Aquinas claims that ‘He Who Is’ is the most proper of the names we have for God. But this attempt to ‘describe’ God with a philosophical concept like ‘being’ can seem dangerously close to creating a false conception based on our limited understanding – an idol. A dominant criticism of Aquinas’ use of this term is that any attempt to use ‘being’ to describe God will inevitably make him merely some object in our ontology alongside other beings, unacceptably mitigating God's radical transcendence and otherness. I will argue that Aquinas has a very creative response to this charge: ‘being’ stands in a unique relationship as the only concept that can ensure we do not draw God under some particular creaturely limit and thus use divine names to create an ‘idol’. In other words, ‘being’ is a special paradigm concept/term which ensures that we preserve humility in our attempts to name God.

中文翻译：

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作为标志性的：阿奎那关于“他是谁”作为上帝的名字

阿奎那声称“他是谁”是我们对上帝的最恰当的称呼。但是，这种用“存在”这样的哲学概念来“描述”上帝的尝试似乎危险地接近于基于我们有限的理解创造一个错误的概念——偶像。对阿奎那使用这个词的主要批评是，任何试图用“存在”来描述上帝的尝试都将不可避免地使他成为我们本体论中与其他存在并列的某个对象，无法接受地减轻了上帝的根本超越性和他者性。我会争辩说，阿奎那对这一指控的反应非常有创意：“存在”处于一种独特的关系中，是唯一可以确保我们不会将上帝置于某些特定的受造物限制之下，从而使用神圣的名字来创造“偶像”的概念. 换句话说，