– Aquinas and Scotus have two different ways of speaking and knowing of God – analogy and univocity, respectively. The former is more well known (and in this old post I give a quick overview of it).
– Scotus is concerned primarily with with developing a concept of being that applies to both God and man, because, as Scotus sees it, unless there were such a concept, we could not have objective, positive metaphysical knowledge of God. We could have negative knowledge of God, but Scotus sees that as empty (if that’s our only knowledge of God). To say only what God is not cashes out like this: we can say that God is not a rock, but we can say the same thing about anything not a rock. All we know, then, is that God, like anything not a rock, is not a rock.
– He holds that if our knowledge of God is equivocal (as Henry of Ghent held), then we can have no real knowledge of God, since our terms would be emptied of all their meaning.
– So what exactly is this univocal concept of being? This: a concept such that it cannot be both affirmed and denied without a contradiction. So, in the case of being, both God and man fall under the concept of being, but not in the sense that they are both under a single genus – Scotus’ univocity is logical, and not metaphysical concept. Put another way, God and man are both infinitely different in their being – but they are both opposed to nonbeing, though opposed in different ways.
– Scotus and Aquinas are both in agreement that knowledge of God comes from knowledge of creatures – our experience of creatures is the source of all our concepts that we apply to God. They also both agree that these concepts don’t apply to God directly or perfectly. Aquinas holds this by way of analogy, where concepts apply to God in both a similar and dissimilar sense. Scotus holds, however, that analogy is fundamentally a kind of equivocity, and that for analogy to work at all it must presuppose some kind of univocity.
– Scotus holds that our concepts apply to God via abstraction – that is, he abstracts the creaturely imperfections in, say, our concept of wisdom, and them applies them to God with maximum perfection.
Theologians, Inc. 