Analogical Knowledge of God

What does it mean when we say that “all our knowledge of God is analogical”?

In brief, it means that every concept that we rightly apply to God is partly the same as, but also partly different from, that same concept as applied to creatures.

In Logic, we study the three modes of predication: univocity, equivocity, and analogy. As will soon become obvious, predication is not the same as “definition.” In univocal predication, I apply a word to two things in exactly the same way. In equivocal predication, I apply the word to two things in a completely different way. In analogical predication, I apply the word in partly the same and partly a different manner.

If I say that the apple is red and the house is red, I am speaking univocally. Both the house and the apple are possessed of the quality of redness. If I say that junior sat in Grandpa’s lap while he watched the race car driver take a victory lap, I am using the word lap equivocally — i.e., in a completely different sense. But if I say that I am healthy and this meal is healthy, I am using healthy analogously. The meal cannot be healthy in the way I can be, because it is not a living thing possessed of health; however, it can cause health. In analogy, something is the same and something is different.

Many words — e.g., “father,” “son,” “generation,” “holy,” and “just” — can be applied both to God and to man. Yet, when said of God, they are not exactly the same as when said of man, but they are not totally different, either. That is, they are said analogously — not univocally (exactly the same meaning) or equivocally (a totally different meaning).

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Speaking of the “violent anti-intellectualism” of the Protestant Reformation, Mortimer Adler faulted Protestant “Theology” for its failure to grasp the analogy of being. Exemplifying the foundational importance of analogy to the vocabulary by which we speak of God, he pointed out the failure of modern Protestantism to deal with the challenge posed in Ludwig Fauerbach’s The Essence of Christianity: “[Fauerbach] noted that the attributes of God and of man appear to be the same. We say that God lives and that man lives, that God knows and that man knows, that God wills and that man wills, that God loves and that man loves. Feuerbach then pointed out quite rightly that when two objects have the same attributes, they must be identical. God and man have the same attributes, hence they are identical. …

“The remarkable fact is that six generations of German Protestant theologians from Schleiemacher to Karl Barth and down to the present day, all knew that this was a deathblow to Christianity. Yet none was able to answer Feuerbach by correcting the basic error he made. His basic error was his failure to see that while God and man have the same attributes, ‘living,’ ‘knowing,’ ‘willing,’ and ‘loving’ when said of God and man are saidanalogously, not univocally…” (Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D., “Concerning God, Modern Man, and Religion,” http://radicalacademy.com/adlergodmodernman1.htm [link is now defunct], emphasis mine.)

What Adler applies to the acts of God, we may apply to His essence and attributes. God is. I (Brother André Marie) am. But while I am, I may never say of myself “I am who am.” My being is derived, contingent, utterly dependent on the only Being whose essence to exist. That being, and He alone, may say “I am who am,” because he is the necessary being, the being who is the fullness of being.

So, too, when I am merciful, or just, or provident to those depending on me, etc., I am all those things in a finite, derived sense and secundum quid. God is all those in an infinite, absolute sense, and simpliciter.

To speak at all intelligently about God, and especially to deal with the perverse objections thrown out by modernists and secularists such as Fauerbach (e.g., when they mock the anthropomorphisms in Holy Scripture), we must resort to the concept of analogy. That we may do so – and, further, that we may cite such an elevated philosophical insight in the writings of Medieval theologians – will go a long way in disabusing the proud modern mind of its anti-Catholic prejudices.

A pipe-smoking Mortimer Adler (quoted above), pictured, perhaps, with the Encyclopædia Britannica, on whose Board of Editors he served. Besides being a notable American public intellectual, Dr. Adler was a Jew who converted to Catholicism.