Analogia...in a nutshell

The question of the analogia entis and analogical language in general is often posed in terms of how God could possibly be thought of as "being" (or "good" or "beautiful," or "wise," etc.). Really that's only part of the question. The real mind-blowing issue that metaphysics raises is: how can WE adequately be thought of as "being?"

"To be" is notionally pretty simple. But when we speak of the being of creatures, we describe things that do not exist by definition. That is, they do not exist simplicter; nowhere in the description of what they are will you find "exists." We are talking about things ontologically composite: because things come to be and pass away, and the world could have kept on going without them existing, what they are is something conceptually (and really) separate from that they are. "Being" said of creatures thus never means "simply to be," because coming to be and passing away is not what we really mean by "being." We always point to a limited instantiation. There is always a qualification.

But how does being come to have this limited sense? Why not imagine something that just plain IS? That fully makes-real what we mean by "to be?" In fact, we can't avoid addressing such a "thing." Because acknowledging that what the things around us are is different from the fact that they are, we implicitly acknowledge that they are created: they are caused to be. They must receive their existence from something outside of themselves (their essence). And after all of the connecting-of-the-dots that St. Thomas does in the first 11 questions of the Prima Pars, we conclude among other things that in order to be the kind of thing that causes the being of all things, this Cause cannot itself be ontologically composite. It cannot receive its existence from something else, for then we would have to look for something else that already was before. In other words, the way that this thing exists is simple.

That would be what all call God (if you hadn't guessed). The fact that He is the First Cause in the order of existence entails that He simply IS. His "whatness" and His "thatness" are identical, and He doesn't "have" Being, Goodness, Wisdom, etc. He just plain IS His Being, Goodness, Wisdom, etc.! God IS in the fullest sense of the word, he fills it out. As it turns out, He is the only "thing" worthy enough to be called being. When we say "He is," we can mean it; and when we say that other things "are," we are always speaking with a kind of inherent blasphemy.

So the question of religious language can be flipped around: acknowledging all this, we are forced to admit that God monopolizes the concept of "being;" so while we may have a word in itself completely adequate to God, we have seemingly evacuated language of the ability to talk about the things around us. Instead of negative theology, we are seemingly forced into a kind of "negative anthropology" (possibly even a "negative physics," and a "negative biology," etc.). How could any human discourse that claims "humans ARE tall/short/bipedal/good-looking/intelligent" or "trees ARE leafy/plants/tall/rooty/" really say anything meaningful if things actually "aren't?"

If we are to talk about our "being," then we do so only with an understanding of how inadequate our use of it is. Our composite nature means two things: 1) we receive our being as a gift, we are caused to exist by something outside of ourselves which simply IS; and 2) we do not exist simply but only in a very qualified, limited sense. These two statements express the same fact in different ways. As caused to be by that which fully IS, we get a limited share in being. The traditional way to say this is that we participate in being. For God to cause something to exist is inherently to give it a limited share, a taste, of what it is for Him to be. To put it technically, efficient causality implies exemplary causality.

It may be more accurate to say that we "have" our existence, rather than that we exist. But the point remains that in actuality, we are more downgrading a divine tongue when we speak ontologically about common things than we are imposing a foreign speech onto something that has nothing to do with "being" when we speak about God.

The primary meaning of the word "Being" is thus cashed out in God. But composite beings don't exist on their own, they only "have being" due to God causing it in them. That means that language of "being" can only be attributed to us in virtue of the causal relationship. There is the famous example of "healthy." We speak to the focal meaning of the word "healthy" when we use it of people (or animals): Joe is healthy because his mind and body are in a certain order. But when we describe medicine as "healthy," or say that our urine is "healthy looking," we aren't speaking in the same sense. We can only attribute "healthy" to things like medicine and urine in virtue of some relationship they have to the primary meaning: medicine causes health in a man, and urine can in cases be a sign of it.

Composite being in its very structure stands to simple Being as effect to Cause. Thus we can only speak of ourselves and other natural things as "being" because they bear an ontological relation to God.

That is one way to go about describing analogy....in a nutshell.

Pax Christi,