 That Aquinas in fact honors this constraint is far from obvious, given the seemingly positive claims he makes regarding the divine nature. To understand his approach one must come to grips with his theory of  analogical predication.  In a case like God’s goodness, for instance, Aquinas does not mean only to deny God’s badness. It can be truly said, he thinks, that God is good. The difficulty is that the word ‘good,’ when truly applied to God, has a different sense from what it has in cases familiar to our own experience. The two senses are thus not univocal, but nor are they purely equivocal, as if God’s goodness were wholly unrelated to the goodness we experience. Instead, the usages are analogical (ST 1a 13.5). So, “when we say God is good, the sense is not that God is the cause of goodness or that God is not bad; rather, the sense is that what we call good in creatures preexists in God, albeit in a higher mode” (ST 1a 13.2c). We can say with confidence, on the basis of this analysis, that God is good, indeed preeminently so. To the extent that we are good, it is so only by participation in God’s goodness. But our cognitive limitations preclude a more adequate account of this “higher mode” in which God is good. (On analogy in Aquinas see McInerny 1996; Montagnes 1963 [2004]; Dewan 2007; Ashworth 2014; Hochschild 2019.)