Analogical Synthesis: An Impossible Project?

In the effort of bringing together Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and theology, the doctrine of analogy has played a decisive role for centuries, at least in the Catholic tradition.¹ If we agree that both—philosophy and theology—have something to say about the ultimate reality of that we call God, it is crucial to formulate some rules for their respective languages. Analogy has been used to convey such rules. Yet, its importance has been much more far-reaching. The search for a via media between the univocal and the equivocal in language describing the relationship of man to God helped to avoid bringing Him down to the level of our understanding, on one hand, and placing Him absolutely beyond the reach of our intellect, on the other. Analogy assisted in this way by staying on the narrow path between various sorts of pantheistic deification of the world that deny God of His existence, on the one side, and attempts at an absolutization of God that would deprive the world of its autonomy, on the other. Or to put it in a positive way, analogy was a means of keeping the transcendence of God without divesting creation of its autonomous meaning.²

A philosopher should stop here. But for a theologian, the most important step remains. If the above description of the role of analogy is correct, the doctrine explaining how human words may help us to discover the created and human similarities to God without compromising His always greater dissimilarity must lead us to His last and definitive Word—Christ. It is in Christ, whose humanity became the tool of divinity, that the logic of analogy reaches its ultimate confirmation and completion.³ It is therefore no wonder that some theologians consider the teaching on analogy as one of the most important consequences of the tenets proclaimed solemnly at the Church Councils⁴ and that, for some of them, this doctrine has become the most pithy synthesis of the Catholic identity: a tenet upon which the Catholic understanding of God and the world stands or falls.⁵

Unfortunately, the last century was not so kind to such projects. Various kinds of scientism promoted univocal discourse as the only possible mode of reliable cognition. If there was some openness to other ways of acquiring knowledge (as in the work of Heidegger or Jaspers), analogy was rejected in favor of equivocation, purportedly to suitably safeguard the apophatic dimension of our approach to the ultimate reality, but in fact accommodating the latent agnosticism of contemporary culture. Finally, the fashion for deconstruction in the second half of the twentieth century did not privilege any synthetic attempts.

Yet, if we agree that the doctrine of analogy has (or even might have) its role to play according to the lines mentioned above in spite of all the difficulties, we should consider it as a theme of philosophical and theological research that cannot be abandoned or marginalized. In this paper, I want to assess the necessary conditions for such a consideration. At the beginning, I will present the classical doctrine on analogy as concisely as I can, taking into account the essential differences in its interpretation (first through third sections). I will focus on the classical doctrine, with Aquinas as the key point of reference because Thomas attempted to use analogy as the main tool in the discourse on the divine names.⁶ After this presentation, I will focus on a selection of contemporary criticisms (fourth section) in order to formulate the main desiderata concerning future research on analogy (fifth section).

What is Analogy About?

Analogy is a doctrine that emerged to express two separate although sometimes overlapping phenomena: (1) nongeneric likeness of things and (2) the neither univocal nor equivocal association in meaning. The example of the first may be the similarity we find between the feathers of a bird and the scales of a reptile. Without a doubt, there is something similar between them. But we have neither a word nor a concept to express it. To spell out this similarity, we need to describe their functions and...