The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia

Chapter One. Systematizing Aquinas?: A Paradigm in Crisis

— 17 Chapter One Systematizing Aquinas? A Paradigm in Crisis Cajetan’s theory of analogy has hardly been neglected by modern scholars. Its influence on all subsequent discussion of analogy has been widely felt and recognized, by both Cajetan’s defenders and his critics. As we will see in this chapter, however, debates about Cajetan’s theory of analogy have taken place within a framework of common assumptions—assumptions that, once made explicit, will allow us to suggest an alternative, more fruitful, interpretive approach. Cajetan’s Recent Interpreters Central to contemporary concerns is the significance of Cajetan’s classification and hierarchy of analogy: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality (in order from least to most proper). For one group of scholars in the past century, the task has been to argue that Cajetan’s threefold division and his preference of analogy of proportionality accord with Aquinas’s own thought. Especially during the first half of the century, several scholars followed and defended Cajetan’s theory of analogy as faithful to the teaching of Aquinas. To the extent that such scholars acknowledged novelty in Cajetan’s presentation, this was explained as the development of a tradition, naturally growing out of a systematization of Aquinas’s 18  — Cajetan’s Question unsystematic remarks about analogy. Thus, according to M.T.-L. Penido, Cajetan set out to “restore the aristotelico-thomistic theory” of analogy.1 Admitting that Thomas’s texts are not obviously consonant , Penido admired Cajetan for synthesizing apparently inconsistent teachings.2 Similarly, Aloys Goergen defended the harmony between Thomas and Cajetan. He argued that Cajetan developed, expounded, and systematized Aquinas’s views. The title of Goergen’s thesis summarizes the concern that occupied him and most other interpreters of Cajetan at this time: Cardinal Cajetan’s teaching on analogy and its relation to Thomas Aquinas.3 The case made by Penido and Goergen depended especially on two texts in Aquinas. In his commentary on the first book of Sentences , d. 19, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1, Aquinas says that “there are three ways in which something can be said according to analogy,” and he goes on to distinguish between things that are analogous (1) “according to intention only, and not according to being”; (2) “according to being and not according to intention”; and (3) “according to intention and according to being.”4 Cajetan indicates (at DNA §§6, 19, and 30) that his own threefold distinction parallels this threefold distinction in Aquinas’s I Sent. 19.5.2 ad 1. In another text—question 2, article 11 of the disputed questions De Veritate—Aquinas distinguishes between analogy according to an agreement of proportion and analogy according to an agreement of proportionality. In this text, Aquinas favors the agreement of proportionality as the most useful mode of analogy for theology. Cajetan cites this passage (at DNA §77) in support of the primacy of what he calls analogy of proportionality. For Penido and Goergen, Cajetan’s theory of analogy seemed to grow out of an assimilation of I Sent. 19.5.2 ad 1 and DV 2.11. It was natural for these interpreters to depend on these two passages in Aquinas to justify the Thomistic authenticity of the threefold division itself, and the priority of analogy of proportionality. Other scholars endorsed Cajetan’s teaching, especially the classification and hierarchy of modes of analogy, but without trying to demonstrate that this was also Aquinas’s own teaching. Without much argumentforitsconsonancewithAquinas,Garrigou-Lagrange,5 Maritain ,6 Phelan,7 Simon,8 and others promoted Cajetan’s classification Systematizing Aquinas? — 19 andhierarchyofmodesofanalogy.Likewise,theextensivediscussions of analogy by Anderson9 follow much of Cajetan’s teaching, articulating and defending the details of the theory without examining the textual or historical relations between Cajetan and Aquinas. It was thus consistent with this early twentieth-century consensus that De Nominum Analogia’s only previous English translators, Bushinski and Koren, presented the work as “the unsurpassed systematization of the Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of analogy” by “a faithful interpreter of St. Thomas” who “points out the self-consistency of St. Thomas.”10 But when Bushinski and Koren published these words in 1953, the tide of opinion was beginning to turn. Despite—or rather largely because of—the longstanding influence and status of Cajetan’s theory of analogy, a new wave of scholarship emerged that tried to separate Cajetan’s teachings from the teachings of Aquinas. By the middle...