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 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 and God's perfections (such as God "is", "is a consuming fire", "is our father", "is patient" and perhaps even "is infinite", "is love", "is just") 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: the double motion and :
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.
The term was originally coined around 1350 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.
See 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 : DSo "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."[1]
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.."[2]
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,[3] 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,[4] a judge,[5] an advocate,[6] a fire,[7] a hound, a worm,[8] divine law.[9]
Scientist Douglas Hofstadter has claimed that analogy is the "core of human cognition."[10] 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.
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:
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.[11]
Thomas Cajetan attempted to reduce all analogy to three kinds (inequality, attribution, proportionality)[2] and state which ones, in logical use, could be used syllogistically.[12]
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'.
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.
Aquinas discussed this as analogia nominum (analogy of names).
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.
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."[13]
Thomas Aquinas wrote:
The metaphysical distinction between essence and existence in all beings apart from God is termed the real distinction.[14]
In Thomistic theology, God is whose essence is his existence.
Key proponents of analogia entis position it as theology not philosophy. 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."[15]
However it is to some extent founded on a philosophical claim about the "ground of being" of creatures which then allows such theology.[15] 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'" [15]
For Edith Stein the relationship between Being and Becoming is analogia entis; being was anything we could 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."
For Stein, the analogia entis is a relation between two "I am": the human and creatural "I am" and the divine "I am."[16] 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":[17] this real, temporal, finite being that one experiences as her own is an analogue of ("faintly visible") divine, eternal being.[18]
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.
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)[19]
The idea was found implicitly in Book XV of Augustine's De Trinitate.[20]
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)[21]
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.[22] 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[23]) 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".[24] 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 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."[25]
Notable 16th Century scholastic formulators of analogia entis were Thomas Cajetan and John of St. Thomas, and Francisco Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae. (Betz)
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."[26] However, his philosophy has been called a kind of analogia entis argument for the inner world only[27] in its concern for essense, existence and cognition, even though it rejects the remainder of scholastic theology.
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.
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.[28] 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 [29] 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."[30]
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",[31]
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).[32]
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,[18] 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.[33]
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 queried 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:
The analogia entis is a condition of good theology[35] and a test of bad theology.
Pope Benedict XVI's Regensberg address[36] said:
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.
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)
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."[37] 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,[38] 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."[11]
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.[39]
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.[40] 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.[41]
Catholic writers tend to view Barth's early objections as, to some extent, based on a caricature [42] or extra baggage [43] Fr. Przywara stressed "analogia entis in no way signifies a 'natural theology'" [44]
Barth conditionally withdrew his objection "as the invention of the anti-Christ" for a version of analogia entis couched as God making himself known[45] (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[46] in response,[47] including the idea that the only thing that God can be analogized from is Jesus[40] 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)"[48]
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.
For Welsh theologian Rowan Williams, the analogia entis is the proposition that "there is no system of which God and creatures are both part."[49]
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)."[50]