Jonathan and I have begun to read together the seminal work of Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory. We’ve decided to interact via dueling blog posts; he posted the first last week and I’ll soon be posting my response on his blog (as well as copying his post and my response here). At the end of his post discussing the preface, Jonathan asked me for my thoughts on the ontological status of the analogia entis. Good question, I thought. I also wondered where else the debate on the analogy of being has been going recently, and so did a bit of reading on this, which I summarize here.
To begin with, for those unfamiliar with the term, there’s a good introductory post here, which includes the following brief (classical) definition:
‘It is the notion that the very being (entis) of the created world offers an analogy by which we can (in a very limited way) comprehend God. For example, if you’ve looked at a sunset and wondered that perhaps God is similarly beautiful, you’ve intuitively employed what theologians call the analogia entis.’
As the same post goes on to describe, Karl Barth rejected the analogia entis in favor of the analogia fidei. According to Hans Urs von Balthasar in his The Theology of Karl Barth (around p. 163), Barth’s critiques of the analogia entis are:
- The analogy obscures the true basis for the relation between God and man. It portrays this basis as something the two have in common (‘Being’), while in fact the relation depends on an inescapable distance between them: the aseity of the one and the utter dependence of the other.
- To approach God via the analogia entis is to presuppose knowledge of the mode of God’s self-revelation, or to assume that he can be approached apart from it in the first place.
- A characterization of God derived from finite being cannot be otherwise than finite, even if we do no more than borrow terms from our existence for use in negative theology.
- It proposes to produce in us knowledge which can come only as a pure gift.
Instead, Barth preferred the analogia fidei. ‘The analogy of faith expresses the fact (1) that all knowledge of God rests on a prior revelation by God from above, should this fact occur; (2) that man gains knowledge from this revelation only by freely surrendering his own truth in worship in the act of faith… (3) that God’s self-revelation must be grasped at the point where it is most unambiguously expressed: at its center, Jesus Christ.’ (The Theology of Karl Barth, p.164)
Charitably seeking to rescue Barth from his hyperbolic characterization of the analogia entis as the invention of antichrist (and noting that the more mature Barth conceded an analogia relationis, an analogy of relations, by which we could understand a propertion between the faculties necessary for God’s act towards us and our response to it), von Balthasar argues in a manner that seems designed to appeal to Barth that it is possible to enfold the analogia entis within the analogia fidei. Recalling the principal role played by presuppositions in Barth, he characterizes this as a case in which a center (Christ) presupposes a periphery. The order of the Incarnation presupposes the order of creation, which is itself patterned after reality in triune God. Creation is oriented to the Incarnation, and so contains images, analogies, and dispositions pointing to it. Balthasar argues that between the order of creation and the order of Incarnation, analogia entis and analogia fidei, it will not do simply to give one priority over the other; we must see them as one interlocking order. ‘Just because the Covenant is the ground and goal of creation does not mean it is creation’s form and content. If the images inherent in creation are to be lifted up and used as images that really tell us something about the history of the Incarnation, then we cannot say that in the potentiality they are without value as images. And this in no way prejudices how we decide the way these images are to be recognizes as similia of God.’ (The Theology of Karl Barth, p.165). Compare Barth: ‘In order for it to be we who know God, it is necessary that we depict God with our images, concepts and words and not simply as something utterly foreign and other.’ (Church Dogmatics 3, 252).
The essence of creation, then, is its receptivity to the Incarnation and to revelation – and, moreover, this is not an inherent property of nature, but is a ‘presupposition’ written into the fabric of creation by the decree of its creator.
More recently, the eastern orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, in his treatment of the analogia entis in The Beauty of the Infinite, suggests that what Barth was rejecting in the analogia entis was what he perceived as a form of natural theology. He is somewhat less gracious than von Balthasar (see here, though, for an example of von Balthasar interacting with Barth in a more polemical spirit), turning the tables on Barth, claiming that Barth’s rejection reduces God to an absolute negation, leaving God and creation standing at opposite poles of a duality. Further, to reject the analogy of being is to reject the possibility of revelation to being situated in creation: it is to deny that creation is itself an act of grace.
Hart also checks von Balthasar’s language about Covenant being the ground of creation: God, he says, is the being of all things, ‘not as the infinite “naught” against which all things are set off (for this is still dialectical and so finite), but as the infinite plenitude of the transcendent act in which all determinacy participates.’
Hart understands the analogy of being as ‘the analogization of being in the difference between God and his creation.’ (The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 241):
‘Being, simply said, cannot be reduced to beings or negated by them; it plays peacefully in the expressive iridescence of its welcoming light, in the intricate weaving of the transcendentals, even in the transcendental moments of “this” and “not this,” which speak of God’s simple, triune infinity: his coincidence within himself of determinacy (“I am that I am,” “Thou art my beloved son”) and “no-thing-ness” (“Wherefore he is all,” “In him we live, and move, and have our being”). And the analogy, most importantly, should be seen as an affirmation of God as Trinity: as the source of all being, and yet the living God of creation, redemption, and deathless love; it is the metaphysical expression of the realization that the very difference of creatures from God – their integrity as the beings they are, their ontological “freedom” – is a manifestation of how God is one God.’
Thus the analogy maintains that being in its essence always already differs, and refuses to posit God as absolute substance or absolute absence. It refuses to reduce God to the Supreme Being or highest principle.
(Martin Heidegger famously wrote, ‘The ultimate blow against God [by Nietzsche]… consists in the fact that God, the first of beings, is degraded to the highest value. The heaviest blow against God is not that God is held to be unknowable, not that God’s existence is demonstrated to be unprovable, but rather that the god held to be real is elevated to the highest value. For this blow comes precisely not from those who are standing about, who do not believe in God, but from the believers and their theologians…’)
A couple of good posts on Hart’s position are here and here. The latter contains notes from an exchange between Hart and George Hunsinger in a session on The Beauty of the Infinite, which deal somewhat with the question of whether the analogia entis proposes a mediator between God and man other than Christ.
[...] imply that being in its essence always already differs (I’ve written a bit more about this here). But again, my impression is that Milbank is interested in ontology only insofar as it informs [...]
Hi Nathan.
Can I just ask – in my relative ignorance – if the analogia entis is, in a nutshell, what Luther would designate ‘Theologia Gloriae’ whilst Barth’s position would correspond more squarely with his ‘Theologia Crucis?’
It occurs to me – and I could be wrong, of course – that this obviously has a bearing on divine impassibility. I think I’m correct in stating that the passibilist Vs. impassibilist debate can be divided fairly consistently along Protestant (passibilist) and Catholic/Orthodox (impassibilist) lines (with the main exceptions of Von Balthasar’s ‘Holy Saturday’, Hallman’s ‘Descent’, Sarot’s ‘Impassibility and Corporeality’, and the Orthodox Sergius Bulgakov’s work). I should think this is due, in no small part, to the different metaphysic of Scholastic Vs. Kantian/Hegelian?
Am I anywhere near accurate, and what role, if any, do you think the concept of the Univocity of Being has played in the development of the ‘new orthodoxy’ of passibilism?
Hope this isn’t too far off-topic.
Sorry for my ignorance.
All the best,
D.
Daz –
Wow, these are great questions; I hadn’t thought of the second two at all and had only given limited thought to the first.
It seems to me that Hart is right in saying that the analogy of being rejected by Barth was a form of natural theology; my sense is that we could just as well say that it was a form of theologia gloriae. Barth was clearly keen to identify Christ as the sole mediator between God and man, and would clearly have gone further and said that it must be Christ as he is revealed, in particular Christ crucified. So I think you’re absolutely right to spot an affinity between Barth’s preference for the analogy of faith and Luther’s Theology of the Cross.
On the other two I’m less certain. I know less about the passibilist debate (although I will say that I found Wynandy’s book on the subject both illuminating and that, as a protestant myself, I nevertheless resonated with much of what he said – not that I can be taken as representative of all Protestant thought). It’s not entirely clear to me how the question of the analogy of being as debated by Barth and von Balthasar bears on this question, although I can see how Hart’s discussion (which, it must be said, takes up only a few pages of his book) and McCormack’s later reading of Barth (presented in his essay Grace and Being, which argues that in a coherent reading of Barth the doctrine of election must logically precede the doctrine of the trinity) are more relevant. I have to admit I don’t know what Hart has to say about divine impassibility, but it seems to me that in asserting that in its essence being always already differs, he provides himself with a (very nonclassical) way of aligning himself with other Orthodox theologians in saying that God does not suffer or change.
That’s about all I can say at the moment. I’ll be reading Barth’s commentary on Romans soon, so may have more to say on this topic as related to him shortly. If anyone else has more to say about these topics, it would be great to hear.