Analogy and the Meaningfulness of Language about God: A Reply to Kai Nielsen

ANALOGY AND THE MEANINGFULNESS OF LANGUAGE ABOUT GOD: A REPLY TO KAI NIELSEN IMUST SAY that I feel considerable sympathy with Professor Nielsen in his difficulties in making sense out of the Thomistic doctrine of analogy as a device for rendering language about God meaningful. In fact, for many years now I have been struck by the constantly recurring phenomenon of philosophers outside the Thomistic tradition trying to understand the doctrine of analogy as applied to God and being quite sincerely baffled in their attempts to see how it can do the job assigned to it. When this occurs so often, there is a good chance that the fault is not all on the one side. And, to be honest, I do not think Professor Nielsen gets adequate help from either Father Copleston or Professor Ross. He may not get adequate help from me either, but I would still like to try, since I consider the issue such an important one. The main reasons for the obscurity surrounding the Thomistic theory of analogy seem to be three. First, historically, St. Thomas himself, ordinarily such a systematic thinker, for some unexplained reason was never willing to pin himself down to any one consistent terminology or structural analysis of the logical form of analogy. He simply used it, very sensitively, but without any full dress explanation of what he was doing. When Thomistic commentators after him have tried to pin down the theory more precisely and technically, they too often have fallen into the straight jacket of Cajetan's oversimplified and restrictive systematization, in which the structure of proper proportionality is understood as a four-term proportion , a structure that St. Thomas himself quietly abandons as not adequate by itself after his early work, De Veritate.1 1 For a summary of these developments, see David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), Chap. 6 61 62 W. NORRIS CLARKE Secondly, doctrinally speaking, Thomists tend too often to omit in their formal analyses of analogy the indispensable metaphysical underpinning that alone justifies the application of analogy when one of the terms is not known directly in itself. No purely logical or semantic analysis of the structure of analogous concepts can supply this extra-logical component. In addition, Thomistic commentators for the most part do not bring out clearly enough-if indeed they accept the point at all-the fact that analogy does not lie so much in any formal structure of concepts themselves as in the actual lived usage of meaningful analogous language, found only when the so-called analogous concepts are used in judgments.2 In the light of the above comments I would like to see if I can shed some light of my own on Professor Nielsen's difficulties, so that at least the authentic and essential points of disagreement may be brought more clearly into focus and allow more fruitful dialogue thereon than usually seems to be the case in this elusive question of analogy. Objections of Professor Nielsen The three most crucial objections of Professor Nielsen against the explanations of Copleston and Ross seems to me to be the following. (1) The first concerns the distinction made by Copleston between the " subjective meaning" of an analogous term, i. e., our understanding of the meaning as drawn from instances in our experience, which he admits is anthropomorphic, and the "objective meaning," i. e., the objective reality referred to by the concept as found in God and affirmed of him, even though we do not know just what this is like, but only point to it in the dark, so to speak, and for good reasons, since it is an infinitely higher mode beyond the direct grasp of our experience and concepts. But the on Aquinas, and G. Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Anafogy (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960). 2 Although I had come to this conclusion some time ago myself, I am deeply indebted to Fr. Burrell for his fine elucidation of this point, one of the main ones in his fine book cited in n. I. ANALOGICAL TALK OF GOD-AN Al!'FIRMATIVE REJOINDER 68 trouble here, as Professor Nielsen points out, is...