Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith

Chapter Four: The Analogy of Being and the Transcendence and Analogical Intelligibility of the Act of Faith

97 Chapter Four The Analogy of Being and the Transcendence and Analogical Intelligibility of the Act of Faith If the act of faith and that which is materially comprised in it is to be intelligible, then true affirmative propositions must be formable about God. Likewise, if these propositions are to be true of God, then they must signify God as incomprehended and as exceeding the very terms of the true propositions. Nowhere are these considerations so vital as in regard to the act of faith. In the act of faith we hold fast to God the First Truth, revealing and revealed. But this cannot be to reduce God to merely and reductively human categories, nor can it be wholly vacuous of intelligible content. It would seem, then, that if intelligible content is considered as reductively or purely human, such that nothing can be known or affirmed of God, then the act of faith will be at best a limit concept with 98 Analogia Entis regard to the world, and a limit concept that can never be proposed such that its essential conditions could be even knowably possible. In short, the putative unintelligibility of the very content and object of the act of faith will have placed man in a circumstance in which agnosticism presents itself as the final cause of wisdom. The problem here is not merely that of the praeambula fidei, although it essentially involves the rationality of belief in God. Rather, the problem is the fundamental problem of Christian discourse about God. The via negativa cannot be the sum of the story because negations presuppose prior affirmations. If no true and nonreductive affirmations can be made about God—­ affirmations that do not reduce God to human categories and so constitute speech not about God but about a conceptual idol—then theism and the very idea of divine revelation become pure leaps of faith, utterly nonrational acts founded upon and foundable upon nothing that could even remotely justify them.1 It is precisely here that the measured distinctions of Aquinas regarding analogy—and especially those he offered early in his ­ career that indicate why all analogy of proportion is only improperly and by transferrence so called—are necessary. It is true that there is no real proportion of God to man, because no finite determinate measure can be assigned to the excess of divine over created perfection. Yet there is a real proportion of creature to God such that the creature is an effect of God. God is the cause of finite being, although—­ unlike other causes—there is absolutely no necessity for this causation, because God is the end absolutely speaking and so is ordered neces­ sarily to no end ab extra, including that of the being of creatures. That which accounts for causality—superabundance of being—by its absoluteness in this case also provides the reason why no causing need occur. (The cause is already infinitely complete without causing, and so any causing is purely adventitious and unnecessary to God.) All the language of dependence of effect to cause, and of one to another, presupposes this real relation of the creature to God. Yet God is not really related to the creature: whether the creature exists or does not exist, nothing is altered in the supreme divine perfection . Hence the real relation of dependence of the creature upon The Analogy of Being and the Act of Faith 99 God falls short of any proper proportion because it places God in no similar real relation to the creature. How then are we to affirm God as cause without simultaneously implying that this causality is in some determinate proportion to the creature, save through the analogy of proper proportionality? One can say that esse:creature as esse:God insofar as in each case esse is act, and in each case esse is act proportionate to the subject— proportionate to the finite subject contracted by potency, and proportionate to the infinite subject uncontracted by potency. But are we not now back to mere predication, about which—as Klubertanz admitted—it is always true to say that predicative analogy is analogy of proper proportionality? Granted that in God there is no real distinction between subject and esse, subject and esse are yet indeed rightly said of God, and God is both subject and esse, so that while the distinction betwixt them is merely conceptual, the absolute transcendence in pure...