Explain Aquinas' views surrounding religious language as analogical.

Criticism surrounding religious language largely comes from those who regard statements about God as cognitive, in other words literally true or false. Many try to overcome this by arguing that religious language should be seen as non-cognitive and so is not open to truth or falsity. Truth, then, for those who take an analogical approach is relative to the community who are making the statements. Religious language as analogical is fundamentally associated with Aquinas, who is aware of the problems surrounding religious language - for instance, words applied to God such as 'father' and 'good' seem problematic as they anthropomorphise Him, however, God is everything humans are not, such as infinitely perfect, ultimate goodness and immaterial. Aquinas therefore argued for analogy as a way of understanding religious language to meet his idea of 'via eminentae', meaning the way of eminence, asserting that what we speak and know of God is partial. For instance, God's goodness is the prime example of goodness, but our goodness is flawed and partial.
In Aquinas' work Summa Theologica, he rejects both univocal (exactly the same meaning in two instances, for example 'green') and equivocal (two completely different and unrelated meanings, for example 'bat') language as a way of talking about God and argues for a middle ground, that being analogical language. Aquinas rejects the use of the former due to the idea that this anthropomorphises God and contradicts His divine simplicity as it would suggest that God and humans are equal and also that God is dependent on something. Aquinas also rejects the latter because it would make two things impossible: (1) faith and (2) claims that God has made himself known to humans. Instead, religious language is analogical, meaning there is a comparison between the two things, where the simpler thing is used to explain the more complex thing, which is similar in a lot of ways but not identical. For instance, to explain 'strawberry ice-cream' to someone who has never tasted it before but has tasted vanilla ice-cream, we say it is much like vanilla ice-cream, but tastes like strawberries.
Aquinas uses analogy in two different ways: analogy of attribution and analogy of proposition. Analogy of attribution refers to the concept of derivation, meaning that the qualities and attributes denoted to one another or other things are reflections of God’s qualities and attributes. For example, Davies uses the analogy of bread. If we are to say the bread is good, this must, in consequence, mean the baker is also good as the bread is a product of the baker – his goodness ‘spreads’ to the bread. Aquinas also has his own example, which is medieval medicine. It was believed that if a bull’s urine is healthy, then the bull’s themselves were healthy, which means that their urine was a reflection of them. This shows that the qualities, such as wisdom, are essentially reflections of those of God. Analogy of proposition refers to the idea that qualities of something or someone are proportionate to their nature. For instance, to say my younger sister is a good drummer means she is good for her age, as if I were to see a professional drummer that played to the same standard as my sister, I would be disappointed. In the same way, attributes of God are proportionate to his nature, which shows that when we are speaking of God, we are speaking of an infinite being, however when we are speaking of others, we are describing finite beings, so the meaning cannot be the same.