Cracking Open the Nutshell

Brendan has raised some thought-provoking questions in response to my attempt to present- in a nutshell- what's at stake in the analogia entis. With a teaching this complex, doesn't any bare-bones presentation risk giving birth to a legion of mistaken reductions; allowing the "monsters of concision" to feed on precisely what is left unsaid, or perhaps on what is said without adequate explanation?

In truth, I think the issue of the analogia entis cannot be presented in a nutshell without being in danger of countless reductive conclusions. In my opinion this is the case because 1) analogy is one of the most complex and most fundamental around; and 2) because the univocal mind always has a certain seductive power over us, such that seeing things through a univocal lens will always be a strong temptation. In light of all this, it seems far more likely that any simple explanation of the issue demands a certain back-and-forth and supplementation, progressively sharpening our understanding of it with a certain dialectic. Without this, the way we use language of being will always be heard improperly, and thus nothing will really be said. It's something like a theoretical pendulum, always in need of a push back in the other direction until it finally balances out. In short, it demands that the nutshell be cracked open.

As it turns out, the discussion of whether being is adequate to God or to creatures (in the way I laid it out) presupposes quite a bit about how the terms under discussion are being conceived. Lacking these presuppositions, the dichotomy between God and creatures (as it were, fighting over being) tends to cloud the fact that here we should not, and, I think, ultimately cannot, use the language of being as if we had a definition of it. In other words, it clouds the fact that being is intrinsically analogical (really and notionally).

We might approach the issue, as so many thinkers have, by assuming that being is primarily what marks the difference between us and God: being is proper to God and therefore it cannot be proper to us (resulting in the devaluing of our finite substantiality); or being is proper to us and therefore God must be thought "without" being (ultimately threatening to obscure the relationship between God and creation). Scylla meets Charybdis, and both sides attempt to uphold their primary emphases while figuring ways around their potential flaws. However, the more foundational problem is that such a dichotomy already concedes ground to a univocal vision of being: as if here "being" were functioning like a universally common concept, a "quasi-essence," a grand category, a pure "quality" or the "greatest common denominator" of things, etc. The dynamics of being here are those of genus.

However, a fundamental aspect of metaphysics for Aristotle and Aquinas is the denial that being is a genus. Simply put, differentiating things that fall under the same genus requires the addition of a principle that is external to the genus (specific difference). But here we run into a metaphysical wall: the notion of "extrinsic principle" does not adequately map onto the notion of being, precisely because the only "thing" that can be extrinsic to being is nothing. But, as is obvious, "nothing" can't function as a separate, differentiating principle, thrown into the mix with being (because IT'S NOTHING!). Therefore the kind of differences relevant to the discussion of ontology cannot be thought "outside of" the notion of being, but must rather be intrinsic to it; they must be differences OF being. The unity of being is not like that of an abstract, univocal genus, but is inherently a unity-in-difference.

The denial that being is a genus, and the realization that it is intrinsically plurivocal, completely reorients how we use our ontological language. In this context, with this understanding of being, we can say things like "being is proper to both God and creatures," without presuming that we are talking about some quality they both share, or some generic category they are both lumped under (onto-theology). What our vision implies is not that univocity leads to one speaking too much about the difference between God and creatures; rather, it fails entirely to speak it at all. With a generic conception, if we attribute being to God, any space between equality and nothing disappears, and thus all difference is ultimately conceived nihilistically. Vice-versa, if man claims being as his domain, God can only be an abyss of nothing, and any space of relation to Him vanishes: we then have a kind of nihilistic god-talk, and seemingly Nietzsche's vindication.

Further, analogy is not the attempt to overcome difference, but precisely to speak that difference at all. Analogy is the only real form that the difference takes. Being is not generic, but transgeneric. And when we speak about transgeneric realities (also good, wisdom, life, etc.) as "common" to both God and creatures, an idolatrous equation is actually not implied in our utterance. This means that when we speak about God as the "only reality that fills-out what we mean by 'being'," we are not implicitly denying the being of creatures. In this context, the ways of expressing the difference between God and creatures (uncreated and created, pure act and limited act, simple and composite, Esse Ipsum Subsistens and entia, etc.) really do all the work that so many other thinkers want the language of “being” and “non-being” to do. In fact, they do so far more adequately by avoiding the extremes of obscuring the relationship between God and creatures.

Because of being's transgeneric, non-univocal character, statements like "God has a monopoly on being" don't make a whole lot of sense; being is not the kind of thing one could have a monopoly on (given the fact that there are more than one thing in the world). But if we do say such a thing in this metaphysical context, we are actually pointing toward that which most fully embodies being. Within analogy, claims of monopoly refer to the primal instance, the point of "focal meaning" which provides the intrinsic unity that holds between all the various instances of things that are. For instance, in the order of action, substance is more adequately called "being" than accident is, because accident only "is" derivatively of substance. Likewise, in the order of being (esse), the most adequate is that which exists through itself alone, in an entirely unlimited, unqualified manner: that which just....plain....IS...(God). Composite beings (creatures, by definition) only exist derivatively, dependent upon that which IS unconditionally. Thus the unity subsisting between all the different things that we call "being" derives from the fact that all are ordered to the most fundamental and primary "instance" of being: God. And only in this way, does my former talk about God as the only one "worthy" to be called "Being" have any meaning.

That is a little more of what I think is at stake in the analogy of being....in (or out) of a nutshell.

Pax Christi,