Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments I should particularly like to thank John F. Boyle from the University of St. Thomas for the benefit of his comments and criticisms , for his unfailing jeweler’s eye with respect to speculative inquiry , and most of all for his friendship: who could ask for a more condignly Thomistic inspiration than this? The present work also is indebted to Reinhard Huetter of Duke University, for whose judicious encouragement and insight I am grateful. Likewise, am I indebted to a man with whom I disagree, in the course of the very manuscript below, regarding the nature of analogy: our late and beloved Ralph McInerny. He encouraged me to pursue this manuscript and its publication, having seen an early version, and while clearly differing with me regarding the question, strongly sympathized with my criticisms of the overemphasis on causal relation and participation as tantamount to the analogy of being. His extraordinary gift for encouraging serious engagement, and his exemplary joy and wisdom, will be missed wherever minds gather to viii Analogia Entis pursue the scientia sought and developed by Aquinas (no one was ever less snookered by the attempted reduction of speculative life to historicist text-­ juggling and word searches than he). Of course, I would be lacking were I not also to mention here the friendship and counsel of Fr. Romanus Cessario, OP, whose appreciation of this work has been the strongest of encouragements; as likewise, Russell Hittinger, who—although remote by dint of simple necessity from the composition of this work—as teacher and friend inspires my efforts. Here I would also like to thank the late Fr. Jan Walgrave , OP, my old mentor from Louvain, with whom during my stay in Belgium I had the grace of weekly conversations of a strictly speculative nature. I should very much like to know what he would make of the ensuing analysis, which our conversations about analogy have in part engendered. But far beyond this, I mention him here because I am grateful for his pronounced encouragement to engage not in secondhand philosophy and theology, but in theology and philosophy proper; and because of the luminosity of his person and his witness as a profound and contemplative Dominican theologian and philosopher. I owe heartfelt thanks to my generous colleagues from Ave Maria University, whose intellectual and spiritual engagement and example are a constant invitation and stimulus to reflection, research , and richer converse with the Catholic intellectual tradition. I am grateful in particular to Michael Waldstein, Gregory Vall, and Joseph Trabbic for their intelligent appreciation and encouragement of my work. Last, I mention what is also in principle first: the understanding of my family, which at times is of course for them more like the cloud of unknowing (what Dad is doing in the study is important: but what is he doing in there and how much longer will it take?). Writing imposes sacrifices on both authors and their families. Because this work seeks to contribute to the absolutely necessary recrudesence of metaphysics within theological contemplation, and so to serve the wider needs of the Church, one hopes that it—at least in intention, if not in execution—is worthy of the sacrifices that enabled it to be composed. I am grateful to my wife, Anna Acknowledgments ix Maria Long, and to our seven children, who not only enabled this to be written through their sacrifices, but who manifest for me anew, each day, the inscape of the analogia entis, the likeness of diverse rationes of act, as manifest in their diverse characters, gifts, individual predilections, strengths, and weaknesses—for being is not only generically and specifically, but also individually, diversified and analogous. Perhaps a Catholic husband and father is optimally situated to see that the actual being of creatures is prior to their necessary relatedness to God and others, even though the latter is pari passu with the former. Family life teaches the humility, the joy, the suffering, and the ecstasis of being in a unique manner. We do not push this ladder aside after climbing it, as our individually diverse being endures even in beatific vision; and as St. Teresa of Avila reminds us, no matter how sublimely our contemplation may rise, it never transcends the humanity of Christ. ...