Thomas Aquinas and Analogy: A Textual Analysis

THOMAS AQUINAS AND ANALOGY: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS WHATEVER PARTICULAR claims or assertions a philosopher or philosophical tradition may wish to make, what is unqualifiedly affirmed in the very endeavor of philosophy is inward or mental experience; and " spoken words are the symbols of mental experience." 1 Speech and mental experience or understanding would seem to be inseparable. The philosopher's inquiry into the whole invariably leads, then, to an inquiry into language. By looking directly at whatever presents itself in our familiar world, at things and their properties, at human affairs and actions, we run the risk of being blinded, as do people who observe the sun during an eclipse if they do not look at its image on some watery surface.... To avoid being " blinded " Socrates thought he had to " take refuge in spoken words " . . . in exchanging questions and answers with himself and with others and in them search for the truth of things.2 Philosophers whose conceptions of human speech and understanding are as divergent as Heidegger's and Aristotle's still concur in the centrality of language for man. Aristotle defines man as a living being possessing speech, and Heidegger asserts that: To be a man is to speak . . . in his profound essence he is a speaker, the speaker. That is his distinction and at the same time his burden. It distinguishes him from stones, plants, animals, but also from gods.3 1 Aristotle, On Interpretation, I. 16"8, tr. E. M. Edghill, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). • Jacob Klein, "Aristotle, An Introduction," in Ancients and Modems, ed. Joseph Cropsey (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 56. 8 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 69. 230 THOMAS AQUINAS AND ANALOGY: A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS ~81 For Aristotle and Aquinas, to " take refuge in spoken words " is to take refuge in the power of human language to translate the language of the things themselves and thus to symbolize the mind's experience of the whole. This power of language is, in part, the power of analogous signification. Analogy, briefly, is the dilation of the focus of our meanings and words beyond their original concrete matrix. Without analogy, names would be but serial numbers stamped upon the objects of our experience and designating no more than the sequence in which we encountered them. Embedded so deeply in the fabric of man, analogy, it seems, is a" mystery" in the sense of an inexhaustible source of concrete problems. This is to say that analogy itself is analogous, i. e., subject to a variety of formulations all of which bear upon the mysterious issue involved, none of which, however, fully embody it. Our discussion, then, in focusing upon the Thomistic doctrine of analogy, necessarily lays no claim to an explanation of analogy as such but rather seeks only an accurate explication of but one traditional (i.e., the Thomistic) formulation of the problem, or " mystery " as we have defined it, of analogy. The Thomistic doctrine of analogy has been handed across the centuries nestled for the most part in the largely unquestioned categories of Thomas's commentator, Cardinal Cajetan, Thomas De Vio (1468-1584). Recently, however, the accuracy and authority of Cajetan's interpretation of Thomas on this point have been as widely disputed as they were once accepted. Therefore it seems that we must initiate our discussion either by validating the position of Cajetan or by prying the Thomistic doctrine free from a regrettable distortion of long standing. In either case we must see what it is that Cajetan maintains Thomas to be saying. Cajetan constructs his interpretation of St. Thomas around an early text in the Commentary· on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1254-56), which text reads as follows: Something is predicated analogously in three ways. First, it may be predicated according to intention alone and not according to its being (secundum intentionem tantum, et non secundum esse). ROBERT E. MEAGHER This happens when one intention is referred to several things according to a priority and posteriority, and yet this single intention really exists only in one thing. Thus, the intention of health is referred to animal, urine, and...