1

Thomas Aquinas on the Claim that God is Truth1

William Wood
Oriel College, Oxford

ABSTRACT

Thomas Aquinas argues that God can be identified with the truth as such. He holds that ‘God is

truth’ is an analogical claim that asserts, first, that God exemplifies truth to the highest possible

degree and, second, that God is the cause of all truth. To understand his arguments fully, one

must also understand his claim that created truth “participates in” or “imitates” divine truth.

Creatures participate in or imitate God just by virtue of being created. Thus, these claims simply

reiterate that God causes all created truth by causing all created being. Aquinas’s claim that God

is truth may seem nonsensical to contemporary readers, but properly understood, it is quite

modest, and poses few intellectual obstacles beyond those posed by classical theism itself.

The Christian tradition has consistently claimed that, somehow, God may be identified

with the truth as such. The claim has a fine biblical pedigree: John’s gospel asserts that Christ,

and therefore God, is truth (John 14:6, 16:13). It is prominent in the early church fathers,

especially Augustine, and the medievals, including Anselm, largely followed his lead. Nor is the

claim confined to the pre-Reformation era. It is also found in the Reformed Church’s

Westminster Confession, for example.1

Despite its pedigree, the claim that God is truth strikes modern sensibilities as bizarre, a

gross category mistake. For example, many contemporary philosophers treat truth as a property

of statements or propositions, but God cannot be a property of any proposition. Other

1
Final Manuscript. Please cite version found in Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (2013):
21–47
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philosophers deny that there is any such property as truth. Does their denial equate to an implicit

assertion of atheism? That seems unlikely. In short, it is no longer clear what it even means to

say that God is truth. One is strongly tempted to treat the claim as metaphorical. After all, in

John 14:6, Jesus also calls himself “the way,” and “the light” as well as the truth, and those

ascriptions certainly seem metaphorical. Why not “the truth” as well?

Several contemporary philosophers of religion are willing to defend the claim that God is

identical to goodness as such.2 The claim that God is truth has received no similar treatment by

philosophers, though it has occasionally been discussed by theologians.3 Again, it is not hard to

see why. There seem to be significant dis-analogies between identifying the divine nature with

goodness, on the one hand, and truth, on the other. For example, all theists say that God is good,

but they do not typically say that God is true. Moreover, it sounds much more natural to assert

that God exemplifies goodness to the greatest possible degree than to say that God exemplifies

truth to the greatest possible degree.

Thomas Aquinas defends the claim that God is truth in three major texts: in one article of

the Summa theologiae (1.16.5), across three chapters of the Summa contra gentiles (1.60–62),

and in one article of De veritate (1.7).4 In each of these texts, his explicit arguments are very

compact, and depend heavily on unarticulated assumptions and conclusions he takes himself to

have established elsewhere. As such, they can be difficult for a contemporary reader to

appreciate. Aquinas’s specific arguments in favor of the claim fall into three groups: arguments

from adequation, which appeal to the general nature of truth; arguments from divine perfection,

which appeal to the divine nature as the highest exemplar of truth; and arguments from divine

causation, which appeal to God as the cause of truth.

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Aquinas holds that ‘God is truth’ is an analogical claim. When unpacked, it asserts, first,

that God exemplifies truth to the highest possible degree and, second, that God is the cause of all

truth. Aquinas thereby grounds truth in the divine nature as well as in the divine activity.

Because Aquinas’s treatment of the specific claim that God is truth presupposes his general

account of the nature of truth, I begin by outlining that account. Unlike the specific claim,

Aquinas’s general account of truth has been widely discussed.5 Nevertheless, much of that

discussion also remains opaque, at least to those unschooled in the vocabulary and

presuppositions of continental Thomism. As a result, it can often seem as though Aquinas’s

account belongs to a thought-world that is far removed from our own, a thought-world

inhospitable to many of our commonsense notions about God and truth. One key purpose of this

study, then, is straightforwardly interpretive: I aim to show that Aquinas is actually much closer

to us than he initially appears. For example, any theist who affirms that God creates all things

will find much of what Aquinas says about God and truth to be thoroughly unsurprising.

Properly understood, his claim that God is truth is actually a modest claim, one that poses few

intellectual obstacles beyond those posed by classical theism itself.

More theologically-inclined readers might wonder why I do not discuss Aquinas’s further

claim that Christ is truth or why I do not tie his account of the divine truth to his account of the

trinity. A complete treatment of Aquinas’s views on God and truth would indeed need to discuss

these topics. Nevertheless, one cannot understand these further claims without first

understanding the more basic sense in which Aquinas affirms that the single divine nature,

shared by all three persons of the trinity, may be identified with truth itself. It is to that task that I

now turn.
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1. Truth as Adequation

Aquinas’s specific claim that God is truth presupposes his broader account of the nature

of truth. It will therefore be helpful to present that broader account before turning to the more

specific claim. As is well known, Aquinas defines truth as the adequation, or conformity, of

intellect and thing: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.6 Unlike most contemporary theorists

of truth, Aquinas holds that the relationship of conformity that constitutes truth is symmetric.

Truth is a relationship of conformity between mind and world and not simply of mind to world.

In Aquinas’s terminology, truth is found both “in the intellect” and “in things.”7 In a more

contemporary idiom, both intellects and things can be truthbearers, according to Aquinas.

Any theory of truth must explain what it is for a truthbearer to be true or false. Although

Aquinas does say that both intellects and things can be truthbearers, he also insists that truth is

found primarily (per prius) in the intellect and found only secondarily (per posterius) in things.8

In other words, he holds that intellects are the primary truthbearers. He further specifies that

“properly speaking, truth is found in the intellect when it composes and divides.”9 The intellect

composes and divides when it forms a judgment. It is clear, then, that Aquinas holds that the

primary truthbearers are mental states that result from acts of judging. For ease of reference, I

will simply call these mental states “judgments.” Judgments should be understood as mental

states, and not as spoken utterances, sentences, or any kind of abstracta.10 Aquinas holds that

sentences and spoken utterances signify the mental states that are the primary truthbearers, and

so are themselves only derivatively true.11

According to Aquinas’s account of truth as adequation, judgments are true when the

judging intellect either conforms or fails to conform to the way the world really is. Consider the
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judgment “Grass is green.” With this particular judgment, the intellect combines the two mental

concepts of grass and being green. When the intellect combines the concept grass with the

concept green, the resulting mental combination is true if and only if it conforms to the relevant

extra-mental state of affairs. That is, the judgment grass is green is true just when it is the case

that outside the intellect, in the world, the form of green inheres in the substance of grass—in

other words, when it is the case that grass is green.

Aquinas’s account of adequation (conformity) should be regarded as a variant of the

correspondence theory of truth.12 In Aquinas’s version of the correspondence theory, an intellect

corresponds to its extra-mental object when they both share a complex structure that is formally

identical. The judgment grass is green is composed of three elements: the concept grass, the

concept green, and some relation (established by the mental act of composition) that links the

two. Similarly, the real-world object the judgment is about—the green grass—is composed of a

substance (the grass), its accidents (including its greenness) and the relation by which the

accident of greenness inheres in the grass.13 When the judgment corresponds to its object, each

element of the judgment corresponds to each element of the object and so the judgment as a

whole is true. As Aquinas puts it, the intellect “asserts truth… by composing and dividing, for in

every judgment some form signified by the predicate is either applied to the thing signified by

the subject, or removed from it.”14 When the intellect judges truly, it combines its concepts into a

complex judgment that corresponds to the extra-mental objects that the judgment is about

because it is formally similar to them. This is what it means to say that the intellect conforms to

things in the world, and that truth is “in” the intellect.15

2. Ontological Truth
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Although the judging intellect is the primary truthbearer on Aquinas’s account, he also

holds that things in the world, both natural objects and human artifacts, can be called true.

Consider, for example, a house. The house as it actually exists is an artifact that conforms, to a

greater or lesser degree, to the pre-existing pattern or model according to which it was designed

and built. That model exists in the mind of its architect. To the extent that the house conforms to

the model of its design, it is true, according to Aquinas. Aquinas calls this kind of truth truth-of-

things per se.16 Alternatively, we can also say that the house is a true house because it can be

known by an intellect. In other words, it can cause true judgments about itself. Aquinas calls this

kind of truth-of-things per accidens truth. Insofar as the house is knowable by an intellect, it is

true per accidens.

Truth-of-things per accidens and truth-of-things per se both describe relationships of

conformity between an intellect and an object. They are distinguished according to whether the

particular object’s being (esse) depends on a given intellect or not. On Aquinas’s understanding

of exemplar causation (about which more below), the being of the house depends on the intellect

of its architect. The house is a house (and not, say, a ship) because it has been built in accordance

with a pre-existing model in the mind of its architect, and it is the particular house that it is (and

not some other house) for the same reason. Thus, the house depends for its being on the intellect

of its architect and is true per se insofar as it conforms to the architect’s model. But it is true per

accidens with respect to other intellects. It can be known by those intellects, but it does not

depend on them for its being.

Aquinas argues that truth is a transcendental aspect of being, which means that

everything that exists is true. In other words, truth is coextensive with being and convertible with
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being.17 Yet truth does not add anything real to being, in the way an accident (color, for example)

adds something real to a substance. A thing’s truth simply is its being—its being considered in

relation to an intellect. A chain of quotations confirms this view:

<ext>

The agreement of being and intellect is expressed by the word ‘true’ (DV 1.1); Truth is a

disposition of being, but truth does not add any nature to being, nor express some special mode

of being; rather, truth is something that is found generally in every being, but that nevertheless is

not expressed by the word ‘being.’ (DV 1.1, ad 4); It is plain that the truth found in created things

can encompass nothing other than the being of the thing and the adequation of the thing to an

intellect or the adequation of the intellect to a thing or to the privations of a thing (DV 1.8); For

each thing is cognizable insofar as it has being (ST 1.16.3); Every thing is true insofar as it has

the proper form of its own nature (ST 1.16.2); The truth that is in things is convertible with being

according to its substance (ST 1.16.3 ad1).18

</ext>

The notion of ontological truth has attracted much attention from Aquinas’s commenters, but it is

important to reiterate that it is wholly dependent on intellectual truth. At the level of created

being, an existing thing is called true only because it either depends on some intellect for its

being, or because it can be known by some intellect. Aquinas can coherently argue that

everything that exists is true without making ontological truth depend on human intellects

because he can appeal to the divine intellect. Everything that exists depends on the divine

intellect for its being and is known by the divine intellect, and so everything that exists is true.

3. Exemplar Causation
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God, the divine creator, bears a relationship to natural things that is like the relationship

that a human craftsman bears to human artifacts. That is, natural things are true per se with

respect to the divine intellect because their natures conform to ideas of those natures that pre-

exist in God’s mind before creation. “For instance, a rock is called true when it achieves the

proper nature of a rock in accordance with its preconception in the divine intellect.”19 The rock

attains the proper nature of a rock just insofar as it has the substantial form of a rock. But the

rock’s substantial form is itself a copy of God’s own preexisting idea about the nature of rocks.

In Aquinas’s terminology, God’s idea of the rock is an exemplar of the rock. When God

wills to create and sustain the rock, he becomes the exemplar cause of the rock’s existence.

Aquinas’s claim that God is truth depends heavily on his account of exemplar causation, so it is

worth unpacking that account at some length. The basic idea is straightforward enough. The

ultimate model for everything that exists is an idea in the divine mind. Thus, the determinate

forms by which a rock is a rock (and not some other thing instead) and this particular rock

(instead of some other rock) are themselves copies of exemplars in the divine mind.20 Three

features of exemplar causality deserve further attention.

First, although Aquinas does say that there is a plurality of divine exemplars, this claim

must be qualified, since he also holds that the divine exemplars are not really distinct in the

divine intellect. The divine intellect has only one object of knowledge, the divine essence,

through which God knows all other things, and so strictly speaking God has only one exemplar:

his idea of his own perfect essence.21 The divine exemplars are what God knows when he knows

all the different ways that he can be imitated by creatures.22 We can speak of the divine

exemplars as multiple not because God’s intellect is like a container filled with many different
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ideas, but because when God knows himself, he also knows all the different ways that he can

create creatures modeled on the divine essence. To speak of a multiplicity of divine exemplars is

simply a shorthand way of indicating the range of God’s knowledge and creative power.

Second, an exemplar cause is a cause at all only insofar as its corresponding effect is also

the result of intentional agency. According to Aquinas, all things receive their determinate forms

by virtue of being like their exemplars.23 But exemplar causality is not an additional, fifth kind of

causality beyond the four standard Aristotelian causes.24 Since an exemplar is not a cause in its

own right, its causal power results from a craftsman’s intention to create something using the

exemplar as a model.25 To say that all things receive their determinate forms by assimilation to

their exemplars is also to say that all created things are ultimately a product of intentional

agency, whether the agent be God or some human craftsman.

Third, an exemplar also functions as the ideal standard against which concretely existing

objects are measured. This point simply echoes the point made above about the per se truth of

things. A house is a true house to the extent that it conforms to the exemplar in the mind of its

architect, and a rock is called a true rock because it conforms to the proper nature of a rock as

preconceived by God’s intellect.26 Of course, natural objects like rocks cannot fail to conform to

the divine exemplars, and so they are all true per se.27 The claim that exemplars serve as ideal

standards plays an important role in Aquinas’s claim that God is truth. Since God acts as the

exemplar cause of every created thing, the divine mind serves as the standard of truth.

Furthermore, since God is simple, God is identical to the divine mind and the divine ideas, and

may therefore be called truth itself. I return to these points below.

God intends for the world to be intelligible to us and intends for us to know it. Aquinas’s

account of exemplar causation furnishes the metaphysical backstory that underpins these claims.
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Everything is what it is, and has the qualities that it has, by virtue of its substantial and accidental

forms. These same forms are also the forms by which we know things. They are intelligible to us

precisely because they are like ideas in the divine mind, the ultimate source of intelligibility.

God’s intentional act of creating establishes the link between our concepts, the forms of things in

the world, and the ultimate source of intelligibility.

4. God is Truth

Having outlined his general account of truth as adequation, I turn now to Aquinas’s

specific claim that God is truth. As I noted at the outset, Aquinas’s assertion strikes many

contemporary readers as baffling, and his rather cursory treatment of it does little to alleviate

their puzzlement. I find three major argument-forms that Aquinas uses to establish and elucidate

the claim that God is truth. I will call them ‘arguments from adequation,’ ‘arguments from divine

perfection,’ and ‘arguments from divine causation.’ I discuss each in turn and then, in the next

section, set Aquinas’s claim that God is truth in the context of his broader account of analogy

and participation. It is perhaps unsurprising that Aquinas argues that ‘truth,’ like all positive

terms, must be predicated of God and creatures analogically.28

4.1 Arguments from adequation

In De veritate 1.7 Aquinas argues that God is truth by appealing to his general account of

truth as adequation. Truth in the primary sense is the adequation of an intellect with the object it

knows. Given this definition of truth, and given certain of his assumptions about divine
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simplicity, Aquinas is well-positioned to argue that because God knows his own essence, and

because the divine intellect and the divine essence are absolutely identical, God can therefore be

called truth itself.

Strictly speaking, the argument of De veritate 1.7 does not actually conclude that God is

truth, but rather that truth is predicated of God essentially. Given that Aquinas also holds that

God is identical to his essential attributes, however, the two conclusions are equivalent.

<ext>

And because the thing the divine intellect understands first is the divine essence, by which it

understands all other things, truth in God primarily implies the equality of the divine intellect

with the divine essence… For just as in the divine intellect the act of understanding and the thing

understood are the same, so too in the divine intellect the truth of the intellect and the truth of

things is the same, without any connotation of origin… Moreover, with God, every name that

does not imply the notion of an origin or what is from an origin is predicated essentially. Thus,

with God, if ‘truth’ is taken properly, it is predicated essentially.29

</ext>

It is interesting to note that despite its appeal to the adequation account, the key premise in De

veritate 1.7 is actually a theological premise about divine naming: “with God, every name that

does not imply the notion of an origin or what is from an origin is predicated essentially.” This is

an important claim of trinitarian theology, since Aquinas holds that only certain terms—like

‘unbegotten,’ or ‘begotten’—may be predicated properly of the individual persons of the trinity,

because those terms “imply the notion of an origin or what is from an origin.” All other terms—

including ‘goodness,’ ‘being,’ and ‘truth’—must be predicated of the single divine essence and

not of the persons. 30

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On my reading, Aquinas argues as follows in De veritate 1.7:

<ext>

(1) The divine intellect knows the divine essence.

(2) So the divine intellect and the divine essence are true.

(3) So we must predicate the attribute ‘truth’ of God.

(4) The divine intellect and divine essence are identical.

(5) So the attribute ‘truth’ does not imply that any relationship of measure, principle, or origin

obtains between God’s intellect and essence.

(6) Every attribute that does not imply the notion of measure, principle, or origin is predicated of

God essentially.

(7) So we must predicate ‘truth’ of God essentially.

(8) God is identical to his essential attributes, and so God is truth.

</ext>

Steps (1) – (4) do not hang together as easily as it might initially seem, since the relation of

adequation or conformity that constitutes truth is a real relation, according to Aquinas, but

equality or identity is a conceptual relation, not a real relation. It follows that an instance of

identity is not properly an instance of conformity.31 But Aquinas is plainly committed to all of

(1) – (4) so he appears to assume an additional premise:

<ext>

(IC) when an intellect and its object are identical, then they also satisfy the conditions for

conformity that constitute the truth relation

</ext>
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By implicitly appealing to (IC), Aquinas is able to argue that God’s intellect and essence are true

even though they do not, strictly speaking, conform to one another. Moreover (IC) also allows—

indeed, requires—Aquinas to treat God’s essential truth as qualitatively different from creaturely

truth, a point to which I return below.

Aquinas certainly needs premise (IC), but he assumes it without argument, and it is not

obvious that he is entitled to it, because it is far from clear that an instance of identity should

count as an instance of conformity. In defense of (IC), it appears that Aquinas is treating identity

as the “limit case” of the relationship of conformity, rather than as the maximum degree of

conformity. The limit case of a series is not a member of that series but is outside it;

nevertheless, the limit case is that to which the series points. For example, consider a series of

regular polygons with sides n, n +1, n +2,… The limit case of this series is a circle, which is not

a member of this series because it is not an n-sided polygon at all.32 Or consider the speed of a

moving body. Its upper limit is the speed of light, but its lower limit, 0 km/s, is not really a limit

but a limit case since, strictly speaking, 0 km/s is not any speed at all. Nevertheless, a body that

is not moving at all can indeed satisfy by surpassing, as it were, certain conditions that are also

satisfied by a body that is moving infinitesimally slowly: a body moving infinitesimally slowly

will never pass an object that is moving away from it at the rate of 10 km/h. Neither will a body

that is not moving at all. Similarly, Aquinas seems to be treating the identity of the divine

intellect and the divine essence as the limit case of conformity between a knowing intellect and

its object. An intellect that is identical to its object surpasses even the maximum degree of

conformity between intellect and object and therefore satisfies the criteria for the truth

relationship.
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However we arrive at it, step (2) itself is not controversial, since it is surely innocuous to

say that God’s intellect is true, granting that intellects are the primary truthbearers. The move

from (2) to (3) allows Aquinas to shift from a relatively innocuous claim to the more weighty

claim that “truth is predicated of God.” While this step may seem like a trick of language, it also

comports with common practices in contemporary discussions of truth. Anyone who believes

that truth is a property of propositions, for example, should agree that we can infer p has the

property of truth from p is true. Aquinas simply makes the same move—albeit with an intellect,

rather than a statement or proposition, as the truthbearer. Steps (4) and (8) are entailed by divine

simplicity, and step (5) follows directly from step (4). Step (6) is the theological premise about

divine naming mentioned above.

It is worth flagging at the outset that Aquinas is able to build a plausible argument that

God is truth from some very basic building blocks. His argument requires only that intellects are

the primary truthbearers and that God is simple. For if God is simple, then he is identical not

only to his intellect but also to his attributes. Thus, if we say that the divine intellect is true, we

can predicate truth of God, from which we can immediately conclude that God is identical to his

truth, and so is truth itself.33

This version of the argument from adequation focuses on intellectual truth. But Aquinas

also argues that God exhibits ontological truth in such a way that he can be identified with truth

itself. Recall that Aquinas holds that an object may be called true in two senses. First, an object

is true per accidens when it is a potential object of knowledge—when it is conformable to an

intellect. In Summa theologiae, Aquinas argues that because God’s essence is identical with his

intellect, his essence satisfies the conformability condition and is therefore true per accidens.34

Second, an object is true per se to the degree that it conforms to the exemplar that exists in the
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intellect of its creator. Aquinas seems to find it trickier to apply this sense of truth to God, and

does not attempt do to so in either De veritate or Summa theologiae. After all, even though God

is self-existent, he does not create himself, and he certainly does not create himself according to

his own exemplar of himself. Aquinas is also emphatic that the divine essence does not measure

and is not measured by the divine intellect, nor is either one the source of the other.35 Despite

these stumbling blocks, in SCG Aquinas does give an argument that God exhibits the truth of

things per se in a way that requires that he be identified with truth itself. He writes:

<ext>

Sometimes a thing is called true because it fully achieves the act of its proper nature. Thus

Avicenna says, in his Metaphysics, that the truth of a thing is a special quality of its being [esse]

that has been established in that thing, insofar as it is such as to cause a true estimation of itself

and insofar as it imitates the proper model of itself that is in the divine mind. But God is his

essence. Therefore, whether we speak about truth of the intellect or truth of a thing, God is his

truth.36

</ext>

At first blush, this argument seems like a non sequitur: we get the (by now) standard claim that a

thing is true when it is such as to give a true account of itself—which simply means that the

thing in question is the particular thing it is and not something else, by virtue of its substantial

form, which is itself a copy of its divine exemplar. But then we get the conclusion that since God

is his own essence, he is his own truth. This conclusion does not seem to follow. The best way to

make sense of the argument is to suppose that Aquinas again assumes (IC), and so implicitly

claims that because the divine essence and the divine intellect are identical, God not only

satisfies, but surpasses, the conditions under which a thing is properly called true. Suitably
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paraphrased, then, Aquinas here argues that since an object is true per se when it conforms to an

intellect, and since the divine essence and the divine intellect are not only conformed but

identical, the divine essence can be called true per se. Indeed, since identity is symmetrical, the

identity of the divine intellect and the divine essence means that the relationship of conformity

that characterizes truth holds from either direction. Both the divine intellect and the divine

essence therefore exhibit intellectual and ontological truth, respectively. And since God is

himself identical to his intellect and his essence, it follows, according to Aquinas, that in God,

and only in God, intellectual truth and ontological truth are the same.37

4.2 Arguments from divine perfection

In addition to the argument from adequation, Aquinas also launches several arguments

for ‘God is truth’ that rely on his account of divine perfection. The basic form of all of these

arguments is straightforward (as in, e.g., SCG 1.60):

<ext>

(1) God has all perfections essentially

(2) Truth is a perfection

(3) So God has truth essentially

(4) God is simple, so God is identical to his essential attributes.

(5) So God is truth.

</ext>

In support of (1), Aquinas holds that God has all perfections because God is the first cause of all

effects and “whatever perfection is found in an effect, must also be found in its cause.”38 Because
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God has all perfections, and because nothing can exert any causal force on God, God does not

receive his perfections from anything else and therefore must have them essentially, that is, by

nature.39 Granting again that intellects are truthbearers, it is uncontroversial that (2), truth is a

perfection of the intellect, and so (3) God must have the perfection of truth essentially. To say

that God has the perfection of truth essentially is to say that truth is one of the attributes that is

identical to the divine nature, since God is simple (4). Thus, (5) God not only exemplifies truth,

but is truth itself.

Aquinas makes several additional versions of this argument. All of them trade on the

premise that if God has some perfection, then God has that perfection essentially and therefore is

that perfection. In Summa contra gentiles 1.60, he also argues that God knows many truths, from

which it follows that God’s intellect is perfected by truth. Since God cannot be perfected by

anything other than God, God is himself the perfection of his own intellect, and is therefore truth

itself. Similarly, in Summa contra gentiles 1.60, Aquinas argues that truth is a goodness of the

intellect, and that since God is his own goodness, God must also be his own truth. Aquinas also

uses the conclusion that God possesses all his perfections essentially to derive another argument:

“What belongs to a thing by essence belongs to it most perfectly. But truth is attributed to God

essentially, as we have shown. Therefore God’s truth is the highest and first truth.”40

Presumably, Aquinas means to argue that since God is the only “thing” that is true essentially,

God’s truth is more perfect than any other thing’s truth, which then allows him to conclude that

God is the first and highest truth.

This argument is similar to another argument in the Summa contra gentiles, one that

moves from the premise that God is perfect esse to the conclusion that God is the highest truth:

“As things are disposed in being, so are they disposed in truth, and this is because truth and
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existence follow one another in turn; for something is true because it is said to be what it is or not

to be what it is not. But the divine being is first and most perfect. Therefore God’s truth is first

and highest.”41 The central claim in this argument is that “as things are disposed in being, so are

they disposed in truth.” This claim recalls the argument, discussed above, that truth is a

transcendental attribute of being, since being and truth are coextensive. God’s being is perfect,

unlimited, and the source of all created being, and since being and truth are coextensive, Aquinas

can conclude that because God is perfect being, God is perfect truth.

4.3 The argument from divine causation

These arguments from divine perfection presuppose some further arguments that appeal

specifically to God’s creative causation. In Summa theologiae and Summa contra gentiles

Aquinas presents two very compact arguments that begin from the premise that God is the

“measure and cause” of all truth and conclude that God is the first, highest, and most perfect

truth. In Summa theologiae 1.16.5, he writes that God’s “act of understanding is the measure and

cause of all other being and all other intellects, and he himself is his being and his understanding.

From which it follows that not only is truth in him, but that he himself is the highest and first

truth.”42

Again, this argument initially seems like a non sequitur. It is not at all clear why Aquinas

believes that God must be the first and highest truth just because he is both his own act of

understanding as well as the measure and cause of all other being. A similar argument found in

Summa contra gentiles 1.62 sheds some light on Aquinas’s reasoning:

<ext>
 19

That which is the measure of each genus is the most perfect in that genus; for example, every

color is measured by white. But the divine truth is the measure of all truth. For the truth of our

intellect is measured by a thing that is outside the mind, from which it follows that our intellect is

called true when it agree with that thing; on the other hand, the truth of things is measured by the

divine intellect, which is the cause of things, as will be shown; and the truth of artifacts is

measured by the art of the craftsman—for example a box is true when it conforms to its art. But

because God is the first intellect and the first intelligible object, it is necessary that the truth of

every other intellect be measured by his truth, if each thing is measured by the first of its genus,

as Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics 10. Therefore the divine truth is the first, highest, and most

perfect truth.43

</ext>

Here Aquinas adds the key premise that “that which is the measure of each genus is the most

perfect in that genus.” He further explains that God is the measure of all truth because God is the

cause of all being: “the truth of things is measured by the divine intellect, which is the cause of

things…” It is clear that Aquinas has in mind the account of exemplar causation discussed above.

God is the exemplar cause, and therefore the measure, of all being. Thus, Aquinas appears to

argue as follows:

<ext>

(1) Whatever is the cause of all instances of X is the measure of X.

(2) Whatever is the measure of X possesses X to the maximum degree.44

(3) God is the cause of all truth.

(4) So God is the measure of truth.

(5) So God possesses truth to the maximum degree.

 20

(6) So God is the first, highest, and most perfect truth.

</ext>

Assuming that the first, highest, and most perfect truth can be called truth itself, this argument

begins with the claim that God is the cause and measure of all truth and concludes that God is

truth itself. On my reading, it is an apt rendering of the compact argument found in Summa

theologiae 1.16.5 and Summa contra gentiles 1.62.45

Most of the argumentative burden is borne by the key premises (1) and (2). Premise (2) is

a neoplatonic truism that remains intuitively plausible, at least as a rough-and-ready principle.

After all, if X is the standard by which all instances of, e.g., goodness, beauty or truth are

measured, then it makes sense to say that X possesses goodness, beauty, or truth to the maximum

degree. Premise (2) is also supported by Aquinas’s fourth argument for the existence of God in

Summa theologiae 1.2.3.46 Premise (1) is more contentious. It depends on an assumption that

Aquinas regards as utterly obvious, the metaphysical principle that every effect resembles its

cause. This assumption, in turn, depends upon Aquinas’s account of participation and analogical

causation, which I discuss below. For now, it suffices to say that according to Aquinas, because

God causes created truth, created truth must resemble God. But precisely because created truth

resembles God, God must be its measure. Since God is the measure of created truth, God is truth

itself.

Although I have discussed Aquinas’s arguments from adequation, divine perfection, and

divine causation separately, they are mutually supportive. They spell out the unique way in

which God exemplifies truth. God exemplifies truth essentially, because God is identical to his

essence, his intellect, and his own act of understanding. Moreover, God is the measure and cause
 21

of creaturely truth. Indeed, precisely because we know that God causes creaturely truth, we can

know that God’s truth is more perfect than creaturely truth. All of which entails, according to

Aquinas, that God is truth.

5. Analogy, Participation, and Causation

Aquinas’s arguments are now clearly in view, but it is still easy to treat the claim that

God is truth as far more radical than it actually is. For Aquinas is also committed to the view that

‘God is truth’ is an analogical statement. More precisely, he is committed to the view that the

word ‘truth’ does not have exactly the same meaning in the twin statements ‘God is truth’ and

‘Truth is the adequation of intellect and thing.’ Of course, it is well-known that Aquinas believes

that all positive predications of God are analogical, and so it is no surprise that ‘God is truth’

must be analogical as well.47

Regardless of what one thinks about Aquinas’s general theory of analogy, the claim that

God is truth only in an analogical sense of ‘truth’ seems obviously correct. Even if there are

terms that may be predicated univocally of God and creatures, ‘truth’ is surely not among their

number. It may or may not be the case that the word ‘wise’ is used in the same sense when

predicated of both God and Socrates. But the word ‘true’ cannot be used in the same sense when

predicated of both God and a judgment. If it were, then we would have to say incoherent things

about both God and truth. For example, we would have to say that God is himself the

correspondence of a judgment and a state-of-affairs, or that God himself is a property that true

judgments have and false judgments lack. An account of ‘God is truth’ that entails such absurd
 22

conclusions cannot be correct. Thus, it is good that Aquinas insists that ‘God is truth’ is a not a

univocal claim.

It seems equally clear that ‘God is truth’ is not a purely equivocal claim. That is, in the

two claims ‘God is truth’ and ‘Truth is the correspondence of an intellect and a state-of-affairs’,

the two uses of the term ‘truth’ are not utterly unrelated. They are not like the term ‘bat’ in the

two claims ‘The baseball player swung the bat’ and ‘The bat slept upside down in the cave.’ So

the term ‘truth’ is not used equivocally in ‘God is truth.’ Finally, on Aquinas’s own

understanding of metaphor, ‘God is truth’ cannot be a metaphorical claim. On that

understanding, a term is predicated metaphorically of God when it signifies something material

or that can pertain to only one kind of being—for example, that God is a rock or a king. Since

‘truth’ does not signify anything material and does not pertain to only one kind of being, it is not

predicated of God metaphorically.48

Aquinas therefore has good reason to say that ‘God is truth’ is an analogical claim.

Moreover, on his understanding of analogy, analogy is a kind of literal speech, and so the

analogical claim ‘God is truth’ is itself literally true. 49 But if ‘God is truth’ is analogical, what,

exactly, does the analogy express? Aquinas offers little explicit guidance about ‘truth’ as such.

Nevertheless, though it does not directly discuss truth, the account of analogy found in Summa

theologiae 1.13.5 is helpful. There Aquinas writes: “Whatever is predicated of God and creatures

is predicated because creatures are ordered to God as their origin and cause, in whom the

perfections of all things preexist in a more excellent way.”50 Truth is a perfection, and so

following this line, it seems that truth may be said of both God and created things (including

judging intellects, the primary truthbearers) insofar as creaturely truth is ordered to God’s truth
 23

“as to the origin and cause” of truth, and because the perfection of truth “preexists” in God “in a

more excellent way.”

Aquinas would not agree that ‘God is truth’ simply means that God is the cause of

creaturely truth. Rather, ‘God is truth’ means that creaturely truth preexists in God in a more

excellent way. It is only because of that fact about the divine nature that we can say that God is

the cause of truth. Compare his remarks on God’s goodness:

<ext>

When God is called ‘good’, the meaning is not that God is the cause of goodness, or that God is

not evil. Rather, the meaning is that what we call ‘goodness’ in creatures preexists in God in a

higher mode. Thus, one should not say that God is good because he is the cause of goodness, but

rather the opposite: because God is good, he diffuses goodness into things.51

</ext>

As with goodness, so with truth. When we unpack the analogical claim that God is truth, we find

that, according to Aquinas, its meaning is that truth preexists in God in a higher mode. At the

same time, precisely because truth preexists in God in a higher mode, we must also say that God

is the cause of creaturely truth.

These claims are metaphysical claims about the nature of reality and not merely semantic

claims about meaning or reference. In order to understand them, one must go beyond Aquinas’s

semantic account of analogy to his metaphysical account of causation and participation.

5.1 “Every Effect Resembles its Cause”

 24

God is the cause of all creaturely truth because God is the cause of all creaturely being.

Being and truth are coextensive, and so each existing thing is true “insofar as it is produced such

as to cause a true estimation of itself, and insofar as it imitates the proper model of itself that is in

the divine mind.”52 The two elements of this conjunction hang together. Something is of a nature

to give a true account of itself—to cause a true judgment about itself in an intellect that knows

it—just because it is exactly the thing it is and not something else, which is to say just because its

substantial form is a copy of its exemplar in the divine mind. This is simply Aquinas’s account of

the divine ideas as exemplar causes once again. According to Aquinas, however, the fact that

God is the cause of all creaturely truth actually entails that truth preexists in God in a higher

mode. He treats this entailment as an instance of a general metaphysical principle that he regards

as firmly established, the principle that every effect resembles its cause: omne agens agit sibi

simile.53

This principle is somewhat remote from our own thought-world. (Consider: the influenza

virus causes my fever, but it is not obvious that I or my fever thereby resemble the virus.)

Nevertheless, the claim is defensible on broadly Aristotelian terms. On the level of created being,

every effect resembles its cause since, by definition, a cause and its effect must share a form. To

act as a causal agent is to communicate some form, already possessed by the agent, to the object

(patient) of one’s action. This shared form establishes the resemblance relationship that obtains

between the agent, as cause, and the patient, as effect. For example, when a poker is put in a fire,

the poker becomes hot because the fire communicates the form of heat to it. The hot poker

resembles the hot fire because they both share the form of heat. The resemblance relationship

that generally holds between cause and effect also allows us to make inferences about causes

from our observations of effects. In particular, we can infer that cause and effect must share
 25

some relevant form. When we observe a hot poker, we can legitimately infer that whatever

caused it to be hot also possessed the form of heat. Moreover, when the shared form is present in

the same way and according to the same explanation (ratio) in both cause and effect, we can

infer that it is maximally present in the cause.54 Thus, in the case of the fire and the poker, we

can infer not only that fire and the poker share the form of heat, but also that the form of heat is

maximally present in the fire, because it is present in the fullest sense.

At first blush, this line of reasoning seems to apply to the case of God and truth. We

might think that because God is the cause of creaturely truth, truth is present in God in the fullest

sense, just as heat is present in fire in the fullest sense. Matters are not so straightforward,

however. Because God utterly transcends the created order, truth cannot be present in both God

and creatures according to the same ratio, and so God cannot be a univocal cause of creaturely

truth. Aquinas therefore cannot appeal to any univocal account of causation to explain how we

can infer the divine truth from creaturely truth. Instead, he turns to a different theoretical

vocabulary, which describes causation in terms of participation.

5.2 Participation as Analogical Causation

In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Aquinas asserts that all things are true insofar

as they participate in a likeness of God’s essence.55 But what does it mean to “participate” in a

likeness of God’s essence?56 Aquinas’s commentary on the hebdomads of Boethius presents his

most extensive account of participation. Although it does not discuss truth explicitly, it still

furnishes the interpretive key that allows us to understand what it means to say that all things are

true insofar as they participate in a likeness of God’s essence. In fact, the relevant notion of

participation is another form of causation. To say that created truth participates in a likeness of
 26

God’s essence is just to say that God causes created truth to exist by causing created beings to

exist.

In the De hebdomadibus Aquinas discusses three kinds of participation. The first

describes the purely logical—as opposed to real—relationships that obtain between an

individual, its species, and its genus. The second describes the relationships of composition that

occur between substances and accidents or between matter and form. Since the truth of created

things really depends on the divine exemplars, according to Aquinas, and since the divine

exemplars do not themselves form composites with created things, the first two modes of

participation clearly do not explain how created truth participates in the divine truth. The third

mode of participation, on the other hand, concerns a special form causation, in which “an effect

is not equal to the power of its cause.”57

Sometimes a cause and its effects are different in kind, despite the relationship of

resemblance that still obtains between them. In de hebdomadibus, Aquinas calls this kind of

causation “equivocal causation,” but it is more perspicuous to call it analogical causation

instead.58 A cause is analogical when it is qualitatively superior to its effect, with the result that

cause and effect do not have their shared form in the same way and according to the same

explanation (ratio).59 To paraphrase Aquinas’s favorite example, the sun causes the sand to be

hot, but the sun and the sand are not hot in the same way: the sand receives the form of heat from

the sun, but since the sun does not receive the form of heat from anything else, it must be hot in a

qualitatively different way. The sun is the source of heat, and so is essentially hot, whereas the

sand’s heat is caused by the sun. In other words, the sun is hot by essence, whereas the sand is

hot by participation in the sun’s heat. Analogical causation, the third form of participation, is

clearly the way in which created truth participates in the divine truth. God must be an analogical,
 27

rather than a univocal, cause of created truth because God and created things are both true but

they are not both true in the same way or according to the same ratio. God therefore cannot be a

univocal cause of created truth on Aquinas’s scheme, and so must be an analogical cause.

It is important to spell out exactly what is entailed by Aquinas’s claim that God is an

analogical cause of created truth, lest one regard it as a more mysterious claim than it actually is.

The very idea that God must be an analogical cause is not especially mysterious, and indeed,

seems entailed by the doctrine of creation. To say that God is an analogical cause is simply to

say that the explanation (ratio) of God’s causality is different from the explanation given for all

other non-divine causes. God causes by creating ex nihilo by sheer fiat, whereas creatures cause

by operating on already-existing objects. Surely these two kinds of causality must be explained

differently. Thus, even though the actual explanation of God’s causal power must remain

mysterious, in that we cannot give a positive account of how it works, the basic claim that God is

an analogical cause is not itself mysterious.

Returning to the language of participation, Aquinas holds that God is true by essence,

whereas everything else is true by participation. But to say that something is “true by

participation” simply means that it is analogically caused to be true by God, which—as we have

seen—simply means that God causes it to exist, given that truth and being are coextensive.

Created things are true because, as concretely existing things, they are modeled on exemplars in

the divine mind. They are therefore caused to be true by the divine intellect, which is true by

essence since it is the uncaused source and standard of being, and therefore also the uncaused

source and standard of truth. 60

It is now possible to unpack fully Aquinas’s claim that truth preexists in God in a higher,

more excellent mode. One way to understand this claim is to say that because God’s intellect and
 28

its object, the divine essence, are identical, they surpass the relationship of correspondence that

constitutes created truth. Based on the foregoing account of participation and causation,

however, it is now possible to say more. Each created thing is true because it has “the truth of its

own nature,” that is, its own particular, limited essence. But God is truth itself because God’s

own essence unites and surpasses the truth of every created essence in an unlimited, perfect way.

Properly understood, however, this claim simply means, once again, that in the act of creation,

God is the source of being and the first exemplar cause of all things.

God creates all things with limited essences that are patterned after the divine

exemplars.61 Yet God really has only one exemplar, his single idea of himself as a simple,

unlimited, perfect essence. Again, the divine exemplars do not really exist as discrete entities, not

even as discrete ideas. Rather, they are what God knows when he knows—all at once, as it

were—the many different ways that he has modeled creatures on his own perfect essence. There

are many ways of being like God, but God himself is one. Each created essence is a particular,

limited way that a creature can be like the single, unlimited divine essence.62 Because truth and

being are coextensive, it follows that each created truth is a limited copy of the unlimited divine

truth.63 Just as all colors can be refracted from the color white because white contains all colors,

God’s truth unites and contains all creaturely truth. In the act of creation, God “refracts” his own

unlimited essence into the limited essences of every existing thing. This is what Aquinas means

when he says that God is truth itself.

Aquinas’s talk of “participating” in the divine truth is simply another way of saying that

God is the cause of all things.64 The statement “All creatures participate in a likeness of God” is

strictly equivalent to the statement “All creatures are created and sustained by God.” The

language of participation is valuable, because it emphasizes that all things are not only caused by
 29

God, but also resemble God, precisely in virtue of being so caused. Still, Aquinas’s doctrine of

participation in the divine is often presented in a dense scholastic terminology that

unintentionally obscures its connection with the doctrine of creation. It is therefore well-worth

emphasizing that Aquinas’s claims about creaturely participation in God’s truth can be resolved

into causal claims about God’s act of creation.

6. Aquinas and Contemporary Theories of Truth

For all its richness, Aquinas’s account has surprisingly few theoretical implications for

the way contemporary thinkers should understand truth. That it has so few theoretical

implications also follows from Aquinas’s insistence that ‘God is truth’ is an analogical claim.

Since he argues that God is truth only in an analogical sense of ‘truth,’ Aquinas’s claim

does not—indeed cannot—conflict with contemporary philosophical accounts of the semantics

of true statements. No account of what it is for a statement to be true will conflict with the claim

that God is truth, because propositional truth and divine truth are not two instances of a single

category of truth.65 As an exegetical matter, it seems clear that Aquinas finds himself convinced

by Aristotelian arguments that truth is adequation, and also convinced by the Christian tradition

that God is truth. He therefore seeks to reconcile the two. Yet even on Aquinas’s own terms, God

does not instantiate the adequation relationship at all, since the divine intellect and the divine

essence are not conformed to one another but identical. So even Aquinas himself is in no

position to argue that the claim that God is truth either conflicts with or logically entails some

particular account of the semantics of true statements.

Furthermore, it should now be clear that for all his talk of participation, one need not be

any kind of Platonist to agree with Aquinas that God is truth. To say that created truth
 30

“participates in” or “imitates” the divine truth is just to say that God causes all created things—in

an analogical sense of ‘cause.’ (And to say that God is an analogical cause is to say no more than

that God’s causality requires a different explanation than intra-worldly causality.) Whereas a

more thoroughgoing Platonist might assert that all true judgments are true because they

participate in numerically one truth—the form of Truth, perhaps—and then go on to identify the

form of Truth with God, Aquinas explicitly rejects this move. Thus, one might worry that

someone who affirms that God is truth is committed to the claim that God himself is somehow

the truth of all true judgments. Yet it is quite clear that Aquinas denies this claim. Instead, he

advances the common-sense position that there are as many discrete truths as there are true

judgments: “there are many truths about many true things, and even many truths in diverse minds

about one true thing.”66 Even though Aquinas does identify God with truth, he does not identify

God with the truth of each true judgment.67 It is not the case that true judgments are true because

they participate in a single truth, and so it cannot be the case that God is the truth of each true

judgment.

Suppose I judge that grass is green. According to Aquinas, my intellect receives a

species of the grass and its greenness, forms the concepts grass and green, and combines them in

a judgment that structurally conforms to the state-of-affairs of the grass’s being green. Even on

this account, the truth of grass is green is constituted by the green grass itself. We do not need to

appeal to God’s truth at all in order to explain what makes this judgment true.68 Of course,

Aquinas, like any theist, would agree that God causes or allows the relevant entity or state-of-

affairs (the green grass) to obtain, just as God causes or allows every state of affairs that obtains.

But this appeal to divine causation is pointedly not an appeal to God’s truth. It is an appeal to the

doctrines of creation and conservation. We can indeed say that the judgment Grass is green is
 31

true because God has willed that there be grass and that it be green. We can also say that God has

willed that Grass is green is a true judgment. We can even say that the grassiness of grass and

the greenness of green exist because they imitate exemplars in the divine mind. Yet all of these

claims reduce to the theistic truism that God created the world to be the way that it is and not

some other way. One need not appeal to God’s truth as such at all here.

Nor need one appeal to ontological truth. Aquinas does argue that existing things can be

true, and he further holds that the truth of things is caused by God’s truth. Yet he also explicitly

insists that the truth of things does not cause the truth of our true judgments. Rather, the existing

things themselves are what make our true judgments true: “It is the being of a thing, not its truth,

that causes truth in the intellect.”69 Moreover, he also insists that objects are true only in an

extended sense, and that ‘truth’ in its primary sense means intellectual truth.70 With respect to

what makes true judgments true, then, Aquinas’s account of judgment does not differ greatly

from our commonsense notions. Aquinas agrees that judgments are made true by existing things

and their attributes.

Contemporary Thomists who would set Aquinas in opposition to modern theories of truth

tend (perhaps inadvertently) to elide these points. For example, Rudi Te Velde writes:

<ext>

What Thomas means by ‘truth’ is intrinsically linked with the notion of being. He proceeds from

an ontological understanding of truth, which is, as such, indicated by his conviction that ‘being’

is the first conception of the intellect (quod primo cadit in intellectu est ens). The intellect

operates within the universal horizon of being, which means that it comes to know any given

particular instance of being as particular (finite, limited), to be reduced to a universal principle of

being.71
 32

</ext>

It is of course correct that what Aquinas means by ‘truth’ is intrinsically linked with the notion of

being, if all one means by that is that judgments are true when they correspond to the way things

really are and that things are called ‘true’ analogically, when they are known by a human or

divine mind. But Aquinas does not begin with an “ontological understanding of truth” and only

then “proceed” to an understanding of the truth of judgments—rather the opposite, in fact—and

he does not hold that an intellect can come to know an object only by reducing it to its divine

first cause.

To take another relevant example, Catherine Pickstock and John Milbank write, in Truth

in Aquinas, that:

<ext>

correspondence in Aquinas’s theory of knowledge means something far more nuanced than a

mere mirroring of reality in thought… If there can be correspondence of thought to beings, this is

only because, more fundamentally, both beings and minds correspond to the divine esse and

mens or intellect. Therefore correspondence, for Aquinas, is of what we know according to our

finite modus, to God who is intrinsically far more knowable, and yet for us in His essence,

utterly unknown. This means that rather than correspondence being guaranteed in its measuring

of the given, as for modern notions of correspondence, it is guaranteed by its conformation to the

divine source of the given…. So, in fact, what the mind corresponds to here is things divided

from themselves, from their real ground in divine esse, and so to things forced to dissemble.72

</ext>

Again, it is correct to say that the correspondence of the knowing intellect to its object is

“guaranteed” by a “correspondence” to God’s intellect, if one means merely that all things are
 33

created by God to be as they are and not otherwise, and that we know them when we grasp them

as they are. But Aquinas does not say that the intellect must correspond to the divine mind when

it knows created objects. Nor does he say that the objects that we know inevitably “dissemble”

because they are “divided” from their “real ground” in God. Aquinas would not agree that

created things are most fully themselves when considered as ideas the divine mind—as if God

cannot actually create, for example, fully real rocks. Existing things are fully real precisely as the

concrete things they are. Aquinas does not argue that there is a fully real, perfect idea of a rock in

God’s mind that imperfect, actually existing rocks necessarily fail to imitate. Rather, existing

rocks are imperfect only when considered as copies of God himself. As copies of God they are

necessarily imperfect, but as rocks, they are as real and as perfect as can be.73

7. Conclusion

As Marian David points out, even in ordinary language we often use the words ‘truth’

and ‘true’ analogically. “Truth is promiscuous: it attaches to sentences, utterances, statements,

assertions, claims, judgments, beliefs, thoughts, assumptions, axioms, theorems, premises, and

conclusions,” and it is doubtful that we can give “a single, univocal account that explains what it

is for all of these truthbearers to be true.”74 So, by itself, the supposition that there is an

analogical sense of ‘truth’ in which God is truth seems less worrisome than similar suppositions

about other divine attributes. Nor do we feel a natural, intuitive pull toward saying that ‘truth’

must be used univocally in ‘God is truth’ and, for example, ‘Truth is correspondence.’ Quite the

contrary.

Moreover, precisely because Aquinas resolutely insists that God is truth only in an

analogical sense of ‘truth,’ his account poses few intellectual obstacles beyond those already
 34

posed by his classical theism. He is able to generate an argument for the claim that God is truth

that depends on two key assumptions: (1) God’s intellect is a truthbearer and (2) God is simple.

If God’s intellect is a truthbearer, then it is true and so bears the attribute truth. And if God is

simple, then God is identical both to his intellect and to his attributes and is therefore identical to

his truth.

These soundness of these assumptions is not obvious, but both are defensible. With

respect to (1), there is an ample literature arguing that various mental states—for example,

beliefs, judgments, or sentences in the language of thought—are truthbearers.75 While I am not

aware of any literature that has discussed the specific question whether God’s mental states are

truthbearers, someone who wishes to defend (1) might well be able to appeal to that literature,

suitably adapted. With respect to (2), the doctrine of divine simplicity was once highly

controversial, but it seems to be enjoying a renaissance in contemporary philosophical

theology.76 While popularity is no guide to soundness, one can point to recent defenses of divine

simplicity to make the point that insofar as Aquinas’s claim depends on divine simplicity, it

depends on a claim that many philosophers of religion now regard as defensible.

The question also arises whether one can affirm that God is truth only at the cost of

affirming something like Aquinas’s broader account of analogy. I will not wade into that debate

here. But I will say that anyone who wants to affirm that God is truth, and wants that affirmation

to be more than a metaphysical compliment, must also bear Aquinas’s full argumentative burden.

He must show the right kind of connection between our ordinary talk about truth and God’s

divine truth. For Aquinas, that connection is causal. He holds that creaturely truth must resemble

divine truth because God is the cause of all creaturely truth. Aquinas spells out this connection

by appealing to an account of analogical causation that trades on the distinction between

 35

participated (caused) truth and essential (uncaused) truth. A contemporary defender of the claim

that God is truth must either embrace that account or ground the claim that creaturely truth

resembles God’s truth in some other way. Only then can he properly say that God’s truth must be

higher and more excellent than creaturely truth, and therefore identical to truth itself.77
 36

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ABBREVIATIONS

Works of Thomas Aquinas

DV Quaestiones disputatae de veritate. Leonine edition. Vol. 22-1. S. Thomae

Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia. Rome: Commisio Leonina,

1882–.

ST Summa theologiae. Leonine edition. Vol. 4. S. Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris

Angelici Opera Omnia. Rome: Commisio Leonina, 1882–.

SCG Liber de veritate Catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium, seu Summa

contra gentiles. Edited by Ceslaus Pera, et al. Rome: Marietti, 1961–67.

DDN In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus Expositio. Edited by

Ceslaus Pera. Turin: Marietti, 1950.

In Metaphys In Duodecim Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Expositio. Edited by M.-

R Cathala and R.M. Spiazzi. Turin: Rome, 1950.

Super sent Scriptum super libros Sententiarum. Edited by Pierre Mandonnet and

Maria F. Moos. Paris: P. Léthielleux, 1929-1947.

Super evang. Ioannis S. Thomae Aquinatis Super Evangeliam S. Ioannis Lectura. Edited by P.

Raphael Cai. Rome: Marietti, 1952.

In de anima Sentencia libri De anima. Leonine edition. Vol. 45-1. S. Thomae Aquinatis

Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia. Rome: Commisio Leonina, 1882–.

Compendium Compendium Theologiae. Leonine edition. Vol. 42. S. Thomae Aquinatis

Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia. Rome: Commisio Leonina, 1882–.

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 42

NOTES

1
See Augustine, De trinitate 8.2.3 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 50: 270–271), De libero

arbitrio 2.13.37–2.15.39 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 29: 261–264); Anselm, De

veritate chapters 1 and 10 (F.S. Schmitt, ed., Anselmi Opera Omnia 1: 176–77, 189–90),

Monologion chapters 18, 31, 35 (F.S. Schmitt, ed., Anselmi Opera Omnia 1: 32–33, 48–50, 54).

For the Westminster Confession, see Leith, Creeds of the Churches, 195.
2
See, for example, William Alston, “Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists,” in his

Divine Nature and Human Language, 268–70; Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, chapter 1.
3
As far as I am aware, there are only two extended discussions of the claim that God is truth to

be found in contemporary philosophical literature: Geach, “Truth and God,” 83–97 and John

Peterson, “God as Truth,” 342–360. John F. Wippel discusses the claim briefly in “Truth in

Aquinas,” 543–6, as does Jan Aertsen in Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 396–

400. In contemporary French thought, see the special issue of Revue Thomiste dedicated to

Aquinas on truth, especially Bonino, “La théologie de la vérité dans la Lectura super Joannem

de saint Thomas d’Aquin.,” 141–166 and Emery, “Le Verbe–Vérité et l’Esprit de Vérité: La

doctrine trinitaire de la vérité chez saint Thomas d'Aquin.,” 167–204.

Among contemporary theologians, Bruce Marshall’s Trinity and Truth does take as its

starting point the claim that Christ is truth, but its main goal is to give a Trinitarian account of the

truth of Christian beliefs, rather than to investigate what it means to say that God or Christ is the

truth as such. Similarly, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas is surprisingly

silent on the subject. Less contemporary, but still of great theological interest, are the three

volumes of Hans urs von Balthasar’s Theologik, especially vol. 2, Wahrheit Gottes (1985).
 43

There was a lively debate among French Thomists about the nature of truth in the first

half of the twentieth century that touched on some implications of the claim that God is truth. In

brief, certain forerunners and proponents of the nouevelle theologie rejected the primacy of

propositional truth and sought to ground the mind’s assent to truth not in the correspondence of

intellect and object but in the mind’s innate openness to God as the First Truth. See, for example,

Rousselot, L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas and “Métaphysique thomiste et critique de la

connaissance,” 476–509. See also Blondel, “Le point de départ de la recherche philosophique.,”

225–49. Rousselot and Blondel were opposed by neo-scholastics who denied that these ideas

really represented the thought of Aquinas and also worried that they undermined the objectivity

of truth. For example, see Gardeil, “Faculté du divin ou faculté de l'être?,” 90–100. See also

Garrigou-Lagrange, “La nouvelle théologie: où va-t-elle?”126–45; “Verité et immutabilité du

dogme,” 124–39; “Necessité de revenir à la définition traditionnelle de la vérité,” 185–98.

4
Hereafter abbreviated as ST, SCG, DV. Aquinas also discusses the matter briefly in Super sent

1, distinction 19, question 5, article 2 (Mandonnet and Moos, eds., 491–94) and in passing

throughout his commentary on the Gospel of John. See Super evang. Ioannis (e.g. chapter 14,

lectio 2; ch. 18, lect. 6 (Marietti, 1869, 2365).

5
The best treatment is Wippel’s two-part article “Truth in Aquinas,” 295–326, 543–568.
6
Unless otherwise indicated, all citations to Aquinas’s writings are from the Leonine edition, S.

Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera Omnia (Rome: Commisio Leonina, 1882–)

according to tome and volume, and page number. All English translations are my own. See DV

1.1 (Leonine 22-1.5–6), ST 1.16.2 obj 2 (Leonine 4.208); see also In VI Metaph lectio 4 (Cathala

and Spiazzi, eds., 1230–44); SCG 1.59 (Marietti, 495)

7
DV 1.2 (Leonine 22-1.9).
 44

8
DV 1.2 (Leonine 22-1.8–10). As he makes clear with his standard example of an analogical term

(‘health’), Aquinas affirms that the primary meaning of ‘truth’ is intellectual truth. Real-world

objects are true only in an extended, analogical sense of ‘truth.’ See also Wippel, “Truth in

Aquinas,” 316.
9
Et ideo, proprie loquendo, veritas est in intellectu componente et dividente (ST 1.16.2, Leonine

4.208). See also DV 1.3 (Leonine 22-1.10–11).

10
Given Aquinas’s general rejection of Platonic abstract objects, there can be no question that

abstract propositions are not the primary truthbearers. See In III de anima, ch. 6 (Leonine 45-

1.233 [431b12–b16]). See also Pasnau, “Abstract Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” in Lagerlund, ed.,

Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy, 39. Marian David agrees that

Aquinas is defining truth for “cognitive mental states, like beliefs or thoughts…”

(Correspondence and Disquotation, 18). There appears to be no literature specifically devoted to

the question of precisely what counts as a truthbearer for Aquinas. Many commentators simply

do not raise the question of truthbearers at all and so are content to speak only of the primacy of

“truth of the intellect” over truth of things, without saying any more about what it means to call

an intellect true. See, for example, Wippel, “Truth in Aquinas,” 299. The most natural reading of

Aquinas’s own texts would suggest that it is the intellect itself that is the primary truthbearer. Yet

for Aquinas, the intellect is always the intellect-in-act, the thinking intellect. So it is correct to

say that the primary truth bearer is the intellect, and that an intellect is true when it conforms in

the right way to reality. But to say this alone would be to give a misleading picture, because the

intellect only conforms to the reality in the relevant sense when it has made a judgment (the

result of an act of composition and division).

 45

11
ST 16.8 ad 3: “a proposition… is said to be true in a certain special way, insofar as it signifies

a truth of an intellect.” propositio… dicitur habere veritatem quodam speciali modo, inquantum

significat veritatem intellectus (Leonine 4.216).

12
As in Kunne, Conceptions of Truth, 102. Peter Geach denies that Aquinas is a correspondence

theorist, because Aquinas’s theory does not require the existence of facts to which true

judgments correspond (Truth and Hope, 70–1). But a correspondence theory need not posit the

existence of facts.
13
See, e.g. ST 1.29.1, 1.39.3 (Leonine 4.327–28, 399–400). For Aquinas’s understanding of

attributes, see Leftow, “Aquinas on Attributes.”

14
[sed quando iudicat rem ita se habere sicut est forma quam de re apprehendit, tunc primo

cognoscit] et dicit verum… Et hoc facit componendo et dividendo: nam in omni propositione

aliquam formam significatam per praedicatum, vel applicat alicui rei significatae per subiectum,

vel removet ab ea (ST 1.16.2, Leonine 4.208). See also DV 1.3 (Leonine 22-1.10–11), Super

librum Boethii De trinitate q. 5, art. 3 (Leonine 50.144–151).

15
Among the many full treatments of Aquinas’s views on cognition, concept formation, and

judgment see Stump, Aquinas, ch. 8; Pasnau, Theories of Cognition, especially 11–30, 105–124;

Haldane, “Mind World Identity”; Brower and Brower-Toland, “Aquinas on Mental

Representation.”
16
ST 1.16.1 (Leonine 4.206–207). See also DV 1.2 (Leonine 22-1.9), In III de anima ch. 5

(Leonine 45-1.224–228 [430a26–b5, b26–b31]).

17
DV 1.1 (Leonine 22-1: 3–8). For discussion see Aertsen, “Truth as Transcendental,” 159—

171, as well as his book-length treatment of the transcendentals in Medieval Philosophy and the

Transcendentals, especially chs. 6 and 9. See also Schultz–Aldrich, “Being as the Ground of
 46

Truth in Aquinas.” Lawrence Dewan argues that in ST Aquinas abandoned his claim that truth is

a transcendental (“Is Truth a Transcendental?”). Aertsen refutes this argument (decisively, in my

view) in “Is Truth Not a Transcendental for Aquinas?”.

18
Convenientiam vero entis ad intellectum exprimit hoc nomen verum (DV 1.1, Leonine 22-1.5);

verum est dispositio entis non quasi addens aliquam naturam, nec quasi exprimens aliquem

specialem modum entis sed aliquid quod generaliter invenitur in omni ente, quod tamen nomine

entis non exprimitur (DV 1.1, ad 4, Leonine 22-1.7); Patet ergo quod veritas in rebus creatis

inventa nihil aliud potest comprehendere quam entitatem rei et adaequationem rei ad intellectum

vel aequationem intellectus ad res vel ad privationes rerum; (DV 1.8, Leonine 22-1.28);

Unumquodque autem inquantum habet de esse, intantum est cognoscibile. (ST 1.16.3, Leonine

4.210); Cum autem omnis res sit vera secundum quod habet propriam formam naturae suae (ST

1.16.2, Leonine 4.208); Verum autem quod est in rebus, convertitur cum ente secundum

substantiam. (ST 1.16.3 ad1, Leonine 4.210).

19
dicitur enim verus lapis, qui assequitur propriam lapidis naturam, secundum

praeconceptionem intellectus divini (ST 1.16.1, Leonine 4.206–7).

20
See ST 1.44.3 (Leonine 4.460). For a very valuable discussion of Aquinas on exemplar

causality see Doolan, Divine Ideas, 156–90; see also te Velde, Participation and Substantiality,

108–116.
21
See Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 130; Geiger, La participation, 383–4; Doolan, Divine

Ideas, 83–122; te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 113–16.

22
“This can be seen in the following way. For God knows his own essence perfectly, and so

knows it in accordance with every way that it is knowable. But the divine essence can be known

not only as it is in itself but also insofar as it is possible for creatures to participate in its likeness.
 47

For every creature has its proper species insofar as it participates in a likeness of the divine

essence in some way. Therefore, insofar as God knows his own essence as capable of being

imitated in this way by some creature he knows it as the proper model (ratio) and idea of that

creature. And so it is clear that God understands many proper models of many things, and these

are the many ideas” (ST 1.15.2). Quod hoc modo potest videri. Ipse enim essentiam suam

perfecte cognoscit, unde cognoscit eam secundum omnem modum quo cognoscibilis est. Potest

autem cognosci non solum secundum quod in se est, sed secundum quod est participabilis

secundum aliquem modum similitudinis a creaturis. Unaquaeque autem creatura habet propriam

speciem, secundum quod aliquo modo participat divinae essentiae similitudinem. Sic igitur

inquantum Deus cognoscit suam essentiam ut sic imitabilem a tali creatura, cognoscit eam ut

propriam rationem et ideam huius creaturae. Et similiter de aliis. Et sic patet quod Deus

intelligit plures rationes proprias plurium rerum; quae sunt plures ideae (Leonine 4.202).
23
“An artisan produces a determinate form in matter on account of the exemplar that he has

inspected, whether that exemplar is perceived as something external or as an interior mental

concept” (ST 1.44.3); artifex enim producit determinatam formam in materia, propter exemplar

ad quod inspicit, sive illud sit exemplar ad quod extra intuetur, sive sit exemplar interius mente

conceptum (Leonine 4.460). See also Doolan, Divine Ideas, 19.

24
Rather, exemplar causality is combination of formal and final causality. According to Doolan,

as a final cause, an exemplar idea “arouses the artisan’s will to produce an effect” and as a

formal cause “it measures the effect that he produces” (Divine Ideas, 41).
25
It follows that not all ideas—whether human or divine—are exemplars, strictly speaking. Both

God and human craftsman can have ideas of possible objects that they choose not to create.
26
ST 1.16.1 (Leonine 4.206–7)
 48

27
ST 1.17.1 (Leonine 4.218–19). One might wonder whether God’s ideas can really be called

“standards” in this case, since natural objects cannot fail to conform to them. I see no reason to

suppose that the possibility that objects may fail to conform to it is definitional of a standard,

however.
28
He makes this claim explicitly in Super Sent. 1,19,5,2 ad 1 (Mandonnet and Moos, eds., 492).
29
Et, quia intellectus divinus primo intelligit rem quae est essentia sua per quam omnia alia

intelligit, ideo et veritas in Deo principaliter importat aequalitatem intellectus divini et rei quae

est essentia eius… sicut enim ibi est idem intelligens et res intellecta, ita est ibi eadem veritas rei

et veritas intellectus sine aliqua connotatione principii… Omne autem nomen quod in divinis

rationem principii vel quod est a principio non importat… essentialiter dicitur. Unde in divinis si

veritas proprie accipiatur, essentialiter dicitur (DV 1.7, Leonine 22-1.25).

30
ST 1.29.4; 1.30.2 ad 1 (Leonine 4.333–4, 337–8). Two slight qualifications: (1) following

Patristic tradition, Aquinas also holds that there is sufficient scriptural warrant for applying some

terms—including ‘truth’—to one particular divine person (Christ, in the case of ‘truth’). The

term is therefore said to be applied “by appropriation” to the person even though, strictly

speaking, it really applies to the divine essence (ST 1.39.7, Leonine 4.407); (2) Terms like

‘creator,’ which do imply the notion of an origin—the origin of creatures—must still be applied

to the divine essence and not to the individual persons (ST 1.45.6, Leonine 4.474-5).
31
ST 1.13.7 (Leonine 4.152-4); See also Wippel, “Truth in Aquinas,” 548.
32
For a further application to philosophical theology of the relevant notion of a limit case that is

not a member of the series it limits, see Miller, Most Unlikely God, 7–10.
 49

33
Even so, one might still wonder why saying that God is identical with his truth entails that God

is identical to the truth as such. For Aquinas, the answer lies in the fact that God’s truth is the

cause of all other truth and serves as the standard by which all other truths are measured. I

discuss these points below.

34
“Truth is found in an intellect that grasps a thing as it is, and in a thing insofar as it has being

that can be conformed to an intellect. But this is maximally found in God. For God’s being is not

only conformed to his intellect, but is his own act of understanding; and his act of understanding

is the measure and cause of all other being and all other intellects, and he himself is his being and

his understanding. From which it follows that not only is truth in him, but that he himself is the

highest and first truth” (ST 1.16.5); veritas invenitur in intellectu secundum quod apprehendit

rem ut est, et in re secundum quod habet esse conformabile intellectui. Hoc autem maxime

invenitur in Deo. Nam esse suum non solum est conforme suo intellectui, sed etiam est ipsum

suum intelligere; et suum intelligere est mensura et causa omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius

intellectus; et ipse est suum esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit veritas,

sed quod ipse sit ipsa summa et prima veritas (Leonine 4.212).
35
DV 1.7 (Leonine 22-1.25).
36
res tamen interdum vera dicitur, secundum quod proprie actum propriae naturae consequitur.

Unde Avicenna dicit, in sua metaphysica, quod veritas rei est proprietas esse uniuscuiusque rei

quod stabilitum est ei, inquantum talis res nata est de se facere veram aestimationem, et

inquantum propriam sui rationem quae est in mente divina, imitatur. Sed Deus est sua essentia.

Ergo, sive de veritate intellectus loquamur sive de veritate rei, Deus est sua veritas (SCG 1.60,

Marietti, 500–505).
37
DV 1.7 (Leonine 22-1.25).
 50

38
Primo quidem, per hoc quod quidquid perfectionis est in effectu, oportet inveniri in causa

effective (ST 1.4.2, Leonine 4.51).

39
SCG 1.28 (Marietti, 259–68).
40
Quod per essentiam alicui convenit, perfectissime ei convenit. Sed veritas Deo attribuitur

essentialiter, ut ostensum est. Sua igitur veritas est summa et prima veritas (SCG 1.62, Marietti,

518).
41
Sicut enim est dispositio rerum in esse, ita et in veritate… et hoc ideo quia verum et ens se

invicem consequuntur; est enim verum cum dicitur esse quod est vel non esse quod non est. Sed

divinum esse est primum et perfectissimum. Ergo et sua veritas est prima et summa (SCG 1.62,

Marietti, 516).
42
et suum intelligere est mensura et causa omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius intellectus; et

ipse est suum esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit veritas, sed quod ipse

sit ipsa summa et prima veritas (Leonine 4.212).

43
Illud quod est mensura in unoquoque genere, est perfectissimum illius generis: unde omnes

colores mensurantur albo. Sed divina veritas est mensura omnis veritatis. Veritas enim nostri

intellectus mensuratur a re quae est extra animam, ex hoc enim intellectus noster verus dicitur

quod consonat rei: veritas autem rei mensuratur ad intellectum divinum, qui est causa rerum, ut

infra probabitur; sicut veritas artificiatorum ab arte artificis; tunc enim vera est arca quando

consonat arti. Cum etiam Deus sit primus intellectus et primum intelligibile, oportet quod veritas

intellectus cuiuslibet eius veritate mensuretur: si unumquodque mensuratur primo sui generis, ut

philosophus tradit, in X metaphysicae. Divina igitur veritas est prima, summa et perfectissima

veritas (Marietti, 519).

 51

44
For the sake of felicitous expression, and because Aquinas does not believe that God is a

member of any genus, I have rendered “…is most perfect in that genus” by “possess X to the

maximum degree.” The argument would also work by substituting “is the perfect exemplar of X”

for “possesses X to the maximum degree.”

45
At ST 1.16.5, Aquinas can assume that his reader will have already read ST 1.2.3 which

already implies that God is the first and highest truth. Similarly, at SCG 1.62, Aquinas can

assume that his reader will already have read SCG 1.13, which presents a brief argument that

gradations in truth imply the existence of a supreme truth.

46
In the fourth way, he writes: “Among things in the world, we find some things that are more

and less good, more and less true, more and less noble, etc. But ‘more’ and ‘less’ are predicated

of diverse things insofar as those things approach something that has that predicate to the

maximum degree; for example, something is called ‘hotter’ the more it approaches something

that is maximally hot. Therefore, there is something that is most true, best, and most noble, and

consequently is maximally in being, for things that are maximally true are also maximally in

being, as Aristotle says in Metaphysics 2. Moreover, that which is called maximally this-or-that

in any genus is the cause of everything in that genus, just as fire, which is maximally hot, is the

cause of heat in every hot thing. Therefore, there is something that is the cause of the being

(esse), the goodness and all the other perfections of every existing thing. And this we call God”

(ST 1.2.3); Invenitur enim in rebus aliquid magis et minus bonum, et verum, et nobile: et sic de

aliis huiusmodi. Sed magis et minus dicuntur de diversis secundum quod appropinquant

diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime est: sicut magis calidum est, quod magis appropinquat

maxime calido. Est igitur aliquid quod est verissimum, et optimum, et nobilissimum, et per

consequens maxime ens: nam quae sunt maxime vera, sunt maxime entia, ut dicitur II Metaphys.
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Quod autem dicitur maxime tale in aliquo genere, est causa omnium quae sunt illius generis:

sicut ignis, qui est maxime calidus, est causa omnium calidorum, ut in eodem libro dicitur. Ergo

est aliquid quod omnibus entibus est causa esse, et bonitatis, et cuiuslibet perfectionis: et hoc

dicimus Deum (Leonine 4.32).

47
ST 1.13.5,7 (Leonine 4.146–7, 152–4)
48
For Aquinas’s account of metaphor, see ST 1.1.9, 1.13.3, 1.13.7 (Leonine 4.23–24, 143, 152–

4). Contemporary philosophers of language differ about what, if anything, distinguishes analogy

from metaphor. Provided that we can establish suitably tight connections between God’s truth

and creaturely truth (about which more below), I have no stake in arguing that ‘God is truth’ is

analogical rather than metaphorical on this-or-that account of the difference.

49
We are accustomed to treating ‘literal’ as a synonym for ‘univocal,’ but Aquinas regards

analogy as a form of literal speech just because it is not metaphorical. For example, he would say

that the claim ‘Medicine is healthy’ is analogical (because the word ‘healthy’ is used

analogically in it) but is nevertheless literally true. By contrast, ‘King David is a lion’ is a

metaphorical statement that is not literally true. See ST 1.1.10.ad2, 1.13.3 (Leonine 4.26, 143).

Burrell, God and Action, 63–7.

50
quidquid dicitur de Deo et creaturis, dicitur secundum quod est aliquis ordo creaturae ad

Deum, ut ad principium et causam, in qua praeexistunt excellenter omnes rerum perfections (ST

1.13.5, Leonine 4.147).

51
Cum igitur dicitur Deus est bonus, non est sensus, Deus est causa bonitatis, vel Deus non est

malus: sed est sensus, id quod bonitatem dicimus in creaturis, praeexistit in Deo, et hoc quidem

secundum modum altiorem. Unde ex hoc non sequitur quod Deo competat esse bonum
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inquantum causat bonitatem: sed potius e converso, quia est bonus, bonitatem rebus diffundit…

(ST 1.13.2, Leonine 4.142).

52
inquantum talis res nata est de se facere veram aestimationem, et inquantum propriam sui

rationem quae est in mente divina, imitator (SCG 1.60, Marietti, 504).
53
ST 1.4.2–3 (Leonine 4.51–54); SCG 1.28–29 (Marietti, 258–74). See also his commentary on

the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius 1.3.86 (Hereafter DDN). Cited from the Marietti edition

by caput, lectio, paragraph number. For analysis, see Kretzmann, Metaphysics of Theism, chap.

5; te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 95–102; Fabro, Participation et causalité, 363–412,

512–518; O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 41–44.

54
In II Metaph, lect. 2 (Cathala and Spiazzi, eds., 293–4). Aertsen discusses this kind of

causation under the heading of “the causality of the maximum.” See Medieval Philosophy and

the Trancendentals, 318–19.

55
Super evang. Ioannis ch. 1, lect. 1; ch. 10, lect. 1 (Marietti, 33; 1370).
56
He insists that creatures can only participate in a “likeness” of the divine essence and not the

divine essence itself, because of his commitment to God’s absolute transcendence. Moreover, as

I discuss below, creatures can only be imperfect copies of the divine essence that they imitate.

For further discussion about the sense in which creatures participate in a likeness of God, see

O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 44–48; Te Velde, Participation and Substantiality,

94, 110–12. Aquinas’s account of participation is innovative because he takes a Platonic notion

of exemplar causality and joins it to an Aristotelian notion of formal/efficient causality and then

sets both in the context of the Christian claim that God creates all things out of nothing. See

Fabro, “Intensive Hermeneutics,” 451.

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57
effectus dicitur participare suam causam, et praecipue quando not adaequat virtutem suae

causae (Expositio libri de ebdomadibus 2 [Leonine 50.271]).

58
What I call “analogical causation,” Fabro labels “transcendental causation,” or “transcendental

participation” which he distinguishes from the first two forms of participation discussed by

Aquinas in de hebdomadibus. Fabro calls these first two modes of participation “predicamental

participation.” See Fabro, Participation et caualité, 338–9, 381–90; See also Wippel,

Metaphysical Thought, 517–18.

59
See ST 1.4.3: “Things are [also] called similar which share the same form but not according to

the same explanation (ratio), as is clear with non-univocal agents. Since every agent, insofar as it

is an agent, causes effects that are similar to itself, and causes each effect according to its form, it

is necessary that there is a likeness of the form of the agent in the effect… Therefore, if there

were some agent that is not contained in a genus, its effects would even more remotely resemble

the form of the agent, and they would not participate in a likeness of the form of the agent

according to the same account of genus or species, but according to some analogy, just as being

itself is communicated to all things. It is in this way that all things are from God: they are

assimilated to him insofar as they are beings, since he is the first and universal principle of all

being.” dicuntur aliqua similia, quae communicant in eadem forma, sed non secundum eandem

rationem; ut patet in agentibus non univocis. Cum enim omne agens agat sibi simile inquantum

est agens, agit autem unumquodque secundum suam formam, necesse est quod in effectu sit

similitudo formae agentis… Si igitur sit aliquod agens, quod non in genere contineatur, effectus

eius adhuc magis accedent remote ad similitudinem formae agentis, non tamen ita quod

participent similitudinem formae agentis secundum eandem rationem speciei aut generis, sed

secundum aliqualem analogiam, sicut ipsum esse est commune omnibus. Et hoc modo illa quae
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sunt a Deo, assimilantur ei inquantum sunt entia, ut primo et universali principio totius esse

(Leonine 4.53–4).
60
“Everything that has some quality by participation is reduced, as to its principle and cause, to

that which has that quality by essence” (Compendium Theologiae 1.68). Omne quod habet

aliquid per participationem, reducitur in id quod habet illud per essentiam, sicut in principium et

causam (Leonine 42.103). See also Super evang. Ioannis, prologue (Marietti, 5. For discussion,

see te Velde, Participation and Substantiality, 102–108, 117–133, 214–128; Fabro, Participation

et causalité, 513–518, 603, 629–30.

61
ST 1.44.3 (Leonine 4.460), DDN 1.1.30; 1.2.51.
62
ST 1.15.2, 1.3.3 ad 2 (Leonine 4.201–2, 4.40) DDN 1.2.50, 1.3.88, 1.2.51.
63
ST 1.13.4–5 (Leonine 4.144–7).
64
See also Geiger, La participation, 383–4.
65
Contemporary theologians like Bruce Marshall (in his Trinity and Truth), or Catherine

Pickstock and John Milbank (in Truth in Aquinas) who wish to appeal to Aquinas’s supposedly

more Christological notion of truth over against “modern” correspondence theories fail to

appreciate this point, in my view.

66
Si autem accipiatur veritas proprie dicta, secundum quam secundario res verae dicuntur, sic

sunt plurium verorum plures veritates et etiam unius veri plures veritates in animabus diversis

(DV 1.4, Leonine 22-1.14).

67
See also Super sent. 1, d. 19, q. 5, a. 1 (Mandonnet and Moos, eds., 484–90. As in DV 1.4,

Aquinas there argues that there is a sense in which all things are true by the first (divine) truth,

insofar as God acts as the first exemplary cause of all things, but he also insists that in another

sense, all things are true by virtue of their own being and their own created forms.
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68
In contemporary parlance, God’s truth is not a truthmaker for Grass is green.
69
esse rei, non veritas eius, causat veritatem intellectus (ST 1.16.1 ad 3, Leonine 4.207); see also

In II Metaph, lect. 2 (Cathala and Spiazzi, eds., 298); Super Sent. 1, d. 19, q. 5, a. 1 (Mandonnet

and Moos, eds., 484–90); DV 1.8 arg 6 (Leonine 4.22-1.27).

70
ST 1.16.1 (Leonine 4.206–7), DV 1.2 (Leonine 22-1.8–10).
71
te Velde, Aquinas on God, 172.
72
Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 15–16.
73
Fabro also flirts with the suggestion that creation is an ontological fall from the fullness of

God’s being. See Participation et causalité, 476. By contrast, te Velde correctly notes that,

according to Aquinas, “God does not intend to express his divinity in creation, an intention

which must necessarily result in failure... what God does intend to express is his goodness in

something else according to a manner which he has “thought out’ (excogitavit) for those other

things, as distinguished from the divine goodness itself” (Participation and Substantiality, 106).
74
David, Correspondence and Disquotation, 10–11.
75
For some classic discussions of the claim that sentences in the language of thought can be

truthbearers, see Harman, Thought; Fodor, Language of Thought; Field, “Mental

Representation,” 9–61; Stich, From Folk Psychology.

76
See, for example, Brower, “Divine Simplicity,” 3–30. For citations to additional contemporary

defenses of simplicity see his chapter “Simplicity and Aseity” in Flint and Rea, Oxford

Handbook, 105–28.
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77
Many people offered valuable comments on drafts of this article. I would especially like to

thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal, Brian Leftow, Sarah Coakley, Richard

Swinburne, John Cotingham, Paul O’Grady, R.J. Matava, Lydia Schumacher, and Nick Trakakis.