Aquinas and Analogy

1. Where Cajetan Went Wrong

ONE WHERE CAJETAN WENT WRONG When Thomas de Vio completed his short work De nominum analogia on September I, 1498, in the Dominican convent of St. Apollinaris in Padua, he had put the interpretation of what St. Thomas has to say about analogous names onto a path it still travels today. At twenty-nine years of age Cajetan was already an intellectual power. He was and is one of the great glories of the Thomistic school and it was, pace Gilson, entirely fitting that his commentary on the Summa theologiae should be printed along with that work in the Leonine Edition. Cajetan was to become master general of the Dominican Order as well as a cardinal, and he was chosen for the extremely delicate task of going north to reason with Martin Luther. If he failed to reconcile the fiery Augustinian friar with the Church, Cajetan was himself influenced by the newer approaches to Scripture. Indeed, he devoted the last years of his life to the composition of literal commentaries on the Bible, invoking the aid of the Jewish scholars of Rome. But I have come to criticize Cajetan, not to praise him. My criticism is devoted exclusively to his presentation of St. Thomas's doctrine of the analogy of names. My criticism concentrates on, but is 3 4 PART ONE: PROLEGOMENA not confined to, the De nominum analogia,l whose structure depends on what Cajetan calls types or kinds of analogous name. It is essential to see that Cajetan is fundamentally mistaken in speaking of kinds of analogous name as he does. The distinction of analogous names into types, which we find in his little work, reposes on a fallacy. That is, Cajetan's influential threefold (or fourfold) division of analogous names is based on a mistake that vitiates what he has to say on analogous names in the opusculum and later. De Nominum Analogia After a brief preliminary remark in which he tells us of the need and importance of a correct understanding of analogous names, Cajetan notes that analogia is borrowed from the Greeks and can be rendered in Latin as proportio or proportionalitas. The term has come to be used in ways remote from its origin, however, a development that causes great confusion; to remedy this problem, Cajetan suggests that we approach the matter by first setting down a threefold division that proceeds from what is less properly to what is really and truly analogy. The division is: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality. Ad tres ergo modos analogiae omnia analoga reducuntur: scilicet'ad analogiam inaequalitatis, et analogiam attributionis, et analogiam proportionalitatis . Quamvis secundum veram vocabuli proprietatem et usum I. Thomas De Vio Cardinalis Caietanus, Scripta Philosophica. De Nominum Analogia. De Conceptu Entis, ed. P. N. Zammit, O.P., and P. H. Hering, O.P. (Rome: Angelicum, I952). The literature on analogy in St. Thomas is vast. Other than my own previous work, The Logic ofAnalogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I96I), and Studies in Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I968), I shall mention only Bernard Montagnes, O.P., La doctrine de l'analogie de l'etre d'apres saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris-Louvain: Nauwelaerts, I963); Giuseppe Casetta, ed., Origini e Sviluppi dell'Analogia da Parmenide a S. Tommaso (Firenze: Edizioni Vallombrosa , I987); Metafore dell'invisibile: Ricerche sull'analogia, Contributi al XXXIII Convegno del Centro di Studi filosofici di Gallarate (Brescia: Morcelliana, I983); Franco Riva, L'analogia metaphorica: Una questione logico-metafisica nel tomismo (Milano: Pubblicazioni dell Universita Cattolica, I989); and Bruno Pinchard, Metaphysique et Semantique: Autour de Ca;etan, Etude et Traduction du 'De Nominum Analogia' (Paris: Vrin, I987). In the present essay, I shall not be taking into account the secondary literature, a decision that is quantitative rather than qualitative. WHERE CAJETAN WENT WRONG 5 Aristotelis, ultimus modus tantum analogiam constituat, primus autem alienus ab analogia omnino sit. (n. 3) All analogous [terms] are reduced to three kinds of analogy: that is, to analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality . Nonetheless according to the true and correct sense of the term and Aristotle's use only the last kind constitutes analogy and the first is completely foreign to analogy. This division is based on a text taken from St. Thomas's commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard where the question at issue is: Are all things true by uncreated truth? When creatures are said to be true, are they being referred to the Truth God is...