ABSTRACT
One may say that the fundamental question Thomas is occupied with in most of his theological writings is the seemingly simple ‘What is God?’ As such this question is essentially different from the question central to this study, which is: ‘What is God in the view of Thomas Aquinas?’ The fi rst question asks after metaphysical truth, the truth of God in himself. The second one is a question about historical truth, about how Thomas has in fact conceived the notion of God in his theological writings. For some, however, the former question cannot even be meaningfully asked apart from how people in their historical situation factually think of God. They might want to stress that answers to the question of ‘what God is’ will never succeed in reaching the ‘thing itself’ – if there is such a thing – but that they are all only different expressions of how people factually perceive the divine. John Hick, for instance, strongly defends the view that every human concept of God, as underlying the practices of religious worship, is but a ‘fi nite image’, or mental picture, of the infi nite divine reality that exceeds all human thought.1 What one can deal with are ‘the various God-fi gures’ which are ‘different transformations of the impact upon us of the ultimately Real’. But that reality itself, according to Hick, is beyond the range of conscious human experience, as it does not fi t into the systems of concepts in terms of which we are able to think. ‘It is what it is, but what it is cannot be described in human categories.’ We can only describe its impact upon us, Hick contends.2 The divine in itself is like the Kantian ‘Ding an sich’, unknowable and outside our cognitive reach.
