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Bruno Cassarà 05.12. Fr. Brian Davies Aquinas’ Philosophy of God Analogy and Apophasis Bringing Pseudo-Dionysius to Bear on Thomas’ Doctrine of Analogy It is no secret that conservative Catholic circles routinely reference Aquinas’ theology for the purposes of apologetics. Yet the principles invoked are often simplistic reductions of the Angelic Doctor’s thought, more a “textbook Thomism” than Thomas himself. It can be argued that it is in large part because of the Catholic Church’s adoption and simplification of Thomas’ theology that his work has come to be considered excessively rationalistic and even legalistic, the ground of an airtight apology for an era in which Catholics feel they must justify themselves before a secular world. Thus Thomas is reduced to an apologist. On the side of Orthodox Christianity, too, Thomas is misrepresented, though this is more for confessional reasons than apologetical ones. The tropes of a rigid, purely Aristotelian, and excessively analytic Catholicism persist in the readings of Orthodox theologians the likes of John Meyendorff, Vladimir Lossky, and Christos Yannaras.^1 Crucial to this caricature is a narrative common in Orthodox theological circles, one that sees Thomas as the preeminent representation of the intellectual excesses of the West. He is portrayed as the progenitor of Catholic impersonalism and intellectualism, of an approach to Christianity that has lost sight of the more mystical foundations still treasured in Orthodoxy. Thus, Both sides of orthodox Christianity contribute to this distortion of Thomas. While a certain strand of Catholicism praises Thomas for his supposed excessive rationalism, Eastern 1 Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 45
theologians (Bulgakov in particular) criticize him for it. The latter accuse him of a grave methodological error arising from an excessive dependency on the thought of Aristotle: “The impersonal prime mover is Thomas’s real starting point. The Summa Theologica might well add a layer of dogmatics to the Aristotelian foundations but the whole remains conditioned by its philosophical presuppositions, resulting in woefully deficient account of God, the created world, and human freedom.”^2 A case in point for this portrayal of Aquinas is the frequent misreading of his doctrine of analogy, which is often reduced on both sides to a justification of (what the Orthodox see as an excessively) kataphatic theology. But this depiction misses the deeply apophatic side of Thomas, the side that draws on Pseudo-Dionysius and insists that we, as human beings, do not know who or what God is. In order to disentangle Thomas, at least in part, from these unfair renderings of his work, I will take up his doctrine of analogy and relate it to Pseudo-Dionysius’ primarily apophatic theology. A reading of Thomas’s analogy in relation to Dionysius^3 would be more productive in that it can illuminate at least two important features of Thomas' philosophy which often remain unconsidered. First, it would lay bear Thomas's indebtedness to the (Neo)platonic tradition and enrich our understanding of Thomas beyond the caricature of a "Christian Aristotle." Second, it would bring to light Thomas’s radical apophasis, the highlighting of which will help lead his readers away from an erroneous understanding of the doctrine of analogy. Analogy for Thomas is not a "magic wand" by means of which human beings can come to know God’s attributes in 2 Plested, 193 3 Although it is well known that the Corpus Dionysiacum was not authored by the Dionysius converted by St. Paul after the homily in the Aeropagus, for the rest of the paper I will refer to the unidentified “Pseudo”-Dionysius as Dionysius for the sake of simplicity.
the basis not only for the Platonic and Neoplatonic identification of being as form… and the associated view that the sensible is less than completely real, but also for the insistence that the One or Good, the source of reality, is itself beyond being .”^5 For Plato and his heirs, sensible entities receive their being from a hidden and transcendent source beyond being. Thus, to ask the question of the origin of intelligibility, which is to say the origin of the being of beings, is to cross over the threshold of being into the realm of the unthinkable and inexpressible which, at the same time, makes possible all intellection and expression. It is because the source of being is unsayable that Plato himself resorts to analogy in order to speak of it, as in the well-known analogy of the sun in the Republic : just as the light of the sun makes possible all seeing while the sun itself is above any power of sight, so the form of the Good makes possible the truth of all things and knowledge of them even as it itself is not knowable and is above all truth. For this reason, Plato states that “it is right to think of the truth and knowledge as goods but wrong to think either of them are the Good.”^6 As has been shown, in Plato one already finds a primordial version of analogy and participation. It is from these principles that Plotinus constructs the vast cosmology of the Enneads. For Plotinus as for Plato, the idea of a transcendence beyond being is the direct consequence of the world’s intelligibility: if the being of the world is intelligible, then the source of being must be beyond being and thus beyond intelligibility. Perl makes this point convincingly: 5 Eric David Perl_. Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite_. Albany: State U of New York, 2007, 5 6 Plato, Trans. by John M. Cooper, and D. S. Hutchinson. Complete Works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub. 1997 (508e)
Since to be is to be intelligible and therefore finite, any being is dependent on its determination and is thus derivative. Hence, to be is to be derivative. No being, therefore, can be the first principle, and the first principle cannot be any being; for if it were any being it would be finite and dependent on its determination. Further, it would be one member within the complex totality of all beings, rather than the source of that totality.^7 There is a radical separation between entities and their ultimate source, one which cannot be overcome. For if to be is to be intelligible, then intelligibility as the foremost ontological attribute must be prior to the beings that participate in it. This means, on one hand, that intelligibility must itself be predicated upon a ground that is prior to and transcendent of being itself, and, conversely, that the ground of being can neither be a being nor being itself. The transcendent ground of being Plotinus calls the “One.” Like Plato before him, Plotinus finds that because the One is unthinkable and unnamable, the only way to speak of it is by means of negation. Thus, in the Enneads he writes, “Beyond being’ does not mean that it is a particular thing—for it makes no positive statement about it— and it does not say its name, but all it implies is that it is not this.”^8 Here Plotinus finds that to speak of the One in a remotely adequate manner is necessarily to deny of it any attribute. However, this necessary apophasis itself requires an inverse kataphasis in order to befit the One. In fact, negation alone is insufficient because it can fall prey to the illusion that the One is a distinct, though supra-ontological, something. For this reason, Perl states that “even such [negative] language still represents conceptual definition and intellectual apprehension: to say that the One is ‘not this’ is, inescapably, to think it as something else; to say that it is not multiple 7 Perl, 11 8 Enneads V.5.6.2-11 The translation of the Enneads used here and elsewhere is that of Arthur Hilary. Armstrong, Paul Henry, and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1966)
to point out that if Dionysius is so deeply indebted to the Plato and the Neoplatonists, then whatever influence Dionysius had on Thomas—at least when it comes to naming God— establishes a link between the Angelic Doctor and the Platonic tradition. Now, it is important to point out Thomas’ Platonic heritage not only to push back against an excessively Aristotelian depiction, but more importantly to show Thomas as the heir both of the Aristotelian and the Platonic traditions. Thomas’ conception of being brings together both Aristotelian and Platonic aspects, and this allows him to develop a doctrine of analogy that is superior to Dionysius’, at once more productive and more radical. II. Dionysius and Aquinas on Naming God The purpose of this section is twofold. One objective is to show just to what extent Thomas borrows from Dionysius to develop his doctrine of analogy. The second is to show that while Thomas shares Dionysius’ Neoplatonic concept of participation, Aristotle’s deep influence on the former’s metaphysics adds a second dimension to his doctrine of analogy, one that allows for a superior method of naming God. Dionysius’ apophatic theology is enormously indebted to the Neoplatonic tradition, as was mentioned in the previous section. However, it is not a mere recycling of this tradition for Christian theological purposes. Dionysius in fact never abandons himself to a purely apophatic theology, but always maintains that there are two valid ways of speaking of God. On one hand there is the Neoplatonic, apophatic approach discussed above. This approach he sees as “mystical and silent.”^11 On the other hand, there is the positive, kataphatic approach, which he 11 O’Rourke, 6.
calls “philosophical and manifest.”^12 Because for Dionysius God is both totally transcendent and the source of all being, he synthesizes the apophatic and kataphatic methods in order to attempt to know God from two different points of view, namely, as the cause of all reality and as the unnamable and transcendent mystery. These two approaches come together to form the paradoxes that, in Dionysius’ view, are the most appropriate way in which our language can refer to God. It is often thought that the point of the Dionysian paradoxes is to show just how much God is beyond the human being’s linguistic possibilities. However, the Dionysian paradox is not merely an extreme apophasis that takes even negation to say too much, as is the case with Plotinus. In fact, Dionysius gives real value to positive predication about God, so much so that O’Rourke thinks it possible to extrapolate from Dionysius’ oeuvre a doctrine of divine causality akin to that of Thomas.^13 While Dionysius does not use the terminology of Aristotelian causality that is ubiquitous in the works of the Angelic Doctor, the language of participation both in the Divine Names and in the Mystical Theology makes such a reading plausible. Consider the following passage: It may be true to say that we know God, not from his own nature—for this is unknown and transcends all reason and intellect—but that from the order of beings, which, having been established through him bears certain images and similarities of his divine exemplars, we ascend with method and order, in so far as possible according to our capacity, to him who is beyond all things, both by removing all things from him and affirming them superlatively, and through the causality of all things.^14 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 7-13. 14
nevertheless valid. On one hand, God is the cause of all things and supra-ontologically transcends them. He is therefore “best celebrated by the removal of all things,”^17 by denying of him every attribute which belongs to finite beings. On the other hand, it is only through his effects that God is known, and therefore it is necessary to consider the effects in order to consider the cause at all.^18 Therefore, Dionysius’ predications, though they seem contradictory, should not be taken to be such, because they are statements made of a supra-ontological deity who is known both from all entities and from none. Both the positive and negative way of predication are necessary, and they are also complementary. The point of the Dionysian paradox is not that it is meaningless and that in its meaninglessness it bears witness to God’s total unknowability. Rather, the paradox should be regarded as a dialectic in motion, as the totality of the resources that the finite intellect can muster in order to reach toward the infinite. The paradox is not a performative statement meant to show that God transcends all logic, but rather is a limit- case predication that holds in tension finitude and infinity, participation and transcendence, likeness and difference, analogy and silence. Nevertheless, Dionysius clearly finds the negative way preeminent: “Not even the name of Goodness do we attribute to it as being appropriate; but with a desire to think and speak of its ineffable, we consecrate to it the most sacred of names. Here we are in agreement with the theologians; but since we leave the truth of the matter far behind, they also have chosen the ascent through negation.”^19 Though there is a likeness between creatures and creator, God’s 17 1, 5, 23. 18 O’Rourke, 11. 19
transcendence of his creatures is so infinitely greater than this likeness that positive attribution is seen as inadequate. This kind of attribution has more to do with the intellect’s longing for unity with God than with any hope of saying something adequate of God, even in the most analogical of ways. Therefore, “it is necessary to affirm of him all the positive attributes of beings, since he is the cause of all; more properly, however, they should be denied of him, since he transcends them all.”^20 God is therefore "celebrated most fittingly by the removal of all beings."^21 The dynamic of the Dionysian paradox therefore runs as follows. A positive perfection is predicated of God reasoning analogically from the participation of finite effects in their transcendent cause. Then, through the negation of this predication the predicated concept is purified of all finite connotations. Finally, in a union of affirmation and negation, the content of this concept is intensified toward infinity. Thus, “negation as such…is of value to Dionysius only because it is interior to the affirmation of a transcendence.”^22 While it is true that Dionysius ultimately privileges the negative way over the positive, the purpose of negation is ultimately to point to transcendence itself, and not simply to deny a proposition. The method for naming God that Dionysius presents is not simply a rejection of any positive attribution, but rather the affirmation of God’s infinite transcendence in the face of what is nevertheless a causal relation between him and finite beings. The privilege given to the negative names of God does not then deny that there is any analogical relation between God and 13, 3, 452. 20 Omnia Opera. Patrologia Graeca III. Paris, Migne, 1857; Mystical Theology 1, 2, 100B. 21 Ibid., 1, 5, 23. 22 O’Rourke, 17.
both the distance and the intimacy between God and creatures are dramatically elevated: on one hand, God is present in his creatures because he sustains their being at every moment, and, on the other, the distance between uncreated creator and creature is far greater than the participated- unparticipated distinction. Furthermore, the presence of God in his creation gives the created order a dignity that in the Neoplatonists is nowhere to be found. It is therefore against this omnipresence of God in creation that Dionysius casts the hierarchy of participation, which is to say that a creature’s position in the hierarchy does not remove it from God in the sense that a being’s lower position in the hierarchy would remove it from the One. Only in this double and opposed sense of createdness and participation is it possible to understand the analogical relation of creatures to God, as Turner eloquently states: “Creatures may be more or less ‘like God’ But there cannot be any respect at all in which God is ‘like’ any creature. Creatures may be nearer or further away from God ontologically; but there cannot be any degrees of proximity in which God stands to different creatures… [God] is present to all things, though not all things are present to God.” 25 At last the extent of the analogical relation between creatures and God comes into view. All creatures find not only their origin, but also their continued subsistence in God, but at the same time they can participate in him more or less according to whether they reflect his perfections.^26 For instance, a human being with the capacity to recognize her proximity to God, a capacity that comes from the gift of intellection, is closer to God than a non-rational animal or a plant. 25 Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1995, 22 26 Ibid.
Let us now move on to Thomas’ doctrine of analogy. As was mentioned in the introduction, Thomas’ notion of analogy shows that he cannot be understood simply as an Aristotelian, for it borrows heavily from Dionysius who is in turn inspired by the Neoplatonists. Nevertheless, Thomas enriches Dionysius’ conception of analogy by emphasizing much more the centrality and uniqueness of creatures, and this is undoubtedly informed by Aristotle. As Hutter puts it, “Thomas’s mature doctrine of analogy arises from a distinct synthesis of two strands of metaphysical thought…The one strand (that of the unity of order by reference to a primary instance) is of Aristotelian provenance. The other strand is that of participation, and is of Neo-Platonic [and Dionysian] origin.”^27 For our purposes, the synthetic nature of the Aquinian doctrine of analogy bears two consequences. First, it must be understood as working in two dimensions where Dionysian analogy only functions in one. Second, and consequently, Thomas’ analogy accomplishes more than the Dionysian in that it captures multiple aspects of the reflection of God in his creatures. The very way in which Thomas asks the question of the possibility of any natural knowledge of God is almost identical to Dionysius’. Just as Dionysius states that “it is necessary to inquire how we know God, since he cannot be known either through thought or sense, nor is he at all any of the things which are,”^28 so Thomas wonders in ST I.12.12 whether it is possible to know God by reason given that “our understanding cannot reach to a vision of God’s essence.” He first responds that it is possible to know God because of the participation of 27 Hutter, Reinhard. Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 2012, 354 28 7, 3, 320.
inadequate, Thomas is much more optimistic about the real value of this type of predication. One may at first be skeptical of Thomas’ optimism because, for one, the perfections of creatures are each a part of a composed substance, whereas in God every perfection is united in perfect simplicity.^31 How, then, could one think that attribution can say anything meaningful about the likeness of creatures to God? In fact, Thomas thinks that the very act of predication represents well this tension between multiplicity and absolute simplicity, for “[while] the difference between subject and predicate represents two ways of looking at a thing…the fact that they are put together affirmatively indicates that it is one thing that is being looked at.”^32 Therefore, while our intellect can only know God according to different conceptions and from many, limited points of view, it is not only aware that all perfections are gathered in God in a simple unity, but it is also able to express this by bringing a multiplicity together in a predicative unity.^33 Nevertheless, Thomas’ departure from Dionysius is due, in the final analysis, to a fundamental metaphysical difference between the two, namely, to their views on being and the manner of its intelligibility. Unlike the Neoplatonists (and by extension the pseudo-Aeropagite), Thomas is resistant to the abstraction of “being” from its predications, so that being cannot be understood in a self-identical, pure form, nor as a single genus. Rather, as for Aristotle, being is shared across the multiplicity of beings in a differentiated unity. According to the Aristotelian view, then, being is always already manifest in all creatures according to the ten categories, as 31 ST I.3.7. 32 ST I.13.12. 33 O’Rourke, 45-6.
well as in terms of substance and accident, and potentiality and actuality. And, as we know from Aristotle’s Metaphysics , the only way to carry out a philosophy of being itself is by means of predication.^34 In keeping with this view, the early Thomas already understands analogy first and foremost in an attributive, i.e., formally predicative, manner.^35 Here, then, the synthetic nature of Thomas’ doctrine of analogy comes into view. On the Dionysian side, the concept of creaturely participation in God’s perfections allows Thomas to consider the causal or creative relation of creatures to their creator, thus making analogy possible at all. One can understand this aspect of analogy as a kind of “vertical” relation of finite, imperfect beings to infinite, perfect transcendence. On the Aristotelian side, because being is always differentiated into a multiplicity of categories and modes, the only way to consider the being of things that do not even share a genus (as in God and his creatures) is by means of predication, which is located in the “horizontal” realm of concepts and genera shared across species and genera. Therefore, analogical talk of God and creatures is for him above all attributive. Analogical predication is for Thomas a kind of middle way between univocity and equivocation: It is impossible to predicate anything univocally of God and creatures. Every effect that falls short of the power of its agent cause represents it inadequately, for it is not the same kind of thing as its agent cause. [...] Yet although we never use words in the exact same sense of creatures and of God, we are not merely equivocating when we use the same word…for if this were so we could never argue from statements about creatures to statements about God. [...] So, we must say that words are used of God and creatures in an analogical way, in accordance with a certain order between them. We can distinguish two kinds of analogical or proportional uses of language. First, there is the case of one word being used of two things because each of them has some order or relation to a third 34 This is my own reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 35 Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence 1.2 , in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings , ed. Ralph McInerny, 3rd printing edition (London ; New York: Penguin Classics, 1999).
(here represented by Plotinus) and subsequently adapted by Dionysius. I then gave an account of Dionysius’ paradoxical theology in order to then highlight how Thomas brings together Dionysius’ concept of participation and Aristotle’s method of formal predication in order to predicate analogically of God. At this point it becomes possible to compare Thomas and Dionysius with regard to what their respective doctrines of analogy can achieve. Dionysius proposes a way of naming God that traverses both the positive and the negative ways of previous theologies. It is necessary to begin with the causal relation between creatures and God so as to attribute the perfections of creatures to God as their cause. Next, this attribute is negated of God so as to purify it of all finitude and imperfection. Finally, the attribution and negation are taken together in order to bring to the fore God’s infinite transcendence of his creatures and the inadequacy of what has been attributed to him through the consideration of the causal relation. The apophatic way is here clearly preferred over the kataphatic, but the analogical attribution of finite perfections to God remains essential to Dionysius’ theology as a whole, for without a first attribution there would be nothing to deny of God. Thus, Dionysius’ analogy ultimately serves to point to the irreducible difference between creatures and God, to the unimaginable otherness of God. Yet is points out a relation that nevertheless exists between creatures and God, namely the relation of participation. In this sense, Dionysian analogy makes visible the vertical relation of the finite to the transcendent. Thomas’ doctrine of analogy, by contrast, gathers the Dionysian insight together with Aristotle’s solution to the problem of differentiated being. On the Dionysian side, Thomas adopts the notion of participation and causal relation as the ground that makes it possible at all to speak of God. But Thomas is able to incorporate Dionysius’ transcendent analogy into Aristotle’s substance metaphysics, and this gives him several advantages over Dionysius. First, Aristotle’s
view of being as a differentiated unity gives Thomas a clear method whereby he can predicate the same attribute of radically different beings (e.g., goodness can be said both of a substance and of a fortuitous event). In my view, this gives him more confidence that analogical predication between creatures and God can in fact accomplish something positive, so much so that insofar as a perfection is considered in itself, we can even predicate it of God literally.^37 By contrast, Dionysius does not believe that attributive predications can in any way be adequate descriptors of God. Second, whereas beings for Dionysius are only distinguished from one another insofar as they have a higher or lower position on the ontological hierarchy, creatures for Thomas are in relation to one another both on this Dionysian vertical axis and across species and genera. Analogical statements thus function for Thomas in two interrelated ways. Not only do they bring to the fore God’s absolute transcendence of his creatures, but they show that God’s perfections are distributed differently among beings. This is to say, God is not only reflected in his creatures more or less according to the latter’s level of participation in him, but also differently across different species and genera. Therefore, it is not just that a cat reflects God’s perfections less than a human being; it also reflects them differently. There is an ontological dignity afforded to creatures in Thomas’ cosmology that is missing in Dionysius’, and because of this Thomas’ doctrine of analogy shows not only difference from God, but also the variety of his perfections and the real dignity of all creatures insofar as their essences say something real about who God is. In other words, if cats were to go extinct, a real aspect of God’s self-giving to his creation would be unavailable to us even if those creatures who are higher on the ontological hierarchy 37 ST I.13.3.
