy-levinas-maimonides-and-language-addressing-transcendence/0D0BB44EC079FCF46C2873975DA039BD
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/38660/1/Unit-2.pdf
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univocity_of_being