Analogia entis
The analogia entis is the philosophical claim that the class of relationship of the "being" of created things and the "being" of God is that of analogy. And also the theological and devotional ramifications of this claim.
This entails that God's existence is entirely different to the being and modes of being of all things in the cosmos and therefore to us is ineffable directly: however, analogy can provide true but indirect cognition. All other predications apart from "being" may be treated in the same way, as analogical. It has also been summarized as the proposition that there is no system of which God and creatures are both directly part.
It has been called a guiding principle of Catholic thought which synthesizes many disparate themes in Catholic doctrine and theology: that general names or predications about God are true but analogies. It is associated with the Latin phrase "maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine":
The modern formulation of the analogia entis emphasizes a cognitive rhythm : a double motion of and :
Some 20th century Protestant theologians suspected analogia entis as proposing a different source of knowledge of God to divine revelation, or proposing acts competitive to the event of faith, or for tending to emphasize God's transcendence over his immanence.
Background
Analogia entis has had rather different meanings in particular philosophical, theological or devotional disciplines: sometimes with broad meaning or narrow meaning, and sometimes used to name its perceived implications.The term comes from Greek geometry, where it is used for a rule Used in this sense, "analogy" relates to the geometric/epistimological question "what can we soundly measure against to understand God?" rather than the mental/phenomenological/theological question "what does analogy let us say about God?" which this article more concentrates on.
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 Germanic 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
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 by leaving out terms so that one thing is referred to by mentioning another: A is a C. 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" 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, kindness, 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 subsequent unresolveable oscillation between the in and the beyond.
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.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:
Philosophical
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 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 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 then seeing 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 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"
- Exodus 3:14 "I am who am"
Dialectic
Theologian Ivor Morris saw Analogia entis as dialecticism, "though not of the Hegelian kind, the obvious difference being thatthe 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:
Epistemology
Thomas Aquinas wrote: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 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 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 understand 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."
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."
Catholic formulation
The idea was found implicitly in Book XV of Augustine's De Trinitate in approach later called the via eminentia.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."
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 and by what is known via negativa : 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'' 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
Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury's Proslogion first addresses God as "you are that than which a greater cannot be conceived" but then "you are that which greater than can be conceived" : 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. Cajetan distinguished three kinds of analogy: analogy of inequality, and the uninteresting analogy of attribution, and the proper, geometric analogy of proportion which avoids the fallacy of equivocation.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 essence, 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 theologians than anglophone ones.Erich Pryzwara
The modern positioning of analogia entis as being essential to 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 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 the history of Western thought, to truth and indeed to reality: we understand by mediating analogies. For Przywara, the analogy entis is a communication from God that calls the believer into service.
For Przywara, the analogia entis is nothing more than God's concurrent immanence and transcendence. 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, sacramentalism, mystical piety, religious authority and community, the example of Mary, and the nature of the church.
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 have a unity, and can be analyzed or weighed
Von Baltasar responds to Barth's concern that analogia entis sidelines Christ for scholastic wordplay, with a theology that Christ's homostatic union 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
- As an implication, because analogous statements are approximate, a certain Christological and theological pluralism is necessarily due to these individual limitations.
Joseph Ratzinger
Pope Benedict XVI's Regensberg address said:That analogy is real is the ground by which we can say that what is measured 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" 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 in the difference between God and creatures."However Orthodox theologian John Romanides claimed that "the very presuppositions of theology 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 a so-called 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, and that the analogia entis means humans participate in a similarity to God ; 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 God alone provides knowledge, nothing comes from a consideration of natural things. However, Protestant theologian Jonathan Platter notes that "Barth did misunderstand both Thomas and Pryzwara in attributing to them the idea that the analogia entis locates the possibility of revelation in a relation established by creation prior to the grace enacted in Christ."
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 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. It is the event of gratuitous faith that that actualizes analogy between God and man, not hints or images in pre-existing creation. "If analogia entis is interpreted as analogy of relation or analogy of faith, I will no longer say nasty things "
Eberhard Jüngel
Lutheran theologian Eberhard Jüngel has claimed the common Protestant objections 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.