Aquinas and Analogy by Ralph McInerny (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AquinasandAnalogy. By RALPH MCINERNY. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp. x + 169. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 08132 -0848-3. On 1 September 1498, Dominican friar Thomas Cajetan de Vio completed his De nominum analogia at the convent of Saint Apollinaris in Padua and set in motion a tradition of interpretation that would last into our century. Cajetan's doctrine of analogy and his interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's theory of analogy reigned supreme in the minds of most disciples of Aquinas from the latter third of the nineteenth century until the middle of our own. By the 1960s, however, Cajetan's hold on analogy had begun to be loosened by some detailed historical and textual studies demonstrating that he had misinterpreted Aquinas. Ralph Mcinerny played a crucial role in contesting the Cajetanian tradition, especially in Logic of Analogy (1961) and Studies in Analogy (1968). For some forty years the word has gone out that Cajetan was wrong, and that word has been heeded by many. Nevertheless, Mcinerny believes that much continues to be said about analogy in Aquinas that remains enthralled with Cajetan's misguided interpretation, and so he has rewritten and updated his earlier works in Aquinas and Analogy. The result is a more compact, cohesively arranged and streamlined book shorn of minor internecine Thomist debates and outfitted with newer titles from the secondary literature. The book is a fresh treatment in its structure and organization, and is the better for it, but remains fully concordant with the central theses of Mclnerny's earlier works. Aquinas and Analogy argues for one main thesis and two subsidiary theses. The main thesis affirms that Cajetan was fundamentally wrong about Aquinas on analogy because he unwarrantably turned the latter's purely logical theory into a metaphysical doctrine. One subsidiary thesis states that Aristotle never used the Greek term analogia to refer to what Aquinas calls analogous names, and the other asserts that Aquinas never used the Latin term analogia to refer to what has been called the metaphysical "analogy of being." According to Mcinerny, Cajetan went astray and dreamt up his famous threefold division of analogy (inequality, attribution, and proper proportionality ) because he shackled the meaning of the Latin loan-word analogia with the fetters of its original Greek usage and committed the fallacy of the accident in his interpretation of a crucial text from Aquinas's commentary on the Lombard's Sentences. Not suspecting that analogia itself might be capable of an analogous extension of meaning, Cajetan read Thomas through exclusively Greek lenses which restricted the reference of analogia to mathematical 303 304 BOOK REVIEWS proportions, biological homologies, and other ontological relationships. Fitted with his Greek spectacles, Cajetan was primed to give the Sentences text his own metaphysical misreading. Even so, Cajetan would not have erred if he had been duly attentive to the original texts of Aristotle and Aquinas. Chapter 2 establishes the subsidiary thesis about Aristotle quite persuasively but also shows that, paradoxically, Aquinas's theory of analogous names, while sailing under the analogia ensign which Aristotle would never have flown in such a setting, nevertheless amounts to a repristination and refinement of the Aristotelian logical theory of pros hen equivocals, nonunivocal words that, in an intelligible and orderly fashion rather than haphazardly and by chance, are "said in many ways." Aquinas is also indebted to Aristotle for the two examples that always appear whenever Aquinas discusses analogous names: healthy and being. In his reading of the Sentences text, Cajetan trips himself up by committing the fallacy of the accident. In I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 2 (misprints on pp. 5, 6 and 13 replace 2 with 1), Aquinas asks whether all things are true by one uncreated truth. He answers that although there is one divine exemplary and creative truth by which all things are true, nevertheless there are also many intrinsic truths by which created things are called true formally. The first objection counters that there is only one uncreated truth by which all things are true: since both true and healthy are predicated analogically, and since in the latter case there is only one instance of genuine...