Analogia entis

See also: Catholic theology

The analogia entis (Latin for "analogy of being") is the philosophical claim that the class of relationship of the "being" of created things and the "being" of God is one of "analogy", and also the theological and devotional ramifications of this.

This entails that God's existence is entirely different to the being and modes of being of all things in the cosmos (all "creatures") and therefore to us is ineffable directly. It has also been summarized as the proposition that there is no (e.g. natural or conceptual) system of which God and creatures are both part. However, analogy can provide true but indirect (though not necessarily reliable) cognition. Other predications apart from "being" may be treated in the same way.

It has been called a guiding principle of Catholic thought (or Denkform) which synthesizes many disparate themes in Catholic doctrine and theology: that general names or predications about God (not only names such as "is a Consuming Fire", "is our Father", "is Patient" and predications of perfections "is infinite", "is love", "is just", but even being itself: that God "is") are true but analogies. It is associated with the Latin phrase "maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine":

For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.

— Fourth Lateran Council, 1215.

The modern formulation of the analogia entis emphasizes a cognitive rhythm: the double motion in and beyond:

What is meant by analogia entis is precisely this: that in the very same act in which the human being comes to intimate God in the likeness of the creature, he also comes to intimate Him as the one who is beyond all likeness.

— Przywara, Schriften vol 2, p404

Background

There is no single, universally authoritative, and unambiguous doctrine of the analogia entis.

— Ry O. Siggelkow

Analogia entis has had rather different meanings in particular philosophical, theological or devotional disciplines: sometimes with broad meaning (e.g., used for any divine predication) or narrow meaning (e.g., used strictly about divine being only), and sometimes used to name its perceived implications.

Development

The term was originally coined around 1250 by Albert Magnus and developed subsequently, notably in the 1920s and 1930s by Jesuit Erich Przywara and German theologians, such as former Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar. The concept has a longer history than the term, and drew on commentary by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Aristotle.

Analogy

Main article: Analogy

Analogia entis is not a fancy synonym for analogy; however, the term is sometimes enlarged so that 'being' includes all kinds of analogous predication about God not just essential and infinite being.

Analogy has the general form A is to B as C is to D:

A : B :: C : D

So "one and the same term is analogically attributed to two realities whenever it is attributed to each of them in a way which is partially the same and partially different."

Some analogies get presented condensed (e.g., into metaphors) by leaving out terms so that one thing is referred to by mentioning another: A is a C. (There is a core case, which other terms relate to in various pros hen ways.) So "God is Good" is the analogy "the goodness of humans is to their nature as the goodness of God is to his nature.."

Analogical reasoning can be distinguished from other modes, such as induction and deduction. Analogical statements can be distinguished from other kinds of statement, such as univocal and equivocal.

Such analogy is asymmetric, working in one direction only: the metaphor "God is Father" (i.e., the analogy "God is to us as a human father is to their child") does not imply "Father is God." Similarly, an analogical statement does not rule out another statement that would be contradictory if interpreted univocally: "God is Father" does not rule out "God is Mother." But every analogy breaks down when extended too far.

In Christian thought, God is commonly analogized against many created or experienced things: being, goodness, truth, beauty, just, kind, love, a friend, a judge, an advocate, a fire, a hound, a worm, divine law.

Cognition

Scientist Douglas Hofstadter has claimed that analogy is the "core of human cognition." Pseudo-Dionysius' purported book Symbolic Theology discussed dissimilar similarities and the need for the human mind to have and use symbols.

One facet of analogia entis is as a fallible, non-mystical human cognitive event involving the characteristic double motion of in-and-beyond (and distinct from deduction, intuition, instress, etc.) and subsequent unresolvable oscillation.

Religious cognition

In Catholic usage, the analogia entis is a foundational organizing and epistemological principle of religious cognition: for Bonaventure, for example, the cosmos is conceived as a treasury of things that can be used for analogy.

All created things of the sensible world lead the mind of the contemplator and wise man to eternal God[...] They are the shades, the resonances, the pictures of that efficient, exemplifying, and ordering art; they are the tracks, simulacra, and spectacles; they are divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God. They are exemplifications set before our still unrefined and sense-oriented minds, so that by the sensible things which they see they might be transferred to the intelligible which they cannot see, as if by signs to the signified."

— Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, 2.11, as quoted

Aquinas' ideas on analogy presuppose that "cognition of the supernatural realm cannot be attained from this world by the mere exercise of our natural cognitive powers, but only through divine revelation and faith in the content of this revelation."

Modern Popes have treated analogy as one cognitive mechanism which revelation may use:

I want only to state that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical, and to vindicate the human being's capacity to know this transcendent and metaphysical dimension in a way that is true and certain, albeit imperfect and analogical. [...]Faith clearly presupposes that human language is capable of expressing divine and transcendent reality in a universal way—analogically, it is true, but no less meaningfully for that.

— Pope John Paul II, Fides et ratio., S83, S84

Philosophical

Analogy

See also: Analogy

Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas took the distinction between the univocal and equivocal terms from Aristotle's Categories and also an intermediate but distinct kind: analogical terms where you understand something greater by the measure of something lesser. For Aquinas, "nothing can be said in the same sense of God and creatures." According to theologian K. Surin "at the heart of Aquinas' views on the nature of language about God is his thesis that all assertions about God are to be construed analogically." This linguistic thesis then is the ground for his metaphysical theses.

Thomas Cajetan attempted to reduce all analogy to three kinds (inequality, attribution, proportionality) and state which ones, in logical use, could be used syllogistically.

In the modern version of analogia entis, while the object providing the "measure" can be any thing, the subject of the intimation is specifically God.

The thing being measured may not only be some created thing or positive transcendental or perfection (i.e. things having 'being' in some real or metaphysical sense) but also a negative thing or absence: seeing in some bad thing the absence of expected good provides the analogy for reckoning God as the being with no absence of good (in) then seeing (beyond) that God is infinitely more than 'good'.

Predication and names of God

Following from the Fourth Lateran Council, all "God is ..." statements must be interpreted analogically not absolutely. For example, all the following cases are analogies because love, fire, unity, etc are limited (at least by having finite definitions) while God is not limited.

• Deuteronomy 4:24 "For the LORD your God is a consuming fire"
• Deuteronomy 6:4 "The LORD our God, the LORD is one"
• Psalms 84:11 "For the LORD God is a sun and shield"
• 1 John 1:5 "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all"
• 1 John 4:8 "God is love"

Aquinas discussed this as analogia nominum (analogy of names).

• Exodus 3:14 "I am who am"

For St Thomas Aquinas, even "being" as in: "I am who am" of Exodus 3:14, is an analogy when used of God: our understanding God's "being" is by analogy to our being.

[...] whatever names unqualifiedly designate a perfection without defect are predicated of God and of other things: for example, goodness, wisdom, being, and the like. But when any name expresses such perfections along with a mode that is proper to a creature, it can be said of God only according to likeness and metaphor. [...] For we cannot grasp what God is, but only what He is not and how other things are related to Him[...]

— Summa contra gentiles, 30 2,4

Dialectic

Theologian Ivor Morris saw Analogia entis as dialecticism, "though not of the Hegelian kind, the obvious difference being that[...]the movement of thought is poised between thesis and antithesis and never advances, as with Hegel, to the idea of a higher synthesis."

Przywara saw this unresolving 'poise' not as static but dynamically, as a cognitive/logical trembling or oscillation between the thesis in and antithesis beyond that must always cycle between the two:

"The analogy of being is not an analogy of inequality, as if God and creation could be compared even if only for the purpose demonstrating how dissimilar they are. Instead, the "ever greater" denotes a dynamic disproportionality, so that whatever characteristics we attribute to God must be continually dis/qualified on the basis of a difference that has no limit or end."

— Steven Webb, The End of the Analogy of Being.

Epistemology

Thomas Aquinas wrote:

Our natural knowledge begins from sense. It can therefore extend so far as it can be led by sensible things.[...]But since effects depend on their cause, sensible things can lead us to know that God exists, and to know what is bound to be attributable to him as the first cause of all things, and as transcending all his effects. In this way we know that God is related to creatures as the cause of them all; that he differs from creatures, since he is none of the things caused by him; and that creatures are separated from God because God transcends them, not because of any defect in God

— Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Appendix to Q. 4, Art. 3, 12, Art. 12. (Whether, in this life, God can be known through natural reason.)

Metaphysics

The metaphysical distinction between essence and existence in all beings apart from God is termed the real distinction. In Thomistic theology, God is whose essence is his existence.

Ontology

Key proponents of analogia entis tend to position it as post-philosophical theology. John Betz summarizes Przywara's stance: "For as of yet, from a purely philosophical perspective, nothing whatsoever can be made out about who God is or what he has revealed, or even that there is such thing as revelation."

In this view, Analogia entis is to some extent founded on a philosophical claim about the "ground of being" of creatures which then allows theological investigation. Przywara's argument is that "All that can be made out metaphysically with any degree of certainty apart from [i.e., when excluding] revelation is that creaturely being is not its own ground, that it is not being itself, that it 'is' only in the form of becoming, and that theology, that is, the science of a God of revelation, is a reasonable possibility or to put it in still more minimalist terms, a 'non-impossibility'"

Phenomenology

For Edith Stein the relationship between Being and Becoming is analogia entis; 'being' is anything we can think of; she distinguished finite and infinite being.

"We speak of God in the best ways that are available to us by ascribing to God in an analogous way the perfections found in creatures."

Theophany

For Stein, the analogia entis is a relation between two "I am": the human and creatural "I am" and the divine "I am." Stein starts with the phenomenon of individual awareness, ego cognito: "my certitude about my own existence is the most primordial, intimate and immediate self-experience I can have": this real, temporal, finite being that one experiences as her own is an analogue of ("faintly visible") divine, eternal being.

Detractors

14th century philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus and some subsequent theologians propose a Univocity of being: that God's existence and our existence is the same concept of being, though in different modes.

Theological

Some key proponents of analogia entis position it as theology not philosophy. Von Balthasar, corresponding with Karl Barth, wrote "the analogia is in no sense a philosophical but rather a purely theological principle"

Biblical roots

Multiple passages in the Bible decry the human ability to directly grasp and understanding God directly or well. Isaiah 55:8 "My ways are not your ways, and neither are my thoughts your thoughts." Rom 11:34 "Who has known the mind of God?"

However, Psalm 19:1 "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

"For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." (Romans 1:20)

The Peshitta version of I Cor 12:13 translated to Aramaic then to English expresses it: "Now we see as in a mirror, in an allegory, but then face-to-face. Now I know partially, but then I shall know as I am known." (I Cor 12:13)

Catholic formulation

The idea was found implicitly in Book XV of Augustine's De Trinitate.

The major formulation of the idea was given in passing—in a comment that the kind of perfection in grace that humans could attain is not the same as the perfection of God but only analogous—by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 "For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them." (Latin: maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine)

Scholastic formulations

Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas provides a three-fold distinction: "We do not know what God is but only what is he is not and what relation he maintains with everything" Summa contra Gentiles I:30: It is this relation that is the basis of analogia entis. For Aquinas, the analogia entis is placed as a form of knowledge that is intermediate but distinct from what is known by the positive theology via causalitatis (Cataphatic theology) and by what is known via negativa (Apophatic theology): this is called the via eminentiae. The analogia entis is not cataphatic, in the sense associated with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, because analogy does not limit God.

Aquinas situates this in a typical descent-ascent (exitus-reditus) movement: God's perfections (e.g. "Good") perpetually descend to creatures, are noticed and named by intellects; in turn, "the intellect that assigns the names ascends from creatures to God". Thus any psychological ascent is consequent to this providential descent (i.e. it is not autonomous revelation independent of grace, but an effect of grace.)

Anselm

Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogion first addresses God as "you are that than which a greater cannot be conceived" [emphasis added] (his famous Ontological argument) but then "you are that which greater than can be conceived" [emphasis added]: interpreted by analogia entis the former is the in step and the latter is the beyond step: a paradox perhaps but not a contradiction.

Anselm fills out the beyond step stating that "God is before and beyond even eternal things" and "that he alone is what he is and who he is."

Late

Notable 16th Century scholastic formulators of analogia entis were Thomas Cajetan and John of St. Thomas, and Francisco Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae. (Betz)

Descartes

According to historian William Ashworth, Descartes held that God's immutability was the ground of natural laws and the conservation of motion, but denied that the world was "a collection of signs that demonstrated divine attributes or pointed to God." However, his philosophy has been called a kind of analogia entis argument for the inner world only in its concern for essense, existence and cognition, even though it rejects the remainder of scholastic theology.

Modern formulations

Until recently, most of the key 20th century theological writings on analogia entis were unknown and unavailable in English. Consequently, it has had a much greater influence on continental (especially German-reading Catholic) theologians than anglophone ones.

Erich Pryzwara

The modern positioning of analogia entis as being essential to (and quintessential of) Catholic theology was driven by mid-century Jesuit theologian Fr. Erich Przywara. Analogia entis explicates a key part of Jesuit spirituality: St Augustine's dynamic slogan Latin: Deus semper major ("God is always greater") was the title of Przywara's theological commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

For example his difficult 1932 book Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm provides a major formulation of the idea: this ever-greater God "explodes the limits of every metaphysics as such." Theologian John Milbank has called this book "one of the great masterworks of twentieth-century theology and philosophy."

Przywara's thought has been summarized as "the more we grow towards God, the more we realise how much further than we thought we need to grow",

Pryzwara saw the analogia entis as central or essential to Catholic theology, to truth and indeed to reality: we understand by (or receive inspiration from) mediating analogies. For Przywara, the analogy entis is a communication from God that calls the believer into service (kenosis).

For Przywara, the analogia entis is nothing more than God's concurrent immanence (in the world) and transcendence (beyond the world). In Przywara's view, numerous Catholic doctrines and devotions flow from the analogia entis as a noetic form, such as the Catholic understanding of the Incarnation, synergism (the cooperation of humans and God in salvation), sacramentalism, mystical piety, religious authority and community, the example of Mary, and the nature of the church.

Far from being a rhetorical trope or a philosophical tool, analogy for Przywara is the style of thought that best corresponds to the way in which being makes itself known. Not only is analogy, for Przywara, built into every level of Catholic theology. It is the glue that holds those levels together.

— Stephen H. Webb, The End of the Analogy of Being

Hans Urs von Balthasar

For Przywara's protégé Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christ is the "concrete analogy of being", being both God and man: we learn everything of God by looking at Christ as the measure.

For Przywara and many subsequent theologians, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, analogia entis is seen as a primary tool by which a multitude of apparently disparate things (such as the Real Distinction) have a unity, and can be analyzed or weighed (and this to the extent that analogia entis has been criticised as a theological panacea.)

Von Baltasar responds to Barth's concern that analogia entis sidelines Christ for scholastic wordplay, with a theology that Christ's homostatic union (as both God and man) itself is a necessary analogy of the divine homoousios within the Trinity.

Von Balthasar invokes the analogia entis in multiple other places:

• He further says The saint is right, contrary to all those who see him from the outside, to feel that he is the worst sinner and failure (because the saint knows more than us due to their analogia entis experience of God' holiness.)
• As an implication, because analogous statements are approximate, a certain Christological and theological pluralism (Catholicism) is necessarily due to these individual limitations.

The analogia entis is a condition of good theology and a test of bad theology.

Joseph Ratzinger

Pope Benedict XVI's Regensberg address said:

The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.

— Regensberg Address, 9/12/06])

That analogy is real is the ground by which we can say that what is measured (i.e. in) and what is beyond, though so great, are not so different in kind and scale as to be meaningless, because what is in is there because of the free choice of the creator and so allows him to reveal himself.

Pope Benedict also spoke of "the great et-et" (both-and) of Catholicism: both faith and works, Jesus being both God and Man, etc, things which are in apparent contradiction: for proponents of analogia entis it provides a resolution without falling into paradox.

Orthodox treatment

The modern Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart uses the analogia entis in his book The Beauty of the Infinite, noting "The analogy of being does not analogize God and creatures under the more general category of being, but is the analogization of being (itself) in the difference between God and creatures." (p241-2)

However Orthodox theologian John Romanides claimed that "the very presuppositions of (Augustian) theology (whether) based on analogia entis and analogia fidei has nothing in common with the Fathers of the Roman Ecumenical Councils" and they are "not accepted by any Orthodox Father of the Church." In this view, there is simply no similarity between creature and creator, no possible analogy. One criticism is that analogia entis promotes an intellective ascent rather than theoria. Another theologian's reported characterization of analogia entis goes as far as claiming "The analogy of being refers to the fact that there is a relation between the created and the uncreated being; that God created the world from archetypes and that man’s salvation rests on the return of his soul to the uncreated world of ideas."

Protestant treatments

Analogia entis was not an issue in Reformation theology and not considered a rival to special revelation. For Martin Luther, reason "knows that there is a God, but it does not know who or which is the true God." Calvinists have stressed the correct limits of ideas such as analogia entis.

According to theologian Ry Siggelkow, "It is now widely acknowledged that the numerous debates that have ensued around the analogia entis have been remarkably confused."

Some Protestant detractors take the analogia entis as meaning that unsaved humans can reach a saving knowledge of God outside grace, revelation, faith, etc, but merely by autonomous insight. For example, theologian Paul Brazier claims analogia entis is, or comes down to, "the idea that we can know and understand God soundly, securely, primarily, through analogy in God's creation."

Some Protestant commentators connect the analogia entis to ideas of the Trinitarian Vestages mentioned by St Thomas Aquinas, and Thomistic ideas that an effect resembles its cause, therefore being a form of natural theology, unacceptable to e.g. Calvinists but acceptable to other theology.

Among attempts to reconcile analoga entis with an analogia fidei are theologian K. Sura's comment that "analogy from the perspective of God is an analogy of being, analogy from the perspective of man is an analogy of faith."

Karl Barth

Karl Barth, a 20th century German protestant dogmatic theologian who was a friend of Erich Przywara and Hans Urs von Balthasar, notoriously asserted at one stage that the analogia entis was the only thing that prevented him becoming Catholic, and the invention of the anti-Christ.

Barth's views may have altered radically over his life: Protestant theologian Ry Siggelkow puts it "In contrast to Barth's early critique, which interpreted the doctrine as emphasizing an ontological similarity between God's being and creaturely being, the later Barth, according to Jüngel, feared that the so-called analogia entis would not do justice to the difference between God and man by overlooking the nearness of God."

The early critique: using Aquinas' teachings that grace does not destroy but supports and perfects nature (Latin: gratia non destruit se supponit et perficit naturam), and that the analogia entis means humans participate in a similarity to God ( similitudo Dei); Barth reasoned that consequently if the experience of God is always a possibility, the analogia entis circumvents the need for grace. Barth regarded it as a kind of natural theology and therefore counter to salvation by grace and scriptural revelation of the new covenant only (and particularly imprudent in Nazi Germany as potentially reinforcing their nature-worship mythologies.) God alone provides knowledge, nothing comes from a consideration of natural things.

Catholic writers tend to view Barth's early objections as, to some extent, based on a caricature or extra baggage Fr. Przywara stressed "analogia entis in no way signifies a 'natural theology'"

Barth conditionally withdrew his objection "as the invention of the anti-Christ" for a version of analogia entis couched as God making himself known (as espoused by Gottlieb Söhngen student of Przywara and teacher of Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI.) Barth proposed what he called analogia relationalis then analogia fidei in response, including the idea that the only thing that God can be analogized from is Jesus and his humanity. "If analogia entis is interpreted as analogy of relation or analogy of faith, I will no longer say nasty things (about it)"

Eberhard Jüngel

Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel has claimed the common Protestant objections (following from the early Barth view) tend to "miss the point of the so-called analogia entis entirely."

However, Jüngel ultimately rejects analogia entis as making God unapproachably distant. He developed an "analogy of advent" based on God approaching humans.

Rowan Williams

For Welsh theologian Rowan Williams, the analogia entis is the proposition that "there is no system of which God and creatures are both part."

Islamic theology

According to theologian Joshua Ralston, medieval Sunni theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's Al-Maqsad al-Asna (The 99 Beautiful Names of God) rejects analogia entis: "to speak rightly about God is emphatically to speak "after revelation"—so analogy and reason may be used, but only in light of what God has first revealed (in the Qur'an)."