Proportionality and Divine Naming: Did St. Thomas Change His Mind about Analogy?

531 The Thomist 77 (2013): 531-58 PROPORTIONALITY AND DIVINE NAMING: DID ST. THOMAS CHANGE HIS MIND ABOUT ANALOGY? JOSHUA P. HOCHSCHILD Mount St. Mary’s University Emmitsburg, Maryland HERE IS A QUASI-“GENRE” of passages in which Aquinas distinguishes varieties of analogy in a theological context. In several works across his career, he introduces analogy as the crucial part of an answer to a question about how to understand the relationship between creatures and God. The elaborations of analogy in these various passages share at least three common features: (1) they locate analogy between univocation and equivocation; (2) they classify at least two, and sometimes more, different kinds of analogy, often with examples of each kind; and (3) they indicate that one of the kinds of analogy thus distinguished is the one most relevant to understanding divine naming.1 Six such passages which are often discussed are (in chronological order): I Sentences, d. 19, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1; I Sentences, d. 35, q. 1, a. 4 (in this case, no examples are given); De Veritate, q. 2, a. 11; De Potentia Dei, q. 7, a. 7; Summa Contra Gentiles I, c. 34; and Summa Theologiae I, q. 13, a. 5. Scholars today typically treat one text in this genre—one of the most detailed and apparently comprehensive passages on 1 Different commentators have explored individual texts with great care. To give just two examples: I Sent., d. 19, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1 is the main subject of Lawrence Dewan, “St. Thomas and Analogy: The Logician and the Metaphysician,” in idem, Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 81-95; De Potentia, q. 7, a. 7 is treated at length by Mark Jordan in “The Names of God and the Being of Names,” in Alfred Freddoso, ed., The Existence and Nature of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983). T 532 JOSHUA P. HOCHSCHILD analogy in all of Aquinas—as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative of Aquinas’s thought. The prevailing view is that question 2, article 11 of De Veritate represents an approach to analogy which Aquinas only temporarily entertained, and soon abandoned. As John Wippel describes this view in his magisterial treatment of Aquinas’s metaphysics: “Most more recent scholars regard this particular discussion of Thomas as uncharacteristic of his earlier and later thinking on analogical predication of the divine names, and hence as not reflecting his definitive position.”2 It is intriguing to find it so widely accepted that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy—indeed that he changed it twice, soon before and soon after writing one of his most extensive elaborations of a classification of analogy. In this paper I will discuss Aquinas’s classification of analogy in De Veritate, and summarize the reasons that recent scholars have given for regarding this classification as atypical. While the text does appeal to the notion of “proportionality” in a way that the other texts do not, we will see that the other texts are diverse enough that De Veritate hardly seems to deserve to be singled out. Then, by offering some philosophical clarifications about the notion of proportionality, I will show that the teaching of De Veritate is, in principle, philosophically consistent with Aquinas’s teachings on analogy in other places, and further that there are good theological and philosophical reasons why Aquinas might emphasize different things in this passage than he might in other passages that are otherwise similar. The hypothesis that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy turns out to be unnecessary once we take sufficient account of his attention to dialectical context. 2 John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 553. As Wippel’s footnotes make clear, the modern consensus has roots in the work of Klubertanz, Lyttkens, and especially Montagnes, the last to be discussed below. PROPORTIONALITY AND DIVINE NAMING 533 I. DE VERITATE, Q. 2, A. 11 AND ITS COUSINS In the Disputed Questions on Truth, question 2, article 11, Aquinas raises the question of how a predicate, in this case “knowledge” (scientia), can apply both to...