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6. Analogy of Being in Trinitarian and Christological Keys
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6 Analogy of Being in Trinitarian and Christological Keys Participation turned out to play an important role in the analysis of the Ideal Metaphysic. Participation was found to require primary reference to the analogy of being; in fact, our analysis of the Ideal Metaphysic supports the conclusion that the analogy of being is the content of participation. Moving forward, the question now becomes how to understand the participation of creatures in the Creator within the realm of the Historical Metaphysic. To do this, we must ask about the relationship of the human to the trinitariandivine, to examine the way in which the image of God that creation is has been grounded in the image of the Father that Christ is. In this investigation, the nature of analogy at last comes into full expression as the non-identity of identity, or as the differentiation within unity that is characteristic of uncreated being, and that analogously marks the nature of created being. If therefore the divine love seeks to communicate the incommunicable (whether ontologically or epistemologically) in a non-trivial way to those beings outside the divine nature who are first and foremost called into existence to be objects and willing participants in this cosmic love, unmeasured love must find a measure according to which it will communicate.1 Much as Plutarch’s divinity sought the measure by which to relate ideas and matter,2 God will have to find (or be found to have) a medium of commensurability that can render the communication understandable. Unlike Plutarch, however, there is nothing outside the divinity not created by and in reference to the divinity. And since the maior dissimilitudo rules out that any creature could be a standard of commensurability with reference to God, we find that love has eternally had its own measure in itself. For the infinite, being unable to be compared to anything else, can only be measured and contextualized in terms of itself. This is the furthest moment of the maior dissimilitudo, the maxima dissimilitudo, if you will. And this furthest distance from the creature is the 139 realm of aseity, which is denied to creatures by their very name. Here indeed the doctrine of divine aseity finds its ultimate realization in two fundamental truths: (1) God is from Godself in such a way as to not need another, and (2) God is defined by Godself in such a way as to be incomparable. It is this latter sense which is the insuperable distance between God and creatures, and which prevents any effort at collapsing the one into the other.3 However, the fact of God’s incommensurability means that if God is to be “measured” at all (mensurabilis) it cannot be on the basis of a being like unto God (something co-mensurabilis), and therefore it can only be on the basis of God’s self that such a measuring be possible. It will be claimed that such measuring is not only possible, but has actually happened in the Son, who as intra-trinitarian measure is also the only conceivable measure for the self-communication of God to creatures. It is for this reason that the divine love, consubstantial and identical with the eternally self-subsisting divine being, infinite in quality and quantity, wellspring of God’s creative act and the first thought of God, beyond all comprehension or limit, the primal infinity, the original unmeasured and unfathomable quantity, took on flesh: to become the common ground for the communication of divinity to creation. Indeed, we must allow our understanding of the relationship between the human and the divine to be guided by the fact, developed in Anselm and Bonaventure, that the discussion is grounded in the divine desire for selfexpression outside of itself and for communication to the creature that stands outside of the divine. Put more simply, we must allow the analogy of being to be ruled by a fundamental top-down orientation in all its aspects. For if the analogy is read in the other direction, starting with the human suitability for relationship with the divine, we will in fact be re-interpreting von Balthasar in the sense of Schleiermacher rather than letting him speak for himself.4 I. From the One to the Many: Multiplication in the Ideal Metaphysic In spite of the promises made in the last chapter, we begin this portion of our journey with a return to the Ideal Metaphysic. This is necessary, because we have not quite followed it to...