Thomas Sutton’s Doctrine of Analogy: Revisiting a Continuator of Thomas Aquinas

Introduction

Thomas Sutton (1250–1315) has been called the “Prince of the primitive Thomists.”¹ A contemporary of John Duns Scotus at Oxford in the first decade of the fourteenth century, Sutton was among the first participants in Thomist-Scotist dialogue, as he and Scotus responded to each other’s oral and written teachings.² Twentieth-century scholarship on Sutton’s doctrine of analogous naming was initiated in 1959 by Joseph Przezdziecki,³ whose article served as a point of reference for Bernard Montagnes’s 1963 study of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy and for the 1990s and 2000s articles by E. J. Ashworth and Mark Henninger. Each of these works draws principally or exclusively from Thomas Sutton’s Quaestiones ordinariae 32 and 33.⁴ Przezdziecki, Ashworth, and most of all Henninger provide excellent summaries of significant portions of Quaestiones ordinariae 32 and 33. In the first part of this paper, I relate salient portions of Sutton’s doctrine and an interpretation controversy between Ashworth and Henninger. In the second part, I draw attention to an untreated but important aspect of Sutton’s doctrine of analogy: how demonstration proceeds through analogous terms. I use Sutton’s arguments in this context to support Henninger’s interpretation against Ashworth’s and then to go beyond Henninger by proposing a resolution to the apparent contradiction in Sutton’s position that Ashworth’s interpretation attempts to address. I draw the further but related conclusion that Montagnes was closer to the mark than Ashworth credits him when Montagnes describes Sutton as a precusor to Cajetan in his use of analogy of proportionality.⁵

Thomas Sutton on Analogy, Its Modes, and Its Application Across the Categories and to God and Creatures

Joseph J. Przezdziecki—Introducing Thomas Sutton and His doctrine of Analogy

Przezdziecki summarizes the main arguments that Sutton presented in the objections section of Quaestiones ordinariae 32 for the univocal predication of a conceptus communis of “being” and other names across the categories and of God and creatures.⁶ Rather than addressing Sutton’s responses to particular objections, Przezdziecki turns his attention to Sutton’s respondeo, which begins with Sutton’s account of why some were led to believe, mistakenly, that there is a common signification of “being” across the categories and of God and things. According to Sutton, this view arises from the similarity “being” bears toward a genus, and it is dispelled by showing how “being” lacks the commonality that characterizes a genus term. Sutton employs the standard argument that “being” is not a genus found in chapter 25 of part I of Aquinas’s Summa contra gentiles, among other places. The concept of a genus cannot be included in the concept of its difference. But the concept of “being” is included in every concept. Hence the concept of “being” cannot be divided by a difference as any generic concept can.⁷ Furthermore, “being” cannot be a species, difference, property, or accident because it is more general than any species and it is predicated in quid.⁸ Since “being” is not predicated in the manner of a genus, species, difference, property, or accident across the categories or of God and things, “being” is not signified univocally of these and it has no conceptus communis.⁹

The name “being” is not said purely equivocally in these cases, however, but analogously. Sutton writes that “being” is predicated primarily of substance, and of accidents only by their relation to substance.¹⁰ Regarding “being” said of God and creatures, he adds that, since God is being essentially and others are being by participation, there is an even greater distance between creaturely being and divine being than there is between accidental being and substantial being. Since there is not univocity in the case of “being” said of substance and accident, even less could there be univocity in the case of God and creatures.¹¹

The salient point so far is that, according to Sutton, there can be no univocal signification where there is no common concept. There is no common concept where a...