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  • Thoughts on Analogy and Relation
  • Steven A. Long

Introduction

The present paper engages the relation between two teachings: the doctrine that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the doctrine of the divine simplicity—and the doctrine of analogy.1 It is principally owing to my exchanges with Fr. W. Norris Clarke and David Schindler Sr.,2 and with Kenneth Schmitz (and, again, Fr. Clarke)3 that I have become increasingly aware that certain judgments superordinating relation to being occur in one principal early form in Thomistic writers of the nineteen sixties and seventies, only subsequently to be developed in the thought of the theologians and philosophers whom one might refer to as forming, in North America, the Communio School, or if one likes, “Communio Thomists.” Those early discussions regarding receptivity and relation in creatures and God pivoted around the understanding of the nature and limitation of the analogy from creatures to God. [End Page 73]

Fr. Clarke’s thought on analogy was, as he indicated in his writing (this will be shown below), influenced by the preponderant shift toward the view that analogy is principally a doctrine of the causal relation of participation. Further, the tenability of this view of analogy has very strong implications for one’s understanding of the truth of the doctrine that God has no real relation with creatures; a doctrine with some of whose expressions Fr. Clarke took exception, but which I do not know he ever intended in principle to reject. The speculative stress laid upon participation and relation by the North American Communio Thomists thus in a sense constitute the further development of a certain line of analysis undertaken by Thomists in the 1960s who were struggling with St. Thomas’s teachings regarding the analogy of being, and the analogy of creatures to God.

In this essay, I will first briefly describe the difficulty in understanding Fr. Clarke’s position on the teaching that God has no real relation to the creature, while also pointing to his clear approbation of the teaching that the analogy of being is principally one of causal participation rather than of proper proportionality. Secondly, I will explain why the doctrine that God has no real relation to the creature absolutely necessitates that the analogy of being be principally an analogy of proper proportionality, and only secondarily an analogy of causal relation understood as always “backwards translatable” into the analogy of proper proportionality (what Thomas refers to as an analogy of “transferred proportion” which is that of actual proportionality—cf. De veritate, q. 23, art. 7, ad 9). I will conclude by suggesting the importance of the nature and limits of our understanding of proportionate being for the analogy of creature to God.

I. Fr. Clarke, the Question of Real Relation, and the Analogy of Being

In regard to the divine simplicity, St. Thomas famously holds in ST I, q. 13, art. 7, and in ST III, q. 16, art. 6, ad 2, that God has no real relation to creatures, and that the relation of createdness is logical in God. Further, “nothing that exists in God can have any relation to that wherein it exists or of whom it is spoken, except the relation of identity; and this by reason of God’s supreme simplicity.” 4 Fr. Clarke grappled with this. Early on, he argued that although the real being of God could undergo no change, the [End Page 74] intentional being of God could.5 Yet this seems to introduce a real distinction between the absolute being of God and the “intentional” being. This view might be read as an attempt to retain the traditional teaching, while adverting to that which is temporally predicated of God because in understanding the creature to be really related to God we cannot to some extent avoid speaking as though—which is not the case—God is really related to creatures. In any case, this earlier position of Clarke’s may, if read apart from the traditional account, seem to render the intentional being of God an accident and so to make of God a composite being, which is impossible (and so it seems to me more plausible that...

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