The Analogy of Signs: Rethinking Theological Language with Charles S. Peirce 197871002X, 9781978710023

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The Analogy of Signs

The Analogy of Signs Rethinking Theological Language with Charles S. Peirce

Rory Misiewicz

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

The Essential Peirce, Volume 2, ed. Nathan Houser et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Reprinted with permission by Indiana University Press. Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Misiewicz, Rory, author. Title: The analogy of signs : rethinking theological language with Charles S. Peirce / Rory Misiewicz. Description: Lanham : Lexington/Fortress Academic, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Utilizing the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Rory Misiewicz argues for a new approach to the problem of theological language in Christian theology. This approach, the “analogy of signs,” serves as a critical alternative to influential models of theological language based upon an analogy of being, grammatical analogy, or an analogy of faith”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054230 (print) | LCCN 2020054231 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978710023 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978710030 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Peirce, Charles S. (Charles Sanders), 1839-1914. | Analogy (Religion) | Language and languages—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Semiotics—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Philosophical theology. Classification: LCC BL210 .M57 2021 (print) | LCC BL210 (ebook) | DDC 210.1/4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054230 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020054231 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Megan and Drue

Contents

List of Figures and Table

ix

Acknowledgmentsxi Abbreviationsxiii 1 Introduction 1 PART I: GUIDELINES FOR A SUCCESSFUL ANALOGY 2 How Analogy Works: Intelligibility, Modeling, and Guidelines PART II: INFLUENTIAL POSITIONS ON THEOLOGICAL ANALOGY AND THEIR INADEQUACIES

19 21 67

3 Analogia Entis 69 4 Grammatical Thomism and Analogy

97

5 Analogia Fidei 129 PART III: THE PEIRCEAN ALTERNATIVE FOR THEOLOGICAL ANALOGY 6 Peirce’s Philosophy and Intelligibility

159 161

7 Analogia Signorum 215

vii

viii

Contents

Conclusion269 Bibliography277 Index287 About the Author

295

List of Figures and Table

FIGURES Figure 2.1 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2

Hesse’s Vertical and Horizontal Relationships 37 Peirce’s Architectonic 168 Semiosis in General 179 Argument by Analogy 190 Semiosis in General 222 Analogia Signorum 235 TABLE

Table 6.1 1903 Ten Classes of Signs

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Acknowledgments

Peirce wrote that “your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than…you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity” (CP 7.571, 1893). I entirely agree. While this book is “my” work, the thinking that produced it is the result of habits deeply ingrained in me by family, friends, colleagues, teachers, and other fellow inquirers. To them I owe my gratitude, and my very self. What comes in the pages to follow is a revision of my doctoral dissertation completed at Princeton Theological Seminary. From its campus, I’m deeply thankful for the contributions of John Bowlin, Gordon Graham, George Hunsinger, Stacy Johnson, Hanna Reichel, and Mark Lewis Taylor for their aid and inspiration in guiding me through this project. Taylor, in particular, was remarkably encouraging in the writing process, and what coherence the book has is largely due to his insightful questions and criticism. Beyond PTS, I am particularly indebted to Michael Raposa for his expertise on Peirce’s religious thought, sincere kindness, and generosity of spirit. David Burrell, Vincent Colapietro, Gesche Linde, Robert C. Neville, Peter Ochs, David Rohr and Gary Slater have also been valuable conversation partners on the subjects of analogy, Peirce’s philosophy, and philosophical theology. The final product has been much improved because of their input, although the errors that remain are entirely my own. I am grateful for my editors at Lexington Books/ Fortress Academic. Neil Elliott and Gayla Freeman have been very helpful, and have also graciously put up with my many questions. Special thanks are also owed to Dr. Martin Irvine for permission to use his model of semiosis from his book The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media, xi

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Acknowledgments

a draft of which is in progress. Text from The Essential Peirce, Volume 2, ed. Nathan Houser et al (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) was reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. And, thanks to Harvard University’s Houghton Library for the use of images from MS Am 1632 (1538) of “The Charles S. Peirce Papers” for the book’s cover. Finally, I cannot express properly or sufficiently my thankfulness for my loving family. My wife, Megan, has been my foundation from this book’s beginning, and the reach of the sacrifice she has made up through its completion –while surely great – only she knows. Drue, our two year old, has been a source of delight and wonder throughout this journey, blessing us with his joyful discovery of the world, and his lively analogical – and so semiotic – imagination. It is to them, and with all my love, that I dedicate this book.

Abbreviations

AA AE

AF ALA BR CD

CP

Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy. Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1996. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (AA, 10). Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by John Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (AE, 252). Archie Spencer, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (AF, 160). Mary Hesse, “Aristotle’s Logic of Analogy.” The Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 61 (1965), 328-340. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (ALA, 333). D. Paul La Montagne, Barth and Rationality: Critical Realism in Theology. Eugene: Cascade, 2012. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (BR, 93). Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 14 vols. Edited by G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1969, 1975. Endnote references are to volume, part, and page number: e.g. (CD II/1.123). Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. Edited by C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, A. Burks. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960. Endnote references are to volume and paragraph number: e.g. (CP 1.123).

xiii

xiv

DSSG

EP

FCF GA GMW GWS

HW LA LM

MAS PA PR

Abbreviations

Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (DSSG, 88). Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, 2 vols. Edited by Nathan Houser, Christian Kloesel, and the Peirce Edition Project. Indian University Press, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992, 1998. Endnote references are to volume and page number: e.g. (EP 1.123). Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith. Translated by William V. Dych. New York: Seabury Press, 1978. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (FCF, 73). David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action, 3rd ed. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (GA, 67). Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (GMW, 277). Andrew Robinson, God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C.S. Peirce. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (GWS, 234). Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word. Translated by Michael Richards. New York: Herder and Herder, 1963. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (HW, 34). Ralph McInerny, The Logic of Analogy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (LA, 155). Eric Charles Steinhart, The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Worlds. Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (LM, 40). Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science. London: Sheed and Ward Ltd, 1963. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (MAS, 70). J.F. Ross, Portraying Analogy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (PR, 125). Paul Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (PR, 94).

Abbreviations

SA

TD

TL

TS

W

Joshua Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s “De Nominum Analogia.” Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2010. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (SA, 27). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, 5 vols. Translated by Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988, 1990, 1993, 1994, 1998. Endnote references are to volume and page number: e.g. (TD II, 123). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, 3 vols. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2001, 2004, 2005. Endnote references are to volume and page number: e.g. (TL II, 57). Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol.” In Theological Investigations: Volume IV, 221-252. Translated by Kevin Smyth. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966. Endnote references are to page number: e.g. (TS, 234). Charles S. Peirce. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 vols. Edited by M. Fisch, C. Kloesel, E. Moore et al. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1993, 2000, 2009. Endnote references are to volume and page number: e.g. (W, 2.46).

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Chapter 1

Introduction

The purpose of this introduction is threefold. Its first portion aims to situate the reader with respect to both the book’s main problem—“How is God-talk intelligible?”—and one of the Christian tradition’s long-standing answers to that problem—“By analogy.” In doing so, it will also show why providing an answer to God-talk is important, explain how this answer has been plagued with intellectual difficulties, and allude to the contemporary theological landscape of positions providing accounts of the answer. The second portion addresses what I understand to be the chief problem for the contemporary accounts: the founding of theological analogy on essentialism and dualisms arising out of ancient Greek philosophy. As such, it endeavors to give a brief description of the basic features of that philosophy and reflect on a few of the problems it has produced for Christian theology. The third portion presents my correction and alternative to these influential accounts of analogy: the analogy of signs. It continues with an overview of the book’s chapters and concludes with a reflection on the nature of the theological commitments that inform my perspective during this inquiry. THE CHALLENGE: INTELLIGIBLE, CHRISTIAN GOD-TALK “God loves me.” Ostensibly, this sentence makes sense. It’s in a language that you and I recognize, and its terms are commonplace. It’s in an appropriate syntactical form containing a subject and a predicate: the subject “God” presently enacts a verb “loves” toward the direct object “me.” This statement and its various iterations are pronounced plentifully in public and private contexts: in schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, homes, offices, courts, 1

2

Chapter 1

prisons, hospitals, shelters, and so on. In these contexts, stating “God loves me” does not result in the hearer’s confusion. Surely, agreement with the statement is vigorously debated, ecstatically declared, and everything in between—but, one doesn’t receive quizzical looks, a deadpan stare for more information, a voiced concern for the mental health of the utterer (in most cases), or a request for a third party to interpret. Quite simply, people know what is meant—in some way—when they hear “God loves me.” They know what to make of the proposition, they know what to do with it, and they conjure conceptual consequences for it, even if there isn’t agreement on those consequences. Yet, the first of these words is quite a strange one, and it has strange effects on the words it accompanies in sentences. The word “God” is special, at least for the Christian tradition, in that it refers to the creator and sovereign of all that is, that which is touted as “beyond” our creaturely reality. This means something for our language: there is a certain burden upon it when one talks about this sovereign creator. This burden is well encapsulated by Sallie McFague, in her Metaphorical Theology, in what she and others have traditionally called the “problem of religious language”: among those who are users of God-language, and have commitments to a divine identity apart from their own making, they must hold fast to a narrow road between two ditches, one of idolatry and one of irrelevance.1 On the one hand, religious (or theological2) language must avoid idolatry and respect its object, recognizing that the terms and ascriptions used for God must not be absolutized so as to allow one to think that our language may totally and perfectly render God to us. Thus, we must oppose, says McFague, any appeal to literalism when speaking about God. From this vantage, “God” can’t be just like another creator, and the “love” in “God loves me” is in some way unlike yours or mine. Therefore, instituting protections in our speech against idolatry entails doing so also for literalism, with the aim of preserving God’s specialness, difference, and transcendence. On the other hand, religious language has to mean something, for otherwise the word “God” or “love” in “God loves me” becomes nonsense, and irrelevant, to us. Though McFague herself is primarily interested in addressing how God-language excludes certain oppressed, marginalized, or dominated people groups,3 the general lesson still obtains: if our account of religious language, in its efforts to protect the specialness of its referent, were to so exclude people’s experiences as to prevent them from recognizing the very language they use for God, then it becomes meaningless. Therefore, instituting protections in our speech against irrelevance entails doing so for linguistic nonsense, with the aim to preserve God’s meaningfulness, similarity, and immanence. This, then, leads us to important questions: How is God-talk intelligible? How can language do justice both to the supreme object of the Christian’s

Introduction

3

adoration and praise (the impetus to reverence), and to the requirements for understandable communication (the impetus to relevance)?4 But, before venturing onward, an objection may be developing in the reader’s mind that takes the following form: why is it necessary to have such an inquiry? Why is the intelligibility of our discourse about God important? After all, if we pursue it too far, it may end up altering some basic axioms about God that Christian traditions have passed down. And, further, isn’t it true that since those axioms have been passed down within a community of discourse for so long, they must themselves have an intelligibility conferred by that community? If that’s the case, what is the value in investigating them according to an outside standard? I offer three basic responses to these questions. First, intelligibility is important because it is widely held that it is a virtue in universes of discourse performing rational investigations into their respective subject matter: that a community of inquirers can offer rational bases for its beliefs—or, a system of explanation that is understandable through the ordinary give and take of reasons—is a desirable trait in the intellectual public. As theology touts itself as a discipline that rationally investigates what is true, it would be quite strange for it not to value its beliefs as fitting some standard of intelligibility. As David Tracy notes, if theology is to concern itself with what is true, then it must take up “the demand for publicness—for criteria, evidence, warrants, disciplinary status;”5 otherwise, it “will soon forfeit its right to serious academic attention, and thereby betray its own heritage.”6 This moves us to the second response: a group of inquirers, no matter how contextually specific, cannot determine its standards of intelligibility, for those standards are about getting something (adequately) right that is publicly available for discovery, not about a social construct to be created. More will be said on this point in the next chapter; however, for now I may point out that theologians are not excluded from that principle: they may exclude themselves from explicitly adopting the virtue of intelligibility in their public discourse, but they may not change the meaning of that intelligibility as they see fit. This is because intelligibility is deeply bound up with our experience.7 And, as will be shown, that means that intelligibility is constrained by, and formulated from, what we can possibly conceive as consequent to our lives as human beings. As a result, theologians can no more decide that concepts of “God,” “the Lord’s Supper,” or “justification” are intelligible than they can decide that concepts of “gravity,” “chair,” and “tolerance” are intelligible. They may attempt to alter their religious concepts to make them intelligible, but they cannot manipulate intelligibility to fit a concept—such would be like thinking one can make two apples added to two apples equal five apples by reconceiving addition. The point that I am trying to make here, and which will be refined throughout this book, is that there

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aren’t any “intra-theological” standards for intelligibility because there aren’t any classes of signification that are exclusive to theological, ecclesial, or any other specific social context. Reasons might be offered that are “theological” to buttress a claim’s intelligibility, but such moves are always posterior to the possible modes of signification available to the theologian. We must not confuse operations of inference, then, for the modes of proper signification. Finally, Christian traditions ought not to think that the length of time of the transmission of a set of axioms is commensurate with its validity or consistency (as, say, geocentrism shows). This, obviously, could produce uncomfortable results for theologians. In taking seriously the standards of intelligibility, it may indeed result in certain long-held doctrines about God being rejected as unintelligible (or, at least, in need of substantial revision). But, the point is that this rejection is not because of an opposition to that tradition on the grounds of metaphysical antagonism, or even because of a concern over the weakness of reasons; rather, the point is that those doctrines were never intelligible to begin with (whether considered holistically or in isolation). So then, whatever account we may arrive at as a result of our investigation into the intelligibility of God-talk, the three responses above concerning our status as inquiring creatures—as homo quaerens—demand that our previous theological judgments be subject to critique and rational assessment according to standards that are unable to be influenced by the private symbol systems of a specific context. Considering the object of our discourse, it seems to me we can do no less. To return to our basic problem—“How is God-talk intelligible?”—a popular answer that has been passed down through the centuries in the Christian church is this: it is through analogy. That is, somehow we can access a via media between univocity and equivocity to speak relevantly, reverently, and truly of God.8 But, it has been difficult to figure out what exactly to make of treating terms analogously. Most paradigmatic of this view has probably been Thomas Aquinas, as when he says in his Summa Theologiae, “We must say that words are used of God and of creatures in an analogical way . . . whatever we say of both God and creatures we say in virtue of the order that creatures have to God as to their source and cause, in which all the perfections of things pre-exist most excellently.”9 But, does this appeal to God’s activity as “source and cause” really make the analogous relation more intelligible, or is it sidestepping the issue? Normally, analogies convey some similarity between a source (“just as A is to B . . .”) and a target (“. . . so also C is to D”), but what is that similarity on Aquinas’s account? Do we even need a similarity? If, when saying “God loves me,” we should think that God is the cause of love, is this sufficiently intelligible? And, is that love like any human love I know? Questions like these must be addressed, and that is the effort of

Introduction

5

this book: to think through the God-talk problem precisely through the lens of theological analogy. If God-talk is intelligible, how is it so? And, if it is through analogy, how is that so? Any inquiry into the problem of religious language will quickly find a number of long-running academic dialogues supplying answers to the above questions. One of the most important of these academic dialogues has been a debate among contemporary Protestant and Catholic scholars concerning that which principally grounds theological analogy. For those involved in this debate, the views can be discerned along three broad perspectives: (1) those who support an analogia entis, or “analogy of being”; (2) those who reject the analogia entis in support of a semantic/linguistic analogy; and (3) those who reject the analogia entis for an analogia fidei, or “analogy of faith.” This conversation has been renewed in recent years, particularly with the publication of the ecumenical volume Analogia Entis: Invention of the Anti-Christ or Wisdom of God? (2011), and the English translation of Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis (2014). Though works like these have garnered a greater mutual understanding by the respective camps, the debate does not seem close to a resolution, and this is because, I submit, all of these views are inherently incapable of producing intelligible analogies if they are to be self-consistent. The next section’s task will be to identify the intellectual origins of this cause. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF ANALOGICAL UNINTELLIGIBILITY: ESSENTIALISM AND DUALISM In considering the intellectual foundations of the three accounts of analogy to be exposited and critiqued in this book, I follow Donald Gelpi’s analysis of the Western intellectual tradition in his book The Gracing of Human Experience—therein, he is interested in figuring out the philosophical elements that have moved Christianity toward unhelpful conceptions of the relation between nature and grace.10 The prime elements in that movement have been essentialism and its resulting dualism. For my purposes, I will highlight these elements as they appear in Platonic and Aristotelian thinking. First, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy can be considered guilty of what Gelpi calls the essence fallacy. In this, ideas are reified “by treating them as objects of thought rather than as modes of perceiving the realities and actualities which human minds know.”11 In other words, it’s when abstractions from the objects of experience are treated as having independent reality from the experiencing process. For instance, in thinking as an essentialist about a table, I am inclined to take the table’s properties or “qualitative traits” (hard, wooden, brown, flammable, rectangular, etc.) and abstract them from

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the object designated “table,” which is some sort of extrinsic reality independent of cognition. The main problem here is that this kind of distinction—the table’s “essence” as a different object from the table of experience—frequently results in the definition of one essence as a “logical contradiction of another,”12 and this leads to the second problem: dualism. In Platonic philosophy, a dualism takes place between the spiritual realm and the physical realm as that between immaterial and material essences, respectively. In so setting up these realms as mere negations of one another by definition, there is nothing common between them, and thus no way to make them mutually intelligible through “any positive relationship.”13 Gelpi finds no less than four species of dualism that result from this division: (1) cosmic dualism, in which the realm of spirit is immutably eternal and “gives access to truth, beauty, reality, and goodness,” while the physical realm of matter is always changing, offering only “illusion and unreality”; (2) substantial dualism, in which human beings are a combination of “two mutually exclusive, mutually negating, subsisting realities” as a composite of material and spiritual essence, which thwarts an understanding of their unity; (3) epistemological dualism, in which the realm of sense-perception is at odds with the inner, intelligible world of the spirit due to the former being—at bottom—illusory, while the latter is true; and (4) operational dualism, in which the contradictory realms of the spiritual and the physical are rendered “essentially different” in their workings, and so can’t be coherently rendered under some mutually intelligible operations.14 In Aristotelian philosophy, the essence fallacy results in similar dualisms, except instead of reifying the unchanging essence in a realm of ideas (as Plato did), Aristotle held that these were the forms present in the sensible world as “immanent principles of being . . . constitut[ing] the immanent intelligibility of the sensible world around us.”15 Aristotle made this change because of what he saw as the “problem of participation”—that is, the sensible world remains unexplained if one only posits that understanding involves a grasp of the transcendent, spiritual essence in which the sensible world “participates.”16 Such is a move in the right direction, Gelpi says, but Aristotle’s own hylomorphic theory is still guilty of essentialism. Dividing the physical world itself into matter (hylé) and form (morphé) did not do away with the notion of reality as a dualism of the unintelligible, changeable potency, and the intelligible, unchanging actuality, respectively.17 Surely, Aristotle’s account is more sophisticated (as we will see, shortly); however, matter is still a dualistic negation of form, and that means it can’t be rationally understood. Matter is something used by form, we could say, but otherwise it is impenetrable. The envisioning of the world along this dualistic view had important implications for later theology, and so we must address the Aristotelian structure that has anchored so many of its presuppositions.

Introduction

7

For Aristotle, as Catriona Hanley says, “God is a necessary part of his ontology,” for the world needs grounds to explain both the movement of objects from potency to actuality and why universals are comprehensible.18 In the Physics, Aristotle arrives at the prime mover (not yet the “God” of the Metaphysics) because of a need to explain the movement of substance (ousía) through the principle of change—that is, nature (or, phusis)—in the sensible world.19 Now, movement “is change from (potential) subject to an (actual) subject,” and so the matter of a substance is what undergoes physical change, while that change’s grounding is in the form of the same substance; this makes the principle of change, or nature, the substance’s form.20 The substance’s form is also, then, the final cause that draws the substance toward its full actualization, or entelechy.21 In book eight of the Physics, a “transcendental/reductive” argument is presented for a first mover, or an ousía that has no mover itself and also is responsible for moving everything else through principles of change.22 Basically, the argument goes, if we are not to end up having an infinite regress of things moved by something else, or of finite self-movers that are generated and destructible, then the world needs a first mover that causes eternal motion (251b 10-27). That motion must be eternal, rather than just being first, because a first motion that isn’t eternal indicates a mover that had a potency to be actualized, which causes the need to explain what brought the potency for change to actuality, and initiates the regress again. For this same reason, the mover itself is also one unmoved (258b 4-9). Further, the unmoved mover is eternal and single: it is eternal because something needs to be constantly causing the eternal motion of the co-eternally moving world, and it is single because there is no need, because of parsimony, to posit more than one (257a 31-258b 9; 259a 8). That mover moves the cosmos in a circular fashion because that is the only motion that is continuous and can maintain a “regular” relation between the unmoved mover and moved at all times (266a 22–267b 7). It does so at a location on the edge of the universe’s circumference because the spheres further from the earth appear to move the fastest, and what is closer to the unmoved mover moves faster (267b 7-9). Those spheres, then, mediate the first, unmoved mover’s eternal motion to terrestrial things; in their movement being continuous, this adds a reason for why the first mover does not change position. Moreover, that unmoved mover has no parts or magnitude (i.e., extension), for something that produces a force of infinite duration cannot have a finite magnitude, and an infinite magnitude is impossible (267b 18-26). Thus, in short, the unmoved mover has the following characteristics from the Physics: (1) simple, and so without parts or magnitude; (2) spatially located on the edge of the universe; (3) produces a circular force of infinite duration; (4) static, unmoving, and unchanging; and (5) uncaused, and so eternal.

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In Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, Hanley notes that Aristotle fills out the concept of the unmoved mover as the world’s “ground for the attainment of form.”23 Whereas the Physics is concerned with how the world’s motion can ultimately be comprehensible, the Metaphysics concerns itself with how the actualization of form is so in substances. In this work, much of the argumentation is repeated from the Physics but in the idiom of ousía and the actuality/potency duality: continuous motion that is eternal must be circular; an actual being must be prior to a potential being, for regarding the potential being as prior would need explanation for how it came to actuality; the prime mover must be eternal to ground eternal movement; the prime mover cannot have magnitude for it moves eternally with an infinite power; and so on.24 But, metaphysical explanations pertaining to the four causes are also added: the prime mover moves objects teleologically as the good and necessary object of “desire,” and of thought itself—thus, it is a final cause (1072b 10-14); as a pure form that leads to the manifestation of form in the world, it is also the world’s formal cause; as the eternal actuality drawing the world’s substances to entelechy, it is also their efficient cause; and as that which maintains the presence of potentiality by preventing the annihilation of matter, it is also, in a limited way, the material cause of the universe.25 Aristotle is, finally, able to call this prime mover “God,” primarily due to the enrichment of the concept by the formal and final causes. Having itself no material cause to differentiate itself, the prime mover remains one in pure actuality; being in that pure actuality means it is also in the highest form of activity, which is active contemplation (theoría) of the highest object: itself (1074b 33-34). Having such rational thought of itself—indeed, being “thinking on thinking”—Aristotle names this living being “God” (1072b 23-29) As that constant rationality, God is also the ground for the world’s “rational comprehensibility,” both drawing rational creatures to apprehend the rational, intelligible form as final cause and enabling that form’s actuality to be so apprehended as efficient cause.26 Having grasped the necessity of God, though, we may not go further to explain God, for God has no grounding principle to know—God is God’s own grounds. So, the results from the Metaphysics adds these metaphysical properties to God: (1) God is a substance (ousía) of pure form, and so the “formal ground of the continued manifestation of form in the cosmos”; (2) God is good, and so the “final ground” of movement that attracts the objects of the world to itself;27 (3) God is immutable, pure actuality, and so, directly, the “efficient ground of generation” that moves substances to entelechy, but also, indirectly, the material ground that maintains potentiality in the world by its presence (without it, there would be nothing at all);28 (4) God is the explanation for the “possibility of universal knowledge,” because in leading substances to the realization of their form this also results in their apprehension in rational

Introduction

9

creatures; and (5) God is the “first principle of the science of being qua being,” and knowledge of that first principle is before any other principle.29 This is but a brief sketch of Aristotle’s theology, but it is a crucial backdrop to the accounts of theological analogy covered in this book. To be sure, Aristotle’s sort of rational theology is an arresting feat of a remarkable philosophical mind; however, the fact that its basic building blocks are rooted in a pernicious essentialism and dualism will come back to cause considerable damage to later analogical structures founded upon it. THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEMS RESULTING FROM GREEK ESSENTIALISM AND DUALISM Now, our current study does not allow a thorough examination of theological analogy’s intellectual history. What this book includes, instead, is a set of reflections on the contemporary debates on it within the Catholic and Protestant accounts to be discussed later. In anticipation of these more thorough discussions, we may briefly consider a medieval precursor to their positions in the Neoplatonized, Aristotelian philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, that most famous proponent of theological analogy in the Christian tradition. In the Summa Theologiae, it quickly becomes apparent, as is well known, that Aristotle forms a large part of the philosophical foundation of Aquinas’s thinking. With Aristotle’s resources at ready, Aquinas can argue very early on in the Summa that: (1) God is the cause of perfections in creatures;30 (2) God is not composed of parts, extended, or composite in any way;31 (3) God is pure act;32 (4) God is pure form;33 (5) God belongs to no genus;34 (6) God is substance with no accidents;35 and (7) God is never part of anything.36 In shaping the bounds of God’s perfect being in this way, Aquinas will go on to articulate attributes of God according to the constraints imposed by the dualism of matter and form—God’s goodness, eternity, immutability, knowledge, life, triunity, interpersonal relations, and so on.37 That dualistic view of nature becomes the presumed foundation upon which to build his theology. Since, as Gelpi writes, “Classical metaphysics claimed to grasp with a priori universality and necessity the nature of Being, or reality,”38 Aquinas was in effect building a model of God on that claim’s foundation; others preceded and would follow Aquinas in that same path, whether their permutation were primarily Platonic or Aristotelian. Detailed accounts of the effect of this theological error, of this founding of theology on Greek dualisms, will be provided in the coming chapters. But, one can already project a number of general problems for its proponents, three of which I would like to mention for that version grounded in the Aristotelian

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system. First, we must not forget that what motivated Aristotle’s theology was an attempt to be rigorously empirical—that is, he wanted to explain how the world was comprehensible in terms of its motion, actuality, and causes. This means that Aristotle was trying to harmonize a philosophical account with the best science of his day. But, what happens to the intelligibility of that account when, say, evolutionary change can’t be explained because substantial forms are either the kind of thing that is present in a thing or replaced by another, but cannot itself change or develop into something else?39 Or, what happens when the geocentric model of the world that Aristotle presumed is refuted, or the existence of the aether substance is long dismantled, or the eternity of the world is largely disproved, or gravity challenges the singular, external force of movement, or the explanative potency of hylomorphism is critiqued by modern science, and so on? On the approach of the Physics, it would seem the prime mover’s model would need to be drastically rethought with these changes in empirical knowledge. So, in light of the knowledge of the world, using the best of rigorously empirical approaches available to us today, Aristotle’s perspective is hard-pressed to serve as an adequate grounding for contemporary theology. Second, Christian theologians, being aware that full conformity to Aristotle wasn’t possible given their doctrinal claims, have desperately struggled to simultaneously maintain those claims and a theological program founded on his metaphysics, often risking incoherence, if not outright contradiction. Four sites of this struggle are as follows: (1) God is an eternal sustainer and object of desire for the world in Aristotle’s thought, but not its creator; (2) God has a location on the boundaries of the universe in Aristotle’s thought, and therefore not omnipresent or non-spatial; (3) God only contemplates Godself in Aristotle’s thought, not the entire world; and (4) God is entirely simple, and so does not contain some set of interpersonal relations. Christian theologians would, thus, generally make alterations to the model of God in order to better fit the doctrinal requirements (often using Neoplatonic reasoning to help along this endeavor). The problem, of course, is that the original explanatory purposes of the Aristotelian philosophy are now jettisoned for doctrinal emendations. The result is that the rational basis for the theology, and what the dualistic account requires, is jettisoned. The revised viewpoints of the theologians, then, appear to be at odds with their Aristotelian moorings. Third, and most importantly for Christians who seek intelligible discourse, there is the double challenge of making the tenuous, synthetic model of God intelligible through an account of analogical predication. The first challenge is what we have just mentioned: we are beset from the very beginning by the problem of making a model of God that is both coherently supported by a philosophical account of explanation that is sensitive to scientific inquiry and open to the energetic efforts of theologians to redact

Introduction

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that rational model to cohere with various doctrinal requirements. In other words, there is a demand for a reasonable account of God that can also conform to doctrine. The second challenge is that we must address the first problem analogically, which means without the aid of univocal concepts and expressions. Thus, for an example of this double challenge, we come upon the problem mentioned earlier. For instance, if we say that God is an efficient cause of the world, which is an empirically meaningful claim, and this can be said to cohere with the doctrinal claim that God is “creator,” what is the sense40 of that term, “efficient cause,” which is said to obtain by analogy? How does it coherently express something if God can’t be classed with any other kind of thing, because God is simple (as doctrine would have it)? This, then, is the landscape that these Aristotelian, Christian theologians have had to build their house of analogical language upon. With the problems of essentialism and dualism permeating the very foundations, it is no surprise that many accounts of analogy that came from the Christian tradition—including those to follow in this book—will not be able to answer the question of God-talks intelligibility. A PEIRCEAN ALTERNATIVE: THE ANALOGY OF SIGNS Because of the common flaw that permeates many theological accounts of God-talk (namely, that they presume a classical metaphysics and cosmology within which their doctrinal affirmations can only fit, at best, uncomfortably), I believe that the debate requires a fresh perspective. In this book, I will be offering a new view on theological analogy that brings in a figure who may be thought to be quite extraneous to this conversation: the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (d. 1914). As I will attempt to show, Peirce can help us to rethink what theological analogy means through his insightful and creative ideas on cognition, semiotics, logic, and metaphysics. That system of thought, most importantly, does not rest on the foundation of essentialism, and its resulting dualisms, that vitiate the other accounts. Indeed, Peirce’s architectonic philosophy is able to nullify these cosmological, substantial, epistemic, and operational dualisms by reconceiving the relation between the realms of conception and perception as a matter of sign-process. Altogether, I believe he offers the resources to create what I am calling an analogia signorum—or, “analogy of signs”—that will provide a uniquely satisfactory answer to our question about the intelligibility of God-talk. My argument is that a Peircean analogia signorum is able to succeed where these views have not by espousing analogous speech of God based on the univocity of semiosis. In other words, it is semiosis

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itself—that is, the activity or process of “a coöperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant” that constitutes signification (CP 5.484, c. 1906)—that ensures the proportionality upon which analogy is predicated. This is because both God and creatures are understood as participating identically in sign-process. Deploying a different paradigm for cognition that establishes the structural principle of intelligibility in the univocity of semiosis, the analogy of signs fills out the structure’s prime content theologically: it is Jesus Christ, the Sign of God, who fulfills the affirmation that God is completely sign-able. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK To show the need for, and sufficiency of, the analogy of signs, this book is laid out in three parts. Part I is constituted entirely by chapter 2, which is also the least theologically oriented. The aim here is to present a lineage of contributions from the philosophy of science and cognitive science to the theory of analogy as an intelligible cognitive structure. It will begin with its first major expositor, Aristotle, move on to the very influential medieval appropriation of his account in the thought of Thomas Cajetan, and then jump ahead to the mid-twentieth century to Mary Hesse’s treatment of analogy. After explicating her view, her basic structure for analogy will serve as a touchstone for later cognitive scientific (i.e., Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, Paul Thagard) and philosophical developments (i.e., Paul Bartha, Eric Steinhart, JF Ross). In concluding the chapter, I show that there are some broad conditions for a successful, intelligible analogy that the contemporary accounts agree upon. These conditions—which I set forth as “guidelines” for analogical thinking—will be essential for evaluating the theological approaches in the next part. Part II takes up the task of expositing and criticizing existing views of theological analogy along the three broad stances mentioned at the beginning of this introduction. All of these views, as shall be seen, suffer from their commitment to Greek dualistic thought, especially in their subscription to divine simplicity. Chapter 3 deals with analogia entis proponents, specifically Erich Przywara, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The common problem for these views is this: by maintaining that being is itself an analogous predicate, they have no way to admit of a similarity between God and creatures, and so hamstring God-talk by infinitely deferring the similarity requisite for intelligibility. Chapter 4 concerns semantic/linguistic accounts supported by Grammatical Thomists, specifically Ralph McInerny, David Burrell, and Victor Preller. In that these figures attempt to assign similarity through the mere use of a

Introduction

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linguistic framework, the conceptual similarity is never obtained, and thus analogy becomes unintelligible. Specifically, the move to couch similarity in the grammatical syntax of theological statements - a “grammatical analogy” - does not establish a bridge for meaningful communication, especially when in combination with Thomistic apophaticism; rather, that apophaticism entirely cuts off the possibility of meaningful signification of God. As a result, any similarity posited by the linguistic framework is conceptually irrelevant by confining that meaning to linguistic performance. Concluding part II is chapter 5, the analogia fidei account. Here, Karl Barth takes center stage. It is argued that accounts for discerning the analogy through faith practice turn out to leave underdetermined the relationship between God and humanity that is required for obtaining conceptual similarity. Particularly insufficient for conceiving the analogy is the move to focus on the gracious gift of faithful action in obedience to God and in imitation of Christ’s obedience. If Barth’s argument is that analogy obtains through faith practice supported by a “miracle of grace,” and that the practice occurs simultaneously with the denial of any cognitive possibility to grasp a similarity between God and creatures, then the similarity must remain indeterminate, and so intelligibility is never gained. Part III contains the background and constructive proposal for a new approach to theological analogy, which is primarily informed by the philosophical writings of Charles S. Peirce. Chapter 6 will work through the basic theoretical commitments in Peirce’s architectonic philosophy relevant to the conversation. Of pivotal importance will be an address of Peirce’s semiotic system, logic, and metaphysics. It will also be valuable to understand Peirce’s philosophy of religion and how that squares with the architectonic in general. This chapter, though necessary for this phase of the book, also is important in itself because it offers a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of Peirce’s philosophical thought. This is significant because Peirce’s thought is still relatively unknown in theology, save among a small circle of scholars.41 Chapter 7 may be considered the culmination of this book’s program, for here is explicated the analogy of signs. Having explained Peirce’s account, this chapter will contain the main constructive proposal that builds off his semiotic theory: the similarity that makes analogy intelligible requires the notion of what I am calling the “univocity of semiosis.” This univocity offers a more intelligible understanding of theological analogy in that it establishes similarity through the comprehensive means by which any intelligible communication or signification is obtained. This claim is secured by showing how the Peircean approach to analogy meets the guidelines for intelligible analogy as set forth at the end of chapter 2. Thinking more particularly about a Peircean view of analogy, it is in the irreducible dynamic relations of signobject-interpretant that all meaning must be acquired. Looking at revelation

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from the viewpoint of the more intelligible analogical theory, I take the self-disclosure of God in Jesus Christ to be the base theological form admitting to this semiosis: in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, human beings are confirmed in the belief that God is sign-able, and thus participate equally in semiosis. Through a semiotic analysis (particularly in reference to Peirce’s 1903 tenfold classification of signs), I will indicate both the form that this semiosis takes and the consequent iconic, indexical, and symbolic analogs that manifest it. The remainder of the chapter will closely attend to scriptural instantiations of these various signs to buttress the theological legitimacy of the analogia signorum, as well as address looming criticisms of the account. Part III will finish off with some brief, concluding reflections about the analogia signorum for future theological efforts. In short, this book will establish the requirements for a successful analogy (part I), show the inadequacies of the various influential positions to make theological analogy intelligible (part II), and provide the better, Peircean alternative (part III). The hope is that my reader will find the analogy of signs a compelling hypothesis with fruitful implications for theological inquiry. A BRIEF EXCURSUS ON THEOLOGICAL COMMITMENTS Just like any other work, this book is the product of an author in medias res. And that involves, for me, various positive theological commitments. I am coming at the problem of God-talk in a similar fashion to those who will be presented in part II—as a confessing Christian. I do not set out with the hope to prove the possibility of the reality of God according to some definition; I already presume the reality of God, particularly in the form specified by the historic Christian faith: as a Trinitarian unity of three persons, revealed in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. That belief is not up for debate here, nor would it be apposite to introduce it to criticism given this book’s limited space. Therefore, it is appropriate to describe this as a treatise in “faith seeking understanding”—the question of the intelligibility of God-talk anticipates and depends on a positive answer (even if that answer isn’t applicable to all realms of discourse in which God-talk occurs); the matter for debate is not whether God-talk is intelligible, but rather how it is so. So, I take for granted that God-talk works, and does so among Christians (at least). But, many theologians, in trying to figure out how it works, have unintentionally put up obstacles to its successful operation. In intending to dismantle those obstacles, and the Greek dualisms that cause them, I hope to endow Christians with better theoretical resources for thinking about how their God-talk works. Thus, this book is as much about clearing the way for

Introduction

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practical linguistic conduct for those Christians who wish to speak about God as it is about making a theoretical claim about how signification works. Given this, “philosophical theology” may be an adequate category in which to include the arguments made in this work, insofar as this term does not necessarily (1) exclude the divinely revelatory; (2) presuppose a framework of metaphysical naturalism; or (3) prefer a demonstrative linearity of a priori or a posteriori arguments building up to a certain conclusion in the existence of its object. This is a work in “theology” in that its resources for reflection are continuous with the Christian tradition’s doctrinal spectrum, and it is “philosophical” in that answering the issue of how God-talk “works” may presuppose an explanation that is naturally amenable to human, shared rationality (at least in respects sufficient to grant offering an account). In moving forward, then, the reader should not suppose that I will work through the requirements of religious epistemology or metaphysics before I allow myself purchase on the matter of God-talk—that might be appropriate for a philosopher of religion, but not for a confessional and philosophical theologian. I realize this may be a stumbling block for my readers hoping for a robust defense of the first premise at the get-go, but I think that if they are willing to charitably grant that premise, the completed argument should give them ample material to retrospectively justify that premise on the grounds of fruitfulness and logical coherence. As to fruitfulness, the analogy of signs will, I hope, show itself to be provocative and stimulating as a hypothesis in a number of ways without hindering inquiry; as to logical coherence, it will be argued that it is, in fact, the most sensible account of analogical predication yet on offer.

NOTES 1. Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 4. 2. For the purposes of this book, I consider these terms synonymous. If I were to draw a technical distinction, one can consider William Alston’s understanding of “religious language” as valuable here: it’s “the use of language (any language) in connection with the practice of religion—in prayer, worship, praise, thanksgiving, confession, ritual, preaching, instruction, exhortation, theological reflection, and so on.” So, following Alston, one may more precisely consider theological language a subcategory of religious language; however, as the context will make clear that the use of either term is always in the mode of “theological reflection,” I require no such distinction in this work. See William Alston, “Religious Language,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 220, emphasis mine. 3. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 8–10.

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4. Or, to put this in David Tracy’s terms, how can the Christian tradition navigate successfully the demands of “criteria of appropriateness to the tradition” and “criteria of intelligibility”? See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (Crossroad: New York, 1981), 238. 5. Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 21. 6. Ibid., 20. 7. Humphrey Palmer, with reference to the relation of science to religion, is right, then, to say that religion and science are not “separate systems of life.” Rather, “the traffic between [these systems, and others] is heavy and continuous. None of the departments of life could exist entirely on its own. There may be special rules and forms to be observed in each: but all are part, for each participant, of his own single life.” In other words, the value of either religion or science is going to be derived from their “relation to ordinary life,” and what is significant about the technical language those “departments” use is secured only as connected “back to an everyday language already understood.” See Humphrey Palmer, Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 115, 117. 8. Representative of the view on univocity has been Duns Scotus, as when he says that “creatures, which impress their own species in the intellect, can also impress species of the transcendentals that apply commonly to themselves and to God . . ..there is no concept or species representing something that is proper to God alone and entirely different from what applies to creatures.” And, that of equivocity, Maimonides: “All this is according to the language of man; he ascribes to God what he considers a perfection, and does not ascribe to Him what he considers a defect. In truth, however, no real attribute, implying an addition to His essence, can be applied to Him.” See On Being and Cognition: Ordinatio 1.3, ed. by John van den Bercken (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), Q1.61–62; Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, 2nd ed., trans. Michael Friedländer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1904), ch. 57. 9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I–1a, 13.5. 10. Donald Gelpi, The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship Between Nature and Grace (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007). 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Ibid., 4. 14. Ibid., 28–29. 15. Ibid., 71. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Ibid., 71. 18. Catriona Hanley, Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger: The Role of Method in Thinking the Infinite (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 74–75. The rest of this section is indebted to Hanley’s excellent synopsis of Aristotle’s rational theology in chapter 3. 19. Ibid., 77. 20. Ibid., 78.

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21. Ibid., 79. 22. Ibid., 83. Aristotle, “Physics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon and CDC Reeve (Random House: New York, 2001). Hereafter, identified by Bekker numbering. 23. Hanley, Being and God, 89. 24. Ibid., 90–91, 93. 25. Ibid., 92. 26. Ibid., 94. 27. Ibid., 89. 28. Ibid., 92. 29. Ibid., 89. 30. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I–1a:2,3, co. 31. Ibid., I–1a:3,1, co; I–1a:3,7, co. 32. Ibid., I–1a:3,1, co. 33. Ibid., I–1a:3,2, co. 34. Ibid., I–1a:3,5, co. 35. Ibid., I–1a:3,6, co. 36. Ibid., I–1a:3,8, co. 37. While this is not the place to enter into a detailed description of perfect being theology, it is worth mentioning that Aquinas is here following a long tradition of reflection that ascribes certain great-making properties to God. In her book Perfect Being Theology, Katherin Rogers makes clear that these properties are the result of the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian syntheses with Christian theological reflection in the medieval period. Such properties that she includes under its title are: simplicity, necessity, immutability, impassivity, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness. Although perfect being theology and its characteristics are most closely associated with Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion, which in the late eleventh century famously defined God as “that than which a greater cannot be conceived,” he was certainly not the first to consider God as having “perfect” being in the Christian tradition, or to do extensive reflection on the idea of perfection. For a sampling of precedents: (1) Augustine’s Confessions begins in a prayer that enunciates the nature of God in a list of perfect attributes: God is “most high, excellent, most powerful, omnipotent, supremely merciful and supremely just, most hidden yet intimately present, infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong” and so on; (2) Book III of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy has Philosophy teaching Boethius that God must be the “perfect good” since more perfect things precede the less perfect, and so “if we are to avoid progression ad infinitum, we must agree that the most high God is full of the highest and most perfect good”; and (3) the concluding chapter of PseudoDionysius’s On the Divine Names contains the following statement about God: “. . . the Title ‘Perfect’ means that It cannot be increased (being always Perfect) and cannot be diminished, and that It contains all things beforehand in Itself and overflows in one ceaseless, identical, abundant and inexhaustible supple, whereby It perfects all perfect things and fills them with Its own Perfection.” But, despite these earlier accounts, Anselm is generally considered the one who inaugurated a tradition of providing a definite description of God and systematically elucidating that definition

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as an appropriate prolegomenal effort to theology. See Katherin Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 1–2; Anselm, “Proslogion,” in St. Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. S.N. Deane (La Salle: Open Court, 1962), 8; Augustine, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 1.4.4; for more on how the perfections relate to Augustine’s Platonic notion of contemplation, see J. P. Kearney, “Augustine and Classical Theism,” in Models of God, ed. Jeanine Diller and Asa Kasher (New York: Springer, 2013), 126–127; Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill Inc., 1962), 62; Pseudo-Dionysius, Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000), 98, https​:/​/cc​​el​.or​​g​/cce​​l​/rol​​t​/dio​​nysi​u​​s​.htm​​l, accessed August 27, 2018. 38. Gelpi, Gracing, 266. 39. Ibid., 71. 40. What I mean by “sense” in this book can basically be understood as Gottlob Frege’s determination of that term in his “Sense and Reference.” Therein, he says that the sense of a sign, in contrast to its reference or idea, is the “mode of presentation [that the sign] contains.” By using a sense, one does not exhaust the referent’s meaning by recourse to a particular sense; rather, it “serves to illuminate only a single aspect of the referent, supposing it to exist.” For instance, “The 16th president of the United States,” “Mary Todd Lincoln’s husband,” and “the man shot by John Wilkes Booth on April 14th, 1865” all have different “modes of presentation” for the reference “Abraham Lincoln” as senses. The first has a determinate sense related to a person being an elected head of state; the second has a sense of a married individual; the third’s sense is of someone killed by another on a certain day. See Gottlob Frege, “Sense and Reference,” The Philosophical Review 57, no. 3 (1948): 210–211, accessed October 3, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.jst​​or​.or​​g​/sta​​ble​/p​​df​/21​​​81485​​.pdf. 41. Scholarly works in English that utilize Peirce for specifically theological reasons include: Robert Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Philosophy and Theology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Anette Ejsing, Theology of Anticipation: A Constructive Study of C.S. Peirce (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2006); Donald Gelpi, The Gracing of Human Experience; Robert C. Neville, Symbols of Jesus: A Christology of Symbolic Engagement (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Leon Niemoczynski, Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011); Peter Ochs, Pragmatism, Peirce, and the Logic of Scripture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion (Indianapolis: Indianapolis University Press, 1989); Andrew Robinson, God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution, and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C.S. Peirce (Leiden: Brill, 2010); and Gary Slater, C.S. Peirce and the Nested Continua Model of Religious Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Part I

GUIDELINES FOR A SUCCESSFUL ANALOGY

Chapter 2

How Analogy Works Intelligibility, Modeling, and Guidelines

INTRODUCTION If we are hoping to clarify what is necessary for a successful theological analogy, it seems appropriate to begin our examination by addressing the general conditions for analogy as a cognitive operation: How is analogy supposed to work? What makes for an intelligible one? What factors have to be taken into account in order for people to understand, analyze, and utilize analogical reasoning and description? My interest in this chapter is to make clear the empirical and scholarly efforts to explain these matters. To be sure, theological analogy is, to wit, a “different beast” by virtue of its subject matter; yet, what amounts to the intelligible concerns the human subject, which is not specific to theologizing and so still makes theological analogy a “beast,” to extend the metaphor. Therefore, I am taking a “bottom-up” approach: my first goal is to discern how analogy normally works (i.e., what are its conditions for success), and then I will assess the various theological proposals based on those criteria. This should not only allow us to escape the charge of ad hoc reasoning or special pleading that often accompanies theological projects, but also put in place firm (if at times flexible) boundaries for critique. The aim of this chapter is fourfold: first, I will address the basic requirements for intelligible language use; second, I will briefly cover the influential ancient and medieval accounts of analogy delivered by Aristotle and the later scholastic thinker Thomas Cajetan, respectively; third, I will lay out a series of frameworks propounded by scholars within cognitive science and philosophy that articulate operations for analogical reasoning; and, fourth, I will work from these conclusions to synthesize a set of regulative principles or “guidelines” for successful analogies. 21

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WHAT ALLOWS FOR INTELLIGIBILITY? To begin, we need to get some grasp on what “intelligibility” is. Generally, the term is thought of as a value contributing toward the meaningfulness of sentences, or linguistic expressions. So, “What do you want?” is one such sentence that seems to be intelligible to English-speaking readers. But, intelligibility also admits of degrees: for instance, “Go get me the pen,” seems to be less intelligible than “Go get me the red pen with the black top,” and still less intelligible than both would be “Get it for me.” That the middle sentence is more intelligible seems to have to do with the specificity of the request, whereas the last sentence has less determinate meaning for the interpreter to act upon. Yet, both sentences might be sufficient for the task of securing the pen. There are also cases where an expression appears to be entirely unintelligible insofar as they don’t allow for any advance in meaning. Here, various examples from nonsense verse might come up, like the opening line to Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”: “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves [d] id gyre and gimble in the wabe.”1 Surely, there are prepositions in the verse that we recognize, but we don’t know how they are to be used in conjunction with the other made up words to make the sentence comprehensible (without further context). Thus, to give an account of intelligibility, it needs to be broad enough to cover the requirements of many different speech forms, precise enough to address what is sufficient for meaning, and detailed enough to explain grades of meaning. At this point, I introduce our main figure, Charles Sanders Peirce, to help steer us in the right direction regarding some basic conditions on intelligibility. Though we will only hear from him sparsely until part II of this book, he gives us a lucid and, I think, fairly uncontroversial account of some basic requirements for the intelligibility of linguistic expressions, and this in turn will help us to adjudicate the claims of the proceeding chapters. For Peirce, the intelligibility of linguistic expressions is based upon the conceivability of their constituting symbols. That conceivability is given a description in what he called the pragmatic maxim. This is perhaps best put forth in “Issues in Pragmaticism” (1905), where Peirce offers two formulations for it. First, he offers its conceptual formulation: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearing, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object.” Second, we have Peirce’s restatement of this maxim with regard to the use of symbols—thus, its symbolic formulation: “the entire intellectual import of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.”2 With regard to linguistic expressions (of which God-talk is a species), we may understand

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these formulations as a whole in the following way: a linguistic expression’s rational value is exhausted by its possible usefulness for practical, rational conduct, and the conception that that linguistic expression conjures is exhausted by the imaginable effects or consequences of that possible usefulness for that same conduct. This is what I take the intelligibility of language to be about. But, to break this down into more manageable criteria, we can consider the intelligible expression to have three interlocking features, each contingent upon the previous: 1. Constituted by symbols: An intelligible expression contains signs that refer to conceptions through a general convention. 2. Conceivable through effects: An intelligible expression will conjure possible effects to be conceived. 3. Influences “deliberate, self-controlled conduct”3 if expression is accepted: An intelligible expression will affect rational conduct in some way if it is accepted. These criteria must be elucidated further, and I’ll do so by showing how examples do and do not partake of the criteria. Giving a sudden cry of pain from stubbing one’s toe, for instance, doesn’t meet the first criterion, and thus doesn’t meet the latter two; this is because the cry is a vocal effect elicited by a muscular-nervous event and is not supposed to refer to some concept or object. The sentence, “Square circles are over there,” meets the first criterion for using symbols to refer to a conception; however, it fails the second (and, therefore, third) criterion by failing to produce conceivable effects concerning its grammatical subject. I have no imaginative possibilities available to me for thinking about an experience of a square circle, and, if that is the case, there is a fortiori no way to think through how it would affect my conduct. A sentence that could fulfill the first two criteria without fulfilling the third might be “Trees are special.” I know different ways to imagine trees, and so can conceive of their various effects, but I don’t know what should be the result of distinguishing them as “special” for my conduct. Am I to think that they are to be thought of as a particular species of plant? Am I to compare them to animals? Am I to not cut them down? Or, maybe cut them down? These all remain undetermined until I might receive further information to make this sentence intelligible. So, perhaps my interlocutor, or the book I’m reading, goes on to say, “Trees are special because they provide safety to many woodland creatures.” Now having that further context, my conduct might move in the following directions: if I wanted to find woodland creatures’ habitats, I might look in a tree; if I fell a tree, there might be homes of woodland creatures within it that would be affected; if I were to climb a tree, I should expect to happen upon a woodland creature; and so on.

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But, does this render too high a bar for intelligible expressions? I think not; in fact, I think it quite generous. For instance, it can admit of fairly fanciful or outrageous sentences like “Frodo and Samwise traveled to Mordor” or “Zeus causes thunderstorms,” and idiomatic expressions like “the night is young” or “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” In the former cases, the first proposition can be checked for confirmation in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King if it is believed, and Zeus’s person could be investigated in principle if someone assented to his reality as a cause of thunderstorms (this seems patently false, but that doesn’t prevent it from having conceivable effects and some consequence for conduct). In the latter cases, in recognizing that a concept underlies the figurative expression, one practically can continue on with one’s nocturnal activities (“the night is young”) or receive a gift with gratefulness (“don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”). Before moving on, one other thing is important to mention: on this account of intelligibility, “meaningful” is not the same thing as “intelligible.” Intelligibility may instead by understood to be a special species of meaningfulness, one that has specifically to do with the rational conduct of communication via symbols. The person who stubs her toe and lets out a cry is putting forth a meaningful expression because it is a sign of a causal event involving a human body; however, that vocalization does not stand for any conventionally associated idea, as linguistic symbols do. As such, it is not an intelligible expression, but still a meaningful sign. In short, I think Albert Atkin offers a nice summary of the view of intelligibility propounded above in commenting on Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: intelligibility is about the “language users’ understanding of the practical consequences of taking some concept to be true.”4 If a language user cannot imagine those practical consequences, then it isn’t an intelligible concept that the expression symbolizes, and therefore cannot be properly given a conceivable truth status. These criteria, when brought together, may be called pragmaticistic intelligibility.5 With this account of intelligibility in view,6 we may now move on to the basic concern of this chapter: how should we think about analogy? What is it? How does it function? For that, we must proceed to its Greek origins. THE ARISTOTELIAN BACKDROP Alfred North Whitehead famously claimed that the history of the European philosophical tradition “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”;7 similarly, we might say that scholarship on analogy consists in the addenda, commentary, and corrigenda to Aristotle. Although surely an overstatement in both cases, the practical denouement is that no foray into the current understanding

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of analogy should fail to address its fundamental development in the thought of Aristotle, to whom we first turn. Aristotle holds the pride of place in analogy’s lineage because, as Roger White points out, he was the first to develop analogy’s “full-potential . . . beyond its mathematical basis.”8 While earlier Greeks, particularly Euclid, were able to recognize that two ratios of commensurable magnitudes could bear the same mathematical relationship (i.e., A : B :: C : D), and that this could be used toward the end of determining an unknown value when the other three were known (e.g., 1 : 2 :: 5 : X),9 it was Aristotle who was “able to show us the wide range of the fruitful employment of the concept” of analogy.10 At the heart of it, Aristotle saw that some relationship between two terms was being preserved between a third and fourth term in non-mathematical reality, and that this had extensive consequences for our knowledge of the world. Though his expansion on the concept is far from systematic, Aristotle’s various applications of it help to triangulate a coherent picture of its formal characteristics. Consider some examples: First, in Book I of the History of Animals, the work begins by addressing the differences in animals according to their parts. A part that is not identical, and that differs more than by mere degree (e.g., some birds have long bills and others short), corresponds “by analogy” (κατ᾿ ἀναλογίαν). As an example, “in a fish, the scale is the corresponding thing to a feather in a bird.”11 So, in this case, the preservation of the relationship seems to be instanced through a functional equivalence: the fish’s scale functions in the same way as a bird’s feather.12 Second, and beyond biology, we see a more formal characterization of analogy in the Poetics. Here, Aristotle is interested in the various ways in which metaphor ascribes a name to something that “belongs to something else”;13 the fourth way is by analogy, which is: Possible whenever there are four terms so related that the second (B) is to the first (A), as the fourth (D) to the third (C); for one may then metaphorically put D in lieu of B, and B in lieu of D. Now and then, too, they qualify the metaphor by adding on to it that to which the word it supplants is relative. Thus a cup (B) is in relation to Dionysius (A) what a shield (D) is to Ares (C). The cup accordingly will be metaphorically described as the “shield of Dionysius” (D +A), and the shield as the “cup of Ares” (B+C).14

Although metaphor has a complicated relationship with analogy (as we shall see in the next section), the analogical relationship carries through: one may metaphorically use a cup for a shield insofar as those items relate in similar ways to their possessors. Third, the Nicomachean Ethics employs analogy in a number of ways for moral concepts. Take the idea of distributive justice: for Aristotle, it is

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only intelligible as an analogical concept, or what White calls the “justice of exchange.”15 Aristotle offers an example of a common trading experience: Now proportionate return [τὴν ἀντίδοσιν τὴν κατ᾽ ἀναλογίαν] is secured by cross-conjunction. Let A be a builder, B a shoemaker, C a house, D a shoe. The builder, then, must get from the shoemaker the latter’s work, and must himself give him in return his own. If, then, first there is proportionate equality [ἀναλογίαν ἴσον] of good, and then reciprocal action takes place, the result we mention will be effected. If not, the bargain is not equal, and does not hold; for there is nothing to prevent the work of the one being better than that of the other; they must therefore be equated.16

The notion here is that the transaction is fair only if there can be an equal trading of physically unequal goods; therefore, a “proportionate equality” of the goods in view must be assumed for the bargain to be equally beneficial for both parties. Fourth, Book 12 of the Metaphysics clearly shows that analogical thinking, for Aristotle, extends into informing our understanding of the most general ontological categories. As he says, “The causes and the principles of different things are in a sense different, but in a sense, if one speaks universally and analogically, they are the same for all.”17 What he means is that causes and principles are different with respect to their specific elements—a perceptible body has a particular form, can undergo a privation of that form, and has matter that can potentially have or not have those formal attributes. But, we recognize a sameness in the three principles that disparate perceptible objects have, even if they don’t appear in the same way: form, privation, and matter. Therefore, we may say that, for example, color (white, black, and surface) has the same three principles as day (light, darkness, and air) only by analogy.18 Thus, we see the pervasiveness of the analogical relation. If we are to make intelligible claims about things in different classes being similar, or likenesses in some respect, we need to approach it from the formula R (A, B) = R (C, D). Aristotle says just this in section 17 of Book 1 of his Topics. Likeness must be examined in things belonging to different genera—as A is to B, so is C to D (for example, “As knowledge is related to the object of knowledge, so is sensation related to the object of sensation”), and also, as A is in B, so is C in D (for example, “As sight is in the eye, so is reason in the soul” and “As is calm in the sea, so is absence of wind in the air”). In particular we must have practice in dealing with genera which are widely separated; for in the other cases we shall be able to detect the similarities more readily.19

But, pursuing the analogical relationship into deeper recesses comes with a more complicated intellectual history, to which we now turn.

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MEDIEVAL INTERIM DEVELOPMENTS, CAJETAN, AND CLARIFYING PROPORTIONALITY The ancient interest in analogy as a sort of relational proportionality between differing things became both sharpened and obfuscated in the medieval period. In the former case, the scholastic tradition developed distinctions to isolate analogy’s role as separate from equivocity and univocity, but, in the latter case, these distinctions also contributed toward a variety of other senses in which “analogy” would be used, including those which had no technical use for the relational proportionality of Aristotle. To help navigate this territory—and to situate us with respect to our basic concern about relational proportionality as the driving notion to be clarified—I rely here on Joshua Hochschild’s scholarship in his The Semantics of Analogy.20 Therein, we find both a valuable explication of the kinds of analogy that the medieval scholars differentiated, and an important interpretation of one of the main expositors of analogy’s logic: Thomas Cajetan. To begin, I should say something about two kinds of concepts of analogy during the medieval period. The first is what we have already called analogia according to Aristotle: it is the determination of some similar functional relation between two objects that don’t share a similar genus or class. This Hochschild calls nongeneric likeness. The second is a linguistic phenomenon where a homonymous word refers to a distinct relation with the properly designated object—for instance, “Socrates’s writings are wise.” In such a case, Socrates’s advice is named “wise” because it relates as something that is “the evidence of” or “is likely to produce” wisdom. The writings are not themselves “wise,” nor are they a subject that has wisdom, like Socrates. Aristotle called this a word said “with reference to one” (πρὸς ἓν λέγεσθαι), and Hochschild calls it associated meaning—crucially, it does not rely on a proportionate or similar relation between object relations (SA, 2-4).21 But, what was separate for Aristotle became “entangled” for the later scholastic tradition (SA, 7). That entanglement seems to have a lot to do with the Neoplatonic Aristotelian commentarial tradition, in particular the work of Boethius at the turn of the sixth century CE. In his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, Boethius follows the Latin tradition in treating nongeneric likeness and associated meaning as two forms of intentional equivocation: the former being an equivocation “by proportion,” and the latter being equivocation by “relation to one.” However, Boethius helped to produce a sort of counterintuitive trend in that tradition by opting to name the Greek analogia as the Latin proportionalitas (i.e., proportionality) to characterize nongeneric likeness. In so doing, Boethius helped to cement a “subtle migration” into the later medieval tradition where analogia would tend to be understood

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as—indeed, considered “almost synonymous with”—associated meaning, while proportionalitas was nongeneric likeness (SA, 8). It is in this context that Cajetan would write his De Nominum Analogia, which would become “the most influential treatise on analogy” for the later intellectual tradition (SA, xx). Cajetan’s aim for that treatise, however, has not been clearly understood by his later interpreters, Hochschild argues. An important aspect of the “received” interpretation of his work has been that it was primarily an attempt to systematize Aquinas and present the types of analogy with reference to their metaphysical bearing (i.e., analogical relations between things) (SA, 22-24); however, Hochschild argues that Cajetan’s interest was not to provide a systematic commentary on Aquinas’s teaching, but to produce his own logical account of analogy (i.e., one concerned with the “relations between significations of words”) (SA, 37). Thus, Hochschild says that De Nominum Analogia has, in its general method, a “semantic” intention to clarify the role of analogy in the “classic semantic triangle of word-concept-thing” (SA, 38). But, in particular, the treatise is an attempt to answer the challenge of Duns Scotus: “how can analogy avoid the fallacy of equivocation” (SA, 44)? In other words, if—as Scotus defined it—a univocal concept is one that would “cause contradiction when affirmed and denied of the same thing” (SA, 42), then how could an analogical concept act to provide a valid syllogism, and so then be useful for scientific reasoning? For instance, to riff off the earlier example, one could argue: “Socrates, being wise, is greater than other human beings; Socrates’s words are wise; therefore, Socrates’s words are greater than other human beings.” But, this seems to commit the fallacy of equivocation, for one could affirm Socrates’s wisdom (in himself) and deny Socrates’s wisdom (in his words) without contradiction. Therefore, the syllogism isn’t valid. So, is this the case for all forms of analogy? Cajetan answers that, in the logical analysis of the three modes of analogy, these modes exhaust the ways that one can consider analogy as a mean between univocation and equivocation; however, it is only the last, the analogy of proper proportionality, which is “sufficiently unified to avoid the fallacy of equivocation” (SA, 45). The first mode of analogy, the analogy of inequality, includes those sentences using words that have a common name and “the ratio [concept] according to that name is wholly the same, but unequally participated.”22 As having a concept that is “wholly the same,” this technically puts the analogy of inequality in the logical position of univocity, and so it is only called “analogy” improperly; however, as “unequally participated” in, this reflects on the metaphysical status of the objects compared. Cajetan’s example is one of a body being attributed to both a stone and a plant. The two are both of the one genus “body” and thus are logically univocal, but the plant has a “higher” substantial form as a species of body that includes life, which makes

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the plant have more “bodiliness” than the stone. Thus, we see that Cajetan is well aware of the distinction between the semantic and metaphysical issues at work in these modes, the former of which is what is important for distinguishing what is analogical and what isn’t. As such, he quickly leaves the analogy of inequality to explore the more semantically interesting modes (SA, 108-10). The second mode of analogy, analogy of attribution, is utilized when homonyms have a concept that is “the same with respect to a terminus, and different with respect to relations to that terminus.”23 What this means is that there are “secondary analogates” that take up the homonymous word because they relate differently to the “primary analogate’s” form (as the terminus) (SA, 110). Cajetan’s example is healthy. The primary analogate is just the form of health, but there are numerous ways in which secondary analogates may be related to their terminus: for instance, the animal is healthy because it relates to the form of health as a subject of it; urine is healthy because it relates to the form health as an effect of it; medicine is healthy because it relates to the form of health as a cause of it.24 These secondary analogates are always denominated extrinsically as a result of this semantic definition—that is, the person, urine, and medicine are not so named healthy because of anything intrinsic to their objects but because of how they relate to something else (in this case, the form of “health) (SA, 94).25 But, to be clear, this does not rule out that primary and secondary analogates might not be intrinsically similar in a material or metaphysical sense—it only says what it does insofar as the relation is judged formally or semantically as analogous. (SA, 111-12). Or, put another way, the analogy of attribution is just interested in the concept as denominated or as “signified by terms and conceived in the mind,” not what might be the underlying reason why it is denominated as such or how the “forms . . . are actually realized in things” (SA, 115-16). For instance, medicine may be metaphysically related to the health of the subject in which it produces health, but that isn’t relevant to the semantics of its role as extrinsically denominating health in the subject by causation or production (SA, 114). Thus, again, Cajetan wants to propound his modes of analogy as logically distinguishing, not metaphysically.26 At this point, we need only connect the dots: clearly, analogy of attribution is the Latin permutation of Greek associated meaning. As such, it is also a form of equivocation, “logically speaking”—since the secondary analogates all relate differently to each other and to the primary analogate, they depict different concepts or senses (SA, 118). It follows that, as a form of equivocation, analogy of attribution clearly commits the fallacy of equivocation. Indeed, the earlier example offered of Socrates’s wisdom and Socrates’s words’ wisdom fits the analogy of attribution’s fallacy of equivocation quite well: affirming Socrates as the subject of wisdom does not form a

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contradiction with denying Socrates’s words as the product of wisdom. So, it is clearly necessary that Cajetan must move on to the third mode to secure some means to avoid the fallacy of equivocation. The third and final mode of analogy, the analogy of proportionality, is utilized when homonyms have a concept “similar according to proportion.”27 Hochschild comments that this is the nongeneric likeness of the Greek tradition: though having “no one common element or quality,” the homonyms “bear a commonality” that does not consist in a similar genus (SA, 125). As such, it also fits with the “A : B :: C : D” schema, but it does so properly and genuinely only insofar as the concept can be said for each pair of analogates. For instance, “understanding : soul :: seeing : body” intends to capture the similar—or “proportional”—concept of seeing for both the mind and physical sight (SA, 125-26). However, one may give the analogy improperly when a word signifies only one of the pairs while it means non-literally for the other: such is the case for metaphor. For instance, take an expression like, “That field of blooming flowers is smiling at me!” This could be presented technically as “blooming : field :: smiling : man,” but the concept signified by “smiling : man” is not actually present in the field. This is not to say that there isn’t some genuine proportionality between the blooming field and a smiling man, but it is to say that the particular schema “blooming : field :: smiling : man” does not present the right terminology to discern the concept similar in both pairs of analogates (SA, 126-27). So, in a proper proportionality, “we recognize proportionally similar things and signify them each with the same word,” but in improper proportionality—or metaphor—“we recognize proportionally similar things and signify one of the similar things with a word” (SA, 128). Thus, we may see the former as the relational proportionality in Aristotle given earlier: R (A, B) :: R (C, D). Further, insofar as proper proportionality seeks the proportional concept in the analogates, that means the analogates are always denominated intrinsically—that is, “the term denominates the analogates on account of something intrinsic [or internal] to each analogate” (SA, 140). But, now we must ask ourselves what, exactly, is the “proportionality” in view supposed to signify? If it isn’t a univocal equality between the concepts, then what is it? Cajetan’s own response to this complaint is actually somewhat indirect, and appears fairly circular: he doesn’t himself offer a description or explanation for what proportionality is; instead, the “explanation” for why proportionality is a middle way between equivocity and univocity appears to be just the irreducibility of the proportional unity evinced in “A : B :: C : D” of nongeneric likeness (SA, 136). As such, he assumes that people can recognize this proportionality as a legitimate form of unity per se, and so “makes no attempt to defend its place in the Aristotelian philosophical tradition” (SA, 137). How does this answer Scotus’s objection to analogy with the fallacy of

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equivocation? Hochschild says that the proportional unity in question must presume its legitimacy as a matter of metaphysics, or as a material difference between “kinds of unity” (SA, 139). The Scotists’ objection, he argues, is one that “simply refuses to recognize something that is, in fact, real” and so sets up logical assumptions with respect to the fallacy of equivocation that would bar its possible use in inference. But, we must look at this more closely if we are to see whether the metaphysical nay-saying of the Scotists is licit. Put simply, the Scotists’ complaint against proportionality affects three ordered levels of logic: (1) our simple apprehension is affected because there seems to be no common concept that can be abstracted from the pair of analogates representing equivocal terms; (2) our ability to compose and divide is affected because, without a common concept, one cannot predicate that concept of the pair of analogates; and (3) our ability to reason is affected because, without the common predicated concept for homonymous terms, one commits the fallacy of equivocation (SA, 143). Cajetan will focus the remainder of his De Nominum Analogia on addressing these respective levels. To the first level, then, how does the analogy of proportionality allow for simple apprehension? Here, Cajetan makes a distinction between “perfect” and “imperfect” concepts. A perfect concept represents its form “perfectly,” while an imperfect concept does so only in a proportionately similar way. In an analogy of (proper) proportionality, a target analogate’s concept will represent the target form perfectly, and mutatis mutandis for the source analogate’s concept of the source’s form; however, the target analogate’s concept only represents the source analogate’s form imperfectly, and mutatis mutandis for the source analogate’s concept of the target form. This allows us to say that the two analogates are proportionally similar, and thus enables us to speak of a third “imperfect” concept that represents the form of both the source and target analogates (SA, 146). Importantly, Cajetan warns that this isn’t to be considered a “common” concept to the analogates; rather, this third concept expresses the proportional similarity of the other two (or more) concepts (SA, 148). A second point that Cajetan makes about simple apprehension concerns the matter of abstraction. Here, he agrees that, since the analogates do not share a common genus, a common concept cannot be abstracted; however, there is a kind of “abstraction by confusion” or “quasi-abstraction” that occurs where “the diverse proper analogues are considered as similar, and their diversity is ignored”—that is, “blurred, or made indistinct” (SA, 149). Effectively, the source and target concepts are just considered insofar as they are proportionally similar, a process that Cajetan will later call “resolution” (SA, 159). But, then, can’t one ask why a proper abstraction isn’t available at this point? Cajetan’s response is to say, “it is inappropriate to ask; it is just the nature of

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proportional similarity that it is genuine similarity and yet there is not some commonly abstractable element” (SA, 150). Hochschild comments that we can understand this proportionality as analogates “playing corresponding roles in their respective (and so proportionally similar) structures” (SA, 151). To the second level of logic, composition and division, the question is how to understand what predication of the analogous term means. Here, Cajetan says that proportionality can have its own “superiority” as a universal over the diverse concepts of the analogates, or “inferiors”; it just doesn’t do so as a perfect identity of concepts that a univocal universal has (SA, 152). So, for instance, while “body” may be the superior concept used for both the inferior concepts of “rock” and “plant” in univocal predication, so “sight” may be the superior concept used to unite by proportional identity the inferior concepts of the “soul’s understanding” and the “body’s seeing.” Again, though, Cajetan more or less relies on a “metaphysical recognition” of this further kind of “mode of identity” that the Scotists seem to write off from the beginning (SA, 152-53). But, Hochschild says Cajetan doesn’t need to explain himself further on this point: “if the diverse concepts were not proportionally one [as Scotists allege], then there could not even be the kind of confused or quasi-abstraction that allows the analogical term to be predicated as a superior to inferiors” (SA, 153). Yet, it seems the Scotists’ criticism of the fallacy of equivocation remains outstanding; thus, Cajetan continues with addressing how the concepts of the respective analogates relate to one another to form the proportional concept. Cajetan first clarifies that the two analogate concepts do not relate in the way an analogy of attribution does—as a relation between primary and secondary—but rather as the “foundation of a relation,” meaning that they relate as intrinsically sharing some proportion they possess independent of one another (SA, 154). So, Socrates’s words will not be considered “wise” unless it is so related to Socrates’s wisdom; however, the soul’s understanding “sees” whether or not it is so related to the sight of the body (SA, 155). In turning to the third level of logic, reasoning, we can finally directly address the fallacy of equivocation, Hochschild says. Rephrasing the question, “How can an analogical term avoid causing the fallacy of equivocation when that term, occurring in different premises in a scientific demonstration, signifies different perfect concepts?” (SA, 162). The answer Cajetan offers is that the fault lies in the last clause of the question: it is not that the term is meant to signify the two perfect concepts of the respective pair of analogates, but that it represents that third, mediating imperfect concept that makes the perfect concepts proportionally the same. So, Hochschild says that the response to the fallacy of equivocation is to invoke what he calls the “transitivity of likeness”—that is, “if something applies to a likeness, insofar as it is a likeness, it applies also to a thing of which the likeness is a likeness.” In

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qualifying analogy in this way, Cajetan also modifies how one should understand equivocation: it is not narrowly the contradiction of a univocal that causes it, but the contradiction of “same” terms, which can include proportional sameness (SA, 162-63). To illustrate, consider the “seeing” example in a syllogism: “All seeing involves the perception of a form; understanding is a sort of seeing in the soul; therefore, understanding involves the perception of a form.” If we accept a proportionality between bodily seeing and seeing in the understanding, we can recognize that that imperfect concept is being traced in this syllogism without equivocating upon “seeing.” That logic, Cajetan says, also extends to theological syllogisms; for instance, “Every simple perfection is in God, wisdom is a simple perfection, therefore wisdom is in God,”28 can be valid and true because “the two different [concepts] of wisdom are, in fact, proportionally the same, and their proportional similarity is a sufficient similarity to avoid the fallacy of equivocation” (SA, 163). It is this picture of proportionality that would prevail for quite some time in the Christian tradition. But, Hochschild’s assurances notwithstanding, the answer to the basic question, “What does this proportionality that anchors analogous predication signify?” seems to remain unexplicated as a sort of properly basic kind of unity on Cajetan’s analysis (indeed, there seems to simply be a perceptible difference between it and univocity, on his view). This presents some lingering problems for assessing an analogy’s differentiation from univocal predication and comparing the adequacy of analogies in argumentation. For instance, when is a relation between two things a common relation and when is it a proportionate one? When is an abstraction a proper one and when is it a “confused” one that founds the apprehension of proportionality? How does one assess the better or worse adequacy of two distinct proportionalities aiming to present an analogy more faithfully? It is problems like these that bring us to our next section: does Aristotelian thinking on analogy—which Cajetan represents—have resources for addressing these questions further? MARY HESSE’S COMMENTARY ON ARISTOTLE In the early 1960s, Mary Hesse worked to develop an account of analogy that would extend beyond its Aristotelian moorings. In an important essay, “Aristotle’s Logic of Analogy,” Hesse’s conclusion was that there were “no further resources in Aristotle” for explaining the workings of analogy—particularly for metaphysics and theology—“precisely because the elucidation of analogy was not his problem, and because progress appears to depend on the rejection of his assumptions about univocity.”29 Let’s consider both of these reasons.

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With regard to the elucidation of analogy, take the process of induction in intuitive knowledge as a starting point. In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle is trying to make sense of how demonstrative knowledge—or, the “scientific syllogism”—can be secured. He believes that it must be through “primary immediate premises.”30 But, it’s not that we possess those premises already or that we have to acquire them from another, higher source; instead, we have an “innate power of discernment” to get us there: intuition. Intuition follows a simple process: first, one through the innate power of sense perception, acquires repeated exposure to the world’s phenomena; next, our impressions of the world persist in our minds through memory; then, “out of frequently repeated memories” we obtain an experience; finally, from these experiences we intuit the universal, which produces scientific knowledge.31 Thus, we have an inductive process that is “always true,” giving us unfailingly reliable knowledge of a universal in particular things.32 The point of bringing up induction is that analogy, for Aristotle, will have to somehow address grasping the universal requisite for knowledge. Is it that analogy grasps the universal in some other, partial way? Hesse says this can’t be the case, since Aristotle’s interest in using analogy is precisely to serve as a replacement for when we can’t induce the universal, since no higher genus exists for doing so (“ALA,” 334). In the case of inducing within a genus, thanks to our intuitive faculty, we can acquire a definition of a genus by observing many similar and disparate individuals, discerning their common properties “until a single formula is reached, depending on a single common character. That defines the genus” (“ALA,” 329). But, in the case of an analogy, since there is no higher category to mutually define the target and source, we are left with an “irreducible middle term between univocity and equivocity” (“ALA,” 337). But, what can we say about this middle term? Let’s consider the Metaphysics example from earlier again. Supposedly, day and color analogically share form, privation, and matter. Their specific instances are different, but they seem to have in common some overarching classification “in a sense”; yet, if we only know those higher categories themselves, as Hesse says, “by the analogy of sensible things” (“ALA,” 335), then how does this help us grasp what is being analogized? Hesse thinks that an earlier passage in the Metaphysics is the most explicit about this when speaking about determining actuality and potentiality: Our meaning can be seen in the particular cases by induction, and we must not seek a definition of everything but be content to grasp the analogy, that it is as that which is building is to that which is capable of building, and the waking to the sleeping, and that which is seeing to that which has its eyes shut but has sight, and that which has been shaped out of the matter to the matter, and that which has been wrought up to the unwrought. Let actuality be defined by one

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member of this antithesis, and the potential by the other. But all things are not said in the same sense to exist actually, but only analogy—as A is in B or to B, C in in D or to D; for some are as movement to potency, and the others as substance to some sort of matter.33

Hesse notes four points about this passage: (1) analogy is a mode of definition that “replaces” that by genera and differentiae; (2) like normal definition, however, the definition is acquired through induction of multiple instances; (3) one grasps the analogy in some similar way to one grasping the universal in intuition; and (4) the things defined cannot be applied to all instances “in the same sense” (“ALA,” 336). The difficulty, for Hesse, is that Aristotle’s account appears to be circular: to grasp what the analogy actually is, we have to understand its process “on the analogy of grasping the universal by induction” (“ALA,” 336); however, it is just in comparing the inductive processes for grasping the universal and the analogy that understanding “breaks down.” Whereas in intuition the repeated instances of particulars allow us to grasp the universal for which we can predicate a genus univocally, in analogy, the inductive process connects the terms through a relation and the peculiar “actuality” or “potentiality” of the related object. The problem is that it is just the particular object’s “actuality” or “potentiality” that requires elucidation: how it somehow “defines” the relation by its own character in addition to being related, and how it can translate that meaning in the same sense to other related objects enumerated in the inductive process. Unless we somehow antecedently understand what that analogous relation means (and completing the circle), we seem to be unable to say what it is, apart from pointing to another analogy (resulting in a reductio). So, it appears to Hesse that the analogous relation must remain “primitive and inexplicable” to Aristotle, and, reflecting upon Cajetan’s treatment of analogy, we see that he is entirely consistent with his master in this regard. But, in so doing, this leaves us “no nearer to understanding, except negatively, what it is for terms to be predicated analogically” (“ALA,” 337). In the second instance, that of progress depending on rejecting the assumptions of univocity, Hesse’s answer to the problem of analogy does not involve seeking a hidden univocity of terms in analogy that Aristotle missed, but rather in rejecting the demands of univocity for definition. If it is actually the case that univocity is the strange outlier, and that analogy is the true means by which predication functions, then the induction to universals that Aristotle depends on for definition crumbles. Instead, we should admit a “looseness of fit” between both particular instances with their differences and high-level genera: no two instances of a universal or of an inductive generalization are identical, neither is it clear that they can be analysed [sic] explicitly into identities and

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differences, and even if they can, it seems that the same problem about the alleged identities will arise again. Hence we are led to suggest, every universal or inductive generalization is based on analogy between instances, and can be said to apply to those instances “in different senses,” i.e. analogously. (“ALA,” 339)

So, to return to Aristotle, he gave us tools to think analogously in various realms of discourse, and a way to point to objects that have some similar senses for meaningful comparison, but his account comes up short in giving us further determination as to what analogous predication is supposed to mean. Cajetan, likewise, seems only to be able to hint at the ways in which proportionality is meaningfully different from univocity, but is unable to provide answers from his Aristotelian framework. For my part, I believe that both the inexplicability of analogy and its proper relation to univocity have their origins in the dualism that he sets up between matter and form—that is, the very definitions for his terms prevent adequate understanding. Thus, Hesse, I believe, is on the right track with wanting to overturn the definitions of univocity, which elide important distinctions and processes in what Aristotle called “intuition.” Yet, I think that she is still missing a big piece of the puzzle—but, we will return to this at a later point in our inquiry. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Hesse’s solution to Aristotle, the consequence of his account seems to be that analogy must remain mysterious, for we are simply unable to obtain a universal for scientific knowledge by analogous predication. We can say things are analogous, but each comparison determines its own analogy, and thus any recourse to a genus, differentiae, or broader category is unavailable to us. For making a way forward, thinks Hesse, we must move beyond Aristotle. In order to do that, it seems we must reassess what we understand analogy to be about. We need to ask a more basic question: what are the basic mechanics of thinking by analogy on the cognitive level? The hope is that what has become unclear in the conception that Aristotle and Cajetan presupposed will be further clarified by considering the different ways in which contemporary scholarship in cognitive science and philosophy have addressed that question. We turn now to a few important paradigms on the matter of analogy as a thought-form, starting with Hesse’s own. HESSE’S MODELS AND ANALOGIES IN SCIENCE What Hesse can say Aristotle was getting right in his more mature account, even if this remained unthematized and underdeveloped, was that he seemed to recognize two senses in which terms were proportionately analogous, or,

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in Hochschild’s terms, have nongeneric likeness. The first of these is when there are “properties in common between parts of the members of different species,” and the second is when “there is similarity in the relation of the parts to the whole in each species” (“ALA,” 330). For example, analogy by a common property would be the “osseous nature” shared by fish spine and animal bone, and analogy by relation shows “similar structural positions or functions” between a hand and claw. Again, this is an implicit difference that Aristotle didn’t seem to explicitly formulate. How, then, might we approach incorporating these aspects of analogy in a more salutary way to facilitate the growth of knowledge? Hesse moves toward such an answer in Models and Analogies in Science. Her aim in this slim volume is to explain the function and use of analogies in science for purposes of intelligibility, argumentative persuasion, and predictive inference; her explications therein are quite valuable for an account of analogical predication, and for serving as important background to later analogical theories, which we will come to in the next section. Hesse writes that analogies that are scientifically fruitful have “two sorts of dyadic relations, and [she calls] these horizontal and vertical relations.”34 The horizontal relation tracks resemblances between discrete domain phenomena, or what amounts to the issue of identity and difference, whether that be in property descriptions (e.g., p1 looks like q1), property relations (e.g., p1 is positioned to x like q1 is positioned to y) or property functions (e.g., p1 does something that is like q1). The vertical relation, on the other hand, concerns what kind of relations the object and its disparate phenomena have to each other within their own domains, with the sciences often focusing on causal relations (e.g., phenomena p1 and p2 have a relation in x, wherein p1 can be said to “cause” p2). Hesse offers the figure below for an analogy between sound and light properties (fig. 2.1).35 A few things can be said about this example. First, a proposed analogy seems to employ both of these relations, even if implicitly, thus suggesting their mutual involvement and necessity. For instance, and more obviously, a vertically oriented analogy stating that sound echoes (p1) are to loudness (p2) as reflection (q1) is to brightness (q2) still has to horizontally employ the

Figure 2.1  Hesse’s Vertical and Horizontal Relationships.

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features of a second object to suggest the proportionality. But, horizontally oriented analogy requires some vertical component—for instance, to think that one object is detected by ear (p4) while another is detected by eye (q4) suggests some relation between the respective objects of sound (x) and light (y), even if it doesn’t strictly lay out that vertical relation’s type. Second, the similarity adduced here between the phenomena is a reflection upon non-identical properties, but the similarity relation can be proposed between objects that share properties (emphasizing physical similarity), as well as those that merely share a resembling function (reducing physical similarity). To go back to our examples earlier in this chapter, in the first instance, we can say that the earth is analogous to the moon because they are both “spherical” (MAS, 65); in the second instance, the wings of a bird and the fins of a fish may be compared merely from their similar function of propelling the animal through their habitat’s medium—air in one case, and water in the other (MAS, 68). Thus, the source and target of the analogy can be on a sliding scale of resemblance in their physical similarity, emphasizing properties, relations, or functions. Third, the dependence of the vertical and horizontal relations may change with the specific analogy. In the previous examples of sound : light, earth : moon, and wing : fin, the horizontal relation was independent of an explicit vertical relation: it “could be recognized before the vertical relations were known” (MAS, 70). For instance, the observed properties, structural location, and movement of a fin have resemblances to that of a wing. But, horizontal relations can also be dependent on the vertical relation. For example, “father : children :: state : citizens” provides an intelligible connection between the four objects not through any particular resemblance of physical or sense-based characteristics but because of specific vertical relations. So, the “Families” (x) domain has some relation of father (p1) to child (p2) that is analogous to the relation between state (q1) and citizens (q2) in the “Governments” (y) domain, in this case being rendered as complex social relations: “provider-for, protector-of, obedient-to, owes-respect-to, ” etc. (MAS, 69-70). This, to repeat the first point, does not mean that the horizontal relation is jettisoned, but it does mean that analogies can be intelligible apart from physical resemblances in property description, property relations, or property functions between the domains. Hesse next distinguishes analogy from mathematical proportionality, further explicating what we only got a glimpse of in Aristotle’s scattered remarks on “analogical proportionality.” They are similar in the following ways: (1a) they are both reflexive (a:b = a:b, which is trivial); (2a) they are symmetrical (a:b :: c:d = c:d :: a:b, so “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to a feather” is equal to “a bird is to a wing as a fish is to a feather”); (3a) they are invertible (a:b :: c:d = b:a :: c:d, so “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to a feather” is equal to “a scale is to a fish as a feather is to a bird”); (4a) analogy shares a form of the

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denominator addition property with numerical proportion yielding a logical sum for target and source terms (a:b :: c:d = a+b:b :: c+d:d, so “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to a feather” is equal to “the fish’s properties is to its scale as a bird’s properties are to its feather”); and (5a) given that three of the terms are known, there is a resemblance between solving for a numerical proportion and finding the fourth term of an analogy (a:b :: c :[x], so “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to what? A feather.”) (MAS, 71-73). However, they are also dissimilar in the following ways: (1b) in regard to 5a, there may not be a unique fourth term to find, as there is in numerical proportion (so, in a:b :: c: [x], quantities will give a discrete value, like the answer “10” for “1:2 :: 5:[x],” whereas the example “a fish is to a tail as a bird is to what?” might be “legs” or “tail”); (2b) the horizontal and vertical relations are not commensurable like quantities in numerical proportions are (i.e., one cannot say a:b :: c:d = a:c :: b:d and keep the same relation, so “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to a feather” is not the same as “a fish is to a bird as a scale is to a feather”); and (3b) there generally isn’t an available transitive relation between disparate analogs (i.e., one cannot presume to say a:b :: c:d; c:d :: e:f, therefore, a:b :: e:f, thus, “a fish is to a scale as a bird is to a feather, and a bird is to feather as an airplane is to a rudder, so a fish is to a scale as an airplane is to a rudder” is not a permissible logical move because the analogical relation has changed from an organism’s external covering to a function in flight) (MAS, 73-74). So, we see that analogy can be fairly reliable as long as we don’t get too far away from the basic properties of mathematical ratios limited to four terms, but once we begin using them in arguments, introducing other analogs in the mix, and trading the terms between the proportions, we can quickly get into trouble. This demands that we explore more closely the horizontal and vertical relations that are in some way implicated in all analogical description and arguments with physical theories (on Hesse’s view). We can do this by considering their roles in the two basic kinds of analogy in physical theories: formal analogy and material analogy. Formal analogy concerns a “one-to-one correspondence between different interpretations of the same formal theory” (MAS, 75). This kind of analogy we can call “post-theoretic,” because the analogy is contingent upon some sort of pre-established account or theory of the physical phenomena through which the target and source are interpreted. And, thanks to the account of the physical phenomena unifying the target and source phenomena, “two terms related by analogy need have no similarity other than that of both being interpretations of the same term in a formal theory—that is, of being corresponding relata in the vertical causal network of relations constituting the theory” (MAS, 76). So, what establishes the proportion of the formal analogy is not some physical resemblance of the cross-domain phenomena

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themselves, but a rootedness in a symbolic expression of a postulated lawful regularity between a domain’s phenomenon that carries across to another domain. This allows us to view (a) and (c), and (b) and (d), as “interpretations of the same symbol or set of symbols” for the regularity in view (MAS, 104). For example, “air : sound :: aether : light” can be seen as a formal analogy since the symbols that represent physical phenomena act or behave in parallel ways thanks to a pre-established account of the formal wave theory. In terms of a non-scientific analogy, the earlier example of “father: children :: state : citizens” instances a formal analogy: “father” and “state” relate to “children” and “citizens” analogously because they relate symbolically in parallel with a regular function: obedience, protecting, subservience, securing, etc. Overall, what we learn about formal analogies is that though they may not require any pre-established horizontal relation to be successful (i.e., we don’t know how the distinct domains’ particular physical descriptions, relations, or functions resemble each other), they do require some unifying account of the phenomena in view so that those phenomena can be plugged into a scheme for which they are symbols within a proportionate relation they share. The difficulty, of course, is that not all analogies have such an account—these are material analogies. Material analogies may be understood, in contrast to formal analogies, as “pre-theoretic.” Without an adequate causal theory making sense of the relations within a particular domain (which would in turn underpin the suggested analogous relations occurring across domains), these analogies are contingent on physical phenomena, which may in turn “enable predictions to be made from a model” (MAS, 75). It is here that similarity between the horizontal terms must come in to establish the model for future predictions rather than vertical ones: “if material analogies between models and explicanda are to do the predictive job required of them, they must be observable similarities between corresponding terms, and must not depend on a theory of the explicandum” (MAS, 77). We require the “analysis of similarity into relations of identity and difference” if we expect to “assimilate arguments from similarities between model and explicandum to what traditional logic has called ‘argument from analogy’ ” (MAS, 78). It is important to remember, again, that the similarity in observables is multivalent and spectrally assessable: the phenomena may share the same properties (e.g., the earth is spherical; the moon is spherical), share non-identical but resembling properties (e.g., sound is detected by the ears, light is detected by the eyes), or share structure or function (e.g., wings propel a bird through air, fins propel a fish through water). But, the similarity is still required, even if it is a “soft” one. Notice further that the vertical relations are not then themselves rendered without effect; on the contrary, they may further help prediction of, or persuasion to, conclusions about the hidden phenomena if causal or co-occurrent relations

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are strong enough in observed phenomena. For example, upon seeing that both the moon and earth are spherical, have mountains, rotate around the sun, and have a gravitational field, one might further be persuaded that the moon has an iron-rich, heated core, just like the earth. Hesse’s interests, as well as my own, lie with material analogy—how can analogy make sense or be cognitively successful when different phenomena cannot be presumed to fall under a unifying theory? However, our aims for the account are different. Hesse wants to figure out how analogies can develop predictive models for scientific theories, whereas I intend to make sense out of analogical predication for God-talk—her issue is prescriptive cogency for making arguments based on physical phenomena, while mine is the descriptive intelligibility of creaturely language for a non-creaturely reality. Both subject matter and the role of argumentation are different across the accounts. Nonetheless, Hesse’s insights into the nature of analogy are extremely useful for thinking about later scholarship on analogy, to which we will turn shortly. But, to conclude this section, I will provide some comments on two main problems that appear for Hesse with inferring from scientific models to their explicanda. The first is what Hesse calls the logical problem of analogy—this concerns “whether another character D of x is likely to belong also to y” given that the two resemble (A1, A2, A3), are dissimilar (B1, B2, B3), and are neutral (C1, C2, C3) in specific characters (MAS, 80). So, this has to do with “justifying inference from similarity” (MAS, 111)—when is it appropriate to make the claim that a hidden character is similar when we have a mixed bag of known attributes? The second is the causal problem of analogy—which involves “deciding whether the type of vertical relation implied in the analogy is acceptable as causal for either or both of the analogs.” Any analogy used in scientific reasoning will seem to run into one or both of these problems, but theological analogy has the added problem, which Hesse herself notices, that God has been understood (at least, traditionally) as outside of the normal causal network that the world instantiates (MAS, 95-96). If this is so, what does this mean for analogical predication for divine things? But, I am getting ahead of myself. For now, Hesse has given us a very valuable and lucid model for thinking about analogies: analogies involve two fundamental components, a vertical and horizontal relation, and material analogies, those pre-theoretic starting points for advancing scientific accounts, require some sort of similarity relation to begin predictive inquiry. In so doing, Hesse has given us resources beyond Aristotle and his scholastic interpreters to develop the concept of proportionality. Indeed, it would seem, based on what we have already seen, that proportionality is probably not so irreducibly obvious a relationship as these figures concluded. Turning to work on analogy after Hesse, I would submit that academics are struggling

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with the accurate formulation and essential conditions for these features and their interrelation. It is to continuing this story that we now turn.

SCHOLARLY APPROACHES TO ANALOGY AFTER HESSE Cognitive Science Our interest in delving into cognitive science is, and must be, a limited one. This is not a book on interpretations of analogy in cognitive science; rather, I am interested in taking what I understand as an authoritative stream of thought within this discipline to make the question of the intelligibility of analogy more clear.36 For this, I have oriented my discussion around the work of Dedre Gentner—a cognitive linguist whose “structure-mapping” account of analogy has been particularly influential in the field for the past thirty years—to serve as the main thread. For Gentner and her associates, there is good reason to be researching analogy. As studies show, there is evidence that humans can use some analogical thinking as early as seven months of age, and are probably born with the capacity for those cognitive skills.37 Though the authors are dubious that we come into the world with the “abstract relational representations” necessary to form analogical thought patterns, the claim remains that analogical cognition is not merely a cultural or linguistic consequence, but a way of thinking that is intrinsic to our species.38 But, what is it that counts as analogical thinking for the cognitive linguist? Gentner and Linsey Smith inform us that there are three basic mental processes that occur with analogical reasoning: (1) there is some retrieval from our long-term memory where we compare a current situation and a past one; (2) with a memory retrieved, or with at least two instances in working memory, the mind maps by “aligning the representations [of the cases] and project[s] inferences from one analog to another”; and (3) one evaluates the analogy and its various applications.39 For my purposes, I am most interested in the mapping process, which is shown to have a necessary condition: there needs to be some overlap in relational structure—that is, there has to be a “common relational system” between the two situations for the mapping process to occur.40 Though this does not mean that there might not also be strong links between objects and their physical properties, those properties are not necessary for the analogy to be successful. Thus, as Gentner stated in her influential 1983 paper “Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy,” analogical reasoning necessarily involves predicates taking two or more arguments (xRy), whereas properties, which are predicates taking

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one argument (x), are not so necessary.41 For example, the analogy comparing the Rutherford model of the atom with the solar system is successful because “the sun [x] ATTRACTS [R] the planets [y]” and “the nucleus [x] ATTRACTS [R] the electrons [y]” have relations that fit into a common structure, not because the sun has various attributes (hot, yellow, bright) in which the nucleus partakes. A literal similarity would require both “overlapping” relations and object-attributes or properties to be mapped from base to target, like when comparing two star systems; the analogy, however, may not require any similarities in the objects’ known properties.42 One should not think that the two types of similarity depict a binary, though; rather, they exist on a continuum—the more object-attributes that overlap in a comparison, the more literally similar the source and target will be.43 Gentner and Smith further highlight two principles that research suggests people implicitly adopt when mapping sources and targets.44 First, “we like our alignments to be structurally consistent.” This involves two different components: our minds prefer a symmetrical, “one-to one correspondence” between specific objects in the source and target, and in matching the relations of the source and target, we also want the arguments to which those relations are attached matched to one another.45 In the former, for example, the sun and the nucleus should be the objects that attract, not in addition to something else; in the latter, in matching the sun and nucleus through the analogous relation of attraction, that match should not deviate to other relations—so, the nucleus should not also be matched to something that repels in the solar-system model. A second principle, and one Gentner herself formulated, is the systematicity principle: “people prefer to align two domains based on large, connected relational systems, rather than just a single common relation.”46 In the Rutherford model, its power doesn’t rely merely on the relation of “attraction” that obtains between the source and target, but on the contributions of other potent, mapped connections showing common spatial dynamics, movement, size relations, and so on. This greater concentration of interconnected relations isn’t just helpful for being informative, but it also contributes to other creative inferences. We think to ourselves, “if we see that the solar system behaves in x, y, and z ways, and the atom has been observed to behave in x and y ways, then perhaps it also behaves in z ways.” Gentner’s account is, however, not without its dissenters. Stephen Palmer and Stella Vosniadou both believe that Gentner’s account loses some ground upon closer inspection.47 For Palmer, one such problem is how Gentner distinguishes object-attributes and structural relations, the latter of which must match in the source and target if the analogy is to work. Palmer’s qualm is with Gentner’s recourse to identify primitive relations at a highly abstract level to attain “identity” or “sameness” in relation. For instance, in a pressure/ heat analogy—say, “just as air in a vessel will move from a field with more

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pressure into a field with less pressure, so also will air in a vessel move from a field of higher temperatureto a field with lower temperature”—Gentner says that both source and target can be reduced to a “GREATER THAN” relation between source and target. But, Palmer notes, to be more precise, we have the relations “EXERTS MORE PRESSURE” and “HOTTER THAN,” and this looks more like a correspondence relation than an identity relation. Particularly, one should wonder if the causal reality—pressure or temperature—may be unfortunately elided on Gentner’s account. True, Gentner says elsewhere that similarity is an inherently “flexible” concept and is specific to context and situation in terms of how it is represented or compared,48 but it does introduce some questions about the extent to which one can safely abstract away from the concrete realities of physical phenomena to secure an analogy. It is this question that Vosniadou wants to seize upon in criticizing Gentner. Her contention is precisely with one of Gentner’s key claims: that analogy is only concerned with structural relations, while literal similarity concerns object-predicates as well as relational predicates. While Vosniadou agrees with Gentner more generally that “the process of reasoning by analogy involves transfer of structural information from a source to a target system,” and that “this transfer of knowledge is accomplished by mapping or matching processes, which consist of finding the correspondences between the two systems,” she argues that discovering a similar, explanatory structure does not require domain incongruence.49 In other words, analogies can be within close conceptual domains, and not just between conceptual domains that are fundamentally remote or different. For example, the atom/solar system comparison is an analogy of a “between-domain” type, but comparing a ceramic mug and a Styrofoam cup is also an analogy, but of the “within-domain” type.50 The latter can provide the explanatory structure, “it can be used to drink hot liquids,” even though there are many object-properties shared (being cylindrical, smooth, flat-bottomed surfaces, resistant to pressure, etc.). Indeed, to go further in this direction, the similarities of descriptive properties themselves “can become the vehicle for discovering the similarity in the underlying structure between two analogs.” The heuristic potency of the source and target sharing object-attributes should not be ignored; rather, they should be integrated into any model of “an efficient analogy mechanism.”51 There are also distinctions to be found within the chief models of structure mapping itself. The other major architects, Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, have substantial overlap with Gentner, but they do articulate a different account from hers. Holyoak and Thagard’s multiconstraint theory claims that “people’s use of analogy is guided by a number of general constraints that jointly encourage coherence in analogical thinking.”52 There are three of these: (1) there is some conceptual, direct similarity between the “elements

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involved” between source and target (whether object-specific or relational); (2) the mind seeks structural parallels “between the roles in the source and target domains,” which aim toward isomorphism between the elements of the respective domains; and (3) there is some purpose for the analogy for which the person is analogizing.53 As an example, take a graduate student who looks up to her mentor as a role model—so, loosely, “just as my mentor is a scholar, so also I want to be a scholar.”54 Holyoak and Thagard’s argument is that one will adapt these basic constraints in various ways: she may be drawn to those similar elements initially (e.g., they are both women, both the same ethnicity, both have similar vocabulary, similar senses of humor, similar backgrounds or school experiences, etc.), then focus on possible structural parallels between herself and her mentor (e.g., her mentor’s relations to other students, to oneself, to her institution, to her colleagues, and to her scholarship, have discrete values that the student also partakes in), and then think through aligning purposes that she shares with the mentor (being a research scholar, balancing work and family well, being a mentor to other students, maintaining a campus presence, etc.). To be clear, the multiconstraint theory sees a flexible interplay between these constraints to help the person find and form coherent relationships, so they should be understood as dynamic and variable rather than static and precise;55 however, we can see that Gentner’s two principles of structural consistency and systematicity fall roughly into Holyoak and Thagard’s structural parallelism constraint, except that they broaden the account to include direct similarity of object-attributes (as Vosniadou would approve) and further consider the importance of purposes in analogical thinking.56 So, we cannot say that mapping theorists are entirely self-consonant as a group; yet, I think that there is agreement on the basic constraints in analogical thinking especially in regard to relational similarity. Even purposes play an important role in analogy for Gentner, though she would place it in the evaluation process under “goal relevance,”57 partitioning it from the mapping process in a way that Holyoak and Thagard think is unwarranted—particularly, they would say, because the goals for the analogy affect the process of analogical thinking itself rather than merely appearing post facto.58 In stepping back, the point of addressing Gentner and others has less to do with chasing down their arguments and divergences and more to do with how they are unified within a certain model of thinking. Returning to Hesse’s language, Gentner et al. are trying to figure out the intricacies of the horizontal relation, or similarity. They all agree that similarity is instrumental to the successful analogy for cognition, even if they differ in terms of what counts as an analogy—if it is specific to structural relations, or can include descriptive properties; if those properties are particularly salient in the analogical model; how abstract the relations are allowed to be; what amounts to a same

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cause; how fundamental the purpose of creating the analogy for the mapping process is; etc. Truly, these are big questions and a fuller account of analogy would require their address; however, they are together in that structural relations are pivotal for securing analogical thinking. We need to grasp existing relational similarities in order for an analogy to be intelligible and lead us toward the end of new, inferential knowledge. So, there remains some differences of classification and emphasis in mapping theory; nevertheless, I think that this brief examination of the structuremapping theory in the cognitive sciences shows there is broad agreement both in what constitutes analogy’s basic structure, and what makes for a successful analogy. I would reduce these to three basic insights about the mind’s preferences for analogical success: (1) the stake in similarity is on point—people need to discover a symmetry or consonance (whether descriptive, relational, structural, goal-based, etc.) between the source and target to create or understand an analogy; (2) empirical factors motivate, control, and predict analogical thinking and inferences—that is, descriptive similarities, goals, and circumstance make available, restrain, and evaluate the conclusions for analogical thinking; (3) the more phenomena confirmed to be oneto-one correspondences between source and target the more intelligible the analogy, and the more successful the analogy is for further inferential moves. Our next task will be to assess some recent work on analogy in academic philosophy to see whether these insights are further corroborated. Philosophy As with the previous section, this one will only concern itself with a few strains of contemporary thought in the literature to get a general sense of the role and requirements of analogy.59 For this task, I have selected three booklength works on the philosophy of analogy, and it should be noted that none of these works have a religious or theological focus. Their primary interest is to reason from the resources of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and even structure-mapping theory to provide an account of the semantic and inferential requirements of analogy. Indeed, apart from JF Ross—who dedicates chapter 7 of Portraying Analogy to the subject of religious language—the accounts here do not touch on their application to theological/religious concerns or God-talk. I take this to be a benefit to the project of the latter portion of this chapter, which is to deliver an empirically robust and reasonably accurate depiction of analogy as a cognitive process. In his The Logic of Metaphor, Eric Steinhart makes significant use of the structure-mapping theory of analogy developed by Gentner and her associates, and so his philosophical conclusions are, unsurprisingly, within their general parameters.60 He understands analogy to be “the relative structural

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indiscernibility of parts of the world” (LM, 1), or, more simply, “similarity of structure” (LM, 81). Determining an analogy, then, is to “define two structures and their similarity” (LM, 81), making all analogies irreducibly triadic: there is a source analog, a target analog, and a “structure-preserving map” that allows some characterization to be maintained between the source and target. This follows not only for the conscious creation of analogies but also for “subsymbolic analogies,” which are foundational for what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call “primary metaphors.” For example, they explain that the “systematic correlation” of “happy” and “up” is due to a co-occurrence in experience of an emotional feeling (happy) with a sensory-motor event (being upright), which gives us what they call “orientational metaphorical concepts” like HAPPY IS UP. In Steinhart’s terms, HAPPY IS UP is a metaphor based on a subsymbolic analogy that has its structure-preserving map through the force of bodily association between “sense contents and affective contents” (LM, 83).61 So, given that structural indiscernibility is the distinguishing feature of analogy for Steinhart, how does analogical inference occur? For Steinhart, there are three stages to it, which turn out to be quite similar to Gentner’s three phases: (1), one accesses some source field for applying to targets; (2), one maps the structural map from source to target; and (3) there is some transfer of that structural map to the target from the source. Steinhart believes that each of these stages follow their own inductive logic. For our purposes, we will focus on the major conceptual divisions and general mental processes involved in these stages; while Steinhart is strongly engaged with the computational aspects of his mapping theory, we will be focusing on the major content of the computational models, rather than their operators (LM, 83). Consider the case: “An elephant can (x) a ball with its trunk.” In reading this proposition, how would you understand the relation (x)? In the access phase, Steinhart would say that one’s cognitive faculties receive a conceptual input for the sentence above, produces a set of candidate source fields that are “potentially analogous with the given target field,” and then looks for a shared relational structure (LM, 84). The goal of the search is to find the greatest symmetry between source and target fields, with the ideal outcome being isomorphism. Thus, the inductive logic at work is not an inference to the best explanation, but an inference to the greatest symmetry—a selection based on plausibility of application (LM, 85). In our example, thinking of the term (x) for a human doesn’t have an isomorphic option available for retrieval: we simply don’t have a proboscis as a source for comparison. But, we do have other general appendages—perhaps our hands and feet come to mind. With regard to our hands, this seems a possible analog because the predicate options are expansive and we discover they are similar semantically: we tend to take things with our hands a lot like an elephant does; our hands have

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fine-tuned capabilities for working with objects (we can hold a rock, a pencil, a baby, a violin bow, a gyroscope, etc.); they can be imagined to be holding a ball, like a trunk would; they lift food to our mouths, like trunks do; they are used for tactile exploration like trunks are, and so on. In sum, “semantic similarity and sameness of the number of places of multi-place predicates, along with semantic similarity of the types of corresponding objects, determines the likelihood that the propositions in which they occur are analogous; the likelihood that propositions are analogous contributes to the likelihood that descriptions are analogous.” After the access phase, the mapping stage aims to produce an “analogical mapping function.” This function is meant to “preserve as much of the relational structure of the source field . . . as possible” (LM, 93). Like the access phase, the plausible inference to the greatest symmetry is the running logic, but its aim is to discover the specific identity of that structure rather than search for evidence of relational structure amid various options—that is, access has provided the options, and mapping has to determine which is best. This takes place on multiple levels, including local maps that match specific correspondent propositions, and a global map that integrates the local maps so as to best preserve the structural similarity between the source and target. With our example, if the local maps for the hand—such as “a hand can lift a ball: an elephant’s trunk can lift a ball,” and “a hand can grasp a ball; an elephant’s trunk can grasp a ball”—seem nearly isomorphic in their relational character, then they’ll contribute to the global map in relating the hand to the elephant’s trunk. Steinhart also utilizes Holyoak and Thagard’s multiconstraint theory and their three basic constraints, which all aim for higher consistency, whether that is isomorphism in the map itself (structurally), the similarity of predicate meanings (semantically), or the unity of the particular goal of the analogy (pragmatic) (LM, 97).62 So, the activity of the hand, and its symmetry with the trunk will be assessed on these grounds, and compared with other possibilities. If, for example, the foot comes up as a possibility for the source analog, one might consider the structural consistency of its grasping function with the elephant’s trunk (e.g., being able to grasp), but then its plausibility may be weakened when considering semantic inconsistencies (one doesn’t normally grasp a ball with one’s foot) or pragmatic inconsistencies (e.g., the goal of grasping with the foot is not normally to bring to one’s mouth, as it is with an elephant’s trunk). Overall, the mapping phase should end up giving one the best choice for the analog; in our case, we may have come up with this: “just as we grasp a ball with our hand, so also an elephant can grasp a ball with its trunk.” In the final, transference phase for analogical inference, the logic is ampliative: transference “creates new propositions in the target description” (LM, 115). Steinhart describes his model of this phase as a “copy-and-replace

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operation. It uses propositions in the source description as templates for the construction of new propositions in the target” (LM, 116). It does this by taking the existing known predicates and combining them in different ways with existing variables and constants, making new indices and new connections (LM, 121). So, if we are to take the earlier analogy of the hand as a successful one to the elephant’s trunk, we might start thinking to ourselves whether the elephant’s trunk could also throw the ball, balance a large object, be used for grooming, play an instrument, scratch a different appendage, cup water, and so on. Positive or negative conclusions on these matters may end up putting the original mapping in jeopardy—perhaps refining the relation to the point of abandonment by indicating important points of contrast between the objects serving as arguments for the structural relation (e.g., the hand’s percussive capabilities vs. that of the elephant’s trunk), but that is a task for a new process of access and retrieval. The importance of the transference phase is its function in expanding the analogical possibilities, and leading us to new discoveries. Paul Bartha’s By Parallel Reasoning is next in our discussion of contemporary philosophical models.63 While Bartha’s assessment of analogy is primarily oriented toward its power in argumentative inference, we can gain important insights from him on how to think about analogy’s role in the development of concepts. Like the other accounts, for Bartha, analogy is about comparing “two objects, or systems of objects, that highlights respects in which they are thought to be similar” (PR, 1). He takes Mary Hesse’s work as a ground-breaking study in analogy, and seems to understand his work as an extension of hers; however, he has issues with how she understands the requirements of an analogical argument. He states Hesse’s requirements as follows, as well as a fourth “simplifying assumption”: 1. Requirement of material analogy. The horizontal relations must include similarities between observable properties. 2. Causal Condition. The vertical relations must be causal relations “in some acceptable scientific sense” (1966, 87). 3. No-essential-difference condition. The essential properties and causal relations of the source domain must not have been shown to be part of the negative analogy. . . . 4. Similarity-identity reduction. All similarities can be resolved into relationships of identity and difference. (PR, 40-41) Though Bartha doesn’t think these requirements miss the mark entirely, he does think they need modification. Regarding (1), Bartha thinks that formal analogies, which don’t require such similarities, sometimes are the starting

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points in theories in mathematics; further, and most importantly, Bartha thinks we would be hard pressed to discover an analogical inference independent of some partial or incomplete account of the target—in other words, a purely “pre-theoretic” analogy seems difficult to come by (PR, 43). Regarding (2), loosening the causal relation to “co-occurrence” would be preferable, since mathematical, statistical, and logical relations could also serve to connect vertical relations. Regarding (3), Bartha worries that this is also too restrictive since we may lose good analogical arguments as a result (e.g., rectangles and boxes seem to have major differences in dimensions that could contribute to a dis-analogy, but what is common to them is still useful for analogizing, as when one might draw a rectangle on a board and call it a “box” for illustration); instead, what is “essential’ to similarities and differences requires closer attention to inferential context. Regarding (4), reducing similarities to identities and differences elides over different ways in which to understand similarity and the degree to which identities can really be discerned without masking salient differences (PR, 41). Indeed, Bartha thinks that this summary assumption is one of the main problems that he wants to fix. For Bartha, and contrary to Hesse, it would be best not to think of analogies as resting upon a definitive schema, or “a list of similarities and differences between two domains” (PR, 57). This is because such schemas can only give us overall similarity, but analogies that are successful in science don’t sink or swim on overall similarity, they do so on relevant similarity. Bartha’s contribution is to help analogical modeling obtain that relevance, and so he thinks they “must satisfy” the following conditions in what he calls the “articulation model” of analogy: Prior Association. There must be some connection in the source domain between the known similarities P (the positive analogy) and the further similarity Q that is projected to hold for the target domain. Potential for Generalization. There must be some evidence for, and no compelling evidence against, the generalization of this prior association to the target domain. (PR, 57). In rejecting overall similarity as essential to analogy, Bartha is also disputing Hesse’s focus on horizontal relations; instead, analogical arguments are assessed primarily on the articulation model by their vertical relations (PR, 92-93). The weaknesses of the other approaches seem to highlight the need for this re-conception. On one hand, an approach like Gentner’s promotes systematicity, or “the idea that analogical inferences involving complex, high-level networks of relations and attributes are inherently the most plausible ones” (PR, 93). But, Bartha says, this just isn’t so. I’ll highlight two of his reasons: (1), increased systematicity can’t be sufficient for greater plausibility

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on its face—merely according a syntactic similarity between objects does not guarantee that those similarities are relevant. For example, just because the relations of congruence and color are reflexive, symmetric, and transitive between a source and target doesn’t mean that they make sense as analogs— birds of a same colored feather may flock together, but systematicity alone might suppose we could get congruent lines to do it, too (PR, 70-71). But, (2), which is a more fundamental issue, systematicity has no way of accounting for valence, or “the direction of relevance” for the contributing phenomena (PR, 71). Systematicity of relations can’t be ordered in terms of which phenomena are most important, trivial, or negatively relevant. One would reasonably be able to conclude from systematicity alone, for instance, that if Usain Bolt is Jamaican, male, and wears gold running shoes, then Malcolm Gladwell with gold shoes would be more likely to obtain a sprinting worldrecord than Gail Devers, who lacks those attributes. On the other hand, Hesse sees overall similarity in terms of the “pre-theoretic” similarities between domains, often in the form of metaphors between observed phenomena. But, like the systematicity principle, we would, on this account alone, be goaded into thinking that the quantity of pre-theoretic correspondences is directly proportional to analogical success. But, as was seen above, this simply isn’t the case (PR, 93). This is why we must start with the vertical relations and the condition of prior association—we need to see some clear “kind of connection” between the source and target domains. Bartha proposes four major kinds proceeding from, for the most part, stronger associations to weaker ones: (1) logical associations, which bank on entailment relations to support an analogical argument; (2) causal associations, which are empirically grounded factors that tend to predict phenomena; (3) explanatory associations, which connect effects to hypothetical causes through efficiently causal or teleological factors; and (4) correlational associations, which have no particularly strong logical or causal explanation but that rely on probability or statistical connection (PR, 96-98). Bartha’s analysis of these associations show them to be mutually interpenetrating, multiply used in particular analogies, and requiring adherence to the demands of certain “preconditions” to have successful associations, but these are beyond the scope of this chapter to address.64 The main point, for Bartha, is that failing to be attentive to the kinds of association that exist between analogs will render poor and even false analogies. In the sprinter example above, the important vertical relations of “sprinter” between Usain Bolt and Gail Devers makes for a causal association that overrides a weaker correlational association between Usain Bolt and Malcolm Gladwell contingent on the notion that “being Jamaican makes for a fast runner.” As to the second condition, potential for generalization, Bartha understands successful analogical inferences as being able to be applied generally,

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not just in a unique case or particularly—in other words, “a plausible analogy must be consistent with and show some promise of generalization, and that it gains [strength in that plausibility] to the extent that it demonstrates such potential” (PR, 196). So, one may aim for some sort of probability distribution, or a causal mechanism, or the development of a mathematical axiom. For our purposes, we will look at how Bartha thinks about the similarity relations’ role in generalization. For him, three kinds of common similarity are particularly important: feature matching, formal similarity, and parallel similarity. Feature matching involves the resemblance of observable features that are supposed to indicate the “discovery or extension of a kind” (PR, 195). This kind of similarity tends to be focused in on correlative associations, and they follow two stages of argument: first, some list of shared properties are proposed, leading us to think that the source and target belong to a general kind; and, second, there is an inference to further similarity, wherein predicates had by the source are then applied to the target as also hypothetically possessed (PR, 199). But, even if we have isolated a correlative analogy and recognized a sort of statistical similarity between source and target, that doesn’t mean that the similarities are informative—as such, Bartha offers a few suggestions for criteria, including the scarcity or uniqueness of a shared feature, the uniqueness of a combination of shared features, explanation to a common cause, and a preference for qualitative similarity over quantitative similarity (PR, 203-205). Formal similarity follows the logic of Hesse’s formal analogies: “two features are formally similar if they occupy corresponding positions in formally analogous theories” (PR, 195). What is generalized here is usually a “common mathematical formalization”—that is, “they are interpretations of the same symbol in the common abstract form” (PR, 196, 209). With arguments, formal similarity can take either a predictive mode inferring from similar causes to similar effects, or an explanatory mode inferring from similar effects to similar causes; the inclusion of the latter, explanatory analogy expands Hesse’s formal analogy, however, for it does not presuppose a known theory, but advances a generalization from similar effects. For instance, recording that a light source’s luminous intensity at 5 meters drops to 25 percent of the original candela value at 10 meters, and that a radioactive source’s intensity at 5 meters drops to 25 percent of the original Gray value at 10 meters would be an analogical argument for the formal similarity that both sources obey the inverse square law. Finally, parametric similarity represents the hypothetically analogous features of the source and target as both distinct values of a variable and can be “linked by a range of intermediate features corresponding to intermediate variable values” (PR, 196). The generalization attained here is extending a “uniform or invariant relationship: a pattern of counterfactual dependence.”

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Bartha suggests here the example of a culture being linked to a historical ancestor—the idea is that there is some discernible relationship that continues to persist across the domains (PR, 225). Take, for instance, the story of the Last Supper and contemporary celebrations of the Eucharist in the Christian tradition—the acts of eating bread and drinking wine through Christian history in memory of Jesus’s act instantiate values along a variable of sacramental activity. Determining a parametric similarity will receive support through various means, including: (1) general surveys of data to show existence of an invariant relationship ; (2) the conditions for the value of the source are similar to those for the target; and (3) the absence of counterexamples for intermediate instances between the source and target values (PR, 228). Again, Bartha has more to say on these criteria, but the point is that an analogical argument can be successful if the analogs show continuity in significant features . Overall, then, Bartha considers there to be three steps to evaluating an analogical argument: (1) determine and elaborate upon the prior association, modeling its “canonical forms” (e.g., mathematical derivation in the case of logical association) and preconditions; (2) determine which “features of the source and target domains are relevant to the conclusion of the argument”; and (3) assess the potential for generalization that the relevant features— whether positive or negative—offer to the argument’s plausibility (PR, 102103). If one follows this procedure, then Bartha is hopeful that analogical modeling will be much more attentive to the specificity and contextuality within which analogies are formed and considered adequate for the purpose of furthering knowledge.65 In our final account, JF Ross presents analogy from a different perspective than Steinhart and Bartha. He is not explicitly connected to structure mapping theory or to Hesse, respectively, and his interests are more specifically in how words are understood to be analogous, and less in the conceptual qualifications for similarity that the previous authors want to chase down. As a result, he has a particular linguistic purpose. However, it is no less valuable for getting precise on some of the technicalities of how analogies carry their meanings. In Portraying Analogy,66 Ross is interested in clearing up a major misunderstanding about analogy: that a word’s meaning is derived from the “relationships of thought to things” rather than through linguistic structure (PA, 3). This becomes a problem because, for Ross, the crux of understanding the meaning of words is through how they differentiate, or adapt themselves to various semantic contexts—that is, “(roughly) . . . words take on different presuppositions (different affinities and oppositions to other words) depending upon what words you combine with them” (PA, 8). If there is no attention to the sentences in which analogous words appear, then an account of analogy is going to fail by presuming that connecting homonymous terms will yield a structural connection prior to any

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linguistic utterance—that is, for example, one can’t just say that CREATE can be applied to “time” and “trouble” because of a prior existing connection between “time” and “trouble”; one needs to be attentive to the contextsin which those words appear. To remedy this, we need to think about how differentiation functions similarly and differently between analogy and mere equivocation to “uncove[r] the structural ‘software’ that generates the whole range of analogy phenomena and diachronically develops the expressive capacities of [a] language” (PA, 6). The failure to analyze the commonalities between mere equivocation and analogy are what spelled the failure of the classical account, proponents of which, Ross claims, thought that analogy most fundamentally denotes some sort of “relation of similarity among the designata of the terms . . . [but] similarity of meaning is not the foundational characteristic of analogy” says Ross, “relatedness of meaning is . . . mere equivocation is differentiation without relatedness; analogy is differentiation with relatedness” (PA, 22). It is giving an explanation of the contrasting environments in which those words take place that has to precede the derivation of their meanings. For Ross, analyzing how a word functions in its given context shows that analogy, metaphor, and mere equivocation are governed by what he calls semantic contagion—that is, “the dominance of one word (or group of words) over another (or group of others)” (PA, 49). This dominance is the reason for a same-word’s meaning differentiation in different contexts: it excludes meanings from a word based on whether it is acceptable in the combined context of the sentence and that sentence’s environment (PA, 50). For example, the meaning of “lost” in “I lost the x” is subordinate to the term “ball” or “game,” for it will adapt itself to those terms, rather than the other way around, and the possible meanings will also become apparent in the context of the sentence (e.g., “I lost the game” uttered when coming home from a soccer game vs. coming downstairs from the attic after looking for the chessboard). But, what are the possible meanings that a term can have, apart from nonsense constructions? How does a meaning get chosen? For this, we must look at Ross’s ideas about predicate schemes. A predicate scheme—for any specific term in a sentence within an environment—is a set of distinct words: (1) positively, co-applicable, or substituted in a given sentence without making that sentence unintelligible, grammatically inconsistent, or unacceptable to normal speakers of the language (PA, 59, 63); and (2) negatively, meaning-relevant, or that have “a difference of predicate meaning” indicated by their being not co-applicable in a different sentence (PA, 67). So, included in the predicate scheme for “find” in “I couldn’t find the ball” (the sentence) uttered by a child coming back to a group of peers from a wooded area just after playing a game of baseball (the environment) would be a term like “throw” since it achieves (1) by being intelligibly replaced in the sentence “I couldn’t throw the ball,” and achieves (2) in that “find” cannot

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be replaced with “throw” in a sentence and remain co-applicable in a sentence like “I find your explanation plausible.” What we consider the appropriate use of a term will depend upon the relationship between various predicate schemes. For our purposes, we will now narrow in on what Ross thinks about analogy, particularly of proportionality (or what he calls “analogy of meaning”). As mentioned earlier, the main problem with the classical account is that it didn’t take stock of the commonalities between mere equivocation67 and analogy, so we will start with mere equivocation from the perspective of the predicate scheme. For Ross, the “mark of mere equivocation is not lack of similarity but unrelatedness” (PA, 87). What he means by this is that a word will be merely equivocal if the respective predicate schemes for two uses of a word differ to the extent that (1) there is no substitutable near synonym that can be put into both cases that yield that approximately same meaning; and/or (2) any near synonym for one that replaces the original in a second case “either (i) produces an unacceptable ‘replacement’ sentence, (ii) occurs metaphorically, or (iii) causes new differentiation in other terms in the context frame” (PA, 88). Take for instance “charged” in the two sentences, “I charged my credit card,” and “I charged my door.” This is an example of mere equivocation in the first condition because near synonyms to the respective meanings cannot be used interchangeably: thus, “I charged my credit card” can become “I used my credit card” and retain roughly the same meaning, but “I charged my door” can’t become “I used my door” and retain the same meaning. Nor, likewise, could I say “I rammed my credit card.” It also fails the second condition, since we saw the replacement sentence “I rammed my credit card” would be an unacceptable replacement, probably bordering on incoherence. Ross says that this is an instance of a general, and “absolute” rule for merely equivocal homonymous words: they have no near synonyms (PA, 94). In contrast to this, analogy does not have entirely disparate predicate schemes for homonymous words: they always share some overlap. This cashes out in a series of conditions for analogy, what Ross calls “analogy of meaning,” which is worth quoting in full: Analogy of Meaning (of Proportionality): Term A is analogous in meaning, in complete sentential contexts (1) and (2) if and only if: (1) A occurs equivocally in (1) and (2). (2) The predicate schemes for A1 and A2 differ. (3) Other terms or expressions, x and y, in the environment, are in predicate scheme contrast and syntagmatically dominate and differentiate A1 from A2.

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(4) There is a discernible overlap of scheme members, including near synonyms, for A1 and A2 and the semantic contrasts among scheme members for A1 and A2 are discernibly related (e.g. same-word antonyms, sameword determinables, etc.) along with differences of scheme members or of intrascheme contrasts or of both. (5) The difference of meaning between A1 and A2, mapped into the contrasting predicate schemes, directly reflects syntagmatic contrasts (and syntagmatic overlaps) between the schemes for x and y. (6) Some meaning-relevant near synonyms of A1 are substitutable for A2, or vice versa, yielding replacement sentences approximately the same in meaning as the corresponding originals. (7) Some meaning-relevant near synonyms for A1 or A2, when substituted in both (1) and (2), satisfy condition #6 and are differentiated but not merely equivocal, and do not newly differentiate expressions belonging to the original sentential context. (8) There are no substitutable near synonyms that are merely equivocal. (PA, 95-96)

Clearly, this must be fleshed out. Take “loves” in the examples “John loves Susan” (A1) and “John loves apple pie” (A2). Now, let’s put it through the conditions: (Re 1)—“Loves” is equivocal (not merely equivocal) for the two senses since there is difference in linguistic meaning in the two sentences. They are not entirely interchangeable in their near synonyms. For example, “admires” could not be changed and retain the meaning for both; (Re 2)—From (Re 1), we see that the predicate schemes differ. A1 includes “admires,” while A2 does not. (Re 3)—The differing words in A1 and A2 apart from “loves” contrast with it and produce syntactic and semantic constraints on how “loves” is understood. (Re 4)—“Loves” in both cases could be interchanged with some common near synonyms such as “likes/adores/enjoys/etc.” and could be interchanged with antonyms to retain the relation (e.g., “dislikes/hates/is disgusted by/etc.”). (Re 5)—That “admires,” for example, cannot be mapped for both A1 and A2 is connected to the semantic dominance of Susan or apple pie. (Re 6)—Replacing “adores” for “loves” in either A1 or A2 creates approximately the same meaning.68 (Re 7)—Replacing “adores” for “loves” results in some meaning differentiation but it doesn’t produce total unrelatedness in similarity, nor change the expressions of the original sentence. However, a word like “admires” would: being of high partiality to the taste of apple pie is quite distant from

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respecting its object, and admiring a cake has a substantial effect on the expression of A2, moving the sense from gustatory enjoyment to reverent appraisal of other qualities. (Re 8)—The synonyms I can think of that are appropriate for “loves” in A1 and A2 should not be merely equivocal. So, for A1, “John likes/adores/ enjoys Susan” and A2, “John relishes/savors/is fond of/takes pleasure in apple pie,” there is no intrinsic unrelatedness of these substitutable synonyms. The result of all of this is what Ross calls predicate “clusters,” or the set of terms that are analogous to one another within two predicate schemes for two given sentence’s context and environment (PA, 99). In other words, the “class of meaning-relevant near synonyms for an occurrence defines a cluster of analogous meanings for that word” (PA, 103). It is also at this point that we may make some pronouncements regarding analogy, for Ross. First, there is no reason to suppose a “focal sense” or “focal meaning” for an analogical term—that is, analogs do not indicate a form that is primary by principle of a privileged or primordial meaning (PA, 103, 106). Or, in Cajetan’s terms from earlier, there is no reason, on the grounds of semantics, to presume that there is some independent primary analogate over other secondary analogates that the analogy of attribution presumes is the case. Like Cajetan, Ross claims that analogy of attribution is actually a species of equivocation, which shows that it doesn’t illuminate a proportionality intrinsic to the pair of analogates. But, moving beyond Cajetan, Ross also takes it that there is nothing illuminating to the semantic connectedness of predicate clusters by positing primary and secondary analogates. In the above example, “loves” is not more primary in “John loves Susan” than “John loves apple pie.” That would presuppose that clustering behaves as a ground for the predicate scheme’s associations in the sentence’s context, when in fact it is the converse. Though “loves” in “John loves Susan” might appear to us to be the more natural or primary meaning, we should recognize that this is due to our preponderance of a sense’s use and how the foci of clusters may overlap, and this links to our next, more substantial point. Second, one can say, with the classical tradition, that analogous words really are similar; however, it’s not a derivative meaning based on an inherent similarity of meaning that the object referred to has itself. Instead, similarity is based on how words overlap in their meanings within their respective contrasts, and even how they similarly differentiate from other words. As Ross sums it up, “Analogy of meaning is based not upon direct resemblance but upon similarity (with difference) of semantic relations, particularly similarity of contrast relations” (PA, 107). Hence, the notion of proportionality that is bequeathed to us from Aristotle is still right in the main, even if the similarity in view has to be revised to allow for

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these differentiations that occur in linguistic practice to be restricted to the semantic domain. TAKING STOCK: GUIDELINES FOR AN INTELLIGIBLE ANALOGY Having explicated and complied this series of analogical models, what may we conclude from them? Clearly, as has been noted, there are important differences between a number of the accounts; however, there seem to be some guidelines that I believe can be distilled from them. Following the description, I will also offer examples and their explicit connection to the criteria of intelligibility put forth earlier in the chapter. 1. Determinate vertical and horizontal relations must be secured for intelligible analogies (Hesse, Bartha, Palmer). To be sure, there are differences in the accounts as to which relations might be more important for intelligible analogies (e.g., Hesse takes the horizontal to be most pivotal, while Bartha focuses on vertical relations). But, it can’t be denied that specificity in co-occurrent phenomena and the degree of their similarity on some discernible scale is necessary for an analogy to be accessed, mapped, and evaluated. As Palmer showed us, as well, the specificity of the relation might tell for or against the generality of an applied relation thought to be identical. Thus, any analogy will need to be justified based on its attention to the articulation of these relations per se and as interrelated. Poor analogies do not specify the kind of similarities or the sort of association between co-occurrent phenomena. a. Example: “Just as water flows through a river bed, so time flows through bodies.” Here, the vertical relations are clear (water flows in a river bed; time flows in bodies) and the horizontal relation is clear (water is proportionate to time; river bed is proportionate to bodies). Vertical relations could be made more determinate by adding phenomena to be worked out by vertical relations (water, river bed, erosion of river bed’s edges; time, bodies, aging of body) and then naming their relation (water flows in a river bed and erodes the river bed’s edges; time flows in bodies and ages bodies). Horizontal relations can take those same phenomena and consider them proportionate (“water erodes the river bed’s edges” is proportional to “time aging the body”). b. Pragmaticistic intelligibility: The more determinate the phenomena are, the more possibly determinate the relations. The more determinate the relations, the more accessible specific effects will be from

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the resulting concept. And, the more accessible specific effects imaginable for the analog’s concept, the better likelihood for application to practical conduct. 2. Similarity is multivalent, and discerning those valences is crucial for discovering the strength of an analogy (Gentner, Holyoak and Thagard, Vosniadou, Bartha, Hesse, Steinhart): Gentner privileges systematicity in a way that Bartha would contest isn’t always relevant or most ideal for inferential potency, and Vosniadou thinks descriptive similarity is able to anchor some analogies; Holyoak and Thagard want a flexible constraining system of structural parallels, direct similarities, and goals; Steinhart similarly aims for the greatest symmetry; Bartha advocates three major kinds of similarity, recognizing each could be useful for analogy. But, again, there is unity in the diversity here in that types of similarity are not all equal in efficacy, requiring careful attention to how they function in the analogy. a. Example: “A human’s hair is similar to a bird’s feathers.” How might this “similarity” be more greatly specified? If it is a functional similarity, is it a warming function, a flight function, a protective function, or something else? If it is a systematic combination of these, is one form privileged over the other in terms of being causing these others? b. Pragmaticistic Intelligibility: Higher specificity in what the similarity in view is regarding vertical and horizontal relations will result in more determinate conceivable effects, and so also more specific applicability for practical conduct. 3. An analogy should aim for structural isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence in its features (Hesse, Gentner, Holyoak and Thagard, Steinhart): All of these authors support the notion that discrete phenomena, in an optimal analogy, will have a matching correspondence of the kind, degree and specificity of the features between source and target. a. Example: “Light refracts off a mirror like a ball ricochets against a wall” is improved by “Light refracts off a mirror and changes its trajectory like a ball ricochets against a wall and changes its trajectory,” and still more by “Light refracts off a mirror and changes its trajectory and velocity like a ball ricochets against a wall and changes its trajectory and velocity.” b. Pragmaticistic Intelligibility: Getting closer to the one-to-one correspondence will involve more precise information, and so more determinate effects. Those more determinate effects will render more determinate practical conduct (e.g., investigating both refraction trajectories and velocity to compare with trajectories and velocities of the ball’s bounce).

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4. Determining the association is important both for distinguishing more or less relevant similarities, and clarifying analogical relatedness of homologous symbols (Ross, Bartha): Ross’s linguistic account of analogy showed that homonymous words’ similarity was a posterior, and not prior, concept to their contextual associations when understanding an analogy’s meaning. Bartha’s attention to four basic kinds of association is highly tuned to the “vertical” relation of analogy. a. Example: Linguistically, whether “I made the bed” is determined as analogous to “I made up my mind” is contingent upon their overlapping predicate schemes and clustering. But, at a more refined level, the areas of clustering may be stronger if the associations of one term share strong vertical relations between their respective phenomena, making the analogy stronger. For instance, to what extent is making a bed caused by a decision, how is that cause shared by making up one’s mind? b. Pragmaticistic intelligibility: Predicate schemes and kinds of association will be further determined by the specific effects that can be marshaled for their support and the ways they affect conduct. If “making up one’s mind” and “making a bed” are said to share causation by decision, the degree that one can show their similarity in conduct and in effect will be proportionate to the degree that the analogy is comprehensible. 5. Inferential potency affects the mapping procedure’s cogency and needs to be assessed (Holyoak and Thagard, Bartha): These authors show that an analogy’s power can be partially derived from the goal of the analogy. Holyoak and Thagard show this most generally, while Bartha demonstrates how the potential for generalization is important for evaluating cognitive mapping and promulgating the growth of knowledge. a. Example: “Just as birds fly, so also mammals fall from trees” has weak inferential potency because the source analogate is not a legitimate generalization: not all birds fly (like penguins). More generally, the analogy seems misplaced because the purpose of the bird’s flight is a sort of intentional movement that a mammal’s falling from a tree is not. b. Pragmaticistic intelligibility: As this ultimately has its denouement in possible effects on practical conduct, clarifying an analogy’s purpose and/or the analogates’ purposes will be helpful for increasing the specificity for its role in conduct. 6. Regarding the horizontal and vertical relations, successful analogies will require compensation by the other paired relation if one relation is weak (Hesse, Bartha): Hesse directly advocates for a continuum where object-specific descriptions, abstract relations, and formal theories can

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make analogical comparisons; Bartha’s attention to the strengths of association, while quibbling with some tendencies in Hesse’s account, corroborates attention to a similar continuum—strong horizontal relations would be needed to offset weak prior associations (e.g., stand-alone correlations), though this is no guarantee for the analogy’s truth. a. Example: “Just as light loses its intensity in a medium as it traverses it, so also gamma rays lose their intensity as they traverse a medium.” This analogy may be weak on similarities of their respective phenomena, but it assumes they share a strong vertical relation in the form of a causal connection between their intensity in media, which makes up for its lack of determinate horizontal relations. Conversely, “just as kangaroos hop, so also rabbits hop” is weak on the formal character of the respective animal’s movement, but can note a similarity in their styles of locomotion. b. Pragmaticistic intelligibility: Stronger vertical relations (e.g., entailment, causality, explanation) will have discrete effects that can be conceptualized for practical conduct even with weak similarity relations (e.g., one will expect to find gamma rays acting in certain ways if they are studied). Likewise, stronger horizontal relations will have discrete effects that can be conceptualized for practical conduct even with weak vertical relations (e.g., one will expect that rabbits would produce a pattern of movement similar to the kangaroo). 7. Familiarity with vertical and horizontal features of source and target is contingent on empirical data (Hesse, Ross, Steinhart, Bartha): Hesse has shown the importance of observable co-occurrences between different phenomena for material analogies. Ross’s claim is that semantic relations ground similarity, and those relations will be determined by a term’s use and situational propriety through social experience; thus, the features making for sensible analogies are empirically derived. Steinhart corroborates Lakoff and Johnson’s point about primary metaphors being based upon subsymbolic analogies between affective states and sensory experiences. Bartha strongly advocates for empirical confirmation of the kinds of association that would lead one to analogical inferences. a. Example: “Just as a hand may grasp a ball by curling its fingers, so also an elephant may grasp a ball by curling its trunk” is made more familiar by using empirical information than “Just as a hand does what hands do, so also an elephant’s trunk does what a trunk does.” The more empirical information about the pair of analogates, the more potential for familiarity with vertical and horizontal relations. b. Pragmaticistic Intelligibility: Empirical information manifests itself in cognizable effects in experience. If an effect can be reproduced, observed, predicted, and compared, then the more likely it will

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affect practical conduct. Inversely, if effects cannot be made familiar through means as these, then there will be less effect on practical conduct. Having thus framed these guidelines, the critical chapters to come will include an examination wherein they will be used to discover the accounts’ adherence to pragmaticistic intelligibility, and so their overall success at making theological discourse coherent. The constructive account will also be assessed according to these same standards. NOTES 1. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the LookingGlass (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 164. 2. CS Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Vol. 2, ed. Nathan Houser et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 346. 3. CS Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Vol. 1–IV); Arthur Banks (Vol. VII–VIII) (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960), 8.191. Hereafter, “CP” in endnotes. 4. Albert Atkin, Peirce (New York: Routledge, 2016), 39. 5. In doing so, I adapt Peirce’s term for his particular brand of pragmatism— pragmaticism—to distinguish my particular, Peircean interpretation of intelligibility. See EP 2:360, 1906. 6. Of course, more explanation would have to be provided to situate pragmaticistic intelligibility within a comprehensive account for meaning in general. But, this should not undermine the basic notion that the criteria presented would be necessary for intelligible linguistic expression. Indeed, I think the view can be quite succinctly incorporated into currently influential accounts of the philosophy of language. In particular, I think Robert Brandom’s inferentialism is quite amenable to this approach. In his Making It Explicit, Brandom argues that “semantics must answer to pragmatics”—that is, expressible linguistic contents are intelligible only insofar as they reflect some “practical reasoning that is taken somehow to stand behind or be implicit in the [rational] behavior” (83). Those practical reasonings in turn have propositional constituents that must explain “the circumstances under which judgments and inferences are properly made and the proper consequences of doing so,” or else they have no semantic value (144). Pragmaticistic intelligibility is quite consonant with this account when considering its criteria: for (1) intelligible expressions are associated to conceptions through conventional linguistic practice, and an expression unassociated to practice is void; regarding (2) there must be conceivable effects of the propositions constituting the practical reasonings, or else the latter will be context-less and, thus, unemployable for future action; and, concerning (3) if an expression has no power to affect rational conduct, then it has no use for practical reasoning, whether implicitly

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or explicitly. See Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). 7. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 39. 8. Roger M. White, Talking About God: The Concept of Analogy and the Problem of Religious Language (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 27. This is not to say that Aristotle was the first to develop analogy beyond its mathematical basis—that honor appears to belong to Plato. As Battista Mondin explains, Plato expanded ἀναλογία into the areas of epistemology and ontology, as evidenced in the Republic (534a) when he addresses the proportionality between the forms of knowledge (“knowledge/opinion = thinking/imagining”) and the proportionality between kinds of knowledge and being (“being/becoming = knowledge/opinion”). See Batista Mondin, The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 1–2. It should also be said that the development here is only focused on the Western tradition; for an address of ancient Chinese reflections on the use of analogy, in comparison with ancient Greek thought, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Analogical Investigations: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 43–57. 9. See White, Talking about God, 13–16, for more on relevant definitions for analogy from book V of Euclid’s Elements. 10. Ibid., 27. 11. Aristotle, History of Animals, Volume I: Books 1–3, trans. A. L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 437 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 7. 12. White, Talking about God, 32. 13. Aristotle, “Poetics” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon and CDC Reeve (Random House: New York, 2001), 1457b7–8. 14. Ibid., 1457b17–23. 15. White, Talking about God, 42. 16. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon and CDC Reeve (Random House: New York, 2001), 1133a5–14. 17. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” 1070a31–33. 18. Ibid., 1070b10–22. 19. Aristotle, “Topics” in Posterior Analytics. Topica, trans. Hugh Tredennick, E. S. Forster. Loeb Classical Library 391 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 108a7–15. 20. Joshua Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s “De Nominum Analogia” (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2010). Hereafter, “SA” in text body. 21. Hochschild notes that associated meaning is commonly called “pros hen equivocation” or “focal meaning” in current scholarly works (4). 22. Thomas Cajetan, De Nominum Analogia, ed. N. Zammit and H. Hering (Rome, Angelicum, 1951), §4, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 107. 23. Cajetan, De Nominum Analogia, §8, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 107. 24. Cajetan, De Nominum Analogia, §8, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 110.

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25. Hochschild notes that Cajetan expands extrinsic denomination to not only include extrinsic relations but also “extrinsic foundations of relation”—that is, when the concept extrinsically denominated is just the form itself not possessed by the secondary analogate. Cajetan’s example is when one says the air is “bright” from the brightness of the Sun: the reference to brightness in the air is just to the appearance of its form. See Hochschild, Analogy, 95; Thomas Cajetan, Commentaria in Summam Theologiae St Thomae, Rome: Leonine Commission, 1906), 1.6.4, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 95. 26. Failure to keep these two apart has led to many problems. As Hochschild writes, conflating the two has led “the Suarezians to insist on intrinsic case of attribution—that is, cases where a secondary analogate’s relation to a primary analogate entails something metaphysically inherent in that secondary analogate” (SA, 116). 27. De Nominum Analogia, §23, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 124. 28. De Nominum Analogia, §105, quoted in Hochschild, Analogy, 162. 29. Mary Hesse, “Aristotle’s Logic of Analogy,” The Philosophical Quarterly 15, no. 61 (1965), 340. Hereafter, “ALA” in text body. 30. Aristotle, “Posterior Analytics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon and CDC Reeve (Random House: New York, 2001), 99b20–22. 31. Ibid., 99b32–100a8. 32. Ibid., 100b8. 33. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” 1047a35–1048b8, emphases mine. 34. Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science (London: Sheed and Ward Ltd, 1963), 66, emphasis mine. Hereafter, “MAS” in text body. 35. Ibid., with minor adaptations. 36. In so doing, I must also bracket the interesting work being done in computational modeling to represent brain functions in analogical cognition. For excellent introductions to these matters, see Dedre Gentner and Kenneth Forbus, “Computational Models of Analogy,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 2, no.3, (2010), 266–276, Accessed October 3, 2018, http:​/​/gro​​ups​.p​​sych.​​north​​weste​​rn​.ed​​u​/ gen​​tner/​​paper​​s​/gen​​tner&​​Fo​rbu​​s​_201​​1​.pdf​; also, see Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, eds., The Analogical Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), Part I, 21–196. 37. Dedre Gentner, Alissa Ferry, and Susan Hespos, “Prelinguistic Relational Concepts: Investigating Analogical Processing in Infants,” Child Development 86, no. 5 (2015), 1400–1401. 38. Ibid. This shouldn’t be understood to mean that other animals aren’t naturally capable of some analogical thinking as well. For instance, Joël Fagot and Roger Thompson argue that some baboons are able to analogically reason without being “symbol-trained” by humans to do so. See Joël Fagot and R.K.R. Thompson, “Generalized Relational Matching by Guinea Baboons (Papio papio) in Two-ByTwo-Item Analogy Problems.” Psychological Science, 22, (2011), 1304–1309. Accessed October, 3, 2018, doi:10.1177/0956797611422916. 39. Dedre Gentner and Linsey Smith, “Analogical Reasoning,” in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (2nd Ed.)., ed. V. S. Ramachandran, (Oxford: Elsevier, 2012), 131.

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40. Ibid., 130. 41. Dedre Gentner, “Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy,” Cognitive Science 7 (1983), 157. 42. Ibid., 159. 43. Ibid., 161. 44. An earlier article highlights three such principles; but, the third principle, what Gentner and Markman call “relational focus,” is basically the previously stated commitment that relations are the necessary component of analogies and not properties. As they say, “analogies must involve common relations but need not involve common object descriptions.” See Dedre Gentner and Arthur Markman, “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity,” in American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997), 47. 45. Genter & Smith, “Analogical Reasoning,” 131–132. 46. Ibid., 132. 47. Stephen Palmer, “Levels of Description in Theories of Analogy,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, ed. Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 338–339. 48. See Dedre Gentner, Douglas Medin, and Robert Goldstone, “Respects for Similarity,” Psychological Review 100, no. 2 (1993), 257. 49. Stella Vosniadou, “Analogical Reasoning as a Mechanism in Knowledge Acquisition: A Developmental Perspective,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, ed. Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 414. 50. Ibid., 415–416. 51. Ibid., 418. 52. Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, “The Analogical Mind,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 35. 53. Ibid., 36. 54. Loosely adapted from ibid., 40. 55. Ibid., 42. 56. Holyoak himself later acknowledges just this difference between his and Gentner’s account. See Keith Holyoak, “Analogy and Relational Reasoning,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. K. J. Holyoak and R. J. Morrison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 239. 57. Gentner and Smith, “Analogical Reasoning,” 133. 58. For evidence on this point, Holyoak and Thagard give an example of a child thinking analogously about his mother’s injury. The child thought of the earlier source instance of his mother kissing his injury to “make it better,” and analogically resolved the target to involve kissing his mother’s injury to similarly alleviate suffering. What drove the analogy and the way it was processed was a purpose: alleviate my mother’s pain. See Holyoak and Thagard, “The Analogical Mind,” 36. 59. But, for a synoptic overview of approaches to analogy and its role in argumentation in current literature, see André Juthe, “A Systematic Review of Classifications of Arguments by Analogy,” in Systematic Approaches to Argument by Analogy, ed. Henrique Jales Ribeiro (New York: Springer, 2014), 109–128.

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60. Eric Charles Steinhart, The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Worlds (Norwell: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). Hereafter, “LM” in body text. 61. For their pioneering work on metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 62. Although Steinhart raises concerns with Holyoak and Thagard’s mapping account being limited, he basically agrees with the nature of their constraints on analogy in general (99). 63. Paul Bartha, By Parallel Reasoning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hereafter, “PR” in text body. 64. But, for more on this, and how the associations need to be analyzed, see PR, 107–141. 65. In other words, Bartha thinks that through these means we can secure a theory of analogical reasoning that meets certain critical criteria. He offers six such criteria: (1) a theory should be clear and consistent with regard to representation and evaluation of analogies; (2) a theory should be applicable to instances of analogical argumentation and provide predictive adequacy; (3) a theory should be have explanatory power to show how an analogy is plausible and justified; (4) a theory should be as wide as possible in the scope of arguments it can accommodate; (5) a theory should be as simple as possible, without unnecessary components; and (6) a theory should be nontrivial by making analogies relevant to justification. Ibid., 92. 66. J. F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Hereafter, “PA” in text body. 67. For Ross, “merely equivocal” is distinct from “equivocal” in that the latter is supposed to indicate “any difference of linguistic meaning” between same words. On the other hand, being “merely equivocal” is to be, by definition, disparate from univocal or analogical. This means that an “equivocal” term can include analogical meaning, on his account. See PA, 87. 68. This and condition 7 relate to Hesse’s earlier point that analogues are symmetrical, but not transitive; that is, both A1 and A2 have interchangeable near synonyms, but one cannot assume that the predicate scheme for A3 is going to be nearly synonymous for A1 if it is for A3. For instance, “As a tree, this birch loves rain” (A3) is analogous to A2 particularly with the meaning-relevant terms for consumption, but it would be merely equivocal to A1.

Part II

INFLUENTIAL POSITIONS ON THEOLOGICAL ANALOGY AND THEIR INADEQUACIES

Chapter 3

Analogia Entis

INTRODUCTION Having addressed some basic guidelines for an intelligible analogy, we are now at liberty to begin considering some of the influential views on theological analogy. One long-standing answer to the question of God-talk has been to establish a sort of ontological principle by which it is permissible. If it is said that God “loves” us, then we must be able to say—advocates would urge—that this love has some order with respect to creation that can be understood by human beings; without that order, it wouldn’t make sense to claim that “love” has any approximate bearing on our language. The proponents of the analogia entis—the “analogy of being”—view that order as somehow a fundamental part of creation itself: there is some participation of created nature in the divine nature that allows us to conceive a similarity within difference. It is to this view that we now turn. Before commencing, an important qualification for this chapter—and those following in part II—bears mentioning: though I am operating with the presumption that the “God” being articulated by the authors in part II can be granted to be real (insofar as they affirm the God of Christianity), I do not operate with the same presumption about that God’s definite description. Part III will see some judgments made on this score, but for now I am merely interested in whether or not the accounts offered by the theologians in view are able to successfully advance God-talk on the God-model (or, Godmodeling principles) that they presuppose. The chapter proceeds in the following way. First, an exposition of the central themes of the accounts of the analogia entis will be provided for three influential figures in twentieth-century theology: Erich Przywara, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karl Rahner.1 Second, I will critically evaluate the three 69

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positions. This may be done in a single section as the authors—at least in their core, formal commitments—have very similar accounts, with both Balthasar and Rahner making modifications to Przywara’s main proposal only in matters that don’t change the underlying framework. Finally, I will conclude the section by assessing the accounts according to the guidelines on analogy delivered in the previous chapter. ERICH PRZYWARA With some forty monographs and 800 articles ascribed to him, Erich Przywara was an intellectual giant in early twentieth-century German theology.2 While the Jesuit was influential in the revival of Thomism and for his systematic command of the western philosophical and theological traditions, his most well-known theological contribution is the analogia entis, the fundamental account for which was first offered in his Analogia Entis (1932). Therein, the reader finds a mind intent on a synthesis of philosophical and theological intellectual history that can supply a grounding “catholic thoughtform” (katholische Denkform). Throughout its chapters, his recurring goal is to explicate the analogia entis as this pivotal ontological principle that is able to strike the perfect balance between the great philosophical intellects of Plato and Aristotle, and their theological parallels, Augustine and Aquinas. Of course, I cannot begin to examine some of these synthetic inferences, especially their exegetical adequacies, in this chapter. Rather, the issue here is a practical problem about theological language, not one of authorial interpretive veridicality. Hence, I must proceed with a narrow focus. In discussing the analogia entis, we must also take a brief look at the document that inspired its development: the second constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Therein, the council is responding to the theology of Joachim of Fiore, an Italian abbot who was critiquing Peter Lombard on his conception of the Trinity. Joachim found Peter Lombard to be espousing some form of additional essence to the Trinitarian persons, amounting to a “quaternity.”3 The council ends ups defending Peter Lombard, though they disagree with Joachim’s interpretation that God’s essence would be some fourth reality, instead thinking that an accurate summation of Lombard is three persons all sharing the same nature or essence. The main interpretive problem that the council saw in Joachim, and what is relevant for my purposes, is that he argued for a “unity” of the Trinitarian persons that was too close to that of creaturely persons. Joachim said that the Trinitarian persons’ unity was “collective and analogous” to human persons being in one accord, rather than a unity by substance.4 This functional—rather

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than ontological—interpretation was too anthropomorphic for the council; they thought it ignored a pivotal axiom, and one very important for later articulations of the analogia entis: “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”5 It is this—the relation of this similarity so great (tanta similitudo) and greater dissimilarity (maior dissimilitudo)—that preoccupies and fascinates Przywara; indeed, he speaks of his account of the analogia entis as being an “abbreviation” of the Fourth Lateran Council: “it signifies, so to speak, God’s ‘dynamic transcendence,’ i.e., that God is ever above and beyond . . . ‘everything external to him and everything that can be conceived,’ as was stressed in the ‘negative theology’ of the Greek fathers and transmitted like a ‘sacred relic’ from Augustine to Thomas to the [first] Vatican Council.”6 Before we investigate the analogia entis’s formal account, how did Przywara understand analogy, more broadly? In the fifth paragraph of section two of Analogia Entis, Przywara characterizes analogy as representing a particular “order,” one that is a result of a sublation (Aufhebung) of a thesis—logic—and an antithesis—dialectic (AE, 194). More precisely, yet remaining in his metaphysical, mystical mode, logic is an expression in which meaning is immediately given: it is a unity of concept and object that is “modeled upon the ideal of divine knowledge which comprehends everything from the One . . . and thus comprehends the fullness of reality from its idea.” But, this thesis of identity between concept and object is simply not a creaturely phenomenon with regard to being, for there are possibilities to being that are in opposition to each other. This brings on the antithesis, the dialectic of incompatible, contrasting being. The Aufhebung manifests in the sort of “inner balancing” between the longing for identity or “fusion” with divine knowing (logic) and the “creaturely realism” that denies such knowledge while desiring it (dialectic). That sublation—the “self-ordering within a being-ordered”—maintains a rhythm “according to an orderly sequence” that orients the questing mind “upward” and “toward” the origin of being “above” the creature (AE, 196-97). This pattern is simply what “creaturely metaphysics” is, for Przywara, and this balancing act wherein one is caught in an ordered oscillation between identity and contradiction in “upward movement” is a phenomenological description that must be kept in mind with an exposition of the analogia entis. The clearest account, I would submit, of the analogia entis can be discerned from the sixth paragraph of Part I: “The Grounding of Analogy as Analogia Entis in The Principle of Non-Contradiction.” Therein, Przywara identifies the analogia entis with what he calls the “analogy of every greater dissimilarity” (AE, 234). It is an analogy that “encompasses” three moments: an ascending analogy of attribution, a descending analogy of proportionality,

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and a second analogy of attribution. I will provide an explanation of each of these moments. The first analogy of attribution—what may be called the “intra-creaturely analogy” (AE, 219)—is also the logical starting point of the analogia entis. If a typical analogy of attribution involves the ordering of secondary meanings to a primary meaning of words, then this analogy involves the creaturely ordering of its being—an “is (valid)”—to God’s “primordial” being—an “Is (Truth, etc.)” (AE, 234). This analogy, we can say, encompasses the “similarity, however great” (tanta similitudo) between creature and God: insofar as God’s being generates and is the origin for the creature’s being, there is some similarity via this positive relationship. As such, the creature also acts as an index: its being “points to” its divine ground (AE, 233). This moment, then, Przywara characterizes as from below to above. But, once this analogy is conceived, it must also be “reduced” to an “analogy between God and creature” in a second moment—the analogy of proportionality (AE, 231). In recognizing one’s contingency upon God, one is also immediately confronted with the stark “absolute otherness” of God, which can only be construed as a negative relationship. Thus, the proportionality in view is a relation that admits of radical “alterity”—in the creature pointing beyond itself, it also points beyond anything it can imagine, that which is “beyond its mode (proportio) of the ontic and the noetic, into the wholly other mode of God” (AE, 233). The result is a sort of paradox, an “incomprehensible ‘suspended’ analogy”: the analogy of proportionality admits the categorical difference as the ordering relation. This, then, is the other half of the Fourth Lateran Council’s confession, the “ever greater dissimilarity” (maior dissimilitudo). While the first analogy claims a primordial ground for the creature’s being (i.e., the “is (valid)”), this analogy reminds us that there is nothing common between that ground and creaturely being (i.e., the “is not (valid)”); God is “ineffably sublime” (AE, 235).7 But, we are not left, says Przywara, in the “dazzling darkness” of the second moment; rather, it ushers us into a second analogy of attribution, which is the sublation (Aufhebung) of the other two (i.e., the “is not not (valid)”) and the third, defining moment of the analogia entis. It is an ‘analogy of analogy”—that is, the particular relation between the intra-creaturely analogy (first moment) and the analogy between God and creatures (second moment). It, thus, combines the phrases of the first two analogies: “within every ‘similarity, however great’ is an ‘ever greater dissimilarity’” (AE, 234). Here, God is known as unknown; any participation in God has always with it the “illimitable”—and greater—distance between creatures and God. This downward return—the “above to below”—affects the individual in such a way that she is now prepared for humble “service” to God from the initial “longing” (first moment) and its ensuing “blinding rapture” (second moment) (AE, 235).

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This final moment is what completes the characterization of the analogia entis. It is “expressed by the principle of non-contradiction: ‘is (valid)’ as ‘is not not (valid)’ ” (AE, 235). In both the realms of being and knowing, this analogy is the “ultimate structure, encompassing and thoroughly shaping everything” (AE, 236). It is the “bridge” between creaturely becoming and God’s being, but that bridge’s proportionality is as wholly dissimilar as the relation of non-being to being that is definitive of its source and target, respectively. So, what does one make of this oscillating rhythm between creaturely being and God’s being? Further characterizing this relation is the task of Przywara’s seventh paragraph, “The Scope of the Problem of the Analogia Entis.” Przywara says that it suspends us in a “middle between pantheism and theopanism that is not dialectic” (AE, 243)—that is, the “undulation of the in-between” never itself resolves into something non-analogical between God and creatures (as in some absolute knowledge via creaturely sublation), though it does have an upward movement toward the divine in the “freedom of struggle” that characterizes creaturely reality in the midst of the sublation achieved in the structure of the analogia entis (AE, 244). After laying out analogy in Plato and Aristotle, as well as the presentation of the analogia entis in Augustine and Aquinas (the latter of whom figures most prominently in the concluding account), Przywara writes that we need to elucidate the “middle” that establishes the “immanent rhythm” between creatures and God (AE, 295). What is the mediating agency grounding the structure? Przywara denies this can obtain for humanity or for “pure spirit”— they both are “confined within the universe,” particularly in that they both participate in a logical genus: “mutability.” By elimination, the middle must be God, “as the one in whom alone all multiplicity and all correlated antitheses are one.” Specifically, it is God as “personal revelation” and mediator in the flesh: Jesus Christ (AE, 301). It is in Christ that the infinite plenitude of being, the “above-and-beyond” is in unity with creaturely “nothingness of sin” (AE, 302). From this come “three conclusive formulae.” First, the middle of mediation “exists in God and therefore derives its existence from God”—meaning that any “positive naming” that can occur through creaturely means, like that God is ‘good,’ has its warrant from the “descending analogy,” or third moment, of the analogia entis (AE, 303). Second, in the incarnation is found the interplay between the supernatural antecedence of God being found in creaturely being—“in the form of God”—and its perfecting and redeeming the consequent (and natural) nature of creaturely being. Third, Christ is the sublation of the antithetical humanity and spirit, neither of which were viable as the middle alone, or together. Where creaturely spirit and humanity could not unite their essence and existence in oneness, Christ the middle is able,

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by the mystery of incarnation, to simultaneously be unified in essence and existence as one substance (as God), but to also take on a new relation (nova habitude) to a human existence, a “secondary existence” (esse secundarium) (AE, 304-305). As a result, Christ is the “middle of creation,” one that “brings all things to perfection” through his sanctifying grace, bringing the natural world to its fulfillment (AE, 305). In effect, as Przywara says later in his essay “Between Metaphysics and Christianity” (1958), Christ “appears as the ‘what’ of the ‘invisible God’”—he is the “self-expression” of God as Godself. This makes “all human theology . . . practically nothing but the ‘interpretation’ (‘exegesis’) of the received self-expression of the meaning of God in Christ” (AE, 532). But, that self-expression is in human flesh; the sensory perception of the human Jesus is “completely the ‘presence of God,’” meaning that “Christ the paradox” remains ineluctably intertwined with Christ as self-expression of God (AE, 533). But, this paradox of the unity of “common man” and the inapproachable God in Christ is stretched further in the crucified Christ: the “scandal and foolish madness” of this God also being the “lamb slain” is a “contradiction in regard to the divine as such” (AE, 535). Thus, again, we see the analogia entis’s logic at work in the notion of paradox itself: there is no “comprehensible dialectic” to arrive at to render the paradox in some univocal fashion—we instead remain with a “contradictory God” that is the “in-and-beyond” between the incarnation and the mystery of the cross (AE, 535-536). The paradox is always itself analogical. In his concluding paragraph for the original 1932 text, Przywara again returns to the idea of the analogia entis as a “principle.” In identifying it as the definitive “expression” of the law of non-contradiction, it is the bedrock “starting point” for any creaturely metaphysics and for thought itself (AE, 310). “It is the principle of a metaphysics,” Przywara says, “that sees the all as ordered to God as its origin and defining end.” It is this principle, then, that grounds “the very potentia obedientialis,” or obediential potency, of the human being to be drawn by God into things “beyond its nature” by participation in God (AE, 311, 311n6).8 But, he says, we cannot assume that securing this principle, and our confidence in creaturely movement “aboveand-beyond” ourselves into God, is some static affair to deduce and reduce all things; instead, the undulating rhythm in the moments of analogical sublation is a “primordial dynamic” true of being, thought, and even the “intra-divine itself” (AE, 314). So, our creaturely life, as far as it can be imagined, is an analogical affair. Though Przywara does not give us anything like an analytical exposition of the consequences upon language of the analogia entis, his remarks on the Logos and symbol, I think, best help to approximate how Przywara would have us think about language from its viewpoint. In the case of the Logos,

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Przywara in his “Image, Likeness, Symbol, Mythos, Mysterium, Logos” (1956) understands this, just like being, as intrinsically analogical, and so it involves the Fourth Lateran Council’s confession of the “ever greater dissimilarity” in the “similarity, however great” when contemplating its “divine ground” (AE, 432). This Logos—which encapsulates the ideas of reason, understanding, and meaning—is supposed to have a threefold form: the “creative Logos” in God, the “ontic logos” in the world’s objects, and a “reasoning” and “understanding” logos in human beings (AE, 458). The latter human respect naturally involves investigation into the world of intelligible forms (the ontic logos), but not the divine Logos, since the former is “bound to creatureliness” (AE, 459). In the language of the respective moments of the analogia entis, the separation of creaturely Logos and divine Logos is the “ever greater dissimilarity” in the “similarity, however great” in which one names God as Logos (AE, 461). So, the analogical movement is simultaneously one of progression toward understanding the mystery (similarity) and regression from the inaccessible divine being to creaturely uncomprehending (dissimilarity)—but, importantly, the stress is on the regressive movement, for Przywara (AE, 462). In the case of symbols, Przywara’s “Man, World, God, Symbol” (1958) explains that symbols are an expression of the analogical dynamic exposited above: symbols both convey a meaning about a creaturely reality (similarity) and transcend that reality to one beyond itself (dissimilarity) (AE, 498-499). In the case of divine revelations to human beings, these are “always and exclusively in symbols,” whether in myths “outside of Christianity,” or the stories, images, parables, and so on that are used by major figures—even Christ—within Scripture (AE, 499). But, they are also “never more than an advance into ever more impenetrable veils of ‘mysterium,’” meaning that any grasp on the symbol is simultaneously, and paradoxically, confronting the “dazzling darkness,” which is the second movement of analogy by proportionality mentioned above (AE, 500). Przywara concludes the essay with a reflection on 1 Cor 13:11—these symbols are genuine revelations, but the human being’s seeing “in a glass darkly” results in her symbols rendering the divine object “unapparent,” the “babbling of a babe.” We thus see the pervasiveness of the analogia entis in all creaturely dynamics—all revelation is simultaneously, and perhaps in an “ever greater” way, a veiling. HANS URS VON BALTHASAR As Peter Casarella notes, Hans Urs von Balthasar defended Erich Przywara’s account of the analogia entis against Karl Barth’s forceful critique in his Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung Seiner Theologie (1951); however, Balthasar

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himself did not espouse the analogia entis in the same way.9 Particularly, as an examination of Balthasar’s mature thought on the matter primarily from his Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic will show, Przywara’s account of “the living form of Christ and the Christological determinations of the analogy of being are still too vague” for Balthasar.10 To be sure, Przywara’s work on the analogia entis is sufficiently grounding for Balthasar, but the work of his “old master” doesn’t quite draw out the Cruciform implications necessary for “articulating a Christology of mission that is robustly Trinitarian and that simultaneously addresses fully the dilemma of human freedom as it needs to be understood today.”11 Though my angle of critique on the analogia entis is a different one from what led Balthasar to develop it the way he did, it remains the case that his motivations should be made clear as we examine his own account.12 Like Przywara, Balthasar says in Volume II of his Theo-Drama13 that we need the analogia entis to prevent “a pantheism or theopanism which dissolves God into the world or the world into God” on one side and a “pure dualism, which isolates God’s divinity from the world” on the other (TD II, 118-119). Further, Balthasar understands it as a “fundamental rhythm . . . similarity within an ever-increasing dissimilarity” (TD II, 406). On the one hand, the divine origin can “to some degree” be compared with creaturely effects; on the other hand, the “irreducible opposition” between selfsubsistent being and a being created out of nothing enshrouds any claim to a conceived similarity (TD II, 401). In Theo-Logic I,14 Balthasar reflects on this paradox of the analogia entis in the realm of cognition, which concerns the relation between the “structure of creaturely truth and the structure of divine truth” (TL I, 7). In cognition, the subject’s experience of an object is predicated upon the identity of being and consciousness in absolute being, or God (TL I, 50-51). Though the creature’s comprehension of any object is adequate because of its self-consciousness that gives it some “measure of being” of the object, it is a limited comprehension of being that is contingent upon the “all-measuring, infinite measure” that is God, in whom it participates (TL I, 51). Because of this, creaturely cognition “knows God implicitly in every act of consciousness and in every object” (TL I, 52). But, neither the creature’s consciousness nor every object is divine being: God is not further up the scale on the measuring line to be extrapolated from consciousness or the object, but is the very measure itself. Thus, God’s truth transcends the creature even while it participates in God. It is this recognition of contingency, Balthasar thinks, that mediates and grounds the “(implicit) causal inference” that there is an absolute being grounding “all reality and truth in the world.” As such, the creature’s growth in knowledge of the world is simultaneously growth in knowledge of the difference between God’s knowledge and

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its own. As one progresses in awareness of the “absolutely infinite openness of truth,” the greater the distance appears between the creaturely measure of that truth and God’s (TL I, 53). We must then ask, how does any cognitive purchase come out of this scenario for who God is? “Can God make himself understandable to the world as God without losing his divinity” (TL I, 17)? For Balthasar, we must turn to Christ to understand how he can bridge the gap between God and creature by the analogia entis, and then apply what we’ve learned about Christ to the issue of translating divine into creaturely truths. For the first, Christocentric component, we must turn to volume III for its more thorough exposition. In volume III of his Theo-Drama,15 Balthasar presents to his reader in part II an exploration of Christ’s person through his mission: his particular function and role as the “One Sent” (TD III, 150). Balthasar says that one’s personhood is defined “when God addresses a conscious subject, tells him who he is and what he means to the eternal God of truth and shows him the purpose of his existence—that is, imparts a distinctive and divinely authorized mission” (TD III, 207). Christ’s person is the unique archetype as a result of this definition: he is not just one called to a particular purpose, but his being the Word of God shows an identity between his being a subject and his mission (TD III, 220). While all other human persons only participate in God and are called to a mission, it is Christ who simply is mission in his very being; esse and telos unite in him, for “his being sent (missio) by the Father is a modality of his proceeding (processio) from the Father” (TD III, 226). All other human subjects are dependent upon their relationship with Christ in order to become persons (TD III, 207). This last point is important as we bridge into Balthasar’s Christological analogia entis. As he says, “In Christo . . . every [human being] can cherish the hope of not remaining a merely individual conscious subject but of receiving personhood from God, becoming a person, with a mission that is likewise defined in Christo” (TD III, 220).16 In explicitly addressing the analogia entis, Balthasar states that it is Jesus Christ’s person who overcomes the divide that is the “essential abyss” between God and creatures (TD III, 220). Jesus does this in his very being as the God-man, which is both “mystery” and “paradox” (TD III, 220-21). Accepting the Fourth Lateran Council’s account of the ever greater dissimilarity in any expressed similarity,17 Balthasar says that Jesus uniquely and most highly expresses that relationship as the “concrete analogia entis” (TD III, 222). Christ’s personhood, then, is itself an analogy in his hypostatic union, not a synthesis, or reduction to something common, like “being as such”—thus, there is no available comparison between the infinite God and finite human being of Christ’s two natures. Instead, it is the united, single person of Christ that allows for the communication of attributes or qualities

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between Christ’s human and divine natures. This unity also signifies “that all conscious, created nature is an image, at a fundamental and indestructible level, of the primal Image of God”—that is, the analogia entis in Christ shows the mimetic expression of created nature with the primordial divine nature, but without the presumption of a commensurate substratum (TD III, 223). But, it must be asked, how is this identity of personhood—which seems to be a matter of consciousness—possible? For this answer, we must, says Balthasar, be attentive to “Jesus’ trinitarian [sic] mission, which characterizes his entire existence” (TD III, 224). Jesus, as a whole person, lives “solely to fulfill the Father’s will”; that means that his consciousness is united in the mission of revealing “God’s nature and his disposition toward [human beings]” (TD III, 224-225). Therein, Jesus both reveals in himself the attributes of God and is the “revelation of [human being] as he ought to be, as he is and as he is once more to become (through Christ’s action on [humanity’s] behalf)” (TD III, 225). So, Balthasar takes it that though the analogia entis provides no commensurate reality, the united consciousness in mission of Jesus unites his natures (TD III, 227). Given this unity in mission, how does this impact created natures apart from Christ’s human nature? It is not as if we copy Christ’s consciousness, since though he is a “conscious subject,” we are not alike to his; instead, “he is the Logos in Person who has created all rational beings (logikoi) and in whom, by nature, all participate” (TD III, 233-34). In that all participate as rational beings, and Jesus’s salvific mission to disclose God to them is of universal scope, Christ “influences” human beings to respond to his personality by empowering them to take up a personality analogous to— and participating in—Christ’s; a life that follows his mission “as a pattern and archetype,” but one that also is “specifically designed for and tailored to each individual” (TD III, 248-49). The material characteristics of that mission are wide and varied, but they are anchored in this participation in Christ’s personhood. Thus, Jesus has a “two-in-one role” united in one distinct personal function: on one side, his role as God means that Jesus Christ is “his valid exposition and presence in the world,” and through him is God “made visible in the human history of Christ” (TD III, 258). On the other side of the coin, people are allotted “theodramatic significance” by Jesus’s human person as the archetype for their individual, personal roles as Christ’s united body on earth, enabling them to reveal God through their distinct missions. Though Balthasar thinks that people do not have the relation that Christ does to the Father, he takes it that Jesus desires for them to imitate his archetypal life in such closeness as to be “coheirs with Christ,” both obeying the Spirit and communicating good news (TD III, 258-59).

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We can now, secondly, look to how Christ helps us translate theological truths in human expression in his Theo-Logic II.18 In a section titled “Verbum-Caro and Analogy,” we see a concise summation of Christ’s relation to analogy as a language form. Christ, as Balthasar is keen to show throughout this volume, is the “exposition” or “expression” of the invisible God (TL II, 312); Jesus’s self-exposition is also the exposition of the Logos of the Father through the Holy Spirit, but it is not a sort of expression that reduces it to a principle—“not even to the substance-accident duality” (TL II, 313).. In this exposition, Jesus’s perfect understanding of God can also be understood “by those who have received the divine Spirit so that they might enjoy such understanding of his exposition,” even of the Trinitarian nature of God. So, while Jesus exposits the Father directly, it is the Spirit that makes intelligible to us what Jesus communicates through word and deed (TL II, 314). But, this “hidden wisdom in mystery,” Balthasar says, quoting Paul (I Cor 2:7), escapes “the grasp of every conceptual apprehension” (TL II, 313). The distance between creaturely and divine being remains ever present, even in Christ as the “recapitulation of the creation.” Balthasar concludes with his own spin on the analogia entis in view of this reality: we must begin with a primary attributio [attribution] of all things to the Logos, who, being the ground and end of the creation, himself exemplifies prototypically the right proportio [proportion] between God and the creature and, through the Spirit, communicates it to creation. Yet this proportion transcends every human concept. Consequently, despite all appropriation (attributio) to Christ and all graced ‘participation in the divine nature,’ it remains a proportionalitas [proportionality], a ‘proportional relation between proportional relations,’ that is, between the relation of difference between God and creature and the relation of difference between Father, Son, and Spirit. (TL II, 316, emphasis mine)19

Thus, as Junius Johnson notes, the grounding of the proportionality is not a “neutral ground” that may include divine and human realities, but is rather the intra-Trinitarian relations themselves: “proportionalitas is the point of contact between the derived proportional relation of creatures to their archetype with the grounding proportion which constitutes that archetype.”20 So, the creaturely expressions made of God, though unable to be conceived, may still be understood within a metaphysical structure that has its fundamental basis in the person of Jesus Christ, not in a “worldly analogy.” And that means that those expressions have a prepared direction to transcend themselves, for God’s being “has always had the intention of making room within itself to receive and beautify finitude.”21

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KARL RAHNER Like Balthasar, Karl Rahner is indebted to—and presupposes much of— Przywara’s founding work on the analogia entis.22 Yet, despite this grounding, his own admission that “all theological statements—even if this is manifest in a variety of ways and degrees—are analogical statements,”23 and his voluminous writings, Rahner never offers a monograph treating the problem of analogy.24 Indeed, on this latter point Joseph Palakeel notes that the massive twenty-three-volume work of Rahner’s Theological Investigations dedicates a mere “two pages . . . to the problem of analogy.”25 But, reflections on the analogia entis are available, nonetheless, particularly in his earlier works, which establish the philosophical underpinnings that carry through to the rest of his corpus. As concerns the analogia entis, Rahner’s most explicit, early address of it comes in Part II of his Hearers of the Word (1st ed. 1941).26 Therein, a fourth chapter, titled ‘The Analogy of ‘Having Being’ ” (Analogie der Seinshabe), concerns a potential problem to a Thomistic, transcendental idea that knowledge is the subject’s “being-present-to-itself” that Rahner espouses as his “first proposition of general ontology: the essence of the being of a thing which exists is knowing and being known in an original unity” (HW, 43, 44). If, the argument goes, being “signifies the original unity of knowing and being known,” then it seems “knowing and being” - or simply “knowledge and being” - unite in an “a priori identity” (HW, 45). If that is the case, then what is the point of inquiry, and how can we know anything distinct from our own being (HW, 46)? Does this result in pantheism? Rahner’s response is that an inquiring being does not have being in the same respect as the being about which it inquires. Thus, the first proposition of ontology does not properly apply to “not-being” but only to “pure being.” In other words, the original unity of being and knowledge only applies to God, not to a creature’s reality. The latter has a sort of “possession” of being, or is in the state of “having being,” that is one by degree: it “manifests itself in the degree in which the appropriate thing which is, is able to turn back on itself, that is, in the degree in which it is possible for it to be reflected in itself, to be illumined by itself and in this sense to be present to itself” (HW, 47). So, the unity of knowing and being characteristic of dependent reality is not of identity but of variable applicability: knowledge is never a complete matter for the creature, but always a partial possession. However, creatures don’t know the measure of being as a “fixed quantity,” and so they have no formal concept of it. This makes being an “analogical concept” to creaturely comprehension. The consequence for creaturely knowledge is that there is some attribution of being to it, but it is never totally so, nor do creatures apprehend where their knowledge is in respect to that of the original unity (except that

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their knowing is commensurate with the degree they are “having being”) (HW, 49). For God, on the other hand, it is a possession of being—indeed, a “self-possession”—that is “absolute self-clarification” (HW, 48n1). We thus see Rahner’s epistemological spin on Aquinas’s affirmation of God’s unity in essence and existence: God’s existence as “to-be” is translated as unity of knowing and being known, whereas creaturely distinction in essence and existence underlies their epistemic incompleteness. Thus, for Rahner, the “concept of being is analogical, and this analogy is evident from the very beginning of an understanding of what being is, therefore the meaning of being thus discovered (the being-present-to-itself) is also analogical” (HW, 49). This denies a pantheistic view of “being is knowing” because all things do not entirely possess being, or are not purely “having being” (HW, 50). As a corollary, “Not every thing which is, is a ‘knowing’ in the same sense and in the same measure.” God, as has been said, is pure being and that in which “the concept of being itself is perfectly realized,” but human beings inquire, meaning that they are “finite spirit” and limited consciousnesses (HW, 51). But, that inquiring is itself caused by a desire to know the unity of being and knowing, and that unity—the “logos”—is the “ultimate presupposition” for divine revelation to human beings: it is what grounds the notion that “all that is, can fundamentally be turned into a ‘true’ speech, into an information, addressed to the mind.” That logos, further, allows the “incarnate Logos” to communicate “what lies hidden in the depths of God” (HW, 52).. Having addressed the formal reality of the analogia entis, Rahner addresses how human beings “must possess an openness” to God’s revelation (HW, 53). They possess this openness, says Rahner, because they possess a “preconcept” of being in its unity, of being “pure and simple” (HW, 63). Having the pre-concept of being carries with it the positing of the pre-concept’s absolute completion, which is God. This is not to say that the pre-concept gives a concept of God, but that God’s “specific possibility” is affirmed in the pre-concept because the “ontological differential” of non-unity in creaturely knowing and being is contingent upon its pure identity in God (HW, 64). Indeed, by inference, every cognition “having being” is also an implicit cognition of God (HW, 65). Thus, we may characterize human being as “absolute receptivity for being pure and simple, in perpetual, unfulfilled ontological differential” (HW, 66). This openness to God makes God’s revelation to human beings possible, and makes them have “an ear that is open to any word whatsoever that may proceed from the mouth of the Eternal” (HW, 68). What then, we may ask, prevents the utter fulfillment of our knowledge of the divine if humans are this “absolute receptivity” to the divine? Later, Rahner qualifies that God’s standing as the condition of knowing finite things means that knowledge of God’s being must be a negative knowledge, a knowledge of what we don’t know; accordingly, “in such a mode of the

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knowledge of God, he remains veiled within the positive content of his infinitude” (HW, 81). But, this should not make us think we slide into the other ditch where God is completely unknown. Rahner here wants us to think of God in analogy to “supra-mundane” existences that don’t directly intimate themselves to our senses as appearances—objects like substances. With such existences, negation still offers a “specific character” to define their “having being” since the pre-concept of being allows us to grasp “a priori all possible modes of ‘having being,’ ” and the recognition of the infinity of God allows us to remove the limitations or “upper limit” of these modes of “having being” to denote the supra-mundane existences (HW, 151). Therefore, Rahner says, we can secure a “growing concept,” by negation and excessus, of things like substances. An important implication that Rahner draws is that it is possible—and, indeed, actual—that supra-mundane existences be communicated to human beings through words—that is, through “the conceptual symbol of the spirit” words can be “directly applied to the thing” (HW, 154). It is, then, a small step to say by an analogous reasoning that “the word is thus ascertained to be the locus of a possible revelatory encounter with the free God before whom [humanity] constantly stands by virtue of his transcendence” (HW, 156). Just as God delimits Godself in freedom to reveal supra-mundane existences to human beings through conceptual symbols as “words,” so also God may reveal Godself in history through human words. But, the site of revelation of God in human words, made possible by “logos,” takes place principally through the incarnate Logos, which Rahner endeavors to explain in his “The Theology of the Symbol” (1959).27 Therein, he explicates a “general ontology of the symbol,” making two important assertions: first, “all beings are by their nature symbolic, because they ‘necessarily ‘express themselves in order to attain their own nature” (“TS,” 224), and, second, “the symbol strictly speaking (symbolic reality) is the self-realization of a being in the other, which is constitutive of its essence” (“TS,” 234). Thus, existences are by their nature expressive and must be to be what they are, and one’s being a symbol of something means to have that other being realized in oneself. This clearly opens a path, he thinks, for the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, to be the “self-expression” of the Godhead from eternity past—indeed, the Logos’s generation by the Father is “the absolute act of divine self-possession in knowledge” (“TS,” 236). Here, the Logos as symbol is distinct as expression of what it expresses, but also as simultaneously constituted by what it expresses. In being expression, Rahner says, this justifies not just God’s intra-Trinitarian expression, but also those expressions ad extra, those that obtain in the finite, created world because of their continuity with the self-expression ad intra. And, most importantly for our concerns, this means that the incarnate Logos—Jesus Christ—is the “the

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absolute symbol of God in the world, filled as nothing else can be with what is symbolized” (“TS,” 237). Jesus Christ is not some arbitrary symbol applied to the divine Logos as it “exteriorizes himself”—rather, Christ is the true “self-disclosure” of God, the Logos made “present” in the world (“TS,” 239). And it is due to this that “the symbolic reality of all things . . . has now in ontological reality received an infinite extension by the fact that this reality has become also a determination of the Logos himself or of his milieu.” Thus, we can see the world as more than just having God as its “efficient, exemplary and final cause”; we can, by faith, recognize it as God’s own “substantial determination or as his own proper environment.” At present, the incarnate Word has its “persisting presence” in the Church, which possesses the “eschatological grace of God” unto salvation and God’s “infallible truth” (“TS,” 240-41). This Church, as symbolic reality of God, “really contains what it signifies”—the grace enacted on the Church constitutes it and enables the Church to be that grace’s sacramental sign, even dispensing that grace accordingly in historical space and time (“TS,” 242). Therefore, Rahner presents to us a logical ordering of how the symbolic reality of human expression in the Church is able to be a “continuation” of its transcendent arche in the intra-Trinitarian life. Turning finally to Foundations of Christian Faith (1976),28 Rahner offers his reader a summary of the role of analogous language. Recognizing that we must speak of God with “secondary and categorical concepts which are contraries within the realm of the categorical,” he adduces that we maintain a constant, un-synthesizable dialectic unique to the transcendent God (FCF, 71). Language of God intimates an “irresolvable tension”—one that simultaneously intimates that our creaturely concepts are grounded in God while also defying application to an “antecedent system” within which creaturely concepts must function (FCF, 71, 72). As such, “analogy” does not occupy some middle ground on a spectrum between univocity and equivocity. It is no “hybrid” of the two. Rather, analogy is constituted by a relation between the original transcendence of God and the drift of the “whole movement of [human] spirit” to comprehend the objects of experience (FCF, 72). It is the more primordial reality that establishes categorical knowledge, and, indeed, univocal and equivocal statements are “deficient modes of that original relationship” (FCF, 73). So, the objects of our experience mediate the knowledge of God for us by being a “starting point” into the depths of the incomprehensible God without ever resolving the tension of analogy. This is just another mode of our own analogous existence of being grounded in, but being always surpassed by, the holy mystery of absolute being. Analogous language, then, is a logical consequence of this fundamental metaphysical principle. As a result, “knowledge of God has a quite definite and unique character” (FCF, 54). In that knowledge, God is “grasping” us in mystery, rather than

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the converse. In being so grasped, we can arrive at “the so-called concept of God, explicit language about him, words and what we mean by them and try to say to ourselves reflexively,” but we are simultaneously exhorted to uphold our “orientation towards the absolute mystery” if any metaphysical speculation is to “remain true.” Knowing God is always sui generis, always different, always on the edge of the abyss, but nonetheless real. CRITIQUING THE ANALOGIA ENTIS Before getting into particular problems, it is worth noting what appears to be the overarching issue of the analogia entis, what I am calling the proportionality problem. The idea is this—analogies, as we’ve come to understand from chapter 2, require at least one of two main axes to be clear in order to make an analogy intelligible: the horizontal relations (i.e., cross-domain similarity) and vertical relations (i.e., inter-domain associations of phenomena). It is through these relations that the human mind seeks out some sort of proportionality by which it may make a comparison to another thing for the purpose of analogical thinking. In horizontally focused analogies, we may look for a descriptive proportionality; hence, a basketball is in analogy to the earth because of similar shapes; in vertically focused analogies, we may look for a co-occurrence in phenomenal events to provide a commensurate proportionality; hence, light reflects off a surface as a ball bounces off a wall. The question for the proponents of analogia entis, then, is what is supposed to establish an intelligible analogy if the existence of God and creatures is not united by any distinct proportionality? What one finds, I believe, is that Przywara, Balthasar, and Rahner can’t answer this question; in fact, they implicitly must contradict their own positions if God-talk is to be intelligible. A first matter to address concerns the possibility of an intelligible analogical relation of being between creatures and God given the latter’s simple being. This means that God is not composed of any parts nor is part of anything, but, most importantly, God does not belong to any genus. This ascription to God is deeply embedded in the Christian theological tradition, and is considered by many to be what is most definitive of God. For instance, David Bentley Hart says, “It seems obvious to me that a denial of divine simplicity is tantamount to atheism, and the vast preponderance of metaphysical tradition concurs with that judgment.”29 The proponents of the analogia entis listed here would agree.30 Przywara explicitly advocates Thomas Aquinas’s position when he says that God is extra omne genus (“outside every genus”), consequently making God’s being so radically divergent from creaturely being that the only authentic relation is one between the most extreme of contraries: “is” and “nothing” (AE, 236-237). Balthasar also firmly espouses God

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as the “simplicity of being itself” (TL II, 185), noting that “God cannot fall under any concept” for this would include God within something, even if it is a merely mental entity (TL I, 17). Rahner agrees when he attests to the “one, simple essence of God,”31 though he thinks that some conceptual purchase can be gained through thinking closely about God’s “relations” (to which we will turn shortly). Clearly, then, by these accounts, God is inconceivable in any straightforward or univocal manner, but is there still room for conceiving God-talk analogically? I don’t see how this can be the case: as has been said, to have a sense of the analog in question one requires some concept either on the horizontal or vertical axes that can be rendered proportional to another concept. But, if God’s simplicity by definition renders human concepts of God nugatory, then the horizontal axes of similarity are clearly written off for they rely on some categorical overlap between source and target. The vertical axis may not require an isolated concept of similarity in the way horizontal analogies might need it, but they do need (1) an indirect appeal to categories like causality via some phenomenal relation’s overlap with regard to their phenomena; and (2) some commensurate phenomenal reality with recourse to sense-data. But, if God is not a spatiotemporal entity, and does not produce phenomena that we can presume to be intrinsically connected with God’s nature, then that eliminates (2), and if God is outside any concept, then the concept of cause—regardless of what kind—is not going to help us ascertain God’s role with respect to the phenomena, thus eliminating (1).32 So, this makes all the running ascriptions that the authors use obfuscatory, whether it is God as creator, good, loving, first cause, or otherwise. Let’s take the specific attribute of God’s infinity, which all of the authors make use of to distinguish God and creatures. Even if Aristotle had his issues with his account of the analogical as we saw in the previous chapter, his rational theology was admittedly more careful about construing a simple unmoved mover (though, as has also been shown in the introduction, not without errors). At the end of his Physics, the reader will recall, Aristotle shows that such a simple being, if without parts, would also be without magnitude, since magnitude would have to imply divisibility. But, a simple thing cannot be divisible; therefore, the unmoved mover has no magnitude accorded to it. Further, if there is no magnitude, then assigning measure—even endless measure—would be nonsensical to that object. Thus, for Aristotle, the unmoved mover is neither infinite nor finite in character.33 The proponents of the analogia entis would do well to ruminate on Aristotle’s conclusion. They all readily employ the language of the “infinite,” but this must itself have non-univocal bearing on God; the question, then, is what God’s infinity is supposed to mean when God is accorded some suprametrical status. Przywara’s prose are saturated with allusion to infinity, but

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he often accompanies them with circuitous prepositions that rely on vague imagery. Aquinas’s “infinite above-and-beyond” is one such allusion that has several iterations throughout the work (AE, 302).34 But, what does “infinite” mean here? And what is it doing to modify “above-and-beyond,” and how is that metaphorical phrase—itself obviously capitalizing on spatial imagery— supposed to help us better understand what we are talking about when our object is extra omne genus? If the “formal fundamental form” of the concept of God, for Przywara, is summarized as “God beyond the creature” (AE, 157), what is positively significant about this “beyond”? Or, lowering the bar, what is a valuable concept with which to understand the limitation?35 Balthasar also claims that God is the “all-measuring, infinite measure” (TL I, 51). But, if God is identifiable with this measure, then we must not have a concept of it, per simplicity; so, what is the point of articulating God as “measure”? I imagine that Balthasar might reply that this is all metaphorical language, but a metaphor employs empirical realities for comparison and contrast (e.g., even a metaphor like “warmth” for a person’s affection, though possessing no clear horizontal similarity of attributes, is connected conceptually via a causal, sensorimotor experience36). Further, as Cajetan made clear in the previous chapter, a metaphor subsists on some intrinsic denomination that is shared by the pair of analogates; it just isn’t made properly clear as it is in the analogy of proper proportionality. We must, then, ask: what does metaphorical mean here? What ought one to grasp by it? He states the analogia proportionalitas involves some “inner proportion” within source and target that can mutually supply a “basis for comparison” between those objects (TD III, 221fn52); however, if identifying the inner proportion is contingent on identifying it conceptually, how will we be able to determine what that proportion is in the divine target? Continuing on, Rahner, too, makes substantive use of the language of the “infinite.” In particular, recognizing God’s infinity is what allows creatures to remove the “upper limit” of distinct modes of a supra-mundane existence to conceive of the substance itself (HW, 151). But, to remove an “upper limit” presumes some commensurate quantity with which to lift off the limit, so to speak. Turning up the volume only makes sense if one presumes decibel levels; if one transcends volume itself, then there doesn’t seem to be a point to the phrase. Similarly, it seems we need to presume that the modes of a substance are in some way commensurate with the substance if the modes are to communicate to us something about it, but if God is simple and thus has no determinate sense of measure ascribed to Godself, then what is being conveyed about God by which we may ascertain a “growing concept”? Nor do efforts that rely on some distinction between properties and relations help our authors. Rahner, in particular, seems to place his eggs in this basket. He tries to explicate this notion in his book The Trinity during an

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attempt to harmonize the notion of God’s simple essence and the existence of distinct divine hypostases. Therein, he says that two things (i.e., hypostases) that are identical with a third (i.e., divine essence) can be different from one another if they are conceived as “real relations” distinct “only through their esse ad (their being relative to) and the three opposed relative esse ad are of the same perfection.”37 The status of the divine persons as “opposed relations” allows this. Rahner continues: [Being opposed relations], they possess also a content (an intelligibility) which does not let them simply and altogether (re et ratione) coincide with the absolute reality with which they are supposed really (re) to be identical. In this event the relations are not distinct by what they posit “absolutely” each for itself, but through their opposition as such. That which is absolute possesses, as it were, its content in itself, whereas that which is relative is constituted by its relatedness to another, and in the case of real relative opposition by its necessary distinction from the opposed relation to which it refers. Hence despite its real identity with an absolute, an identity which is presupposed, a relative reality possesses a content through which it is distinct from other, opposed relations. Hence in our case we presuppose that two opposed relations can be really identical with something absolute.38

So, since the persons are not “absolute contents” but “opposed relations,” they do not need to be formally identical with one another, which means that asserting their disparity with one another does not make an affront to the principle of contradiction. The disparate persons still have an identity that is “real,” but it is not a formal one. But, there are a number of challenges to this position. First, Rahner himself admits that the presupposition here “cannot be positively verified in the empirical domain of finite reality.”39 Though he thinks he stabilizes himself by welcoming the double-edged sword, assuming escape from verification is also escape from falsification, it remains the case that any way to examine the legitimacy of relational opposition in absolute, simple reality is lost to us. As we have no way to access a non-spatiotemporal, simple entity, there is also no means to corroborate an authentic distinction between the formal and real identities that the argument hinges on. Our closest analog to this would have to be something like a geometric point. But, such an abstraction is still only identical with itself: the introduction of different intrinsic relations would have to presuppose some complexity, whether spatial, temporal, or otherwise. Second, his argument is clearly question begging: the relations esse ad result in content that is distinct from the absolute essence because that is just what it does. Third, the way in which a “real” identity is maintained as distinct from the formal identity of the principle of contradiction is clearly predicated upon

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some analogous sense for the identity of the relations or their “contents,” but Rahner never identifies the analogous sense in which it does, nor does he provide an assessment of how this hangs together with simplicity. All we have is some unique ascription of relations that are simultaneously identical yet distinct, but we don’t know how they are so distinguished apart from the terms ascribed to them (“essence” and “relations,” respectively). For instance, how is a relation “constituted by its relatedness,” and how does that avoid bearing on the content of the absolute reality? Thus, we see another iteration of the proportionality problem in Rahner’s writing: if there is no determinate sense offered for how the content of the “opposed relation” exists, and no empirical means to corroborate it, then we can’t isolate the proportionality to make the analog intelligible. In other words, there isn’t a way to conceive of the effects of these concepts, and, a fortiori, there is no way to make the concept useful for practical conduct.40 A second matter concerns bridging the gap between the ontological participation that is presumed of creatures in God, and the cognitive realm. Przywara’s account of the “undulating” or “oscillating” rhythm of the analogia entis places our own being as wavering back and forth in a perpetually unresolved dialectic, but it is also drawn up in obediential potency “beyond” our being into participation with God (AE, 311). Balthasar’s human person is one who gains the knowledge of objects as an extension of limited self-consciousness by participating in God—but, we do not ourselves gain access to the pure truth of God, though we participate in God (TL I, 51-52). Participation in Christ is also a strong theme that cements human personhood through being united in missional obedience to Christ (TD III, 248-249). Rahner seems to prefer the language of “possession” over participation, but it seems to arrive at roughly the same meaning as Balthasar’s account: the absolute possession of “having being” is constrained to God and is translated epistemically as “absolute self-clarification,” while human beings possess it by degrees in ways they don’t fully recognize and can’t fully participate in as finite creatures, hence indicating their limited knowledge and fallibility (HW, 47-48). Altogether, then, participation (or possession) language does heavy lifting in our authors. But, redounding to it results in a number of problems. First, simplicity, once again, affirms that God is not composed of parts, nor is part of anything. So, if being a part of something is ruled out for God, then how could an idea for which it is constitutive apply to God? In other words, what does the part-icipation mean for creatures? Presumably, if creatures are participant in God then that must yield some larger whole, even if it is a conglomerate of different beings; so, what is the whole that is conceived in that act or process? And, if we can conceive of that whole, isn’t that a problem for God’s simplicity? Second, participation in something does not demonstrate that thing’s intelligibility: one need only think about something

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like the discovery of galaxies to recognize that ontic participation does not involve one’s epistemic awareness of the whole, even tacitly. Balthasar seems to recognize this when he says that knowledge of the being of objects via participation is not also knowledge of God’s being, but this prompts the question of how he could then articulate anything about God’s being without knowing the measure of being—or truth—that God has. The knowledge by negation our authors propound might perhaps be a way forward here, but that is not sufficient for the analogical language they employ. Third, it seems difficult to comprehend how the participation squares with the undulating rhythm or unresolvable dialectic that the proponents all espouse for the analogia entis, in some form. Participation, as a common term and in its synonyms, is not intelligible if one denies a constancy of effects in that participation. If I say I am “participating” in a community but I only know who is not a part of it, or I must simultaneously deny and affirm who are the participants, then an interlocutor wouldn’t put much faith in my actually participating in the community. So, the tension of the analogia entis just doesn’t sit well with the language of participation, which is instrumental for much of its proponents’ theological program. A third matter concerns Christ’s role as mediator between God and human beings. The authors clearly think the analogia entis has its concrete exemplar in Jesus Christ. Przywara takes Christ as the unity of the plenitude of being with creaturely nothingness (AE, 302), establishing God as the true mediator between God and creatures, the perfection of human nature by redeeming grace in his person, and a unity that requires no common genus in the ineffable mystery of the identity of essence and existence taking on a new relation as it takes on human flesh (AE, 303-305). What the divine Logos does is not so conceived by human beings situated within the creaturely, ontic Logos, but must be understood within the analogia entis as the greater regression in however great a progression into the understanding of the mystery of divine being (AE, 459-461). But, it seems that we are no nearer to understanding the function of our words with respect to Christ’s mediation than we were prior to knowing of Christ’s mediation—indeed, it’s hard to see how it isn’t ultimately irrelevant. Przywara’s unity is one “even so”—one in spite of securing anything common between creatures and God. It’s an ineffable paradox situating itself as an analogical reality between incarnation and crucifixion. We might participate in some “redemption” as part of Christ’s act as incarnate Logos, but our language seems no nearer to conceiving the divine object. Balthasar’s treatment does develop the Christocentric component, but he is merely farther down Przywara’s road, and, to quote Francis Bacon, “it is obvious that a man on the wrong road goes further astray the faster he runs.”41 His conception of Christ as the “concrete analogia entis” seems, for all intents and purposes, to mirror Przywara’s quite closely: the hypostatic union

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that subsists on no common substratum, involves no true synthesis, and is the true exemplar of created nature in perfected union with God. So, enabling comprehension suffers the same problems. The bestowal of personhood by analogy to Christ’s mission is also, under examination, an extended exercise in irrelevance: following Christ’s example on earth may be of practical and ethical significance, but redounding to an analogous mission in the world does not explain how God becomes intelligible to us. One may very well imitate Christ’s life and consciousness of a mission with salvific intent, but if there is no human concept that corresponds to God’s activity—no sensible proportionality to ascribe—then it doesn’t make sense to affirm the intelligibility of human expressions about God. The Holy Spirit’s work seems, likewise, just as irrelevant. Finally, Rahner’s creation is one that is in “continuity” with the Logos’ selfexpression of God, which makes it a “determination of the Logos himself,” specifically in the form of the Church. But, it is difficult to see how Christ’s activity here is efficacious with the irresolvable dialectic of contradictions that our categories fall into on his account even with the Logos’s grounding. Lacking the right conceptual system, the grounding of our language in God is also incomprehensible in application to God. We are somehow expressions of God that don’t know what we express about God. Once again, the irresolvable dialectic common to all three figures assails what is necessary for adequate conceptualization for God-talk to even get started. Late in his life, Rahner said—in the context of remembering God’s incomprehensibility—that he had given “too little thought to the analogical nature of all [his] theological assertions.”42 This could well be applied to Balthasar and Przywara, as well: too little critical thought was dedicated to the possibility of meaningful theological assertions under the radically apophatic implications of the analogia entis. CONCLUSION: ASSESSING THE ACCOUNTS ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES Having addressed and critiqued these major views on the analogia entis, I find that Robert C. Neville is able to concisely articulate the proportionality problem. In that the analogy of proper proportionality is contingent on knowing something about an order of “the divine kind of being” to “our kind of being,” we would need to know some sort of “determinate distance between the divine and human.”43 But, the adherence of all our advocates to some form of the Fourth Lateran Council—whose axiom is that the “ever greater dissimilarity” always displaces any graspable similarity—is precisely what would preclude the intelligible order that the advocates are

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aiming for in the first place. Instead, we have an ever-deferring dialectic in which we enounce, “A similarity,” but then simultaneously enunciate louder, “A dissimilarity!” The result is conceptual vacuity, and so unintelligibility for discourse. So, the ever-deferring dialectic results in the infinite deferral of proportionality for intelligible meaning. And, that infinite deferral seems to be simply the genetic output of fallacious dualisms handed down from Greek philosophy. As James F. Anderson says, the analogia entis has its “ultimate basis [in] the division of reality by the pair called ‘potency-and-act,’”44 which, as was seen in chapter 1, are opposed categories without mediation. If the analogia entis, then, is contingent on these mutually exclusive categories, then attempting to explain the relationship between them is going to result in failure. And, as we have seen, that is indeed what happens. When squared with the guidelines from chapter 2 on analogy, then, we can characterize their adherence in the following way: 1. Determinate vertical and horizontal relations must be secured for intelligible analogies: Clearly, without distinct and co-ordinate proportions between creaturely sources and the divine target—due to the target’s reductively incomprehensible attributes—similar relations or properties cannot be distinguished between the two (rendering horizontal relations indeterminate), and neither can particular relations between the target’s phenomena be determined at all (rendering vertical relations indeterminate). Meaningful, proportional relations in some sense are required for this effort. 2. Similarity is multivalent, and discerning those valences is crucial for discovering the strength of an analogy: Without some conceptually stable apprehensibility, the ways in which attributions or relations are similar will remain unknown, and so also will the strength of a particular analogy. For instance, to know whether it is more consistent with divine love to think that a situation requires deception or truth-telling could not be determined, for what is “more loving” would require that creaturely love be a commensurate idea with divine love. 3. An analogy should aim for structural isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence in its features: Analogia entis proponents must assume that creaturely features of excellence have only the one, simple, divine analog: for instance, while knowledge and justice are distinct creaturely attributions, they must be the same for a simple God. So, simplicity itself would prevent intelligible analogies since the “C : D” characterizing the divine nature are reflexive properties, whereas “A: B” in the creaturely realm are not. Further, the analogia entis prevents any stable conceptualization of the divine properties, even if the object were complexly

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constituted. Thus, the challenge of structural isomorphism is doubly compounded. 4. Determining the association is important both for distinguishing more or less relevant similarities, and clarifying analogical relatedness of homologous symbols: This would have to involve some conceptual grasp of the sort of association involved. If a relation like causality is supposed to be the proper association to ground the analogy, then we must say that causality is applicable to both source and target realms on some intelligible, proportionate order. Simplicity and analogia entis must deny this; therefore, we can’t determine the association, and so also cannot determine the relevant similarities. 5. Inferential potency affects the mapping procedure’s cogency and needs to be assessed: The analogia entis cannot provide a distinct similarity or association by which to make judgments about analogies that might follow upon them. Without a univocal concept for application to both realms, we are not licensed to make further inferences upon them. So, if I have no distinct concept of God’s love, I wouldn’t know how to plug it into a situation for ethical deliberation. 6. Regarding the horizontal and vertical relations, successful analogies will require compensation by the other paired relation if one relation is weak: Clearly, both similarity and association cannot be comprehended without assuming a sensible conception of the object with regard to either. At that point, the mind cannot search for inferential resources to make an analogy intelligible. Compensation involves some mutually commensurate use of data for the end of the analogy, but analogia entis cannot allow for that commensurate use. 7. Familiarity with vertical and horizontal features of source and target is contingent on empirical data: In denying any categorical similarity between the creaturely world and the divine being, one also denies empirical resources for attributing any intelligible characteristics. Thus, we have no familiarity with horizontal or vertical features of the divine being. In summary, as a result of my critical analysis and the positions’ general incoherence with the guidelines for analogy, it appears that the analogia entis cannot afford us pragmaticistically intelligible language, as we explicated that term in chapter 2. First, the analogia entis does not allow us to conceive of any determinate concepts of God because of the barriers erected by simplicity, and, second, without any determinate concepts to be used, there is no use for them in practical conduct, of which comprehensible communication is a type.

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NOTES 1. The interpretation that theological analogy is contingent on such a formulation is a long-standing tradition having roots in the fifteenth century with the work of Thomas Cajetan’s De nominum analogia. But, as mentioned in chapter 2, there is good reason to think that Cajetan has been falsely interpreted as propounding an analogy of being along these lines. See Hochschild, Semantics of Analogy, 17–32. 2. John Betz, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, ed. Erich Przywara, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 4. Hereafter, “AE” in text body. 3. “Fourth Lateran Council,” Daily Catholic, last updated June 3, 2017, accessed December 7, 2017, http:​/​/www​​.dail​​ycath​​olic.​​org​/h​​istor​​y​/12e​​c​ume1​​.htm. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Erich Przywara, In und Gegen: Stellungnahman zur Zeit (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955), 277–278, translated and quoted in Przywara, Analogia Entis, 113. 7. As Przywara says later in “Metaphysics, Religion, and Analogy” (1956), the analogia entis “excludes all systems that exclusively assert the ‘similarity, however great,’” including one that would assume a “univocal being” that is “prior to pure analogy.” AE, 428. 8. We should not assume, though, that being drawn into the above and beyond is tantamount to “progress.” As Przywara says in a later essay, “Metaphysics, Religion, and Analogy” (1956), one does not proceed ever forward in experiencing the oscillating relation, but a “wandering from darkness to darkness.” Any illumination one might receive is also to plunge into greater mystery. See AE, 422. 9. Peter Casarella, “Hans Urs von Balthasar, Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis, and the Problem of the Catholic Denkform,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? ed. Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 195. 10. Ibid., 204. 11. Ibid., 205. As Thomas O’Meara corroborates, Balthasar “found Przywara’s metaphysics of being and grace somewhat lacking in a clear Christian word and center, for he saw in Christ the expressive figure of the Father, someone and something going beyond the oscillations of an analogy of being; not only the Word of God but the suffering Redeemer of humanity.” Further, that interest in concretizing the role of Christ in his analogical account had much to do with Barth’s work on the analogia fidei. See Thomas O’Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 136–137. 12. For a concise address of Balthasar’s theological development with regard to the analogia entis, see Joseph Palakeel, The Use of Analogy in Theological Discourse: An Investigation in Ecumenical Perspective (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1995), 68–72, 100–110. 13. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Volume II, The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990). Hereafter, “TD II” in text body.

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14. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Volume I, The Truth of the Word, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000). Hereafter, “TL I” in text body. 15. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Volume III, The Dramatis Personae: The Person of Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). Hereafter, “TD III” in text body. 16. For the sake of adequacy to the original German Mensch or Menschen that Balthasar and Rahner use, and in the spirit of universality with which texts like these are meant, I switch out the English “man” or “men” for “human being” or “human beings,” which can also be considered synonymous with “person,” or “people,” respectively. 17. In this, Balthasar differs with Przywara since he thinks that tanta should be removed to maintain the original formulation, which would eliminate the overly apophatic stress that he thinks prevented Przywara from developing a proper Christology. However, for my purposes, the difference is trivial. TD III, 220fn51. 18. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Volume II, The Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004). Hereafter, “TL II” in text body. 19. In Theo-Drama III, Balthasar notes that a proportionalitas is when “both entities are incomparable per se, but each exhibits an inner proportion supplying the basis for a comparison” (221fn52). 20. Junius Johnson, Christ and Analogy: The Christocentric Metaphysics of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 154–155. 21. Ibid., 155. 22. As Rahner said of Przywara, “Through him the analogia entis moves from being a small technical issue to being the basic structure of the Catholic reality.” See Karl Neufeld, Die Brüder Rahner (Freiburg; Herder, 1994), 82, translated and quoted in O’Meara, Przywara, 141. 23. Karl Rahner, “Experiences of a Catholic Theologian,” Theological Studies 61 (2000), 4. 24. Ibid. 25. Palakeel, The Use of Analogy, 236fn44. 26. Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word, trans. Michael Richards (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963), 43, 44. Hereafter, “HW” in text body. 27. Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations: Volume IV, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966). Hereafter, “TS” in text body. 28. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury Press, 1978). Hereafter, “FCF” in text body. 29. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 128. 30. As would Hart himself as such a proponent. For his own defense of the analogia entis, see his The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 241–249. 31. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Continuum, 2001), 69.

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32. Even contemporary defenders of the analogia entis seem to miss this latter point that redounding to a concept of cause is still going to be rendered useless by simplicity. Steven Long, for instance, writes that “there is a real proportion of creature to God such that the creature is an effect of God,” but he reasons that by saying there is no “proper proportionality” to that relation, there is thus no “similarity” or “determined proportion” between the creature and God. Instead, God’s “causality” is a “transcendent perfection” that goes beyond any difference of degree. Yet, Long still admits that there is “proportionate identity sufficient for reasoning” provided by the notions of creaturely potency and God as pure act. The problem is twofold here: (1) Long denies any proportionate similarity between God as “cause” and creaturely “causes,” but then admits something available for reasoning all the same. Long’s reliance on an improper proportionality is still dependent on some commensuration— however fuzzy or confused—between God and creatures, and so he must implicitly undermine the notion that God as “cause” is truly transcendent or beyond conceptual grasp. But, (2), he’s on the first steps to a reductio with his reliance on the act/potency dualism, for we also require concepts for what these are in order to make comprehensible the explanation for cause and effect. See Stephen A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2011), 98–102. 33. Aristotle, “Physics,” 267b17–28. I recognize that Aristotle does admit that the prime mover imparts an “infinite” force; however, (1), that force must be determinately quantified with respect to what it moves (266a22–23); (2), as the unmoved mover, that force conveys no “effort” from it so as to identify it with that “infinite” force (267b1–2); and (3) Aristotle identifies the “infinite” in context here as the unceasing and eternal cause of all other natural motion (266b19–120), meaning that he has in view the indefinite continuity of the force rather than ascribing to it a particular measure in time. Thus, we are still left with nothing to say of that object’s character apart from how it relates to the objects it moves. 34. Other instances: “infinity of God,” or infinity as “God’s true self-concept (184); “infinitum actu” (474); “infinite moment of fullness” (589). 35. I should also note that Aquinas’s treatment of the infinity of God in the Summa suffers from similar problems. He avoids Aristotle’s restriction on the term by saying that since God does not have any matter, and matter is what makes a form finite, then God, as pure form, is infinite. The problem, though, is that Aquinas can’t avoid the notion of quantity (quantitates) in defining a pure form, even though quantity is supposedly restricted to matter. He says that a form “as such, may be shared by many things,” meaning that a form’s most basic description involves the indefinite application of itself to numerous instances. Thus, Aquinas still must provide some sense of measure for a pure form, and this compounds the problem as it applies to God’s form: if God is sui generis, and does not contain or become contracted by matter, then what does “infinite” mean? Aquinas doesn’t provide an answer, nor can he since he has the relation of infinity and quantity backward: quantity is not a class of infinity (i.e., there is no meaningful concept of infinity apart from quantity, or number); infinity is a class of quantity (a limitless quantity is a type of quantity). See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, I-1a:7, 1, co., ad. 2.

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36. For a fascinating account of the development of these “orientational” or “primary” metaphors, see Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 14–21; Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 45–59. 37. Rahner, The Trinity, 71. 38. Rahner, The Trinity, 71–72. 39. Ibid., 72. 40. This same issue, unsurprisingly, crops up in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Aquinas says that there are “real relations” between the Triune persons. Such relations properly have a meaning that “refers to another,” and specifically with regard to “their own very nature [as] ordered to each other, and have a mutual inclination.” But, sometimes these real relations are only apprehended by reason, as when a person compares a “man to animal as the species to a genus.” The divine relations are similar in that a divine person “proceed[s] from a principle of the same nature” as its source (Aquinas is thinking specifically of paternity and filiation, here). Having this “identity of the same nature,” then, the Triune persons can be the same in substance yet different persons, meaning that there are these real relations between the persons. The problem, then, is to discern what useful distinction the notion of “procession” can offer to this picture. What is the logical distinction that can amount to a real relational difference yet not amount to some difference in character to the two respective objects? In the example offered of man and animal as species to genus, there are empirical distinctions to be made between what a human being shares with other animals and what is unique to her (featherless biped, ability to produce sophisticated symbol systems, perform advanced quantitative reasoning, etc.), and these are all contingent on material, biological differences. The species/genus distinction is then a useful abstract categorization for a complex set of comparisons. What is the commensurate reality that “processions” can identify that won’t be overridden by simplicity? Aquinas doesn’t explain. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1948), Ia-I.28.1. co. 41. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. Jonathan Bennett, accessed February 26, 2018, www​.e​​arlym​​odern​​texts​​.com/​​asset​​s​/pdf​​s​/bac​​on162​​0​.pdf​. 42. Rahner, “Experiences,” 7. 43. Robert C. Neville, Philosophical Theology, Vol. 1, Ultimates (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 182–183. 44. James F Anderson, Reflections on the Analogy of Being (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 72.

Chapter 4

Grammatical Thomism and Analogy

INTRODUCTION Having seen that accounts of the analogia entis fail due to the proportionality problem—that is, the infinite deferral of some similarity between creaturely and divine being by which analogy becomes intelligible—we come to a family of views that approaches analogy from a different perspective. Whereas proponents of the analogia entis espouse an ontological grounding for analogical language, the writers presented in this chapter are skeptical that such a grounding is necessary for it. Francesca Murphy designates this group the “Grammatical Thomists,”1 which describes a “shift from the reference of religious statements to what we are doing when we speak about God”2 and whose adherents aim to produce a theory “translating metaphysical concerns into concerns about the logic of religious language.”3 The “Thomist” is selfexplanatory: these are figures who follow an interpretation of the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas, who they find authoritative for addressing analogy. There are many writers who could be considered under this canopy, but, as space is short, I will be concerning myself with three major advocates: Ralph McInerny, David Burrell, and Victor Preller. Though these have influential predecessors (e.g., Herbert McCabe) and notable contemporaries (e.g., Fergus Kerr, Denys Turner), some of the most extensive work on Aquinas’s theory of analogy from this perspective has been done by these three authors. As with the analogia entis advocates, my main interest here is not about preserving an ontological postulate or a certain definite description of the term “God.” It is to determine whether an account offers a means to have an intelligible analogy. A further qualification is also necessary, though: in juxtaposition to the aims of the works that I will be perusing in this chapter, 97

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I have no stake in whether the author “gets Aquinas right” on analogy. This is a matter immaterial to my project. To be sure, I will be evaluating to what extent the interpretation of Aquinas is self-consistent—particularly with regard to the doctrine of divine simplicity—but, I will remain agnostic as to the veracity of that interpretation of Aquinas. Following the principle of charity, I will assume that the author’s treatment of Aquinas is adequate, or at least admissible within a certain spectrum of interpretation—but, again, my concern is with the sufficiency of the interpretation for an intelligible analogy, and not internecine conflicts. The chapter proceeds like the one before it, with one tweak: first, an exposition of the key texts on grammatical views of analogy will be explored for McInerny and Burrell, which will be followed by a critical evaluation for their cogency; second, we will examine Victor Preller’s account and perform a similar critique. Preller is being so distinguished in this fashion from McInerny and Burrell because of his sophisticated syntactic approach and his division between “divine science” and “the science of God,” both of which McInerny and Burrell do not state that they share. So, Preller requires his own critical treatment, in my estimation. Third, working from the guidelines of chapter 2, a summary assessment of the views will be offered for conceiving of the fruitfulness of Grammatical Thomism. RALPH MCINERNY In The Logic of Analogy, Ralph McInerny gives voice to how we should follow Aquinas in thinking about God.4 Foremost of these measures is the acknowledgment of God’s simplicity, which denies “all the sources of multiplicity and complexity” to God (LA, 155). McInerny is fairly laconic with explicit references to simplicity in this work (and elsewhere), apparently supposing his readers are fairly familiar with Aquinas on the question. But, for my readers requiring a refresher, the following are the conceptual ramifications of simplicity for Aquinas, as discussed in the Summa Theologiae. It should also be remembered here that these ramifications are the result of the Aristotelian dualism between matter and form.5 1. God has no potency and does not change, and so has no body or material constitution (3​.1​.​co; 3​.2​​.co). 2. God the subject is not different from God’s nature, and God’s essence is not different from God’s existence (3​.3​.​co; 3​.4​.​co.). 3. God belongs to no genus, and so nothing exists in logical priority to God (3.5.s.c.). There are three notable meanings of genus denied here: (1), strictly speaking, as a species belonging to a genus; (2), by way of

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reduction, where terms are reduced to principles—say, unity and point can be reduced to quantity—or privations—say, blindness to sight; and, (3), by way of mediation or generation, where a thing gets included in a genus by participating in it somehow, as a point is what generates and mediates the extension of a line (3​.5​​.co). 4. God is not a subject to which something can be added, for this would involve potentiality, but God is pure act. Thus, God has no accidents (3​ .6​.​co.). 5. God in no way has parts (3​.7​.​co.). 6. God is not part of anything (3​.8​.​co.). The epistemic consequences here, for McInerny, are massive and can’t be underestimated: “in no way can a name signify God and creature univocally. Not even a logical genus can comprise God and creature” (LA, 133-134, emphasis mine). This is very important, for McInerny is effectively saying that no category can be univocally meaningful between God and creatures; thus, we can have no proper concept of God, not even by the “way of reduction,” or “as the principle of one determinate genus” (LA, 135).6 Thus, even those basic categories that are not strictly a genus—relations, qualities, and quantities, for instance—must also be denied as having God among their members (LA, 40). In Studies in Analogy,7 McInerny continues to denounce conceptual univocity: though one can affirm with Aquinas that God simply is being (esse) (SA, 60), being belongs to no genus and so “a concept can add to it only in the sense that it expresses a mode of being [a modus essendi] that the term ‘being’ itself does not express” (SA, 8). Of course, this does not mean that the so-called “transcendental” ascriptions of “true,” “good,” “one,” and so on fail to be convertible with “being,” but just that the same conceptual opaqueness applies to them, when so ascribed to God (SA, 55). As a result of simplicity, McInerny says, any predicates used of God must somehow be identical with God (LA, 155, 162). How is this supposed to work? Aquinas says that we predicate terms of God analogously: “whatever we say of God and creatures we say in virtue of the order that creatures have to God as to their source and cause, in which all the perfection of things preexist most excellently.”8 Explicating this notion in Aquinas, though, has seen with it a great variety of interpretations, and we saw one family of views in the last chapter on this: the analogia entis. But, McInerny thinks that many of these views are rooted in a problematic reading of Aquinas’s text, principally due to the influence of Thomas Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia. As we saw in chapter 2, there’s good reason to think that Cajetan was neither systematizing Aquinas nor propounding an analogia entis; nonetheless, for the sake of getting at that for which Grammatical Thomism is a response, I’ll treat McInerny’s view of this interpretation here.

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In what is likely McInerny’s most mature account of the subject of analogy, Aquinas and Analogy is an effort to “treat the matter afresh” from his previous articulation of it some thirty-five years earlier in The Logic of Analogy.9 But, much of the story is the same. McInerny’s main interest is to critique Cajetan’s interpretation of Aquinas’s account of analogy in the former’s De Nominum Analogia. The basic problem is this: Cajetan committed the fallacy of the accident (AA, 100). He did this by taking Aquinas’s account of analogy and suggesting that the meaning of an analogous name can be ontologically connected to the nature of the source itself; however, Aquinas really thinks, says McInerny, that analogous naming is about an accidental feature obtaining according to its specific being (secundum esse) in some linguistic situation. So, to say what is the case for a thing in an analogous sense is also accidental to what is ascribed to it, but it is not pointing to some ontological aspect of the referent itself (AA, 10-11). For instance, calling a medicine “healthy” is relative to what it causes in another object, but it does not suggest the medicine is in its essence “healthy.” Similarly, to call God “wise” will “mean a quality of a certain kind, that is, an accident distinct from the substance which participates in it, something it cannot mean when applied to God” (SA, 64). Thus, Cajetan’s famous three-part division of analogy—where he proposes that analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality refer to an ascending ladder of improper to proper forms of analogy demonstrating ontological connections between homonymous names—is left without a leg to stand on since Aquinas never allows for such a division or the metaphysics on which it would be grounded. Instead, Aquinas’s account is a logical one, unconcerned with propounding a metaphysical doctrine for analogous names. For our purposes here, Cajetan’s “errors” are less interesting than McInerny’s proposed corrections, so we’ll proceed into what he takes Aquinas’s fuller account of analogy to be. For McInerny, to speak of names analogously is to assign some proportion (which McInerny seems to categorize as a relation of some kind) between a prior, primary meaning that is the proper definition of a name, and a posterior, secondary meaning that is always said with respect to that primary meaning (AA, 96)—“that is, one ratio [or concept] is primary and presupposed by the others, this being revealed by the fact that the first ratio enters into the others” (AA, 98). The primary meaning is one that takes precedence over the others as a “proper sense” (ratio propria), and may refer to the thing signified (res significata) without reference to the secondary meanings, which, in contradistinction, do require reference to the primary meaning (AA, 104). So, in the case of “healthy,” the primary meaning would be the “form or perfection” of “health,” while the secondary meanings are the ways of signifying this quality of health in some proportion—say, as symptomatic of it (e.g., “healthy” bodily excretions), causing

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it (e.g., “healthy” medicine), preserving it (e.g., “healthy” diet), and so on (AA, 98-99). But, importantly, even the primary meaning is an analogous name: so, “health,” just like the other analogates, has a mode of signification (modi significandi) that is non-identical with the object itself. Cajetan’s claim, then, of an ontological connection between a proper sense and the object—on McInerny’s interpretation of him—is denied. Now, though Cajetan’s divisions are a mistake, thinks McInerny, we can still discern two broad classes of analogous kinds that Aquinas writes of in ST 1.13.5. First, there is plurium ad unum (“many to one”), which denotes that a homonymous term is said of two or more things because they have some distinct “order or proportion” to the proper sense. So, “healthy” can be said to be analogous for both diet and medicine because they have distinct proportions to the quality of health (the proper sense), as preserving and causing it, respectively (AA, 102). Second, there is unius ad alterum (“one to the other”), which denotes that the homonymous term is said of two things because of a proportion between the two. The medicine is analogously “healthy,” then, because it has the particular relation of “causing” to the proper sense, the quality of health. But, there are special qualifications required if we try to apply these terms to God, for “there is no third thing to which God and creature could be referred in receiving a common name, for whatever is not a creature is God and whatever is not God is a creature” (AA, 111). Thus, the plurium ad unum account can’t work when our reference is God, since that account is contingent on three distinct conceptual objects. By elimination, that leaves us with unius ad alterum; however, we must be careful not to “overstate the case” with this kind, so McInerny sees a further distinction in unius ad alterum that Aquinas makes in his Disputed Questions on Truth that is particularly valuable. To quote Aquinas: Since an agreement according to proportion can happen in two ways, two kinds of community can be noted in analogy. There is a certain agreement between things having a proportion to each other from the fact that they have a determinate distance between each other or some other relation to each other, like the proportion which the number two has to unity in as far as it is the double of unity. [But], the agreement is occasionally noted not between two things which have a proportion between them, but rather between two related proportions—for example, six has something in common with four because six is two times three, just as four is two times two. The first type of agreement is one of proportion; the second, of proportionality.10

Not wanting to claim that human language can secure a “determinate distance” between God and creature that the subdivision of unius ad alterum

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called “proportion” would suppose for the divine names, Aquinas espouses the subdivision of unius ad alterum called “proportionality” that advocates for an “imperfect similarity” (AA, 113-114).11 Unlike the example of medicine having a determinate relation to healthy—in causing it—that proportion would advocate, we should think of proportionality as more like how “seeing” is analogous for sight and the intellect: sensing red with the eyes is different, yet similar to, grasping red with the mind. The “seeing” is thus an analogous relation as the product of comparing two non-identical proportions (i.e., seeing with the eyes/seeing with the mind), whereas proportion is contingent on just the one relation (i.e., causation). Through these proportionalities, we can acquire more knowledge about the lesser known meaning, which “entails a gradual build-up from the activities of the external senses—and the way their activities differ from mere physical occurrences—through the interior senses to the intellect. Despite the analogical extension of terms first used of lesser powers to intellect, the relation between the things of which we speak is determinate enough to yield satisfactory knowledge of intellectual knowledge” (AA, 114-115).

So, how do we apply all of this to an account of the divine names—that is, the positive terms given to God? First, we must recognize that these analogies set up some relation between creatures and God, but they don’t tell us about who God is as Godself (AA, 158). Even a word like “cause,” which, when denoted of God analogously, bears a meaning of “the ontological dependence of creature on God that enables the human mind, from knowing the creature as effect, to be cognitively proportioned to God the creator” (AA, 140), which does not penetrate further than knowing God’s effects. The proportionality of these names anchor our linguistic expressions of God. Normally, “we name things as we know them,” and so “the application of these names to God is dependent on their previous application to creatures” (AA, 158). In coming to understand a name’s application to creatures, we come to understand the ratio propria or primary mode of it—thus, health as a quality of a subject is the primary meaning upon which secondary meanings for health, as applied to diet and medicine, for example, are contingent. Likewise, we apply a name like “wise” to God in first learning it from creatures, with the name being known prior in creatures and the ratio propria also being so known as creaturely (AA, 160). The conceptual result for proportionality with the divine names, like in the “seeing” example, is afforded by extended “knowledge of created effects [to] yield only imperfect and remote knowledge of God” (AA, 115). This imperfect knowledge of the secondary meaning of the analogous name presses upon us various restrictions: (1) we acknowledge that God does not possess this quality like a person would, but somehow transcends the distinction caused by any

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creaturely definition of a term through a genus (and differentia distinguishing that genus), as God is in God’s essence, for instance, “wise,” the res significata of all creaturely modes; (2) we recognize that the name is “ontologically first” even if named second, as creatures are ontologically dependent on God; and (3) we acknowledge a “Dionysian process,” whereby we affirm a name of God (via affirmationis), deny its creaturely sense (via negationis), and finally ascribe to God a mode greater than any creaturely possession and above our comprehension (via eminentiae) (AA, 160-61). In short, proportionality, constrained by a set of interpretive rules, allows our language to be “stretched” to allow for the imperfect similarity of the names (AA, 161). DAVID BURRELL We next turn to David Burrell, to whom McInerny dedicated his Aquinas and Analogy. As with McInerny, Burrell says we must first get straight on what the term “God” does in order to see how analogy functions. In keeping with his Thomism, Burrell also thinks the Summa’s Question 3 is normative for his inquiry, and, like McInerny, he understands Aquinas’s account of simplicity as one uninterested in providing any kataphatically definite description of God. To say something of God through predication involves something accidental to the subject, but God has no accidents; thus, “all statements of subject and predicate—that is to say, all discourse—will falsify the reality which God is” (GA, 28). As with McInerny, there are wide-sweeping consequences from this: we must admit that all of the manners of being, exhausted by Aristotle’s ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation, etc.), cannot be said of God and creatures univocally, and so we need to deny any “trace” of divine inclusion within them (GA, 59). Even to say God is substance—which, strictly speaking, is not a genus but is the category that genus itself belongs—can’t be properly said of God because “it functions like [a genus] in delimiting that sort of thing of which something can be said to be the case. So properly speaking, nothing can be said of God.” Altogether, Burrell calls this a “two-fold” inadequacy: “structural (subject/predicate) as well as categorical (genus/species)” (GA, 69).12 So, simplicity is a “shorthand way of establishing a set of grammatical priorities designed to locate the subject matter as precisely as possible” (GA, 5). Chief among these grammatical priorities is violating the typical rule that the subject and predicate are non-identical; rather, God “exhausts” any attributions of divinity, and so the predicate is considered identical to the subject. When Aquinas explains that “is” means “the mental uniting of predicate to subject which constitutes a proposition,” and says that “God is” (GA, 8),13 Burrell understands this not as an act of referring or signifying God’s existence, but “is one of those crucial tautologies defining the logical

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space of God-talk” (GA, 8). To say that God’s essence is identical with God’s existence is not to mean describing a nature, but that God is necessary for that predicate to obtain (GA, 9). This apparent redundancy—that “to be God is to be to-be”—is really the only “proper” thing that can be said of God, with everything else being said improperly (GA, 48). God is first and only “subsistent existence itself” (ipsum esse subsistens). The upshot of this is that nothing can be said about God, for that would mean transgressing the conception of simplicity. Nonetheless, religious communities want to say quite a bit about God, so how does this work out? For Burrell, the positive ascriptions to God—goodness, mercy, wisdom, perfection, love, and so on—do not undermine the original interdict, but rather have to be put into a proper causal network between creatures and the creator. It is not that those terms signify God’s being directly, but that we identity God as the cause of specific effects and the modes they take in the world. For instance, “God is good” must be understood as “God is the origin of the modes of goodness we experience in creaturely reality.” But, this is true not just of attributions, but also of language itself: “When we utter ‘to be God is to be to-be’ we are saying that God is what it is for God-language to obtain” (GA, 55). Thus, God is the cause of God-talk’s capacity to obtain, and not the target of a specific mode of God-talk. So, we can properly say—or, better, assert—that “God is to be to-be.” But, we cannot know anything about existence itself; we only know it through its proper creaturely effects (GA, 58). Yet, despite this rift, Aquinas thinks that creaturely existence “bears the likeness” of its creator, and in a particular way: “by an analogical similarity like that holding between all things because they have existence in common. And this is how things receiving existence from God resemble him; for precisely as things possessing existence they resemble the primary and universal source of all things” (GA, 59, emphasis mine).14 This might strike one as paradoxical: how can we find a resemblance between creatures and creator when we can’t know what it is to exist? We neither possess it nor do it, and all our features and determinations are its effects—we don’t know what we’re looking for! Burrell’s response is that Aquinas’s understanding of resemblance must be understood through “the resources of philosophical grammar,” since “there is no resemblance to speak of, really” (GA, 60). Instead, we need to understand “resembles” as indicating a manner in which creaturely existence is the effect of its source, which has no manner (as God belongs to no genus). More specifically, Aquinas uses Aristotle’s ten categories to say how creaturely existence has being; that existence is supposed to resemble the unmannered God, who is existence itself (is “to be to-be”). This account, Burrell further suggests, is asymmetric—the mannered effects resemble the cause, but the unmannered cause “in no way resembles any single manner” (GA, 59).

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Taking this for granted, what does creaturely existence show us about God? Burrell prefaces his answer by saying that we have to think of philosophy as a “therapeutic discipline”—we cannot aim to show the “traces of God” within a form of discourse by offering a doctrine or proposition; it must be done by how we “relate discourse to the world” (GA, 61). So, the task for relating language to God is one for logic and grammar, and, Burrell thinks, in recognizing their limits in the face of subsistent being itself, we will rightly understand all that we can of God’s transcendence (GA, 62). It is at this point we can turn to analogical predication, the subject of Burrell’s fourth chapter. He begins by orienting us toward the “practice” of analogy—we shouldn’t look to a theory of predication, by which we may create a doctrine of analogy, but rather to how analogy is linguistically performed (GA, 63). The “theory-builders” focused on a univocal middle term for analogy, or what the proportionality was supposed to be between God and creatures. But, the mathematical bias for a “proper” proportion presupposed “a univocal access to the object in question.” This had two bad consequences: (1), the issue became a purely philosophical problem, without attention to literary context; and, (2), it made analogy itself superfluous, since access to a univocal meaning is presumably available in the first place. What the theoreticians missed in Aquinas, Burrell says, is that theological analogy itself—in agreement with McInerny—should be understood analogously. This means that terms “proper” to God always have some “metaphorical dimension” to them that prevents univocal access—even the most proper of ascriptions, “to be God is to be to-be” (GA, 65). So, the only recourse for Aquinas, Burrell thinks, is to “ground his use of analogous expressions [in] not another expression, but a performance, his own performance.” But, what about this performance grounds analogy? Burrell says that it can’t simply be the subject-predicate structure of a statement, for that already misrepresents God’s simplicity, as we learned earlier that those attributions come to us in their creaturely modes and so presume a difference between subject and predicate (GA, 66). We can’t suppose that our attributions to God—wise, just, good, and so on—are representing God correctly, even if they are true (GA, 68). Even God as “first cause of all” cannot ground representation, because there would need to be some known mode of operation between cause and effect, but this is prohibited due to simplicity’s denial that God is within any genus. But, “nonetheless, Aquinas claims that certain expressions can be trusted to ‘signify that God really is,’ ” despite structural and categorical imperfections in our language (GA, 69). How does this work? Aquinas thinks that certain words—like wise, just, and good—are a “special class of expressions” called “perfection-terms” that apply more aptly to God than to creatures, though the way they signify is more apt to creatures than God (GA, 70-1). This division between what an

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expression signifies (res significata) and the way that an expression signifies (modus significandi) is the key to the matter: these terms don’t point to God in a particular way, but fulfill “certain roles.” In saying that God is good, we speak truly of God, but the expression does not inform us about what we talk about, as “we are unable to form a concept expressing God’s manner of being [good]” (GA, 73). God is literally good, but that is not univocal with the senses in which we understand the term. The term “good” is analogous for creatures and God, then, because of a semantic structure—that is, perfectionterms like it can be applied in diverse contexts, having shown themselves to be capable of application “beyond the manners in which we employ them.” This coupled with the idea that God is the “source and goal of all things” yields the notion that, indeed, the most proper referent for the perfectionterms is God, in whom they transcendentally exist and originate, but are only derivatively known and experienced by us. So, despite not knowing what we mean when we say God is “good,” how to use the terms, or how God possesses the attribute in question, we can be assured that our words are used rightly and truly of God if we remember that the terms used are inadequate to their object while somehow also “correlating” with it (GA, 74). “So,” Burrell says, “the proper use of appropriate expressions turns not on acquaintance with divinity, but rather on a keen appreciation of the peculiar ways we must fracture logic to constitute a domain of discourse about God” (GA, 74). There is a “particular semantic structure” to perfection-terms that we learn as an “acquired skill”—we have a history of uses in which a perfection-term is signified, but then those uses are assessed and corrected according to a structure that keeps the term’s transcendent origin always before us (GA, 76). We must respect the grammatical logic that we have inherited in the tradition to speak about God; though mastering its use requires spiritual discipline, Burrell thinks that this semantic model is the grounding structure for that practical effort. Now, we may ask, if we grant this, then how can we know we speak truly of God? For Burrell, we actually cannot know that we do: “we shall never be able to know whether the God described by those statements which employ appropriate expressions of him is the true God” (GA, 77). But, there are two reasons that we should not lose hope in our language’s veridicality. First, Burrell thinks that if we can be comfortable with lacking a concept or doctrine of God—a set of affirming propositions for our transcendent object—this can in fact be a liberating maneuver in that we can know how not to speak wrongly of God. Through this perspective, we can actually falsify other candidates that would idolatrously elevate our own concepts of the creaturely derivatives of the one true source. As a result, philosophy itself is determined to be irrelevant to verifying religious discourse since any concept of God arrived at is the result of a false method (GA, 78).

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Second, just because we recognize that our terms are not used univocally and that we can’t be sure they do speak truly of God, our semantic model does allow us some “intimation” of what a literal or proper use of the divine names—wise, just, good, and so on—mean. We find, Burrell says, that when we use these terms there is always some “more comprehensive use” of them to be discovered (GA, 79). In developing that more comprehensive understanding, informed and aided by the Christian tradition’s felicitous use of the terms, Burrell thinks we can “approach that literal use” ascribed to God. In effect, as we come to use these terms better, we will have a “gauge for authenticity” for them, which serves as their “progressive verification.” Overall, then, we can trust that our performances are veridical, though we will never constrain or secure boundaries to the perfection-terms, which show that they always “outreach” us in some transcendent overflow of inestimable meaning. CRITIQUING MCINERNY AND BURRELL Having addressed McInerny and Burrell, we can see that they share a number of commitments: (1) they both take Aquinas’s account of simplicity to prohibit knowledge of God’s being; (2) they both turn to imperfect semantic relations between creaturely and divine domains to provide the basis for claims to analogous knowledge of God; (3) understanding the analogous names involves following a set of grammatical rules for transferring meaning from primary meanings to an unknown secondary meaning (in McInerny’s terms); and (4) subscribing to these rules can be trusted to acquire some intimation of who God is that can be “progressively verified” (in Burrell’s terms), even if we can never know those intimations are true. Although they differ in the preferred language of their accounts, and Burrell is more adherent to a vocabulary expressing grammatical ideas, the two thinkers significantly overlap in how they understand Aquinas’s account of analogy. Turning to a critical stance, it may seem that the guiding principles from chapter 2 would be somewhat irrelevant here: if the aim is to figure out the intelligibility of God-talk, and the Grammatical Thomists seem fairly upfront that we don’t know what we mean when we speak about God, then how ought we to proceed? To this, it may simply be said that the question of the intelligibility of God-talk is inclusive of multiple senses: (1) intelligibility of God-talk with reference to its object; and (2) intelligibility of God-talk with reference to a linguistic-practice. Clearly, we will have to highlight this second sense; however, the Grammatical Thomists also attempt to gain some purchase on the first sense as well (I think illicitly), so we must be attentive to both.

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To orient us to our discussion, I would like to consider a certain thought experiment that I believe sheds considerable light on the Grammatical Thomists’ accounts: John Searle’s Chinese room.15 In the thought experiment, which is originally concerned with the limits of artificial intelligence, Searle asks his readers to think about a monolingual English speaker tasked to stay in a particular room. Inside the room are many documents with Chinese writing. Let’s say I’m the person in the room (as I also am illiterate in Chinese languages).16 Now, to me the markings are unintelligible as they stand: they give me no determinate information for thinking about their effects on my rational conduct, whether linguistic or otherwise. But, consider a second batch of writings comes in, along with a set of rules in English telling me how to correlate the first and second batches. But, those rules only allow for a “formal” connection—that is, the English rules let me line up shapes in batch one to shapes in batch two (e.g., when shape x precedes shape y, use shape z). Then, let’s say that a third batch of Chinese symbols comes in along with a second set of English rules, the latter telling me how to both connect the third batch of Chinese symbols to the first two and return certain Chinese symbols through an opening in the room. Unbeknownst to me, the people feeding me symbols and English rules call these related items certain things: (1) first batch = script (i.e., a list of commands to be executed); (2) second batch = story; (3) third batch = questions; (4) the two sets of rules = the program; (5) symbols in response to third batch = answers to questions. Now, if I get very good at following the directions, and provide correct responses, it could be thought by my “programmers” that I understand the stories that I am being questioned about, but, as Searle points out, it seems fairly obvious from my perspective that I do not know any Chinese as a result of following these rules. I may carry out the interpretive function perfectly, but the story, the questions I answer, and the very language itself escape me—or, more specifically, they remain unintelligible. In other words, the characters do not allow me to form concepts with conceivable effects for practical, rational conduct. Now, again, Searle’s thought experiment is in the context of thinking about artificial intelligence—he argues that the Chinese room is good evidence that computers aren’t properly thinking or understanding the languages that they are programmed to utilize. But, more generally, it shows us something about intelligible language use: in order to understand the semantic implications of a language, it is not sufficient to only master the manipulation of that language’s syntactic elements.17 It is this more general point that I think is at the crux of the difficulties for Burrell and McInerny: their accounts do not amount to intelligible communication, whether of God-talk’s object or as a performance claiming to be language concerning God-talk’s object. The best they can offer are a set of grammatical rules to follow for reproducing

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unknown symbols when talk of “God” comes up, but those rules can only deliver a usable syntax, not an intelligible language form. As said before, in the case of the object, “God,” the Grammatical Thomists would not explicitly say that the discourse is intelligible; on the contrary, they claim that God’s object is entirely unknown to them on their accounts. The issue, however, is that they suppose some indirect semantic content can be derived primarily from the use of perfection-terms and then applied to the notion of God-talk, making the performance intelligible and more than a mere syntactic account. This I contest, and there are a variety of reasons for doing so. First, and foremost, the Grammatical Thomists don’t fully recognize the consequences of Aquinas’s doctrine of simplicity. Particularly, there seems to be inattention to the fifth article of Question 3, where Aquinas denies of God any participation in a genus, whether, strictly, by way of reduction, or through mediation. McInerny seems to transgress this when he thinks that proportionality can somehow indirectly tell us of the transcendence or eminence of the divine names, though we don’t know what they mean. But, he has earlier denied that we have any concept of that which we speak, and, as Linda Smith tells us about comparisons of attributes, “Interdefining opposing directions of difference requires the organization of directions of difference by dimensional kind.”18 That is, one can only order some property with comparatives if one isolates a same kind or respect to apply a metric of degree. Just as it would make no sense to say, “3 is more than purple,” as purple has no discernible order on a continuum of quantity to compare it with 3, and 3 no discernible order on the continuum of the color spectrum by which to say it is more/less purple, so it also doesn’t make any intelligible sense to say that God is “greater” in being some attribute than a creature’s participating in it. To do so would violate simplicity, at least in regard to the issue of mediation or generation—meaning, involving God’s attribute of “goodness,” “love,” “power,” and so on, in some comparison, no matter how great, includes it in a genus. This is only compounded by the problem that we don’t know what existence—the “is” in question—means on its own. As Burrell says, “We cannot know what it is to exist. We have no way of expressing the kind of fact that existence is, even though there be nothing more factual than existing” (GA, 58). But, not only positive ascriptions are problematic here; so are the supposed “relative terms” that aren’t thought to say anything about who God is, particularly God as “cause.” By saying that God is a cause, McInerny and Burrell violate simplicity according to the second path, by way of reduction. To say that God is responsible for creation appears to reduce God to the genus of cause— indeed, Aquinas himself seems to commit the same error by calling God the first efficient cause (causam efficientem primam).19 Similar things could be said

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about God’s role as necessary, explanation, or act. Notably, both McInerny and Burrell seem to recognize a problem of this sort, and so acknowledge that such terms themselves seem to be “analogical.” For instance, Burrell says that God’s being the “first cause” cannot ground univocal representation (GA, 69), and speaks of God’s being in act as a “master metaphor” and “analogous ascription,” and God’s life as a “kind of relation” (GA, 130, 161), while McInerny acknowledges God as a “kind of foundation” for the diversity of the perfections, “even though he is perfectly simple” (LA, 155-56). But, this merely moves the bump in the rug: in what sense is “cause” still useful for representation, “act” a metaphor, God’s “life” a relation, or God’s “being” a foundation for the perfections? The authors seem trapped in a vicious circle: explaining the relation of God to creatures in some sense requires categories, which denies simplicity. Further, the notion that one can change a pivotal aspect of a relation to suit the requirements of simplicity doesn’t help the effort to be intelligible. Consider one of Burrell’s rules: with God, the mannered effect resembles the cause, but the cause does not resemble the effect (GA, 60). What sense can be made of the term “resemblance” here? What resemblance relation isn’t symmetrical? In normal use, if x resembles y, then y resembles x. The introduction of the rule simultaneously makes the concept of resemblance incoherent. Thus, Burrell’s hopeful claim of some conceptual confidence that certain “leading analogies . . . help us think of God” despite “fall[ing] short of characterizing God,” is an empty one.20 This leads us to a second point, and that is the general inconsistency over “progressive verification.” This appears implicitly in McInerny’s treatment: it’s the idea that working out the similar relations of the proportionality can be had by a “gradual build-up” of determining the similarities and differences of the source perfection-terms and the target God-talk to arrive at “imperfect and remote knowledge of God,” but knowledge nonetheless (AA, 115). Burrell is more explicit: we have an “intimation” of the positive predications by catching some glimpse of the transcendent overflow in the perfection-terms (GA, 79). As we come to use these terms better in our traditions, we “approach that literal use” and a better understanding of how those predications “correlate” with divine being (GA, 79, 74). So, both McInerny and Burrell seem to have a sort of asymptotic understanding of the truth of religious statements: our knowledge will surely always be imperfect, but we can trust that the perfection-terms are good guides to a “remote” knowledge of God, and our right use of those terms can somehow readily get us to a better understanding of that remote knowledge. Here, it seems clear to me that the grammatical approach is straying into hopes of semantic results that its own Thomistic system won’t allow. As we saw above, in the denial of God belonging to any genus, we must also deny the notion of God being put on any continuum, whether as an interpolated or

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extrapolated value. This makes any progressive verification to an approximation inherently aimless. The presumption of a knowable object must hope that the effects cognized through propositions will—at some point—correspond with the object itself in order to have any positive knowledge. This seems to be the regulative principle for the sciences: extended inquiry into effects will eventually yield a pattern of thought that will not ever be disconfirmed or find empirical resistance from the object studied. But, denying of God any genus, as the Grammatical Thomists do, cuts off any appeal to lawful regularity or conceptualization, yielding efforts of description or explanation pointless. As a corollary, the Grammatical Thomists’ hopes for progressive movement toward understanding have no basis. So, Burrell is being contradictory when he argues simultaneously for progressive verification of God-talk and the falsification of all conceptually bound accounts of God (GA, 78): concept-laden knowledge of the object must be presupposed for verification, even if the concept required is merely that the object being accounted for remains fixed with regard to an account.21 It might at this point be thought that progressive verification isn’t the result of some discursive knowledge or awareness, but must be a product of intuition. But, this can’t be so. As both authors affirm (LA, 154; GA, 17-18), God is not an object connatural to our intellect, and so directly experiential, affective, or instinctual knowledge is barred from contributing to or being a foundation for our knowledge of God.22 If we are going to get anywhere with knowledge about God, it will be through the operations of reason. But, again, if reason can only redound to categories in speaking of non-creaturely realities, we seem to be at a theoretical impasse. From this vantage, rules concerning choosing and using perfection-terms seem fruitless and arbitrary. Simplicity remains an impervious barrier to both knowledge of God and an intelligible way to communicate the positive or relative terms. Third, on a specifically linguistic level, as JF Ross showed us in chapter 2, we cannot think that our terms—whether nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so on—can be switched out for their likes as if sentences are constituted of independent atomic elements. Obviously, context is determinative of meaning, but due to the phenomenon of semantic contagion—that is, “the dominance of one word (or group of words) over another (or group of others)”23—words have peculiar effects on other words in any given sentence. For instance, if I overhear some students saying, “There is nothing between the desk and the cup,” I assume that the “between” relation is a spatial one; however, if I overheard, “There is nothing between John and Jane,” I would probably assume they are talking about a non-spatial relationship for “between.” This is because the introduction of persons into the sentence dominates the literal meaning of “between” to something having to do with personal relations.

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This might seem trite—“of course, words do this,” it may be said, but it has substantial implications for God-talk—particularly, we are exposed to our ignorance as to what the term “God” might be doing to the rest of our terms in any particular sentence. If we say, “God is good,” we can set up a linguistic rule about uniting subject and predicate as McInerny and Burrell advise, but the judgment that the two are “identical” by use of the word “is” cannot be sustained because—apart from the earlier issue of not knowing what “is” means—we have no idea how using “God” will affect the rest of the words in the sentence. In other words, the use of the term “God” has mysterious operations that could very well be altering everything we know about our sentence semantics. It isn’t difficult to find mundane instances of this very phenomenon. For instance, take the sentence “[x] is a riot;” if I choose the word “there,” that gives a determinate meaning to the other three words. But, if I instead use “Sarah,” the result is a completely different meaning for each of the other three words. In that case, to make the sentence intelligible, one requires the first word to rightly orient us to the proper sense of the sentence. This logic is also operative with God-talk—without some semblance of how to use the term, the performance itself doesn’t have conceptual determinacy. Further, the problem is magnified exponentially in affirming Aquinas’s doctrine of simplicity—if there is any word that we should suspect would have dramatic effects on the sentence including it, it would be “God.” Burrell’s selection of perfection-terms, then, both begs the question and is conceptually void: in the former, selecting some genus of terms to apply in a transcendent way to God has no supporting rationale apart from what the author prefers, and, in the latter, has no purchase on the object in view anyway. Thus, the term “God” isn’t just a missing symbol to be formally replaced by a discrete, atomic quantity, but is more like a black-hole that distorts, twists, and alters any relevant terms within its ambit. So, then, let’s return to our thought experiment, except, this time, let’s think about what’s happening in another room: the “God-room.” The Godroom is different from the Chinese room, though, because it’s more like a very large house. Lots of people live there, but they never live outside of it. Within the God-room, the rules for translating the curious scribbles of “God-talk” are passed on from generation to generation. Those in the Godroom are at a further disadvantage than the Chinese room in that when the people inside use their rules, and send out “prayers” from the room or write theological treatises for others in the room to read, nothing outside corroborates that information. Further, one tract from the rules—the one on God’s simplicity—seems to negate the possibility of understanding the words that one produces. From this, it would be even more likely that the person within that room would have an even less intelligible understanding of the syntax of “God-talk” than the one in the Chinese room does—at least the latter might

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presume the language obtains for spatiotemporal beings, has a two-way system of flowing information, and knows the rules came from outside the room. The people in the God-room are simply left in the dark on these matters, having a set of dubious rules that simultaneously prevent all comprehension and dictate the form of their God-talk. How, then, could mastering the rules amount to an understanding of the language or give meaning to the performance with respect to God? The denouement for an account of analogy as linguistic performance on these accounts should be clear: the linguistic rules, while able to be followed insofar as they may allow for production of sentences (written, uttered, or otherwise expressed) including the term “God,” have no sensible bearing for conceptual possibilities about the object “God,” and so eliminate rational grounding for practical conduct. Positive terms—like “God is good”—have no traceable logical or empirical content. Relative terms—like “God is our creator”—are likewise senseless unless the respect in which God relates to creatures can be determined. This lands us in a very similar place to Searle’s thought experiment: like the Chinese room, in the God-room, we say what we don’t understand. Our expressions are reduced to so many vacuous symbols under the silencing power of simplicity. VICTOR PRELLER As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Preller is being treated separately from Burrell and McInerny for primarily two reasons: (1) his distinction between natural theology (scientia divina) and theology proper (scientia dei); and (2) his more sophisticated syntactical account of analogy. As such, he deserves not only his own treatment, but also his own critique. Before turning to these matters, I will say something briefly about Preller’s take on simplicity. As with McInerny and Burrell, Preller does not give much attention to exegeting Aquinas on simplicity per se in his Divine Science and the Science of God,24 but rather presumes Aquinas’s account of it, giving it mind only when he needs to erect prohibitive barriers to limit what God-talk can mean, whether articulated through divine science or the science of God. In the course of that effort, Preller is clear and sweeping: God cannot be an object in any conceptual system informed by natural reason, and so “Aquinas cannot place God in any general class” (DSSG, 153). Those classes include causes, effects, relations, physical things, or any other category that might determine some idea for application to God. Switching over to Preller’s distinguishing features, his separation of natural theology from theology proper needs to be further characterized. In the

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case of natural theology (scientia divina), Preller claims that it concerns the products of “reason alone,” meaning that its purpose must be bound up with the limitation that we “cannot know God in this life even by the most intense application of [our] higher intellectual faculties” (DSSG, 3, 28). Apart from the eschatological hope that God will be intelligible in the beatific vision (which I will talk more about later), natural theology can only be a practice in conceptual dispossession: of showing us what we cannot think about God (DSSG, 32). So, natural theology really takes up, as its subject, the world as it relates to some “unknown source.” In the case of theology proper (scientia dei), its radical difference from the preceding science is that it is “produced by faith,” meaning that it is the only science that has God properly as its subject or referent (DSSG, 3, 30). It will be discovering how these two sciences interrelate that is both Preller’s burden and the answer to Aquinas’s difficult –and seemingly paradoxical—account of God-talk in the Summa. The pivot on which theology proper and natural theology meet—and, for our purposes, upon which analogous language gains its purchase on similarity—is Preller’s notion of syntactical intelligibility. Borrowing heavily from the linguistic philosophy of Wilfred Sellars, Preller spends the majority of his second chapter articulating this account of intelligibility. The idea is this: let’s think about a conceptual system abstracted from an “empirically significant language,” as if it were just created from nothing, like an angel’s (DSSG, 44). This system, Preller supposes, would only have meaning in a “purely syntactical” sense—that is, due to the operations of axioms or rules internal to its structure. Therein, “To say of any term that it expressed a concept of the system would be to say that the term possessed an intelligible or specifiable syntactic status in the system” (DSSG, 45). In other words, in this purely formal system, a term’s “significance” will just be how it operates relative to the axioms and rules, and correct adherence to those rules constitutes that term’s intelligibility (DSSG, 49). But, what happens when we introduce experience into this account? Using the analog of a projector screen, the angel’s sense-experience functions as a series of external inputs that appear as “mental-images that have been projected on [the person’s] mind-screen” from some hidden projector (DSSG, 49). In doing so, the mind recognizes only those “interrelated elements” in the displayed sense-data that are isomorphic with the “logical interrelationships” of the conceptual system. (DSSG, 50). The effect of this “natural program[ing]” is a semantic meaning—an additional sense of reference, or a connection to a “that which is” external to the mind. It is important to get this order correct, for Preller—the semantical cognition is only justified by the pre-established “syntax of the conceptual system” (DSSG, 51). So, take the example of an apple: the sense-data of various accidental features—red, round, sweet, and so on—are projected onto the angel’s mind’s screen, but it

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is the syntax inherent in the conceptual system that informs it of the object— that is, the concept of “apple” is only properly derived and justified from the formal framework, which pronounces a structural isomorphism (i.e., some presumed correspondence) between that intelligible form and the reference (DSSG, 51-52). While Preller admits that, as normal human beings, we do not come into the world loaded with a totally developed conceptual system, it is still the case that “the rules and principles of the conceptual system we find ourselves using to interpret experience” are not the result of experience (DSSG, 54). The consequence is that we can still hold to the notion that the intelligibility of a term is inherent in the conceptual system through its syntactical role, while the referential content is a “function of the nature of our sense experience” (DSSG, 63). But then, why do we use the conceptual system we do? And, why can we think it is isomorphic with “that which is”? Both have fundamentally theological reasons. In the former, Preller thinks with Aquinas (though with alterations, discussed in the critical section below) that we should admit an intellect, a mental faculty that is part of our common, human nature by God’s design, and is the origin of the intentional connections, or “aboutness,” linking significant formal conceptions to our sense-experiences (DSSG, 70, 74). In the latter, God has given us conceptual powers “appropriate” to those “in via—‘on the way’ to God” (DSSG, 70-71). How does this all relate to analogy? For one thing, in so far as reference is always in a correspondence relation with the intelligible form, “our knowledge of the world [including of existence] is analogical” (DSSG, 69). But, most importantly for Preller, the syntactic framework of our human intellects is conceived to be analogous to the “ideal language”—that is, God’s language—that truly and completely expresses the nature of real things (DSSG, 71, 74). Preller conceives this as being able to sidestep his otherwise sweeping denunciation of the epistemic capabilities by negative theology: no arguments can demonstrate God’s intelligibility; no effects of God can be intelligibly expressed; no relationship between God and the world can be the subject of a logically possible judgment (DSSG, 80, 90). But, we must be careful as to how this analogy functions. Given this account, to say some word is analogous is “therefore to say that there is a word with a syntactically isomorphic role in another conceptual framework” (DSSG, 151). This, Preller thinks, is most accurately what the analogy of proper proportionality is about (DSSG, 168n72). But, since we don’t know the syntactical rules for the conceptual framework in which God is intelligible, that analogy must be thought of as a sort of “meta-empirical reference”—that is, it would be to “take advantage of the essentially analogous status of an intentional point of view from which ‘God’ . . . would be an intelligible ‘form’” (DSSG, 165, emphasis mine). But, then, why can we

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presume that certain terms can be used of God when we don’t know their syntactic roles? Here, Preller agrees with Aquinas that all conceptual systems need to provide a basis for syntactically understanding reality, which means that there must be transcendentals (unity, truth, beauty, etc.) that justify that understanding (DSSG, 153, 165). Thus, since transcendentals are convertible with existence itself, and God is subsistent being itself (ipsum esse subsistens), so also transcendentals can be predicated of God by transitivity, though we do not know the syntactical rules—or modus operandi—by which they obtain. So then, the “language of natural theology” may allot permissible terms, but we don’t know what those terms mean—even existence has no specifiable signification to make the term intelligible by the powers of natural reason. We can assert that “God exists” is sensible in the ideal language of God, but we simply don’t know the rules for making sense of it (DSSG, 173). From the vantage of creatures, we can use the term “existence” of God because “the existence of the world would remain radically unintelligible if there did not ‘exist’ something from which the existence of the world derived its hypothetical necessity”—but, we cannot so suppose that God can be meant as the source of the hypothetical necessity (DSSG, 174). So, our use of that ascription and its actual meaning undergoes a substantial rift. It is at this point that we must introduce our only possible bridge—revelation, or the “light of faith.” But, it is not a bridge in any straightforward sense. In fact, Aquinas argues that even faith can’t make God intelligible; all it can do is give us a sort of “referential value” for pointing us toward God, something which natural theology is unable to do (DSSG, 181). But, how should we understand this operation? Preller says that the answer must lie in sacred doctrine: it is only “under the formality of revealed truth” that God can become a “proper subject for human science” (DSSG, 227, 228). Specifically, sacred doctrine reveals to us that “only when God is believed to exist under the formal aspect of one who has revealed himself in Christ does credere deum [believing in a God] form an inseparable unity with credere deo [believing God] and credere in deum [believing in God]” (DSSG, 230).25 Therefore, faith is not endowing the mind with a propositional fact about God, but is a matter of “how the intellect is related to God in the act of believing.” Credere deo and credere in deum, then, while in unity with credere deum, precede the latter affirmation made in the intellect. But, then, how is our mind conformed to God when we still can’t use intelligible terms? Again, the reason is fundamentally theological: Aquinas asserts that sacred doctrine is “an extension of the eternal procession of the Word”—that is, the second person of the Trinity is temporally present and is expressed in sacred doctrine, with its “prime locus” being sacred scripture (DSSG, 232). In that the “Scripture is itself a created analogue of God’s act

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of self-knowledge as expressed in his Word or inner speech,” if the mind is conformed to Scripture, then that entails conformation to God through the Son. But, as mentioned earlier, that conformity means different effects depending on the Christian’s state. For the beatified, their participation is direct and intrinsic, for they possess the “formal principle” of God’s own self-knowledge. This is thanks to a new mode of knowing, the lumen gloriae, only available in the eschaton. Those in this life, however, participate in this knowledge only mediately, as their intentional state of belief is an effect of that formal principle. The in via, not having the lumen gloriae, instead have “nonintelligible ‘articles’ of faith” believed “to be created analogues of the knowledge shared by God and the blessed” (DSSG, 233, 234). So, the believer, on this side of eternity, hopes to understand the articles that she believes to somehow be true without comprehending them in this life. Can more be said on how one participates in the scientia dei without its object being intelligible? Preller says this requires getting straight on how people relate by faith to the “secondary” objects of faith, like Christ’s humanity, the sacraments, and creeds. The main roles come under two broad categories: words and things. With regard to “words”—the “creeds, dogmas, and theological propositions” of the “linguistic system of faith” (DSSG, 234)— we understand these as dependent on sacred scripture. This means that they are co-extensively expressions of the science of God, and so sacred doctrine. But, again, those expressions are in an analogous relation to the Eternal Word of God, which is the “unknown conceptual framework of God.” Since the expressions of the science of God cannot be thought, believing in them must be aided by an infused faith, which is a “gift of grace” to the believer (DSSG, 236). In this gift, the person is able to believe propositions of faith without understanding what they are because God “moves the will to command the intellect to assent without comprehension to the propositions received [by hearing]” (DSSG, 237). The result of this gift is a kind of intention or cognition proper only to the “act of faith,” a sort of apprehension that enables the believer to “assent to propositions that are nonintelligible in the light of conceptual reason” (DSSG, 240). This intention is also what affords us the key syntactical isomorphism required for analogous expressions of the scientia dei in that the language of faith is analogous by an analogy of extrinsic attribution: “it is claimed that there exists in the eternal Word of God an analogical counterpart of the linguistic system of faith, such that it is in all aspects intelligible and unified by the per se principles of intelligibility governing the conceptual framework of God himself” (DSSG, 241). Further, God’s intentional state in his conceptual framework is the direct cause of the intentional state in a person by infused faith, and this state is the “immanent cause in us of the future possession of the intelligible knowledge or intellectual vision of

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God” (DSSG, 240-241). Preller freely admits this is circular reasoning, but holds to it nonetheless. We still require, though, a proper object for our language of faith—some “straightforward and nonproblematic empirical referent” for infused faith to judge as salvific ((DSSG, 246). So, we turn to our second category, things. The role of this empirical referent can be played only by the humanity of Christ; however, it does so indirectly as a placeholder for its “causal soteriological efficacy,” which is strictly the formal object of faith (DSSG, 250). So, it is that efficacy which causes the movement toward beatitude, but it is apprehended through the empirical events of Christ’s life, who is believed to be “express[ing] the agency of God himself” (DSSG, 251). When the believer hears the language of faith, she conceives Christ in the intellect, and the infused faith gives an intention in its own special mode that is apprehended as Christ’s beatitude, which then refers the believer to her own anticipated beatitude (DSSG, 252-53). In this process, the believer remembers that, ultimately, God—as the originator of the causal soteriological efficacy—is the formal object of faith, though mediately through Christ. But, what of knowledge of God that cannot be strictly deduced from Christ? Here, Preller says that the image of God is an image of the “soul of Christ,” and so Christ’s knowledge and love is imperfectly reflected in the image of God in believers. Thus, Christ isn’t just the cause of our beatitude, but we are also given, through faith, some apprehension of an intention of God’s Trinitarian being (DSSG, 260-261). So, then, the believer is taken to be “understanding” propositions about God in the peculiar mode of faith, which is not an intellectual or conceptual grasping of the object; instead, it’s an awareness “that there corresponds to his faith-propositions a reality in God” without knowing how (DSSG, 262). Without knowing the syntactical rules for God’s conceptual framework, the Christian believes propositions she does not understand by an infused grace, thinking that in so believing her mind is being conformed to the mind of God. But, as a last point, one cannot know that she is in a state of infused grace; indeed, the only way to know would be to also know that one has the love of God, or charity. But, we can’t know this, says Preller—we can only guess we do as a result of our loving actions. We simply must hold to the possibility that we do have such a faith, and that we might have the “intentional image of God which conforms us to him” (DSSG, 265). CRITIQUING PRELLER Before beginning the critique, one should recall what was learned about Searle’s Chinese Room: to come into possession of the rules for a language,

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and to master its syntactical functions, is not equivalent to understanding that language. In a phrase, mere syntax does not make intelligibility. Preller’s writing suggests he is the most aware of this sort of problem of our three thinkers, but the further complications created by his theological speculations do not make for an adequate account of analogical language. A first set of problems concern the supposed “conceptual framework” of God, to which the analogy of extrinsic attribution is anchored. Preller supposes the similarity between the believer’s conceptual framework and God’s conceptual framework is the mutual inclusion of transcendentals that justify the syntactical intelligibility. But, to begin with, why should one assume that God has a conceptual framework? There seem to be good reasons for thinking that God doesn’t. First, if God has a conceptual framework, then this would seem to entail that God possesses something which is of a genus—indeed, it seems to be precisely this since it is putatively an intelligible structure shared by the beatified. If it is not, and we understand it as analogous in some sense, then Preller would have to identify that sense, which would just further situate him in a reductio of identification through genera. Second, if God is not composed of any parts, then it seems impossible to suppose that there could be any proper “network” of rules, axioms, or terms to correspond to disparate conceptual items in the mind of God—this would presume some complexity, some difference between basic conceptual distinctions like subject and object. Third, it isn’t clear what need God has for a conceptual system, for what does God need to deliberate upon, reflect about, infer, or communicate if God is already eternal, omniscient, and impassible? A syntactical framework seems to be necessary for creatures to reason about the world in its complexity, but, if God always, immediately, and exhaustively knows everything, then the framework of natural reason seems entirely irrelevant to God. Thus, the target side of the analogy just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. On the source side of the matter, why should we suppose that human beings have access to the transcendentals analogically equivalent to God’s being? For Aquinas, this is established through the intellect. As mentioned above, though, Preller thinks that Aquinas wasn’t quite right about the intellectus agens—Aquinas thought that the axioms and rules of our conceptual frameworks are supplied by the intellect, while Preller thinks they mature pragmatically in response to our social environment (DSSG, 76). Nevertheless, Preller agrees with Aquinas that the intelligible forms for our syntactical frameworks are not derived from experience, since our sense-experience does not provide us with this information (DSSG, 78). Thus, Preller holds to a rationalist— specifically, a Kantian—perspective of the intellect: it is some non-sensory form of representation that is natural to human cognition.26 But, Preller offers no reason for such a faculty; he merely presumes that the syntax must come from first principles inherent in the mind, which are

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also the transcendentals justifying any syntax. But, a number of problems come up here. First, it is not at all clear that syntactical intelligibility could not be derived from experience. Preller does not elaborate on his epistemology of sense-experience, but he seems to operate with a nominalist presupposition that what is “given” in sense experience are packets of particular data or impressions, which could not include the formal connections required for an intelligible syntax. However, one need not suppose this position; instead, experience may be viewed as continuous with and informative of general realities—meaning, formal connections are learned. Thus, something like “quality” need not be construed transcendentally as Kant would,27 but rather as an ontological—and natural—generality understood through our sense-cognition, whether subrationally or upon reflection. I think this is a more parsimonious claim (as it does not require conjuring an intellect with mystical powers), more coherent with the line of thought in cognitive pragmatics that human mental processes are remarkably adaptable,28 and better explains the consonance between the intelligible reality we conceive and the reality external to our minds. In other words, formal, syntactical realities appear to frame the world we know because they genuinely do represent perceived realities—or, rather, we have grounds to suppose they do. A Peircean argument for the claim that our categories are bound up with experience is fleshed out in chapter 6, but for now it is enough to disrupt as groundless Preller’s claim that the mind’s syntax has some transcendental connection. Second, it seems quite difficult—if not impossible—to think about a pure exercise of a non-sensory form of representation. Putatively “transcendental” ideas always appear to be conjured in association with mental significations, whether sense-based, pragmatic, or symbolic. For instance, I might think of “unity,” but it is accompanied by an image of interlocking pieces (sensebased), how I can practically use that term in realms of discourse (pragmatic), and/or how the word is written, said, heard, or otherwise expressed (symbolic). So, it is not justified that one presume that abstract ideas are a priori part of a conceptual framework that has similar components to those of God or a heavenly people, especially when empirical inputs seem be necessary for that conceptual framework to function. Finally, even if it could be demonstrated that human beings from birth do possess such an intellect, this would only show an innate form of syntactical knowledge, but not one that is a priori, which is a necessary condition for the transcendental characters Preller is aiming for. The knowledge may simply be the product of natural selection—a useful genetic variation for human beings developed over time through evolutionary adaptation to an experienced environment. The hypothesis that the syntax would also offer penetration into a realm beyond the natural is pure conjecture.

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A second set of problems concerns the hope of understanding by the mode of belief. On Preller’s account, faith is able to relate us to God in such a way that we may believe in God, and so also believe what is said of God, without intelligibly comprehending what we believe. Two issues are worth highlighting here, particularly related to the transmission of rules and axioms for God-talk. First, if we accept that Jesus Christ is the unique empirical referent through which a referential value can be transmitted to other forms of sacred doctrine, how can we explain that transmission within the church without recourse to understanding the syntax by which they operate? It might be conceded that Christ could speak from the perspective of God’s conceptual framework due to his unique ontological status, but Preller is also adamant that we don’t know what the syntax of that conceptual framework is, even in faith. So, what can those apart from Christ do besides passively receive Christ’s words, trusting that they do in fact refer? Wouldn’t the apostles’ use, the later church’s use, and our own use today be contingent upon knowing something about the syntactical rules by which God-talk operates so that we know when our syntax is correct or strays from Christ’s original transmission? If that syntax can’t be so analogized intelligibly, it seems difficult to understand how any novel theological propositions about God—whether in content or grammatical form—could be made reliably. Jesus may say, “God loves the world,” but if we don’t know the rules for that proposition being made, how can we: (1) paraphrase, re-articulate, or translate that proposition; or (2) make use of it for theological inferences or judgments? These both, it seems to me, would require some familiarity with the rules of the syntax; otherwise, I don’t see how we could get any further than merely reproducing the words Jesus uses—all possible theology would then be relegated to re-dictating what Christ said about God, in hope that someday we will understand what those words mean.29 Another issue relates to our participation in faith. If faith is a necessary condition for comprehending - in some particular mode - the language of faith, and it is only hypothetical that we possess this condition, then any set of theological propositions or proposed syntactical rules must be subject to considerable scrutiny. This also would yield necessary evaluations of the propagator’s faith, and whether her life was consistent with a life of love. This is no conclusive argument against the possibility that certain theological statements have been passed down accurately, nor do I think apodictic certainty of faith is a reasonable aim, but it certainly leaves the door wide open for the specters of skepticism and existential anxiety. How does anyone in good conscience, and without hubris, propose a normative claim about God-talk when she does not know if she does it truly with faith, and so with love? This, it seems to me, severely weakens the reliability of any God-talk on Preller’s account.

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Finally, a third set of problems concerns the proposed efficacy for God-talk of a division between intelligible and meaningful discourse. The notion that God-talk can have meaning through the act of faith while it is rationally unintelligible may confer meaning upon the assertion of specified speech-acts, but that doesn’t make the content of the assertion conceivable for practical conduct. Bracketing the dubious claim that one can believe through faith what one does not understand, and presupposing that certain rules passed down in the tradition can be seen to reliably dictate the use of God-talk in some regular fashion, if we take a sentence and claim that it contains a proposition that is true, that doesn’t make the proposition meaningful. If one writes “#&$*%$” and informs the reader that this is true of God, that doesn’t make “#&$*%$” useful for communication about God; all that is intelligible is the act of assertion. I can understand that the writer takes “#&$*%$” to be true, but since there is no determination of anything that I can understand in the symbols (whether this is something affirmed or denied of God), there is no further meaning bestowed to “God” than what I knew beforehand except that I can reproduce the assertion in this symbolic form. As a mundane example of this logic, if I ask my friend where he parked his car, and the person responds, “You can be sure: #&$*%$ is true,” I am no nearer to understanding anything about the car than what I did before the sentence was uttered. I may come to trust that #&$*%$ is true, but only insofar as I can point to it and say that it may be true of the car, which seems trivial; however, I am no nearer to understanding how I relate to the car as a result of that formulation. There are no conceivable effects upon my practical conduct as a result of it, and so it is unintelligible. Now, it might be claimed that this doesn’t pay attention to the eschatological hope that someday I will understand what “#&$*%$” means. Indeed, my interlocutor might say, that seems like an added meaning because you can say that “#&$*%$” will someday be known by you, and so has this further intention. In response, I say that there is still no determinate meaning to the symbolic rendering; it only holds out the possibility for a determinate meaning. As such, I am learning something about a change in my future cognitive state, but nothing about “#&$*%$” itself or how it affects my conceivable possibilities for rational, practical conduct now. To return to the example of the parked car, if my friend says, “You can be sure: #&$*%$ is true, and you will know it someday,” I still am no better off. To gain some traction on “#&$*%$” I would need to know something about the possibilities of its effects, not merely the possibility of knowing the possibilities of its effects. Before ending this section, let’s think again about the God-room. Preller thinks that one can believe that those in the God-room: (1) have a conceptual framework that has analogous transcendental meanings to the unknown

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conceptual framework of God; (2) can trust that the rules passed down are faithful articulations of God-talk, though they are not intelligible to those in the room; and (3) are able, through faith, to comprehend something meaningful—even if not through natural reason, and so not intelligible—about the God-talk they utter. But, as I have tried to show, there is so much philosophical and theological conjecture to this effort that grasping any reliable meaning for linguistic purposes seems inherently flawed. Preller hopes the articulations of the faithful are “material moves . . . in a language we do not understand” (DSSG, 268), but there doesn’t seem to be a justifiable basis to suggest that the putative material moves are in any sort of language at all. In order for that to be the case, there would need to be an account for how to make good material moves, but I don’t see how we can do so, on Preller’s view. Therefore, the God-room remains an utterly confused place. CONCLUSION: ASSESSING THE ACCOUNTS ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES Having analyzed and critiqued the Grammatical Thomist position through various advocates, I can now consider how it lines up with the guidelines set forth in chapter 2. In rejecting the ontological treatment of analogy, the Grammatical Thomists focus their account of analogy on what Hochschild calls “associated meaning,” or the relationship between two homonymous words in an ordered fashion. In denying some intrinsic sharing of proportionality—or “generic likeness”—between source and target analogs, the resulting analogies are going to lack features of similarity. As such, as one might anticipate, the Grammatical Thomists fare quite poorly when considering the guidelines. 1. Determinate vertical and horizontal relations must be secured for intelligible analogies: Without determinate relationships between “God” and the various predicates, the words are just so many syntactical placeholders. As a result, rules for associating those placeholders are effectively arbitrary, whether as best associated with “perfection-terms,” uniting subject and predicate, or otherwise. Consequently, correlating discrete phenomena through types of associations within a domain (vertical relations) and measuring similarity between distinct phenomena across domains (horizontal relations) are disabled activities. 2. Similarity is multivalent, and discerning those valences is crucial for discovering the strength of an analogy: Simplicity’s wholesale rejection of valences (spanning from abstract categorical to iconically empirical) makes any analogy fail to convey, and this undermines the performative

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function of the grammatical accounts as they rely on distinct similarities in linguistic form to carry meaning. 3. Analogies should aim for structural isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence in its features: The basic syntactical rule that subject and predicate are not different won’t allow for correspondence with any creaturely predication; identity with what does not belong to a genus renders indeterminate any structural isomorphism. 4. Determining the association is important both for distinguishing more or less relevant similarities, and for clarifying analogical relatedness of homologous symbols: Basic vertical relations like logical, causal, explanatory, and correlational associations are without meaning or conferral of degree if one doesn’t address the respect with which God participates in or is identical with one of these. But, this seems a lost cause anyway, as these are all ultimately part of the genus “relation,” so we must simply deny that they obtain. 5. Inferential potency affects the mapping procedure’s cogency and needs to be assessed: The rules for the performance have no potency for telling us about a simple God, so they transfer no inferential potency. “Progressive verification” is hamstrung before it can begin. 6. Regarding the horizontal and vertical relations, successful analogies will require compensation by the other paired relation if one relation is weak: Since both are entirely unknown, we are no nearer to intelligibility. 7. Familiarity with vertical and horizontal features of source and target is contingent on empirical data: By definition, the Grammatical Thomists espouse a God entirely distinct from the order of creation. Empirical data of creaturely effects and causes are irrelevant. In summary, then, we see that neither the object “God” nor performative utterances involving the term are intelligible, as we explicated that term in chapter 2. In the first sense—God as a term—“God” is not pragmaticistically intelligible because we can conceive neither discrete effects of it nor how those effects are important for conduct. As a result, any description or inferential reasoning about “God” is undercut. In the second sense—linguistic performances involving “God”—these are likewise pragmaticistically unintelligible because we can’t conceive the effects of our linguistic performance on our practical conduct outside of how it manipulates an arbitrary symbol system. And, being unable to discern any conceptual consequences apart from what occurs in the symbol system, we don’t arrive at the rational expression of a language. This produces a complete disconnect between our linguistic performance and purposeful action.

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NOTES 1. This group has also been called “Wittgensteinian Thomists” due to their adherence to and expansion of the philosophical insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of language in his later writings. David Burrell says, for instance, in the preface to the second edition of Aquinas: God and Action, his efforts were “unabashedly beholden to Wittgenstein.” David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action, 3rd Ed (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016), xv. Hereafter, “GA” in text body. Nevertheless, I prefer Murphy’s usage since it more accurately reflects a philosophical project consonant with a broad, linguistic focus inclusive of Wittgenstein’s thought without rigidly excluding insights from other philosophers of language. 2. Francesca Murphy, God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 90. 3. Ibid., 89. 4. Ralph McInerny, The Logic of Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). Hereafter, “LA” in text body. 5. All propositions derived from: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Questions on God, ed. Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1a.1: 3. For a fascinating analysis of Aquinas’s conception for simplicity utilizing contemporary cognitive linguistics through “conceptual blending” of metaphor, see Robert Masson, Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology after Cognitive Linguistics (Walpole: Peeters Press, 2014), 120–126. 6. It should be noted that McInerny thinks, in this section, that genus can be applied to God in a broad sense (largo modo), but only if it is understood as already analogical. But, if McInerny admits that it is “of the essence of genus to signify univocally” (101), it becomes difficult to understand in what way we can call such an ascription a “genus.” 7. Ralph McInerny, Studies in Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968). Hereafter, “SA,” in text body. 8. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-Ia:13,5, co. 9. Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 1996), ix. Hereafter, “AA” in text body. 10. Thomas Aquinas, Truth, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), 2: 11, c. 11. One might also juxtapose this with the “perfect similarity” that Kant advocates for with theological analogies in his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), §58. 12. Or, as Burrell says in an earlier work, “such an assertion means that God is outside any of the universes of discourse that provide the contextual meanings for the terms we use.” See David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 125. 13. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-Ia. 3. 4. s.c. 14. Quoting ST, I-Ia. 4. 3.

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15. John Searle, “Minds, Brain, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980), 417–418. My thanks to Gordon Graham for initially pointing me in the direction of Searle’s essay with respect to the question of analogy. 16. For those readers who are already proficient in Chinese languages, one can simply substitute some other logographic language for Chinese in this example, say, Cuneiform or Mayan writing. Or, perhaps a nonverbal language like Morse code or Braille. 17. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 422. 18. Linda Smith, “From Global Similarities to Kinds of Similarities: The Construction of Dimensions in Development,” in Similarity and Analogical Reasoning, ed. Stella Vosniadou and Andrew Ortony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 157. This is a rearticulation of Nelson Goodman’s insight in addressing the “problem of order.” See Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 113, 217–242. 19. ST 1-1a. 2. 3. co. 20. Stephen Mulhall makes a similar point in critiquing Denys Turner on causality: to deny God’s participation in a kind of class is to deny the assigning of a sense, and so the word “has no grammar.” To maintain “causal” language is tantamount to “saying that the term both has a familiar grammatical shape and altogether lacks one that really doesn’t sound like an intelligible way in which a word might have a grammar.” See Stephen Mulhall, The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 49. 21. There is an analogous difficulty with Karl Popper’s account of falsification that Michael Drieschner brings up: Popper doesn’t see the Humean critique that falsification must bank on the notion that a scientific theory, upon being falsified, remains falsified, and so he presupposes the orderliness of the world at the time the theory was falsified. See Michael Drieschner, “Popper and Synthetic Judgments A Priori,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 36, no. 1 (2005), 52–53, 56–60. 22. For a systematic examination of connaturality, see Taki Suto, “Virtue and Knowledge: Connatural Knowledge according to Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 1 (2004), 61–79, accessed October 20, 2017, http://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/20130423. 23. JF Ross, Portraying Analogy, 49. 24. Victor Preller, Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Hereafter, “DSSG” in text body. 25. Also, for Aquinas’s distinctions of the three terms, see Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa-II.2.2. ad. 1. 26. In this characterization of the rationalist intellect, I follow P.F.E Kail’s essay, “Hume, Malebranche, and ‘Rationalism,’” Philosophy 83, no. 3 (2008), 313. Accessed August 4, 2016, http:​/​/jou​​rnals​​.camb​​ridge​​.org/​​abstr​​act​_S​​00318​​1910​8​​00069​​7. 27. For his table of the pure concepts of the understanding derived from the Transcendental Analytic, see Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B106.

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28. For more on this from the viewpoint of language acquisition, see Dominiek Sandra, “Perspectives on language and cognition: From empiricism to rationalism and back again,” in Cognition and Pragmatics, ed. Dominiek Sandra, Jan-Ola Ostman, and Jef Vershueren, 1–15 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2009). 29. Indeed, to be most careful, we would need to reconstruct the Aramaic in which Jesus likely spoke his original words. Considering that scholars possess only a few such sentences of Aramaic in the earliest copies of Greek manuscripts of the gospels, such a task would be practically impossible.

Chapter 5

Analogia Fidei

INTRODUCTION Our examination up to this point has been centered upon Catholic approaches to analogy, whether ontologically or linguistically based. The final view takes a denominational departure to Protestantism in the form of Karl Barth, the early twentieth-century Swiss Reformed theologian. Here, we are concerned with Barth’s response to the analogia entis, what he called the analogia fidei, or the “analogy of faith.” To be explained in greater detail, Barth (at least, in his earlier writings) believed the analogia entis to tread on ground it should not have by suggesting the existence of some ontological commonality between God and creatures—but, he thought this fundamentally misses the human being’s ontological difference from God and the pervasiveness of human beings’ sin, as witnessed to by Scripture. The analogia fidei, on the other hand, espouses a relationship founded upon the person of Christ without recourse to some natural understanding of being, and thus—Barth thinks— avoids the idolatrous orientation of an analogia entis. As with the previous chapter, this one also comes with an important proviso: the development of Barth’s analogia fidei, and how his position changed over the years, is not the target of this chapter.1 Instead, I aim to provide the mature components of Barth’s account of theological analogy that he propounded in the Church Dogmatics. I also am not interested in whether Barth misreads the analogia entis—I am inclined to think his interpretation in the earlier volumes of the Church Dogmatics was coarse, and that he missed the dialectical tension and apophatic trajectory of Przywara’s account;2 but, this remains irrelevant for my purposes. The question is whether Barth’s own treatment of analogy provides sufficient intelligibility for God-talk. 129

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The chapter proceeds largely as those before it. First, an exposition of the main characteristics of the analogia fidei will be offered as they are found in the Church Dogmatics. This will include a chronological explication of Barth’s associated concepts of faith, extrinsic analogy of attribution, and the analogia relationis. These components are compiled under the name of the analogia fidei since: (1) this is Barth’s first term given to an account of theological analogy; and (2) the modifications made to his account of analogy in the later volumes of the Church Dogmatics can be regarded as supplementing and expanding on an original understanding, rather than revising or correcting it. Second, I will critically examine Barth’s conclusions. Third, I will address a few theological defenses of Barth’s analogia fidei in contemporary literature. Finally, I will conclude the chapter by assessing the account according to the guiding principles on analogy delivered in the second chapter. KARL BARTH ON THE ANALOGIA ENTIS With regard to the analogia entis, Barth’s attitude is probably most popularly associated with his (in)famous denunciation of its content from the first few pages of the Church Dogmatics:3 “I regard the analogia entis as the invention of Antichrist, and I believe that because of it it is impossible ever to become a Roman Catholic, all other reasons for not doing so being to my mind shortsighted and trivial” (CD I/1, xiii). To be sure, Barth’s vehement disagreement with the analogia entis is one that puts him in singular opposition to the authors of chapter 3 (though, Balthasar thought that there were definite possibilities of reconciling the positions).4 However, this does not, as a result, accord his viewpoint a more legitimate status; as we will see, Barth’s recourse to a notion of theological language based on the gracious event of God’s selfdisclosure has its own problems concerning the matter of intelligibility. Barth’s basic problem with the analogia entis in the Church Dogmatics is that it posits that “the being of the Church, Jesus Christ, is no longer the free Lord of its existence, but that He is incorporated into the existence of the Church, and is thus ultimately restricted and conditioned by certain concrete forms of the human understanding of His revelation and of the faith which grasps it” (CD I/1, 40). Under this view (one equated with Roman Catholic doctrine5), Barth thinks that God’s freedom and agency are interrupted and possessed as a “constantly available relationship” by the Church, forcing the realm of grace to condescend to the realm of nature (CD I/1, 41). A divine likeness to God in creaturely reality is the inevitable outcome here, and that “neutralizes” the character of revelation and faith since where this natural “affinity and aptitude” for knowledge of the divine in creation (CD I/2, 37),6 or a “special capacity for revealing God” (CD I/2, 43), or a “correspondence

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and similarity of being” between them (CD III/2, 220),7 exists, there the freedom of God’s self-revelation is revoked. Even when, Barth says, that connection is explicated as one in “infinite and qualitative disparity” in work and activity, it still makes for the secularization of knowledge—meaning, divine knowledge is derived through some means other than through revelation (CD II/1, 81). The presumptive principle that God and human beings can be “comprehended together” is what the analogia entis reduces to for Barth, and he takes it to be a pivotal misunderstanding of the Christian faith and what the Scriptures inform human beings about our postlapsarian cognitive powers. The only possible way forward, for Barth, “is not a being common to God and [human beings] which finally and properly establishes and upholds the fellowship between them, but God's grace” (CD II/1, 243). This is made possible by the Son’s adoption of a human nature, which entails “substantially a restoration and confirmation of [created reality’s] original connexion [sic] with God” (CD I/2, 37). This is not to say that a creaturely possibility is realized, but that a miracle of grace brings back a “free and undeserved distinction” that had been, and remains, foreign to nature. God’s self-revelation in Christ, then, is God’s unilateral actualization of God’s free possibility to be known by creatures. BARTH’S KANTIAN PRESUPPOSITIONS AND THEOLOGICAL DEPARTURE FROM KANT In order to grapple with Barth’s address of theological analogy, I think it best to situate his thinking with respect to his main philosophical influence for thinking about the distinction between the world and God: Immanuel Kant. In a lucid account detailing Barth’s usage of Kantian philosophy in his dialectical theology, D. Paul La Montagne explicates how Barth conforms to a Kantian view of metaphysics and epistemology in his Barth and Rationality: Critical Realism in Theology.8 Barth, La Montagne writes, ultimately accepted a “more classical Kantianism [because of] his need to do dialectical theology in a critically realistic way” (BR, 93). In so doing, Barth accepted both Kant’s epistemic dualism between the categories of the understanding and sensible intuition, and his metaphysical dualism between phenomena and noumena, though with certain adjustments for his theological endeavors. In the first dualism, our cognitive experience is always a combination of sense impressions (empirical intuition) relayed through space and time (pure intuitions) and the subjective categories of the understanding that present that material in some intelligible form to our human minds (pure and empirical concepts).9 In the second dualism, the phenomenal realm, or world of appearances, is that realm for which we

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have theoretical knowledge and that to which the epistemic dualism applies; the noumenal realm, which is the realm of God, however, has neither intuitions to be cognitively received nor categories of the understanding that can apply to it for theoretical knowledge (BR, 99-100). Yet, in spite of that theoretical impasse, Barth also interprets Kant’s philosophy as furnishing human beings with practical knowledge of their own freedom, immortality, and God that is “sufficient for moral responsibility” (BR, 99). Though the categories do not apply to knowledge of these noumenal objects, it is still real as an “irreducible and inescapable feature of our moral responsibility as ethical agents.” It is at this juncture with practical reason that Barth will push against—but not abandon—these dualisms with his account of God’s revelation (BR, 100). While Kant can only accept a concept of God as a regulative ideal, Barth wants to have genuine, substantial knowledge of God enabled by God’s self-disclosure (BR, 104). That disclosure, for Barth, in revelation makes use of the same cognitive mechanisms by which empirical reality is disclosed to us; however, it does so by giving the “products” of our cognitive mechanisms “a new reference and a new meaning” (BR, 105). By doing so, God overrides the “Kantian limitations” by “grasp[ing] the human knowing apparatus through the phenomena from the other side.”10 That principally occurs through the empirical reality of Jesus Christ, which is “how the unintuitable [noumenal object “God”] becomes intuitable” (BR, 105), How God so grasps the phenomenal realm, though, is a miracle of grace, and can only be expressed through metaphor and indirect modeling efforts (BR, 110-111). Though God completely reveals Godself in revelation, “the correspondence of our thought to God in theology is analogy, partial correspondence and agreement, similarity” (BR, 125). However, this can still be called “true human knowledge of God” (CD II/1, 227) because “what is said about God is truth in Him, in revelation, but in us it is contingent, improper, and in error” (BR, 125). This is God’s simultaneous veiling and unveiling of revelation to human experience (BR, 126), and that simultaneity speaks to a dialectic that never becomes synthesized into a knowledge wholly possessed by human beings (BR 140, 163). God, in God’s freedom, chooses to enable the theologian to speak of God by God’s own “causal justification”—that is, by God’s own miraculous enabling by grace (BR, 140-141). “The simultaneous affirmation and negation of a concept under the judgment of God,” La Montagne says, “is a self-revealing act of God, not an act performed by a human theologian” (BR, 166). It is for understanding the details of this self-revealing dialectic, and the kind of expression that we are enabled to make, that we now move to the analogia fidei, which brings us to the question of how revelation is received, and thus to faith.

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FAITH IN CD I/1 Faith, Barth says, is “the making possible of knowledge of God’s Word that takes place in actual knowledge of it” (CD I/1, 228). It is the response to God’s inconceivable self-disclosure—something we cannot know the “how” of, yet we are commanded to proclaim “in the service of God and in virtue of His presence.” Barth is concerned to articulate three “different definitions of the concept of the knowability of the Word of God” to explicate the notion of faith, and on the way will address the function of the analogia fidei explicitly (CD I/1, 229). The first thing to be said about the knowability of the Word of God is that “it arises and consists absolutely in the object of real knowledge” (CD I/1, 237). The main point here is that the object of the Christian’s faith—the object of real knowledge—is not the result of a human determination, possibility, or inference. It is “the Word, Christ” that makes itself known as this object—thus, God’s knowability is God’s objectivity (CD I/1, 230). The Word “presents Himself” to the human person in “externality” as Jesus Christ and is received in faith, which is both “a concretely ascertainable temporal act of a specific man, the act of acknowledgment” (CD I/1, 230, 232) and also a state in which God “puts” the believer (CD I/1, 231). So, it is not sufficient for faith that one have a reference to a hoped for, passive object, but that the Word is actively “given to us as the object of this reference” (CD I/1, 232). The “event of faith,” then, is necessarily grounded in God’s self-disclosure as the Word, which is known objectively in Christ (CD I/1, 236). There is no “point of contact” interior to the human being that she may contemplate for knowledge of God, nor do we do well in attempting to muse upon how the Word’s presence is possible to us. The believer believes in faith because that faith is presented for her “use” as if by loan, despite any natural ability to act in faith (CD I/1, 237). The second definition about the knowability of God is that “when and where the Word of God is really known by [human beings] the manner of this knowing corresponds to that of the Word of God itself” (CD I/1, 234).11 Here, Barth wants to repurpose the “point of contact” that allows the believer in faith to be “conformed” or “adapted” to God without deifying her nature (CD I/1, 238). Without submitting to the analogia entis, he nevertheless affirms that “there can be no receiving of God’s Word unless there is something common to the speaking God and hearing [human beings] in this event, a similarity for all the dissimilarity implied by the distinction between God and [human beings].” That commonality is the imago dei, but that is not an attribute of humanity, or even derivative from creation (for this possibility was lost in the fall), but what is restored by God in the “grace of reconciliation,” and consequently the gift of faith (CD I/1, 239). The imago dei restored

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in faith is not, then, some structural or ontological part of human nature, but a goodness or uprightness (rectitudo) miraculously imparted to the person that enables her to respond in faith. As this faith is miraculous, it also cannot be “interpreted anthropologically,” and its existence cannot be examined (CD I/1, 241). This, then, allows us to say what the commonality of the analogia fidei is: it is “an act that is inaccessible to any mere theory, i.e., human decision, is in faith similar to the decision of God’s grace for all its dissimilarity” (CD I/1, 241). It is the act of decision, the “possibility of grasping the promise” enabled by faith that signifies the similarity between God and humanity, and it enables hearing of the Word of God, and so its knowability (CD I/1, 243, 240). And that knowability is “of a clear and certain knowledge, not equal but at least similar to the clarity and certainty with which God knows Himself in His Word” (CD I/1, 243). As the Word “mutually indwells” God and humanity, the Church can proclaim the Word, speak its truth, and also perform the activity of Christian dogmatics (CD I/1, 242). The third definition about the knowability of God is that the “[human being] exists as a believer wholly and utterly by this object” (CD I/1, 244). The groundedness of the person in God’s gift of faith prevents her from claiming any reliance on her own effort of work. But, the dialectic of human freedom and divine sovereignty is still at work. The person’s possibility of knowledge of God is a genuine “event in the freedom” of the person, yet it is not that freedom’s result (CD I/1, 246). In freedom, the person “acts,” “experiences,” and “self-determines” in faith, but it is never her own creation, never by her own power, and always already determined by God (CD I/1, 244-245). ANALOGY OF EXTRINSIC ATTRIBUTION IN CD II/1 Barth later addresses the nature of analogy more closely in CD II/1. This comes on the heels of his address of the “participation of our knowledge of God in the veracity of His revelation” (CD II/1, 220). At the juncture of interest, Barth is questioning what this knowledge means for our “thinking and language”; the preliminary answer takes on the logic of I/1: a miracle of grace “adopts” our language, which permits people to speak truly of God (CD II/1, 223). But, what does this actually mean for our cognition, and what is the relationship between God and our human words? For Barth, there can’t be a simple parity between the meaning of our words applied to creatures and to God. Indeed, we must admit that there is no “likeness” between these applications if we are to maintain God’s hiddenness and freedom to reveal Godself (CD II/1, 224). But, nor is there simple disparity, for then we deny God’s self-disclosure and truthfulness in human words (CD

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II/1, 225). We are then left with the conclusion of the “older theology”: that we have “similarity, partial correspondence and agreement” in the concept of analogy.12 But even “similarity” has an analogous role, for it does not presume a human category of similarity. It rather intimates that God has opted to render God’s revelation in human words that express Godself; words that we don’t trust in our “power of apprehension,” but implement in obedience as God has selected them for our use (CD II/1, 226-27). As God has unilaterally associated Godself with these words, human beings respond to them in faith, and that amounts to the miraculous result of our participation in God’s revealed truth. But, though those words in their original reference to God are not comprehended by us, we still may ascribe them to God appropriately: “Our views, concepts and words, grounded on God's revelation, can be legitimately applied to God, and genuinely describe Him even in this sphere of ours and within its limits” (CD II/1, 227). Barth goes on to say more about how the words God has selected are applicable most properly, and originally, to Godself. This is because of God’s original role as creator, since “God is the first and last truth of all our words” (CD II/1, 233). Words like “father” and “son,” for instance, have their truth “first and properly” in God’s incomprehensible Trinitarian being, not in creaturely reproduction (CD II/1, 229). The same can be said of “lordship,” “patience,” “love,” and so on. Our uses of these terms are derivative, secondary, and of a discrete mode that fail to denote God, but are still granted an “analogy of truth” to their object (CD II/1, 231). When Barth analyzes the consequent “partiality” to be explained by human words of God, he says this can only be understood as a dynamic dialectic of God’s veiling and unveiling activity that reveals his “one whole” being (CD II/1, 236). By being obedient to God’s gracious revelation, the person is not comprehending some of God and not other aspects, but truly comprehends God entirely as the revealed and hidden God. Also, this dialectic is not a necessary accident of the ontological division between God and humanity, but is driven by a “teleological ordering,” one that ultimately has the full revelation of God as its “goal and end.” But, how does this mesh up with the traditional formulae for analogy? Barth’s take is that he can’t be a proponent of an analogy of proportionality, since that would mean that there is some determination that is shared between God and creatures; nor can he go along with an analogy of inequality, since that would suppose that God and creatures can be subsumed under a common genus as disparate species (CD II/1, 237-38). Instead, Barth opts for an analogy of attribution—there is something predicated truly of God that obtains in an original or prior sense because of his role as creator, and that can also be predicated truly of creatures, but in a secondary or derivative sense. However, this can’t be understood as an intrinsic analogy; it must be understood as an extrinsic analogy.

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Barth contrasts his extrinsic view with the intrinsic view of the seventeenth-century Lutheran theologian, Johannes Andreas Quenstedt. For Quenstedt, Barth says, there is falsely supplied the concept of being as the truth of God that can be shared between creatures and God (CD II/1, 240). This is a problem because, even though creatures possess being in a relative sense to God’s absolute sense, that still gives them some ownership of their truth—they still have something “intrinsic” to themselves that warrants some claim on the truth of God. The consequence is that the relationship between God and creatures is a “reversible” one, meaning that human beings appear to be free to contemplate God without faith or God’s revelation (CD II/1, 241). This is not theologically tenable for Barth: it will lead to the elevation of being over God as the criterion for truth, and the ultimate reduction of Christian truth itself into an analysis of being’s concept (CD II/1, 242). Instead, he opts for the extrinsic analogy of attribution, whereby the truth analogized is not being, but grace. As grace, God is the sole judge and dispenser of truth to unmeriting human beings to participate in—a relationship that is “irreversible” and requires a response in obedience and faith (CD II/1, 240). This is simply what the Word of God demands we think about the relationship between God and creatures; otherwise, we will slip into the same dynamic as the Catholic analogia entis, and the work of natural theology (CD II/1, 243). ANALOGIA RELATIONIS IN CD III/1 AND 2 Final developments in Barth’s account of analogy appear in the third volume of the Church Dogmatics, following upon a shift in his focus on the doctrine of election from II/2.13 In this volume, Barth addresses how human beings are analogous to God insofar as they are “covenant partners” encountering one another (CD III/2, 203). The complex idea formed as a result of this partnership is an analogia relationis, which must be understood to subsist on the notion of freedom. First and primordially, that freedom is God’s freedom; second and derivatively, it is the freedom of the human person responding to the gift of faith with responsibility and obedience (echoing the discussion of faith above on the act of decision). Though Barth is laconic in his address of the analogia relationis, I discern that there are principally two dimensions at work in it that appear in volume III—what I will call the depth and breadth dimensions. Volume III.1 addresses primarily the depth dimension—how the analogia relationis subsists between God and human beings. Here, Barth is once again turning to the notion of the imago dei and attempting to uncover its meaning. Ruling out historical ideas that the divine likeness can be reduced down to

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a faculty of the soul, physical attributes, or power of dominion, Barth thinks that the context of Genesis 1:26 yields that the likeness is what enables the human being to be historically related to God as a “true counterpart of God”—something that enables the person to be addressed by God as a “Thou” (CD III/1, 194).14 Barth finds in Dietrich Bonhoeffer a springboard to the correct formulation: it is in humanity’s freedom. Barth says, [Bonhoeffer] asks how God can see, recognise [sic] and discover Himself in His work. Obviously only if and to the extent that the thing created by Him resembles Him and is therefore free: not free in itself; not possessing a freedom which (as in a vacuum) is its own quality, activity, disposition and nature; but free for Him who as the Creator willed and always does will to be free for His creature. That God makes [human beings] free in this sense, and causes [them] to be free, is expressed in the fact that He created [them] as . . . earthly image[s] of Himself. (CD III/1, 195)

This created freedom from the creator’s freedom is expressed in the “I-Thou” relationship of “confrontation” between God and humanity, and also in the relation of male to female, but it is, once again, not indicative of a person’s intrinsic capacity to be free—that freedom is God’s gift that “simply occurs” for human beings (CD III/1, 195). But, the analogia relationis has another facet that Bonhoeffer doesn’t address, which is that the freedom enjoyed by creator, and in an analogous form by the creature, has its original form in the intra-Trinitarian relations. The “Let us” of Genesis 1:26 shows the primordial freedom in “loving co-existence and co-operation” of the divine persons (CD III/1, 196). The “I-Thou” between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is reflected in the “dissimilar repetitions” of the I-Thou between God and humanity, and between male and female. Barth thus summarizes the analogous relation: Analogy, even as the analogy of relation, does not entail likeness but the correspondence of the unlike. This correspondence of the unlike is what takes place in the fact that the being of [human beings] represents, in the form of the co-existence of the different individuals of male and female, a creaturely and therefore a dissimilar repetition of the fact that the one God is in Himself not only I but also I and Thou, i.e., I only in relation to Himself who is also Thou, and Thou only in relation to Himself who is also I. This is the God who as Creator is free for [human beings], and the corresponding being is the [human being] who as a creature is free for God. This God can see, recognise [sic] and discover Himself in [human being]; and for his part the [human being] who corresponds to Him can know God and be the seeing eye at which all creation aims and which is “the true and sole motive of the cosmic process.” This God can and

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will say to [human beings] “Thou,” and the [human being] who corresponds to Him can also be responsible before Him as an “I.” (CD III/1, 196)

But, the character of the analogia relationis in terms of its Christological foundations are matters later addressed in Volume III.2. In §45, Barth’s interest is to uncover what the “correspondence and similarity” is between the person in her creaturely form and God’s divine determination of her to be the covenant-partner (CD III/2, 206). For that, we must move from a Christological locus to an anthropological one, since Jesus is the “true [human being]” for God (CD III/2, 208). As the true human being, Jesus’s humanity is in utter identity with his divine determination: his being is directed toward his fellow-humanity as its savior and deliverer (CD III/2, 209, 219). But, that determination is prefaced upon the original correspondence between the Trinitarian persons. That is, the original freedom that is the love between the Father and Son, in particular, has its image, or “correspondence and similarity,” in the love that God “addresses” to human beings as their creator and covenant-partner in the form of Jesus Christ and his saving work (CD III/2, 220). In the humanity of Jesus is captured that true imago dei, both in Jesus’s being for God, and in his being for human beings: “the [human being] Jesus in His being for [human beings] repeats and reflects the inner being or essence of God and this confirms His being for God” (CD III/2, 219). In Christ is the true reflection of divine freedom to decide to be for reconciliation and active grace in obedient love to the Father: “The whole witness and revelation of the [human being] Jesus in time, the whole point of His life and existence, is that within the cosmos there should be declared as good news and operative as saving power the fact that God Himself is for [human beings] and is [their] Covenant-partner” (CD III/2, 217). This moves us onto the breadth dimension of the analogia relationis, and it takes on this question: what is the correspondence and similarity between the humanity of Jesus and that of people in general (CD III/2, 225)? What is the character of the freedom of those whose image is not, and cannot be, the true image of God? Barth’s answer is that it is the parity between how human beings are in “encounter” with their fellow human beings (CD III/2, 320). In Jesus is the original and prototypical form of humanity, and that humanity took on the form of his being for his fellow human beings—that is, Jesus exists “absolutely for others” as their savior (CD III/2, 318). For humanity in general, their encounter with one another is predicated upon—and analogous to—the original mystery of Jesus’s being for human beings. That encounter with one another is something natural and “indestructible” to their being, and that makes them covenant-partners with one another, but it does not make them covenant-partners with God (CD III/2, 319-320). The latter is, however, a possibility for humanity since it is God’s determination for them within

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the goal of creation by God’s free grace through Jesus. Thus, Jesus is who anchors the analogy across the covenant-partnerships: insofar as the person by nature coexists with fellow-humanity as neighbor in mutual reciprocity (i.e., covenant with one another), this is echoed in Jesus’s original humanity; insofar as the person by grace is summoned to obedience, faith, and proclamation of the Word of God to her fellow-humanity (i.e., covenant with God), this is also echoed is Jesus’s original humanity. Barth summarizes it this way: as human beings are “modeled” on Jesus’s humanity, and Jesus’s humanity is modeled on God, then human beings are in the image of God and destined to be with their fellow-humanity (CD III/2, 324). Keith Johnson puts it in the analogical proportion as such: “Just as the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son is analogous to the relationship between God and the human Jesus, so the relationship between the human Jesus and humanity in general is analogous to the relationship between the human and other human beings.”15 Combining the breadth and depth dimensions, we may say that the analogous relation between human beings and God centers on the freedom to act in loving faithfulness to God and in encounter with one’s fellow-humanity according to the will of God as first exemplified in the humanity of Jesus. Extensive characterization of this relationship for the Christian is beyond the scope of this chapter, but, suffice to say, a Christian’s service, discipleship, and witness to God—if it is to be true—is always “repetition, confirmation and revelation” of the “will and act of God” in Jesus Christ (CD IV/3, 533).16 As Johnson puts it, this is an “analogy of being-in-action”—the Christian’s life is participant with Christ’s as she is an “active partner in the outworking of the covenant of grace in history.”17 In that activity are Christians called to a “divine sonship” analogous to that of Jesus Christ’s original form (CD IV/3, 533). Thus we see the pervasive effect of the analogia relationis upon Barth’s theology: it enlightens and orients the relationships within God’s persons, that between God and humanity, and between human beings in general. And its center of gravity is Jesus. To conclude our analysis of Barth’s texts on theological analogy, we may say that the accounts of faith, knowledge of God, and relationality all have similar characteristics. First, all of these subjects are derivative from the free grace of God: to be able to make the decision to be in obedience to God in the analogia fidei is a result of free grace. That our knowledge is in some likeness to God’s is a gift that is extrinsic to, and grounding for, our human knowing. And, that we are able to relate to God in free love is made possible by the sanctifying life of Jesus Christ. Second, none of the subjects involve a possession of any human capacity: our faith is never a result of our efforts. Our knowledge of God is never something inclinable to our own purposes, but selected in content and form by God. And, our relations are concretized in

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a covenant with fellow-humanity predicated upon Christ’s absolute purpose to be for human beings. Third, all of the subjects depict events for human life: faith is a happening for those to whom God has revealed Godself. Knowledge of God involves a miraculous participation in grace that cannot be controlled. And, the analogous freedom that we have with one another as covenantpartners is a place we occupy with reference to the divine freedom. In these similarities is heard the repeated harmony that any analogy with God is never a natural possession, never a natural happening intelligible on the world’s terms—it is from God and to God that they all exist. CRITIQUING THE ANALOGIA FIDEI For all of Barth’s efforts to distinguish himself from various permutations of the analogia entis, it is ironic that it is possible to group the analogia fidei’s problems into the same trio that the analogia entis positions produced in chapter 3: (1) the compatibility of simplicity and intelligible language use; (2) how Christian participation in faith, however construed, is supposed to establish conceptually meaningful categories for God-talk; and (3) the role of Christ in bridging the human and divine realms. Though Barth brings some new problems to the table, it will be shown that a very similar result appears to that of his Catholic interlocutors. Indeed, it must do so because Barth’s commitments are, at base, those indebted to the essentialist and dualist fallacies. But, before we examine these three major criticisms, it is appropriate to preempt a methodological objection that Barthian advocates might make. The Methodological Objection The objection is this: this book is attempting to provide some account or explanation for how God-talk is intelligible, and so presumes some natural mechanism for that account to be understood. But, as Barth shows us, the possibility of God-talk is a gift of free grace, and so supernatural. Therefore, on Barth’s theological framework, there can be offered no explanatory account for how God-talk is intelligible—we must simply accept it as a miracle of grace. In trying to critique Barth’s account on rational grounds, this book misappropriates Barth and raises objections to a position that Barth never held (i.e., offering an explanation for the intelligibility of God-talk). To this I offer three rejoinders. First, this is clearly question-begging: Godtalk becomes an unexplainable phenomenon because gracious conferral of it is presumed to be at odds with a rational explanation of its operations. We need not presume this, just as we need not presume that creation ex nihilo cannot be understood, at least in part, through investigation into big bang

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cosmology. In other words, we should not think that the “that” and “how” of God-talk obey some putative polarization of revelation and reason, or grace and nature. Second, this admission obstructs any further inquiry. If God-talk is itself a mysterious, supernatural process that humans act out without comprehension, that just happens to them, then we are denied the legitimacy of any further investigation into lawful regularities that might make our activities more understandable to us. I’ll take it that my reader would prefer not to concede ignorance where there is no requirement for it. Third, and most poignantly, the objection is at odds with Christian practice. The fact of the matter is that Christians do talk about God with the presupposition that they share concepts about God, that their language captures a particular meaning distinct from others, that those meanings have pragmatic output, and that those meanings can be intrinsically related to their concepts of the world in a way that is intelligible. For instance, think of one Christian encouraging another that God is “hearing” her prayer, even though she feels that it isn’t being received; that the first communicates something to the second presumes a shared concept of God as one who listens to or somehow detects an uttered petition. It further presumes that the second will be able to discern some practical consequence upon her life: not to be anxious, to continue with her prayers, to hope for a resolution and act as if it is coming. The point is this: to deny that we can offer an account for how God-talk is intelligible is to deny that it presently is intelligible to us, or that we can reflect on how it comes to us, originates, develops, and is critically evaluated. Thus, I see no reason to countenance this complaint and consider the impenetrability of God-talk as axiomatic—it rests on a petitio, prevents investigation into the relationship between ourselves and God, and is decidedly at odds with a Christian’s thought-life and practice. The Critique Proper Returning to our main critique, and regarding our first topic, we may once again address the issue of simplicity and its compatibility with language use. Like the rest of those critically examined, Barth affirms God’s simplicity, identifying the perfections spanning from freedom to love as identical with the divine being (CD II/1, 322). God “is an instance outside of every genus,” and “simple without the least possibility of either internal or external composition” (CD II/1, 447). However, unlike the previous figures, whom are predominantly struggling with making language intelligible as a result of God’s simplicity, Barth’s difficulty has more to do with how he can maintain simplicity while affirming all he does about God’s “multiplicity.” Indeed, unlike the accounts of God from previous chapters, Barth explicitly advocates for a

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“concept of God” (den Begriff Gottes). The concept: (1), is founded in God’s self-revelation in the biblical message as creator, reconciler and redeemer (CD I/2, 873; CD II/2, 733; CD IV/1, 186);18 (2), has a proper “Christian” form (CD II/1, 126); (3), is inclusive of the divine perfections and God’s covenant with human beings (CD II/2, 509); and, (4), is fundamentally based in Christology (CD I/1, 399; CD III/2, 46; CD III/3 30; CD IV/1, 190).19 It’s a concept roomy enough for all these modalities, acts, and particularities, yet it must be united in God’s simple being. This clearly requires a creative use of the notion of dialectic to uphold, for Barth’s simultaneous commitments to the classical attributes and the Kantian epistemological divide push against its comprehensibility. Barth is obviously in the thick of that dialectic when he addresses the perfections of God and God’s threefold nature in their relation to God’s simple being. For the first, in CD II/1, Barth speaks of the perfections of God—such as mercy, righteousness, patience, wisdom, eternity—as all existing “essentially in” God, and quotes Augustine’s On the Trinity approvingly concerning God’s “simple multiplicity or multiple simplicity” (simplici multiplicitate vel multiplici simplicitate).20 But, Barth is trying to walk a fine line in affirming this—one that he thinks was not navigated well by Thomistic or orthodox Protestant theologians who took divine simplicity and made it “the allcontrolling principle, the idol, which, devouring everything concrete, stands behind all these [faulty] formulae” (CD II/1, 329). Barth’s own stance is that we must take with utmost seriousness that God “transcends the contrast of simplicitas and multiplicitas, including and reconciling both” (CD II/1, 333).21 But, as human beings, that contrast cannot be resolved into something non-dialectic. Rather, he says, “We can only accept and interpret God’s simplicitas and multiplicitas in such a way as to imply that they are not mutually exclusive but inclusive, or rather that they are both included in God Himself” (CD II/1, 333). As a result, Christians should say that God is properly both One and Many, both united and diverse (CD II/1, 335). Christians should not seek to comprehend that dialectic, for the perfections of God’s being are not like those of any object in the world—“God cannot be compared to anyone or anything . . . who and what He is cannot be constructed mathematically or logically or ethically or psychologically.” Instead, “we have simply to listen to [God] on this point” (CD II/1, 376). Nevertheless, Barth will follow what is by now a well-worn path and transgress his own rule. Switching to God’s threefold being, his united “modes of being” (Seinsweisen) don’t operate on the same set of axes as the perfections do, since these are “irreversible and non-interchangeable relationships” (CD II/1, 660). Rather, the three hypostases are “distinct in God,” having a particular “succession and order.” So, there is clearly something ascribable to the relations of the divine hypostases that is not so shared by the perfections;

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yet, the logic remains that those modes are still all the divine, simple being. “In the simplicity of His essence He is threefold,” Barth says; God is simply Godself, yet never alone, always coexisting, reciprocally loved, positing and posited, “His own origin and also His own goal” (CD III/2, 218). But, how can Barth know any of these aspects if no comparisons are available for us to make, as he said above? How do we understand God as “being never alone,” or “coexisting,” or “reciprocally loved”? What it points to is this: Barth may be justly criticized for his espousal of divine simplicity as the other accounts are (e.g., how to make sense of God’s infinity; what to do about lacking vertical and horizontal relations that are common; how to address God in a sensible way when God is outside of any genus), and on his own account (e.g., how does a simple God make various free decisions if God is also actus purus? [CD I/2, 530; CD IV/3, 40]), but there is the added issue that he seems unconcerned with voicing the simultaneity of the simple, infinite being of pure act of the classical tradition (CD IV/3, 40), with the rejection of a God that is “uniform or monotonous or undifferentiated” (CD III/3, 138). Barth is content to put the brunt of this tension on his dialect, the “yes and no” of creaturely language that suspends itself in the medium of the analogia fidei. The Christian can repeat the words given by grace in faith, but cannot presume that there is common content with natural language—there is only a common relation afforded by grace as the person becomes a site for dispensing divinely ordained language. That language about God and of God’s work is sui generis. It’s not only when we speak of Jesus’s salvific work (CD III/3, 27; CD IV/4, 183),22 the hypostatic union (CD IV/2, 37, 52),23 or the resurrection (CD IV/1, 304); God’s speech rendered to human beings is always in its own class and cannot be described in terms of other classes (CD I/1, 164). The main problem here, then, is that Barth’s dialectic is another case of the double-edged sword—that is, though it may allow him to escape criticism as to what actually can be said about the gracious relation conferred by God, it also prevents us seeing how theological language is coherent. While the analogia entis advocates have exercised various measures in attempting to explicate naturally how our terms are analogs of God’s, with Barth our options are hamstrung from the beginning because of the lack of any intrinsic commonality in creation to which inquirers can attach themselves (both on theological and Kantian, philosophical grounds). Add this to Barth’s maintenance of the diversity and differentiation in God, and we are only more deeply mired in the paradox. We have no rational comprehension of what God’s language is supposed to tell us about God from the standpoint of God’s simplicity and multiplicity. This leads us to the second problem with Barth’s account of communicating the Word of God or divine speech: while there may be a relation

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established that offers human beings the possibility to utter what is true of God, this participation in God does not seem relevant to the question of how that same language is intelligible for human beings. In order for that language to be intelligible, there needs to be some reason to say that what is common or proportionate to normal language is also common or proportionate to the language selected by divine grace to speak to human beings about God. But, this theological claim actually goes explicitly against the rationale of the Kantian framework that Barth presupposes. If the categories of the understanding can apply to the sensible intuition only in its pure and empirical forms, then there isn’t a way to make sense of the expressions of revelation coming out of the noumenal realm. Barth can claim it does by God “grasping” empirical concepts, but that doesn’t make that claim true or add concreteness to what sense is to be taken as mutually applicable to our empirical concepts and God. This is going to definitively cut off the possibility of God-talk for Barth, if the aim is to be consistent with his perfect being theology. For all of his address of analogy, he never makes it to the point of being able to articulate what enables genuine, practical, and creative use of theological language, which he himself must presuppose if something like the Church Dogmatics can possibly be written. The state of faith, Barth says, is a result of God’s gracious restoration of a person’s goodness to decide freely for God (CD I/1, 240, 243; III/2, 318-320), but Barth can’t offer an account of how one can decide for, or how one can reasonably make a judgment about what one believes. This is because, in order for a decision to be made for something, one needs to know what she makes a decision for. If one is to decide something in faith that has to do with God’s person, then one would need to have some concept for what God’s person is first. But, without a way to articulate or imagine the empirical content that provides a basis for any theoretical understanding, the decision can’t begin to occur because one can’t decide upon that which one has no concept, or even signification. This affects all of Barth’s treatment of analogical forms. He says that there is no “likeness” between the creaturely uses of God’s selected words for God’s self-disclosure, not even that of “being”; instead, the extrinsic analogy of attribution subsists on grace, and demands our obedience and faith to the language God chooses for us to use without any “power of apprehending” how it works (CD II/1, 226-27). Now, as we learned in chapter 2 from Cajetan, an analogy of attribution does not offer any proportionality between concepts of a pair of analogates; rather, it is an equivocation between homonymous terms that are so named because of different relations to a primary meaning. As such, in order to make some sense of that primary meaning, we have to have some concept of the relation. But, in determining that relation, there is going to be some conceptual consequence upon the target analogate. For instance, if God is the “cause” of human freedom, and we say God has

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freedom because of this causal relation, then God becomes an object cognized as being a kind of cause, introducing God into a conceptual genus, and so transgressing simplicity. Thus, even an extrinsic analogy of attribution won’t free Barth from some concept of God redounding through a proportionality in experience; if he denies even this relational proportionality, then I see no possible way in which to consider the terms “analogous”—rather, they are entirely equivocal. Barth’s problem continues to persist into his reflections on the analogia relationis, which ironically situates him in a similar place to the analogia entis—indeed, as I think Roger White is right to point out, Barth is employing an analogia proportionalitatis here that he doesn’t explicitly acknowledge.24 Just as the latter’s proponents can’t make being intelligible on account of the undulating rhythm of the analogia entis, Barth can’t provide a solid basis for intelligibility because his account of free covenant partnership analogically related through God and human beings has no stable cognitive purchase. Barth offers us a confrontation of the “I-Thou,” but no consistent way for them to communicate; human beings can encounter other human beings in covenant partnership supposedly in analogy to how God encounters human beings in covenant partnership, but there is no similar cognitive content to what the parties can exchange in that partnership if he doesn’t allow an explicit proportionality to be given. The problem is compounded when we consider Barth with respect to the Scriptures. In that the Scriptures are a medium for the Holy Spirit to freely impart knowledge of God, we run into a similar issue as with Victor Preller’s account of faith: how does one know she has received true knowledge of revelation and continues to have it? If God’s disclosure is only ever at God’s discretion, and that disclosure is an event that cannot ever consistently be seen in parallel to the witness to that event (i.e., the Scriptures, or their proclamation), then how can a person know she reliably can communicate about the Word of God? As Barth says, Apart from the witness itself, all that [the Church] can have is the recollection and therefore again the expectation bound up with it. It is in its recollection and expectation that it is the witness of divine revelation, and Scripture is Holy Scripture. The Church has no control or power over what may lie between, over the event that this witness is the witness of divine revelation not only in recollection and expectation, but here and now. (CD I/2, 482)

So, if our “knowledge of this being and event does not justify us in thinking and speaking of them as though they were under our control and foresight” (CD I/2, 527), then what may we presume about the inferences and judgments we must make from our past memories of what we thought is the Word of

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God? What is “free” about decisions in such a case when our speech cannot be understood to regularly express revelatory knowledge? More fundamentally, when does the Church know that God has decided to act and make God’s presence known in the Scriptures? While conceding that the later Protestant appeal to the infallibility of Scripture pushes us in the direction of idolatry, what prevents our language here from losing relevance in sheer ignorance of its application? I don’t believe Barth can answer these questions because he doesn’t provide any constancy to our participation in the knowledge of God. Finally, we should consider Christ’s role in bridging the gap between human and divine realms. For Barth, God is objectively known in the person of Jesus Christ. In what have been called the “depth” and “breadth” dimensions of the analogia relationis, Jesus plays essential roles. In the former, Jesus is the target of an original source. Jesus’s being-in-act is a love that is totally directed toward his fellow-humanity as their savior, and this has its original archetype in the love between the Father and the Son. Jesus is the true imago dei as the one who determines himself to reconcile sinful humanity to himself in obedience to the Father. In the latter, Jesus is now the source for a human target. Jesus’s encounter with humanity, his being for his fellow-humanity is the model for which human beings are supposed to be in encounter with one another. That means that both their natural state of being with one another (the human covenant partnership), and their obedience to God in faith (their covenant with God), are in analogy to Jesus’s humanity perfectly doing both. Thus, the human situation is one of an “analogy in analogy”—God’s love is known through Christ’s analogized love for humanity, and that analogized love is analogized further in our encounter as covenantpartners with one another and God in imitation of Christ’s love. What is one to make of this? Notice again that there is an issue of irrelevance, as we have seen already with the analogia entis accounts: the analogia relationis comes up short when it comes down to communicable expressions. First, what can be understood as proportionate between the love of God for Godself and the love of humanity for each other in God in imitation of Christ? Our own acts appear to be radically dissimilar from the acts of God, so what about the two loves can be rendered similar? What is it about the “encounter” between God’s intra-Trinitarian persons, God and humanity, and humanity in general that translates across all three? For a second issue, if we can suppose that love involves some sort of activity, or some sort of service to others as Christ has so served humanity, then what allows us to communicate that activity? For instance, I may do an act of service for the poor, thinking this is an imitation of Christ’s act of service for the poor, but what can I say about these two acts that make them mutually commensurate? What does the act produce that renders God’s love intelligible to me? Further, if these terms are couched in the language of freedom, in a happening that can be supplied

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no rational basis other than its conferral by grace, then what is an analogy to loving in freedom? At the act’s conclusion, there seems to be the presumption that we can trust we are obeying in love as Christ loved us, but the attempt to provide an interpretation or intelligible rendering of what the character of that love is seems to be stopped dead in its tracks, since that would require some means of conceptualizing a harmony between creaturely acts and divine act. Thus, Christ does not appear to make a cognitive bridge at all. We act without understanding; do without comprehending. THEOLOGICAL DEFENSES OF BARTH’S ANALOGIA FIDEI Barth is not without his defenders, of course. There is a strain of scholarship that sees Barth’s analogia fidei as being an entirely adequate account—or basis of an account—for grounding theological language. But, as we shall see, many of these accounts have a common problem: they provide theological answers to problems that are decidedly empirical and philosophical. In other words, proponents of Barth’s analogia fidei tend to merely rephrase Barth’s dialectical claims to defend its rationale; however, this effort, as will be shown, doesn’t add anything to the analogia fidei’s explanative potential for intelligible Godtalk. I’ll look briefly at two such defenses and then provide a more thorough treatment of an account that combines Barth’s approach synthetically with a similar approach. What I hope to show my reader is that these re/constructions merely add to a toppling edifice without resetting the foundation. Defense via Rearticulation—Diller and La Montagne The first instance of this sort of theologizing is in Kevin Diller’s Theology’s Epistemic Dilemma (2014). Diller, in a section titled “The Problem of Analogical Predication,” offers a retelling of the Barthian account of analogy: “The key qualification for Barth is that successful analogy is only made possible by divine self-revealing.”25 That self-revealing, quoting Barth, is “of analogy, of similarity, of partial correspondence and agreement” (CD II/1, 227). This is supposed to enable knowledge of God because, instead of some “human perception of the precise range and sense of the analogical relation, God himself provides cognitively what human knowers cannot provide themselves.”26 To attempt to make this clear, Diller says he’ll show “how this goes for specific analogues,” like “reconciliation, fatherhood, and personhood”; however, he provides no elucidation of what “the active role taken by the object of knowing to illumine [Godself] in reference” is.27 Instead, Diller opts to use

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Barth’s language of “invitation,” “exaltation,” or “sharing” in God’s truth, which doesn’t pinpoint what proportional similarity those metaphors are supposed to capture. There is no identifying what that cognitive something is, only that God self-interprets God’s self in whatever way it is.28 These terms are themselves analogical variants and relying on them to elucidate the matter only compounds the problem of intelligibility via a reductio. God is “paradigmatic reconciliation, fatherhood, and personhood,”29 but without any particular sense that these terms ought to carry, one can’t meaningfully discriminate them from each other or anything else. Thus, contra Diller, I do not see how repeating unexplained metaphors gives “greater clarity” to the “propositional or cognitive content of revelation.” They are merely unassociated symbols for I-know-not-what. That one can go on and say, as a result, “we receive a knowledge of the referent, God himself,” is quite befuddling. For another defense of this kind of theologizing, though with a mathematical twist, we return to La Montagne. La Montagne attempts to defend Barth’s use of the notion of Aufhebung in his dialectic as an instance of a three-valued logic. As he takes it, Barth’s use of Aufhebung is a sort of synthesis that “does not change [the] truth values [of the thesis and antithesis] but does have a logical value in which the thesis and the antithesis are no longer statements that exclude each other’s truth” (BR, 162). La Montagne says that it is “not formally impossible to develop some sort of rigorous logical description of such ways of thinking” that involves more than merely “true” or “false’ two-valued logic. A third value, he says, can be seen as doing what Barth is implicitly supposing in his notion of Aufhebung. Such a value is operative in the analogia fidei by “simultaneous affirmation and negation of a concept under the judgment of God [that] reconstitutes it so that it is able to function positively on a higher plane” (BR, 163). Such a reconstitution is an “indicator that here God has acted and transformed the meaning of regular human statements” (BR, 164). But, there are a number of problems here. First, rendering the dialectic as a three-valued logic gets us no nearer to comprehending what that logic should relay to us. If one were to develop such a logic, how does the ordinary Christian who is not a sophisticated logician or mathematician make sense of this third value? How would any Christian before the invention of such a logic do so? Second, if Christians did become able to understand this logic, who is to say that the “formal possibility” is itself how God actually discloses revelation? Why not an infinite-valued logic? Third, what can be provided to show that this is a tenable approach in any normal area of discourse? La Montagne doesn’t provide any real-world examples of how that logic works, but instead alludes nondescriptly to how “natural language tolerates ambiguity, fuzziness, and even contradiction without losing meaning” (BR, 165). Fourth, La Montagne simply presumes that a two-valued logic isn’t sufficient

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for an object that is “at least infinite”—but, how can La Montagne think that “infinity” is itself subject to the three-value logic? Finally, if La Montagne is ultimately successful in relaying the intelligibility of Barth’s claim, insofar as it offers us some cognitive content as to how intelligible God-talk works, how would that not break the Kantian division between empirical concepts and divine revelation that Barth set up as his philosophical starting point for theologizing in the first place? And, in comprehending God’s activity under such a logical class, how would that not transgress simplicity? In other words, La Montagne’s efforts to make intelligible the dialectic just further entrenches him on enemy lines: the whole point is that a rational explanation can’t be forthcoming for the dialectic of revelation and reason. Thus, I submit, these are instances of theological claims under the guise of a logical explanation: from what I can tell, La Montagne is offering mathematical information without any intelligible purchase on the problem of God-talk—or, at least, none that he relays to his readers. Defense via Supplementation and Update—Spencer through Jüngel An approach that sees Barth’s analogia fidei as an adequate basis for theological language, but that needs revision through other theological voices, is Archie Spencer’s The Analogy of Faith (2015).30 Therein, Spencer produces what could be considered a tertiary iteration of Barth’s analogia fidei: by synthesizing Barth’s primary iteration of the analogy of faith with Eberhard Jüngel’s secondary iteration of that same broad approach (what he calls the “analogy of advent”), Spencer provides a “Christological analogy of faith” that can adequately address our concern with theological language. Before getting to Spencer’s account, however, I’ll briefly summarize Eberhard Jüngel’s “analogy of advent” as we find it in Sections 17 and 18 of God as the Mystery of the World (1983).31 From the outset, Jüngel is interested in an account of analogy that can preserve both the idea that God is the unconditioned mystery of the world and the idea that God has revealed Godself as self-communicative love—in other words, Jüngel is “seeking . . . a doctrine of analogy which is appropriate to the gospel” (GMW, 261). What he finds in the “metaphysical tradition,” stemming primarily from Aquinas, is an insurmountable barrier to this effort since they have ascribed to God the meaning of the unknown, unconditioned source of the known world; therefore, such a tradition denies God’s accessibility (GMW, 277-78). This, Jüngel thinks, is the output of the tradition’s combining the analogy of attribution with the analogy of proportionality: on the one hand, God is given the name of the “unknown” that the world depends on (i.e., attribution), while, on the other hand, the relation of dependence

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known within the world is one pointing only to that between the world and God (i.e., proportionality), but not to anything intrinsic to the divine being that is absolutely unknowable (GMW, 277). Thus, Section 17 closes with the judgment that such an account will never allow God to be incarnate—and so knowable—in Jesus Christ, which should make us doubt “the very premises of the metaphysical tradition.” In response, Jüngel thinks what is needed is an analogy of advent. Within it, “one must understand analogy as an event which allows the One (x) to come to the Other (a) with the help of the relationship of a further Other (b) to even one more Other (c)” (GMW, 285). This produces a riff on the form of the Aristotelian ratio: “x ⟶ a = b : c” (GMW, 295). And what is the “event” wherein God (x) comes (⟶) to the human being (a) and allows the worldly relations (b : c) to bear the analogical correspondence for intelligible God-talk (GMW, 287)? Jüngel answers: the gospel—that is, “the good news of Jesus Christ” that proclaims that God has made Godself accessible in human language in the person of the incarnate Son. The speaking of the gospel then, for Jüngel, is to express an identity between speech of its content and the event of its content,32 for this is the power of “divinity’s own humanity” self-revealed in the “word of the cross” (GMW, 287-288). That self-revealing is not the result of a capacity in language, but of an “alien possibility” introduced by God’s revealing power (GMW, 289). This produces an inversion of the Fourth Lateran Council’s pronouncement: “the difference between God and [human beings], which is constitutive of the essence of the Christian faith, is thus not the difference of a still greater dissimilarity, but rather conversely, the difference of a still greater similarity between God and [human beings] in the midst of a great dissimilarity” (GMW, 288). But, lest we think that our words produce a simple identity relation between their use in the world and their use of God, the event of the incarnation itself reminds us that the relationship must be an analogy, for though the event of incarnation preserves the greater similarity, it also proclaims that Jesus is both true God and true man, and so preserves the dissimilarity. Thus, Jüngel states that Jesus is the “parable of God,” which is the “fundamental proposition” that is necessary for any hermeneutic about God’s communicability (GMW, 288-289). Now having the crux of Jüngel’s contribution—and recalling the expository account of Barth earlier—we can now take a look at Spencer’s synthetic account. Spencer breaks this down into “three ways in which God, in the Bible, corresponds to us, and we to him, in Jesus Christ” and so makes possible theological discourse: an analogy of participated Word, performative Word, and parabolic Word (AF, 309). The first two seem to have a primarily Barthian lineage, while the latter is Jüngel’s contribution to Spencer’s view. With regard to the analogy of participated Word, Spencer holds that the “God-human correspondence” participates in the triune relational life because

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it is established by Jesus Christ “the Word as electing God,” and not by any God-given potency in human beings (AF, 328). Working primarily from John 13-17—and Barth’s guiding theology of election—the election of Christ’s humanity in the “pretemporal beginning” for obedience to the Father’s will to be for human being is revealed in the incarnate Word, and Christ’s disciples analogically participate in God because of that elected humanity within which they are included (AF, 330-31). But, again, that inclusion does not bestow on them a capacity for moving upward, as it were, for the revelation is one received not taken—one defined and determined before time, not open for human manipulation (AF, 334). A number of consequences follow upon this: as the Son’s humanity is loved in God’s election, so also are the disciples loved; as the Son is not of this world, so also are the disciples; as the Son is in the Father, so also are the disciples in the Father; as the Father and Son are united and this shows their glory, so also does the unity of the disciples show God’s glory; and, as Jesus proclaimed good news, so also his disciples should obediently do so (which suggests, then, the possibility for speech to be in participation) (AF, 331-32). So then, due to God’s election of Jesus Christ for salvation, “our participation means our fellowship with Jesus Christ of Nazareth in the full range of human experiences that his life represents for us” (AF, 316). As an analogy of performative Word, Spencer turns to look head-on at the possibility of human witness to divine speech. For him, language is a performance used “to reflect the drama of the divine in the order of salvation” (AF, 339). It serves to address us so that we understand our place in the cosmic drama of salvation, but also so that we may address others as “responsible agents” acting in obedience (AF, 340). Using theological resources from the prologue to John’s gospel, the point here is that the Word of God encompasses and grounds the human witness as an analogous and finite speechact to its own eternal speech-act (AF, 357). Outside of that Word—Jesus Christ—the analogy is not possible, and the mediation between God and humanity is without foundation (AF, 360, 365). The “ordinary modalities of witness, knowing and sensory intuition” are miraculously transcended in Jesus’s expression of God as primary witness, and it is “the very power and possibility” of human repetitions or narrations that analogically perform the secondary witness to that expression (AF, 368, 371). So, the analogy of performative Word has this one end: to make known “in every instance” Jesus Christ as the Word of God (AF, 372). Moving finally to analogy as parabolic Word, Spencer draws definitively from Jüngel to make sense of the “problem of how ‘word-deeds’ may reflect, in real terms, this coming to speech on the part of God” (AF, 373). In that the analogy of advent posits that “divinity fundamentally possesses its own humanity, and that the incarnation is the historical instantiation of this reality

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as revealed knowledge,” this yields the notion that Jesus is himself God’s parable (AF, 374). And, as Jesus is this parable that embodies the similarity and dissimilarity as the God-man, so he also makes human language a site of revelation in the event of the gospel, or the “coming of the Word of God”; this enables speech acts of our own about God “possible and meaningful” (AF, 374-75). However, not all speech-act forms are equal with regard to the revelatory; in particular, parables (unsurprisingly) are the most exemplary because they don’t rely on static conceptualizations, but are rather able to produce narratives that create new understandings for its hearers that break the bounds of regular forms of discourse by “surpass[ing] direct speech with a greater capacity to concretize transcending principles or ideas” (AF, 377378). Jesus’s parables instantiate just this kind of relation, and so the “x ⟶ a = b : c” form: “The kingdom of God (x), unknown in the world and not even knowable within the world’s terms, relates itself to the world (a) in a relationship which in the world corresponds to the way things happen [b:c]” (AF, 379). But, this disclosure of God’s coming to language is not only Jesus’s to make: it is “also a capacity given to all such storytellers.” As such, the coming of God in language is not inherently confined to Jesus’s parabolic speech, but can be repeated in our own parabolic speech. Such constitutes the main characteristics of Spencer’s account. In terms of problems, he seems to merely be continuing the Barthian tradition of replacing floorboards when the house’s foundation is crumbling. In other words, Spencer’s analysis of the “speakability of God” is never able to penetrate into the formal concern for how speech of God is actually intelligible; instead, he opts to theologize the problem, which is operative on a different level than— and one contingent upon—the level of cognition. In so doing, he succumbs to the same criticisms of the Barthian program within which he may be categorized: the further explication of the analogia fidei via an analogy of advent is just further down a path of irrelevance. Truly, I think that Spencer (through Jüngel) gives more concreteness to that analogy by positing something more adequate in the form of the parable, but this is like scraping off the floor lacquer in order to get to the wood of the floor boards: it still says nothing about the foundation of the house. The reader still doesn’t know what about the parable is supposed to be anchoring the greater similarity that Jüngel posits, or how this doesn’t run into problems with simplicity (and the other divine predicates, in general). What, we may ask, about any specific kingdom parable illuminates the similarity of God to human beings? If we can capture that cognitively, must we not wonder about the adequacy of the resulting concept, or story, or metaphor, or image, and so on? God may “come” to language, but we still need some determinate effects to answer that God has come here or there.33 For my part, I can’t see how Spencer makes this more intelligible than Barth does. Further, this is merely in respect to the reception of the parabolic; the question

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of how Christian storytellers may theologize themselves in a parabolic mode that is not mere repetition of Jesus’s parables is never addressed. All this is to say that, I think, Spencer’s problem is a failure to think empirically or with reference to signification. Spencer’s focus, like that of Barth’s, seems to be about setting up a different mode of apriorism: one that begins with a Scriptural hermeneutic wherein the questions it posits are the only ones that seem to matter, and that curtails the question of how that Scripture and its messages are actually interpreted, or how interpretation works in the world of our experience. Spencer can be theologically satisfied because he has pinpointed and centralized a person and mode of discourse that other traditions have not; however, here the problem appears in even sharper relief: what about Jesus as the parabolic Word is significant for similarity? What about our performance bears the similarity to God in Christ when our regular modalities of “knowing and sensory intuition” are transcended? What is really intelligible about the “full range of experience” that Jesus Christ’s life represents to us that we call participation? From what I can tell, Spencer’s account is no advancement over Barth’s in this area. Thus, to tie up this section, we should again ask ourselves a basic question: can the analogia fidei give us reasons to think that Christians– whether in public, academic, private, ecclesial, or whatever context—use theological language intelligibly? That is, can, on this account, Christians understand what they read about God in Scripture or hear in the church, and can they do that well enough to make inferences and creative use of speech about God? The answer is an un-dialectical “No”—if there is no empirical content that is somehow commensurate with God’s self-revelation for the person to think about, then there is no meaningful signification to be cognized. Barth can appeal to a “miracle of grace,” but this adds nothing to make God-talk more intelligible. Human beings rely on determinate content to communicate and understand, and Christians must presuppose that their God-talk has conceptual overlap with the world they inhabit; otherwise, we have empty words, flatus vocis. CONCLUSION: ASSESSING THE ACCOUNT ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES Altogether, then, I believe we can discern two fundamental problems with Barth’s analogia fidei through our earlier critique. First, the dialectical nature of Barth’s take on God’s simple being, God’s self-revelation, and the use of human knowledge prevent us from securing any common or proportionate variable that allows us to make intelligible statements about God. Secondly, Barth’s efforts to ground our language use on the acts of faith, free decision,

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and the covenant partnership are exercises in irrelevance if applied to the question of its intelligibility. From both, it appears that we are implicitly prevented from securing an understanding of the very words God decides to use to reveal Godself. And, a fortiori, we are prevented from doing the work of theological reflection, which requires inferential judgments, critical conceptualization, and creative interpretation. We may thus return to the seven guidelines, once again, and offer the following evaluation as to how the analogia fidei coheres with them: 1. Determinate vertical and horizontal relations must be secured for intelligible analogies: Barth consistently denies conceptual similarity between the divine and creaturely realms, and rejects the notion that any empirical (read “natural”) datum can overlap with the divine nature. As such, both vertical and horizontal relations that are required for intelligible proportions between analogans and analogate are eliminated. For all that Barth tries to say about our language “participating” or being elevated to God’s truth by God’s grace, this does not make it any more intelligible for us. Saying that a proposition I don’t understand is “true of God” doesn’t help me if I can’t identify comparable meanings in my regular use of language. 2. Similarity is multivalent, and discerning those valences is crucial for discovering the strength of an analogy: The senses in which our words are similar to God are incomprehensible for Barth, full stop. If that is the case, then the valences cannot be conceptually distinguished. Therefore, the strength of a particular analogy cannot be ascertained. Is God’s love better understood as that between a parent and a child, or between a king and his country? This can’t be determined, or critically evaluated, if we don’t have a sense for what is similar. 3. An analogy should aim for structural isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence in its features: As with the other accounts, simplicity prevents any strict isomorphism between attributes of God and creatures. But, Barth’s dialectic between multiplicity and simplicity adds the complication that even negating the isomorphism can’t be properly determined. This makes an apophatic approach more intelligible than a dialectical one, in a sense, since that method at least determinately denies some sense. 4. Determining the association is important both for distinguishing more or less relevant similarities, and for clarifying analogical relatedness of homologous symbols: Barth’s Christocentrism may appear to be helpful here in the form of the analogia relationis being anchored in Jesus Christ; however, since a mode of participation is never determined, but simply asserted, there isn’t an opportunity to figure out what the nature

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of the empirical association in Jesus Christ might be. Therefore, its relevance cannot be determined. 5. Inferential potency affects the mapping procedure’s cogency and needs to be assessed: As has been mentioned throughout this section, Barth may provide us with a rationale for how we might passively receive the Word of God without understanding it as a result of faith by the gift of grace. But, that is a far cry from the sufficient requirements for making judgments about the Word of God heard and so communicating it to our fellow human being apart from its rote repetition. Even less ought we to presume to take those analogies of divine language to justify any creative extrapolation, like that required in the constructing of dogmatic statements. 6. Regarding the horizontal and vertical relations, successful analogies will require compensation by the other paired relation if one relation is weak: If Barth’s claim is that God’s being is incomprehensible, and that there is no proportionality between God and creatures, then clearly he will have to accentuate some associative connection between God and creatures. However, as was pointed out in (4), the association that establishes faith is never explained. Further, if the association is itself going to be intelligible, then the target of the association still requires assignment to a category. So, for instance, we could say that the disciples’ brute association with Jesus allowed them to receive his love, but, without a way to cognize that love, the feeling remains unintelligible and incommunicable. Similarly, the act of free human decision may be considered to be like that of God’s, but we need some further explanation as to how it is or how the purposes of that freedom are commensurate (along with a reason to exclude that freedom from the conditions of simplicity). 7. Familiarity with vertical and horizontal features of source and target is contingent on empirical data: Barth’s strict espousal of an ontological divide, and the paradox of God’s involvement and self-disclosure with human beings, offsets any attempt at familiarizing oneself with vertical relations contingent on types of phenomenal associations, or horizontal relations contingent on types of similarity. Indeed, it is antithetical to Barth’s whole project to suggest that the natural world is strictly illuminative of the relation we have to God through Christ. This is not to say that there might not be a role for “natural revelation” after being gifted with knowledge of God, but it certainly is not determinative of that knowledge’s character. In summary, given the inability of Barth’s account to meet the guidelines of analogy set in chapter 2, the analogia fidei also cannot afford us pragmaticistically intelligible language about God. First, the analogia fidei does not

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allow human minds to produce distinct conceptual effects of who God is; second, since there are no conceptual effects to be cognized consistently, there is no way to apply those concepts to our practical conduct. NOTES 1. For an extensive study on the development of Barth’s thinking with regard to analogy, see Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (New York: T&T Clark, 2010). 2. Thus, I agree with Phillip Rolnick’s assessment that “Barth’s early polemic against analogia entis is clearly a misunderstanding.” It’s not that the analogia entis grasps something common between humanity and God, “the problem was that it kept them too distant, thereby worsening the aporia in which the tradition found itself.” See Phillip Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 233–234. 3. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/1, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975). Hereafter, “CD” in text, with volume numbers following. 4. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Pres, 1992), 161–167. 5. For Barth’s response to Gottlieb Söhngen’s take on the analogia entis, which espouses the notion that the analogia entis is subordinated to an analogia fidei, and Barth’s refutation that it does not represent well the Roman Catholic consensus (though Söhngen’s analogia entis is a more palatable form of theological analogy), see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. II/1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 81–83. 6. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957). 7. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960). 8. D. Paul La Montagne, Barth and Rationality: Critical Realism in Theology (Eugene: Cascade, 2012). Hereafter, “BR” in text body. 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A320. 10. Bruce McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008, 111, quoted in La Montagne, Barth and Rationality, 107. 11. As with chapter 4, for the sake of adequacy to the original German Mensch or Menschen the German writers use, and in the spirit of universality with which texts like these are meant, I switch out the English “man” or “men” for “human being” or “human beings,” which can also be considered synonymous with “person,” or “people,” respectively. 12. Roger White points out that Barth’s informal description of analogy here shows he is “not at home in the technicalities of discussions of analogy.” Such as

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account “does not obviously relate to traditional discussions of analogy,” and his use of Quenstedt shows that “he has merely misunderstood many of the key terms in the debate, such as the analogia proportionalitatis.” See White, Talking about God, 153. 13. Johnson, Karl Barth, 202–203. 14. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Volume III/1, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1958). 15. Johnson, Karl Barth, 216. Though it should be noted that I think Barth would have issues with Johnson’s interpretation that the correspondence means humans acting in imitation of Christ to the extent of saying their being is “for” other human beings as well. Barth is clear that human beings cannot be “for” each other the way Christ was, but that they remain “with” one another. He instead speaks of a “mutual assistance”—an “actively standing by the other” that cannot begin to reach Jesus’s act of “representing” his fellow-humanity (CD III/2, 262). 16. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. IV/3 (T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1961). 17. Johnson, Karl Barth, 225. 18. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. II/2, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1957); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. IV/1, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1957). 19. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. III/3, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1960). 20. Augustine, De Trinitate, Bk. VI, Ch. 4 in CD, II/1, 323. 21. Such a move to “transcend contrasts” seems to be consistent with theology influenced by German idealism in general. Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, wants to deny simplicity as a merely negative trait that opposes God to any notion of matter or parts of God, and take it instead as that which “ensures that nothing shall be adopted which belongs to the sphere of contrast and opposition.” See Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. Paul Nimmo. (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), §56. 22. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol IV/4, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1960). 23. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol IV/2, ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (T&T Clark, 1960),, 37, 52. 24. White, Talking about God, 163–164. 25. Kevin Diller, Theology’s Epistemic Dilemma: How Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga Provide a Unified Response (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 247. 26. Diller, Dilemma, 247. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 248. 29. Ibid., 249. 30. Archie Spencer, The Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015), Hereafter, “AF” in text body. 31. Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983). Hereafter, “GMW” in text body. 32. To speak of an “identity” is to say more than, as Rolnick writes, an “announcement or pointer to some greater reality” for Jüngel. Rather, “The being of God is in

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the Word and is to be confronted and known directly in the Word. Human speech about God, analogy, is to be a correspondence to this event of arrival, saying yes where God has already said Yes.” See Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities, 289. 33. I recognize that Spencer takes John Webster’s critique of Jüngel on the danger of over-elevating the parabolic at the loss of other modes of speech as correct; however, he does little to elucidate why this is important besides stating the importance of freeing such modes of speech for “bringing God to speech” (AF, 384).

Part III

THE PEIRCEAN ALTERNATIVE FOR THEOLOGICAL ANALOGY

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Peirce’s Philosophy and Intelligibility

INTRODUCTION So far, we have the following results. In chapter 2, we saw that there were some general guidelines for successful analogies. Chapters 3 through 5 attempted to demonstrate that major approaches to theological analogy have fallen short of these guidelines, rendering God-talk that would subsist on their analogical models unintelligible. The models’ failings appear to be oriented around a pervasive dissonance caused by classical metaphysical categories, in the form of essentialism and dualism. That dissonance has produced a number of further issues, including: (1) the opacity of the concept of “participation” that is essential to all views (whether relative to a notion of being, syntactic framework, or divinely disclosed relation); (2) the baselessness of theological inference; and (3) the ultimate irrelevance of Jesus Christ as a bridge between God and creatures. My judgment is that these problems will be solved neither by slight modification of the analogical framework at play, nor by altering the particular relation that is supposed to be anchoring it (whether love, freedom, being, etc.). I believe that the conception of theological analogy needs to be rethought from the ground-up, and I mean that in two senses. In one sense, theological analogy needs to be construed in a radically different way than it has by these influential proponents: it needs an approach that is not beholden to the classical metaphysical picture. In another sense, and as an empirical approach suggests, moving from the “ground” to “up” is a physical metaphor for the direction of inquiry that must be restored if we are to obtain cognitive purchase on the problem of theological analogy: the inquiry must start from the immediacy of experience, and then project to the theological object. This must not be reversed—the errors of the previous accounts have demonstrated 161

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the insuperable problems for intelligibility when attributes are dogmatically ascribed to a subject with a priori necessity. Although such a methodological suggestion may make theologians uncomfortable, I hope to show that it is required to accurately understand how theological language—or signification of any sort—works. And, further, I hope to show in the next chapter that such an approach is not antagonistic toward Christian faith and confession. In my limited estimation, I see no better figure for rethinking theological analogy from this direction than from the work of one who sought to understand “the constitution of the universe” on the basis, and permission, of “the methods of science,” and utilize “all that ha[d] been done by previous philosophers” for that task (CP 1.7. c. 1897): the American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).1 Peirce’s achievements are many,2 his influence wide,3 and I can’t begin to do justice to the whole of his philosophy in a single chapter, much less the course of developments that led to its mature form; however, a focused examination of his architectonic philosophy—especially his logic and metaphysics—from the lens of intelligibility will be the kernel for the constructive account in the following chapter. My aim is that the elements laid out in this chapter will be shaped and molded into a view that can sufficiently articulate the intelligibility of God-talk through the analogia signorum—the “analogy of signs”—in the next. But, also, I trust that the theologian who is willing to open-mindedly examine Peirce’s architectonic will find much that is valuable within it for her own theological endeavors. The chapter has six major parts. First, I will examine Peirce’s empirical methodology and the rationale for his program. It will highlight some broad insights of Peirce’s approach to inquiry and also provide a general idea of his motivations for it. Second, I will provide an overview of Peirce’s architectonic—that is, how the scientific disciplines are interconnected and have a certain epistemic order to them. The third section will deal with Peirce’s conception of mathematics, particularly the subbranch called “mathematics of logic.” The fourth section will deal with Peirce’s phenomenology, with a special emphasis on the three universal categories. The fifth, and most extensive, section will address Peirce’s logic or semiotic, which he subdivided into speculative grammar, logical critic, and methodeutic. The final section, and last science of the philosophical portion of Peirce’s architectonic (what he called coenoscopy), will cover his metaphysics; both the general metaphysics of Peirce’s categories, synechism, and evolutionary cosmology, and the special concern of religious metaphysics. I should also say something about my thematic approach to this chapter. Peirce’s architectonic can be addressed from many viewpoints. It is a dynamic and difficult edifice to scale, having routes of ascent varying from the ideas of evolution, inquiry, and self-control, to truth, reality, experience, and conduct.

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One could decide to approach the architectonic from any number of these perspectives, and more. For my own part, Kelly Parker’s The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought has been quite influential in my understanding of how the elements of the architectonic weave together, so much of my approach works in tandem to his.4 However, my main point of ascent up the edifice will be along the path of intelligibility—that is, I will approach each section with the question, “How do each of these disciplines inform Peirce’s understanding of how the world is comprehensible, understandable, or cognizable?” One finds that these questions are deeply rooted in his empirical methodology. SCIENCE AND EMPIRICAL METHOD To reflect adequately on Peirce’s empiricism, it is probably best to first consider his long-standing rejection of Cartesian rationalism, which is also what first gained him some academic reputation. When he was yet thirty years old, Peirce published two essays in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy: “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868). In the first essay, Peirce rejects four supposed capacities associated with Cartesianism: (1) introspection, because inferring from external facts is sufficient to account for the knowledge of our internal states;5 (2) intuition, because the objects before our consciousness—whether through sensation or imagination—seem to differentiate themselves sufficiently without some special faculty to distinguish a mode of consciousness in doing so (EP 1:21-22, 1868.); (3) the power of thinking without signs, because if all knowledge is inferred by external facts, and those facts must be represented by thinking in time, then human thought must be a constant act of interpreting (EP 1:24, 1868); and (4) a conception of the absolutely incognizable, because if a conception is derived from the judgments of experience, then something incognizable would be ruled out from entering into a possible judgment—thus, such an object with no relation to anything has no meaning. In the second essay, among the consequences of these capacities—which would be notions that Peirce would continue to pursue for the next forty years of writing—were: the rejection of nominalism; the reality of generals; the fundamental categories being the three of quality, relation, and representation; the notion of reality being co-extensive with the growing knowledge of the community of inquirers; and the semiotic nature of all modes of consciousness (EP 1:42, 47, 52-53, 1868). The above is just to provide a snapshot of Peirce’s general approach to philosophical inquiry. Though Peirce’s mind was to change much in the coming years, his basic thesis was consistent: any knowledge not having its basis in the form, cultivation, justification, and fruitfulness of experience—that is,

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of the “total cognitive result of living” inclusive of both sense cognition and interpretation (CP 7.538, undated)—is no knowledge at all. As Peirce himself aptly put it: “The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason” (EP 2:241, 1903). Importantly, this doesn’t mean that Peirce would reject what might be called innate knowledge—that is, knowledge that human beings may be individually born possessing or based on inherited traits. The point is that we cannot consider that knowledge independent of sense perception, and so raised above empirical justification or defeasibility. Thus, what is rejected is not innate knowledge, but a priori knowledge. Aaron Bruce Wilson summarizes it well: “Peirce is an empiricist in that, on his mature architectonic, no cognition expressible in the form of a proposition is epistemically independent of sense perception, so that any such cognition or proposition is subject to being refuted by perceptual judgments or by what can be correctly inferred therefrom.”6 Even mathematics, which comes in at the head of the architectonic discussed in the next section, is fundamentally an empirical science. It is so because Peirce envisioned it as an “observational” science (CP 1.240, 1902), one that is based on the practice of an inquirer manipulating geometrical diagrams to understand the connections of numbers necessary under hypothetical conditions.7 That manipulation principally occurs in the imagination, but one uses various “aids” to that observation—like paper in Peirce’s day, or computers in ours—for working out the connections.8 Thus, if even mathematics is a science that is empirically secured, and all other sciences, including philosophy, are dependent upon mathematics for their formulation, then it is clear that Peirce cannot countenance a rationalism that would support knowledge that is before any experience, much less that it could be justified apart from experience. This account of the source of knowledge penetrates into Peirce’s address of the fundamental characteristics of science. For him, it is a mistake to think some abstract, dictionary definition of science as “systematized knowledge” is adequate to what sufficiently accounts for science; even less so is it permissible to think, with the ancient Greeks, that science is essentially about “comprehension” (or epistémé), which “define[s] a thing in such a manner that all its properties shall be corollaries from its definition” (CP 1.232, 1902). The latter view, in particular, throws science into “confusion,” for it misconstrues the ideal end of science for its proper method—that is, such a view implies that the end of obtaining a proposition that can be exhaustively analyzed by the necessary conclusions about its meaning somehow also requires that what inquirers hic et nunc need to do to fully determine a proposition is to find out what is deducible from a definition’s premises.9 If this were science, then

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we could conceivably have a science of griffins or present kings of France. What is missing from these definitions, Peirce says, is that it entirely discards the practice of “living” inquirers. If we are attentive to practicing scientists, we see instead that science is “the business whose ultimate aim is to educe the truth by means of close observation,”10 and that it is characterized by an “incessant state of metabolism and growth” (CP 1.232, 1902). Science is a practice of conjecturing, extrapolating, guessing, discussing, discarding, testing, refining, and trying—in other words, it is an experiential practice (CP 1.234-235, 1902). Peirce’s conception of science, then, distinguishes itself from the dictionary option by being an empirical process; one that cannot presuppose the possession of the systematic knowledge it seeks. Indeed, frequently the scientist’s ignorance of other areas of knowledge means a holistic conception of the disciplines’ relations will escape her (CP 1.236, 1902). What the scientist hopes, further, is that her “great desire to learn the truth” will be gratified (CP 1.235, 1902). So, Peirce clearly presupposes that what is true—or, better, is real, which is what the true proposition expresses—can be an object of inquiry. More will be said on this in the section on logical critic, but for now we may point out that Peirce’s scientist is committed to what Christopher Hookway calls basic realism—that is, “the very idea [that what is true] is quite independent of what you or I may think it to be” (CP 2.55, 1902).11 The basic realist does not think that truth is about coming to a perfect understanding of our subjective social constructs, or what propositions best cohere with others. Instead, she works under the hope that there is a reality outside of herself to be discovered, and that she might get closer to discovering it than she was before her inquiry began. She, thus, commits herself to the task of learning from external, empirical realities and places no particular weight in how she thinks toward that effort, apart from the presumption that somehow what she thinks may conform to, or converge upon, that truth. Before leaving this section, I think it valuable to distinguish between Peirce’s empiricism and its classical, British form from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Besides his non-foundationalism and anti-nominalism (which we’ll come to later), the classical empiricists placed four restrictions on ideas—or what Peirce would similarly call the “phaneron,” that which is “in any way or in any sense present to the mind” (CP 1.284, 1905)—that Peirce himself did not. T. L. Short outlines these as follows: (1) whereas the classical empiricists believed ideas were passively received or impressed in sensation and reflection, Peirce allowed for an active role for the mind in, at least, making inferences about those phanera; (2) classical empiricists took ideas to be “atomistic episodes” that occurred in discrete series, whereas Peirce did not presuppose that we couldn’t have ideas of objects like continuous processes; (3) the classical empiricists presumed that ideas only had a psychological connotation or that they were only in the mind, but Peirce’s philosophy “neither

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assumes nor denies that the contents of consciousness are wholly within consciousness”; and (4) while the classical empiricists took it that ideas belonged to individual minds, Peirce left it open whether we might be able to share the same ideas.12 This is, again, merely to show the ways in which Peirce was interested in opening up inquiry to what experience can teach us, and not to place unwarranted restrictions upon it. Thus, though Peirce’s empiricism might be understood to have a similar motivation to the classical empiricists in its scientific presuppositions, the reader should be cautioned in assuming that he may be coarsely categorized as an empiricist of the traditional stripe.13 Though this has been a brief address of a vast topic in Peirce, the point is relatively simple: Peirce’s architectonic is grounded in a working scientist’s ideals of rigorous inquiry. As such, his account of what amounts to intelligibility will have to thrive in the scientist’s ever-refining process of experimentation, and that means both: (1) an account of intelligibility has to submit to the methods of science; and (2) that it has to survive those methods’ scrutiny, revealing its efficacy to the advancement of knowledge. It is with these conditions in mind that we can explore the architectonic. ARCHITECTONIC To use the language of “architectonic” is, of course, to hearken back to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which Peirce claimed to have studied in his teenage years “for two hours a day . . . for more than three years” (CP 1.4, c. 1897). In the beginning of the third chapter to the Critique’s “Transcendental Doctrine of Method,” Kant writes: By an architectonic I understand the art of systems. Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science, i.e., makes a system out of a mere aggregate of it, architectonic is the doctrine of that which is scientific in our cognition in general, and therefore necessarily belongs to the doctrine of method.14

But, unlike Kant, Peirce thinks that the “unity of the manifold of cognitions under one idea”15 that the system offers is not a determination of pure a priori reason; rather, as TL Short notes, the unity of the parts of cognition “emerges from out of those parts in the course of their development.”16 Thus, the ordered relations of cognition comprising scientific knowledge are experientially affected and evolving. Peirce’s architectonic, then, has no corner that is not empirically informed. How did Peirce come to this conclusion on the architectonic? This was primarily because of a strong opposition to prominent features of Kant’s

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philosophy. First, he found Kant’s introduction of “incognizables”—specifically, the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)—to be deeply incongruous with the efforts of science. Peirce thought it an unjustified notion because the idea of the thing-in-itself is without meaning if it is construed as something that cannot affect cognition in any way (CP 5.525, 1905). That would mean the thingin-itself can’t have any meaning itself, however we might apply categories to it. As Peirce says early on, all our conceptions are obtained by abstractions and combinations of cognitions first occurring in judgments of experience. Accordingly, there can be no conception of the absolutely incognizable, since nothing of that sort occurs in experience. But the meaning of a term is the conception which it conveys. Hence, a term [for the absolutely incognizable] can have no such meaning. (EP 1. 24, 1868)

While the Kantian would say that we have some intuition that is “determined directly by the transcendent object” (EP 1.11-12, 1868), Peirce would say that the application to it of the term “object” is to make use of categories that have already been denied meaningful use.17 That is, even an object would have to presume as constituting its intelligible meaning the dyadic relationship to a subject that distinguishes itself from something else, which makes use of the second of the universal categories (to be explained in depth later). Nor could we get away with advancing it as something that causes another thing, for causes are just more complex ideas requiring the notion of, at least, those dyadic relations. Therefore, the Kantian seems to have no way to make sense of her own fundamental conception of the thing-in-itself. But, there is hope for the Kantian, as Peirce himself knew first hand; indeed, he thinks that the Kantian “has only to abjure from the bottom of his heart the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine, and he will find himself to have become a Critical Common-Sensist [or Peircean Pragmaticist]” (CP 5.452, 1905). Second, and as was intimated in the previous section, Peirce found that the pure a priori cognition so instrumental to Kant’s project – that is, thought which was absolutely free from empirical input, necessary, and universal – didn’t exist. Rather, all elements of our concepts enter in through the “gate of perception” (CP 5.212, 1903). This determination shows up throughout his writing career: he reasoned that universal and necessary propositions are not derived from any other means than induction, which rests on experience (CP 5.223 fn2, 1868); he found mathematical propositions to be pure hypotheses made with necessary thinking, which means that they do not make apodictically certain what is the actual state of things, and therefore do not demonstrate those propositions to be true, or adequate to a matter of fact (CP

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4.232, 1902); and, while “a priori” descriptions (i.e., those not based on any particular experience) have some predictive power, they must be confirmed and recognized for their importance in a posteriori descriptions (CP 2.233, 1903). Therefore, because of the uncertain, fallible, and empirical origination of even the most abstract knowledge claims, we see the non-foundationalist character of Peirce’s architectonic: it doesn’t seek for apodictic grounds of knowledge, because Peirce recognizes the hypothetical character of the inferences that constitutes its structure. So then, having disavowed these features of Kant’s philosophy, we can move on to a reworked and improved architectonic,18 the mature form of which is contained in Peirce’s 1903 “A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic.” Its basic schema can be depicted in the figure below (Figure 6.1). Now, I am interested in the secondly ordered theoretical science: philosophy. And by philosophy, or coenoscopy, Peirce means a science that isn’t specialized, or specific to a certain knowledge base (as idioscopy is): rather, it’s the matter of the “universal experiences” that all people find familiar in “every waking hour of . . . life” (CP 1.246, 1902). Philosophy is itself broken down into three sub-branches. First comes phenomenology, then the normative sciences (esthetics, antethics, and logic), and finally metaphysics.

Figure 6.1  Peirce’s Architectonic. From CP 1.180-202, 1903; representation derived from Parker, Continuity, 37.

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This order also represents the order of logical priority or independence; thus, metaphysics is dependent on logic, logic on antethics, antethics on esthetics, and all on phenomenology. It must be said, though, that the positioning of the sciences relative to the architectonic is not intended to be indicative of how actual inquirers chronologically explore or should explore the sciences. As Parker says, it’s not meant to be a linear order of knowing; rather, it indicates the “paths of influence,” showing the conceptual dependence of the disciplines theoretically. In actual practice, there is a “complex involution” in how people learn about these disciplines, for we all come to the scientific exploration of knowledge with presuppositions of a discipline informed by those posterior and anterior to their ordering in the architectonic.19 The mathematician, for instance, never comes to mathematics without some phenomenological or metaphysical preconception—she will always have had some experience of the appearance of number, and she will have some sense of how the object of mathematics is “real” or not. It’s another question whether she is justified in holding to those beliefs, of course; however, the point remains that the means of entry, and what we carry, into the architectonic are varied. Mathematics The first, primary branch of the theoretical sciences is mathematics, and, being at the top of the architectonic, it is logically independent of all the other sciences; however, its conclusions are grounding them because every other science applies mathematics in some way (CP 1.245, 1902). Though this is not the place for a thorough synopsis of Peirce’s philosophy of mathematics, it will have to suffice to say something briefly about Peirce’s account of mathematics at its most general, and how it is essential for the determination of the three categories necessary for thought. For Peirce, mathematics is a non-positive science in that it “studies what is and what is not logically possible, without making itself responsible for its actual existence” (CP 1.184, 1903). As such, it doesn’t concern itself with what is actually true of the world, but only what is hypothetically true of it by observing “imaginary object” we construct in our minds (CP 1.240, 1902). Those conditions being set, mathematics operates as a science that “draws necessary conclusions” from them (CP 5.8, 1905); it says, if numbers proceed in this fashion (1, 2, 3, etc.), and this symbol has this function (e.g., “+”), then this must follow from these operations (e.g., 2 + 3 = 5). Importantly, it doesn’t say how it does this operation, but merely assumes it does; the former task is for logic to figure out (CP 4.239, 1902). For our purposes, it is salient that we take a look at the most independent branch of mathematics, which is also where the three universal categories are discovered: the mathematics of logic.20 Peirce hypothesized that “the

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whole organism of logic may be mentally evolved from the three conceptions of first, second, and third, or more precisely, An, Other, Medium.”21 Accordingly, reasoning itself can only occur if these elements with which the mind reasons are first in the mind. How does Peirce come to this position, and why is it these three? One particular instance in which these questions came to a head quite explicitly was when Peirce considered the notion of combination; what he found was that triadicity was necessary for thinking of this concept, and so was also requisite for thinking in general. We can construct his argument for this along three steps: (1) monadic, dyadic, and triadic relatives exhaust the irreducible forms of possible thought, and any one of these categories includes that which comes before it; (2) the conception of combination is “necessary and irreducible” in thought; and (3) since combination is a necessarily triadic relative, the mind requires triadic relatives for thought.22 First, Peirce thought about propositions and their relational elements, or relatives, according to the number of indexical sign places that a proposition possessed (CP 3.463, 1897).23 By an “indexical,” Peirce means a sign that is merely referring one’s attention to a discrete individual, without presuming a resemblance or any other conventional association (CP 2.306, 1902). A relative with zero open spaces or valences, what Peirce calls a “medad,” has no role in thought, and is probably impossible; this is because such an idea would have no relation to any other, and so have no effect on the rest of our thought (CP 1.292, 1908). A “monad” has one valence, and is something complete “without any reference to anything else.” For instance, “blue” may be said of something—but this merely points to the predicate without saying anything about its relation to another thing. With the addition of a second valence, the “dyad” introduces the notion of a character possessed “relatively to something else.” For instance, “A beside B” expresses a relation that isn’t possible apart from both A and B being involved in the proposition. Importantly, no amassing of monadic relatives will suffice to secure that relation. Finally, triadic relatives are what they are “relatively to two different things in different ways.” Significant here is that this higher complexity of relating requires “the mind’s action” (CP 2.86, 1902). For instance, “A arranges B” is a relation with an implied intentional element that cannot be reduced to dyadic relations without losing the distinct sense of an agency involved (e.g., “A beside B,” “A next to B,” “A in front of B,” and so on could not be summed to account for the arranging relation). Thus, we need another relative, C, to explain the relation between A and B: “A arranges B [by virtue of C].” Having outlined these three, further relatives can be extended indefinitely (tetrads, pentads, hexads, etc.), but, all more complex forms may be reduced to combinations of the monadic, dyadic, and triadic relatives (CP 1.292, 1908). Second, we concern ourselves with the conception of combination. With this, Peirce argues that combination is both necessary and irreducible for

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thought to occur, and he adduces an argument for each in his “The Basis of Pragmaticism in Phaneroscopy.” To the first, we must suppose that the concept of combination is necessary for us to have any “idea of a Phaneron” (EP2.363, 1905). That is, if the phaneron—that “total content of any one consciousness . .​. t​he sum of all we have in mind in any way whatever, regardless of its cognitive value” (EP 2.362, 1905)—is to be perceived, interrogated, questioned judged, or asserted, then we require an idea of combination for the compound object thought (EP 2.364, 1905). Without combination, there is no notion of a whole for the uncombined mental parts to form. To the second, we must suppose the conception of combination is irreducible, or “undecomposable.” This simply states that if combination were a reducibly compound idea (i.e., one that is joined together by two more primitive ideas), it could be found to be so. But, Peirce says, if the concept of combination “would be compounded, [then] the idea of combination would enter into it as an analytic part of it.” Thus, even to analyze the possibility of an idea having multiple elements is to depend on an idea of combination at work among the elements. Ultimately, we simply can’t escape the notion of combination for thinking. Third, we need only make the connection that combination is a triadic notion, and Peirce says just that: “[t]his idea [of combination] is a triad; for it involves the idea of a whole and of two parts” (EP 2.364, 1906). Thus, it is a simple matter to conclude that the notion of composition itself reveals the necessity of some triadicity requisite for thought (or, at least, the kind of thought that humans have). But, the inference here clearly has grand implications for the rest of our thinking: if all cognitive activity about relations— even the monadic and dyadic relatives mentioned earlier—presupposes combination with other relata, then thought’s” whole world [is] of triadic relations (CP 8.283, 1904). For instance, even the notion of the simple quality of “blue” presupposes a mind interpreting the quality to itself as such (but this will be elucidated further in the section on speculative grammar). Though much more could be said here to support triadicity in the mathematics of logic (particularly about Peirce’s demonstrations in his account of infinitesimals),24 we shall have to proceed on to the next branch of Peirce’s architectonic, phenomenology, to see how possible orders of thought play out in our actual experience. Phenomenology In 1903, Peirce delivered seven lectures at Harvard University on the topic of pragmatism. Therein, he is chiefly interested in defending the truth of his pragmatic maxim that we already encountered in chapter 2. He restates the maxim from his 1878 article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” as follows: “consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings we

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conceive the object of our conception to have: then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conceptions of the object” (EP 2.135, 1903). But truth, Peirce says, is an affair of logic, or the science of “how we ought to think” (CP 2.52, 1902). And, if we have something we ought to be doing, then that conduct is dependent on antethics. We need merely to think again about the architectonic to see where Peirce is going with this. If antethics is dependent on what is appealing about the good we do, then antethics is likewise dependent on esthetics. “But,” Peirce says, “before we can attack any normative science, any science which proposes to separate the sheep from the goats, it is plain that there must be preliminary inquiry which shall justify the attempt to establish such dualism” (EP 2.143, 1903). Thus, we must investigate the only positive science that is not itself concerned with drawing normative distinctions, but only with describing “what it sees,” and what one finds to be common in that act of describing. In other words, if we intend to understand what ought to be seen as beautiful, good, and true, then we will need to first give expression to what we actually experience. Therefore, we need phenomenology. As a positive science, phenomenology is a form of inquiry that “seeks for positive knowledge, that is, for such knowledge as may conveniently be expressed in a categorical proposition” (CP 5.39, 1903). For Peirce, the categorical proposition is the joining of a subject (“that concerning which something is said”) and a predicate (“that which is said of [the subject]”) (CP 4.41, 1893). In English, this usually involves the use of the copula, “is.” But, unlike the other positive, normative sciences, it doesn’t judge those propositions for truth or falsity, self-contradictoriness, or consistency—it merely looks for their perceived meaning. Thus, phenomenology could admit a categorical proposition like “A is not A” (CP 2.352, c. 1902)—granted, upon logical analysis we would find that the proposition “means too much” to be admitted as actually true (or intelligible), but the phenomenologist must simply allow whatever meaning someone derives from the proposition to be taken in for description. But, as philosophy, phenomenology does not go about its inquiry with particular interests, or to “make any special observations or to obtain any perceptions of a novel description”—it, instead, aims for the “facts of everyday life, such as present themselves to every adult and sane person” (EP 2.146, 1903). Its purpose is to find the basic “elements of appearance” that are always in our experience of phenomena. And it does not discriminate whether those elements are in our wildest imagination, are forcing themselves upon us unexpectedly in the course of our day, or are highly abstract or speculative conclusions (EP 2.147, 1903). Nevertheless, while our horizon is as broad as possible, we still require a penetrating focus for the task, thus Peirce encourages the training of three faculties of observation: (1) the artist’s

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ability to see what “stares [her] in the face” apart from conventions that might tempt her to pass over it; (2) a “resolute discrimination” to focus on a detail and follow its traces; and (3) the “generalizing power of the mathematician” that can produce what is to be fundamentally understood by the feature (EP 2.147-148, 1903). In the second and third lectures of the Harvard series, Peirce lays out his take on what the universal elements of appearance are—that is, the “simplest feature[s] that [are] common to all that comes before the mind” (EP 2.150, 1903). We begin with what he calls Firsts, and it is also the most difficult to conceptualize of the three categories. By a First, Peirce understands a sort of immediate “presentness”—a “quality of feeling” that “is such as it is, utterly ignoring everything else.” What is difficult to conceptualize about a First is that we should think of it apart from its contrast with anything. It is just simply the sense of something right before us: a color, smell, sight, or other sensation; however, distinguished from the next fundamental category, it is not the presentness of that quality right now, or in this context, or “over there,” but rather that feeling per se. I’ll say more about this in a moment, but Joseph Esposito brings together some notions that highlight the idea of Firsts for Peirce: “freshness, life, freedom, immediacy, feeling, quality, vivacity, and independence.”25 The next category Peirce calls a Second, and, distinct from the presentness of the First, it is that cognition of the “struggle” or “reaction” of one thing against another (EP 2.150, 1903). A Second is what brings a First into the world of sense perception, and they will always be together in that world due to the connective work of the Second.26 To experience a reaction in the world is also to say that it has some quality—but even the occurrence of a single quality (perhaps, the color blue suddenly preoccupying all of one’s vision) still is right there in front of you. Further, what there is to be experienced in sense perception is something that resists our ability to think it otherwise. That makes a Second the ground of what is surprising, and brings before our awareness something that is not “me,” that is “non-ego” (EP 2.154, 1903). The “expected idea” of our ego that can produce whatever quality in the imagination is “suddenly broken off” by the “Strange Intruder, in his abrupt entrance.”27 For Esposito, Seconds may allude to notions of “action, resistance, facticity, dependence, relation, compulsion, effect, reality, and result.”28 The last category, aptly and predictably named a Third, is “the idea of that which is such as it is being a Third, or medium, between a Second and its First. That is to say, it is representation as an element of the phenomenon” (EP 2.160, 1903). It is in this category that the perception can take on meaning for the perceiver.29 What has merely happened in the First and Second categories can now be represented to the self in a “perceptual judgment,” in

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which “the mind professes to tell the mind’s future self what the character of the present percept is” (CP 7.630, 1903). So, if Firsts make us aware of the qualities of the phaneron, and Seconds make us aware of those qualities in sense perception and their distinction from each other and ourselves, Thirds give us an idea “such as it is by virtue of its relations to any multitude,” and thus provides the grounding for the continuity of experience (EP 2.160, 1903).30 And, again, Esposito speaks of Thirds being evident in “mediation, synthesis, inference, representation, intelligence, intelligibility, generality, infinite, diffusion, growth and . . . conduct.”31 To pull this together into a coherent picture, consider the following mundane example: suppose that it’s late at night, and you’re lying in bed waiting for sleep to come upon you. In your bodily stillness, your mind moves from here to there, not purposefully focusing on any particular thing, on any image, sound, memory, and so on. You likely can’t distinguish between the stages of consciousness you are in as you drift between them. Then, you begin to notice, perhaps incrementally, a distinct blip that is being added to the background hum of your breath rising and falling, the insects chirping, the fan running, the wind blowing, and so on. The blip’s sound is gentle, not very obtrusive, somewhat annoying, unaggressive, percussively dull, and vaguely familiar. As it is, it is simply what it is—something to be aware of in itself. This is the blip as First. But, such a First, as said above, is never by itself. For you hear the blip (or, better, begin to hear the blip) in contrast to the sound of the wind, fan, insects, and your breath. You notice that it isn’t something that your mind is just making up as an auditory memory, but rather “there it is” and “there it is, again.” As such, it is situated in connection to other things relative to it by a “double awareness” (CP 7.625, 1903). This is the blip as Second. And, now that the quality has been felt, and experienced in the world, your mind must assign it meaning. You begin to ask yourself, “What is that? Where is it coming from? Why does it repeat as it does?” In other words, your mind is seeking for an interpretation of the event that can make it intelligible, and hopefully explain it. This is the blip as Third. The whole experience may last but a second, and you might tell yourself a simple story: “The faucet’s running.” But, the elements were all there, and necessary, for cognizing the event. Looking back to what was said in the previous section, it is clear to see how the possible forms of relatives discerned from the mathematics of logic have their analogs in the phenomenological categories. The monadic relative shows up phenomenologically as a First, for just as the monadic relative has only one valence, suggesting only something without reference to another, so also the First presents the quality in its irreducible whatever-it-is, as “something positive and sui generis” (CP 1.25, 1903). The dyadic relative corresponds to the Second, for as the dyad brings forth a notion of difference

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from and relation to another, so also the Second places the quality in the world of reaction where our mind is forced to reckon with what is not at imagination’s whim, or what is “non-ego.” Finally, the triadic relative corresponds to the phenomenological Third, for just as the triad introduces the mental element into the relations of qualities to one another, so also the Third is responsible for establishing the meaning of our experiences of related feelings and their presentations. Altogether, it will be these three elements that will make appearances intelligible to the human mind; apart from any one of them, the presentation of the world to the mind would be unintelligible, and, therefore, any aspect of the phaneron must manifest the three elements if it is to be intelligible. Thus we see the continuity of the categories in the disciplines of mathematics and phenomenology, and can expect them in the fields of the other disciplines as well. In that sense, they are properly “universal,” and Peirce will speak of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness pervading the reaches of experience in their own distinct ways. Firstness, which concerns the mere qualities and feelings of our experience, is linked with possibility or what can be a matter of our experience (CP 1.25, 1903). Secondness, which concerns the instantiation of those possibilities, is linked with actuality or what is now a matter of our experience (CP 1.24, 1903). And Thirdness, which concerns the significance of actualities, is linked with potentiality or what will or would be a matter of experience. But, here we prematurely bridge into metaphysics with these categories; so, at this juncture, we must break off until the appropriate time to explore these modes further. Normative Sciences We come now to the normative sciences, which is that branch that “investigates the universal and necessary laws of the relation of Phenomena to Ends; that is, perhaps, to Truth, Right, and Beauty” (EP 2.197, 1903). As such, it concerns how we ought to think about a given subject matter. As said before, our main interest is in Peirce’s logic, or semiotic,32 which is the theory of sign processes. But, I will say something briefly about the other normative sciences, for they give structure to the goals of logic; however, what can be said about this is already relatively little, since Peirce did not himself treat the topics thoroughly (for he was much concerned with the affairs of logic). Now, for any form of conduct, we must have some sort of aim, but it can’t be just any aim, but an ideal that is preferable in a general sense so that there may be some reasonable conformity to it (EP 2.201, 1903). That preference is predicated on the notion of a “dualism” between good and bad, or whether or not a “thing fulfills its end” (EP 2.235, 1903). Whereas in logic that dualism is between the “true and false,” and antethics it is “wise and foolish,” in

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esthetics it is “attractive and repulsive” (EP 2.377, 1906). For Peirce, esthetics concerns itself with determining what is admirable or pleasing about an ideal in itself, and the study of esthetics is about the “deliberate formation” (EP 2.200, 1903) of those ideals as embodied qualities—or “habits” (EP 2.378, 1906)—of feeling. Thus, as the first normative science, it considers that ideal “regardless of what it may lead to and regardless of its bearing upon human conduct” (EP 2.142, 1903). What is the esthetic good to be conformed to in habits of feeling? Peirce says he feels fairly “incompetent” about assessing what this might be, but he muses that, structurally, it has something to do with the perfect relations of parts to one another that produces some immediate felt quality in an interpreter (EP 2.201, 1903). But, as Richard Kenneth Atkins points out, esthetics won’t recognize an ideal of conduct to be the goal of deliberate thinking until it gets further down the normative sciences.33 Instead, esthetics discovers that the state of mind that an attractive habit of feeling procures for the mind is one of quietus, of the absence of the struggle that endures until something has attained its end.34 In inquiry itself, that state is “the agreement of the faculties of the understanding and imagination in reaching determinate concepts by which to subsume (and hence understand) reality”35—but, we could not know that state to be admirable or good without esthetics. This is why esthetics is “perhaps” about beauty: it can’t say what this is ahead of time, but it seeks the admirable in and of itself, whatever that may be. Antethics,36 as the “mid-normative science” below esthetics, is that study that takes the determination of what is admirable in esthetics and applies it to “efforts of the will” (EP 2.142-143, 1903). In other words, it concerns what “ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt,” which is “perhaps” the Right (EP 2.200, 1903). In antethics, the esthetic ideal must be constrained to what is attainable in the actual world, rather than just what might be possible. As such, it is in antethics that is offered a “theory of the conformity of action to an ideal,” but only after the formal character of an attractive ideal and its correspondent state of mind of quietus have been constrained by esthetics (EP 2.377, 1906). But, as a member of the theoretical sciences, antethics is not itself concerned with how one conforms action to the ideal, or precisely what the content of that highest good, or summum bonum, for action is; that is a matter for the more traditionally labeled ethics, which presumably belongs in the practical sciences.37 Coming finally to logic, we deal with the good and bad of things in representation, or of what is true and false (EP 2.143, 1903). If antethics is about what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt, then the logical reasoner seeks to conform to the logically good—or veracity—as “a particular species of the morally good (EP 2.201, 1903). So, as TL Short puts it, “logic is the [ant]ethics of thinking.”38 But, as a subspecies of esthetics,

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logical goodness has a “special variety of esthetic goodness that may belong to a representamen [that is, a sign-vehicle], namely, expressiveness” (EP 2.203, 1903). The task of logic, then, will be to classify these forms of expression and ascertain the extent that they can show forth their veracity. In turning now to consider the classifications that make reasoning possible, we also turn formally to semiotics—that is, “the doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental varieties of semiosis [or sign-process]”(CP 5.488, c. 1906).39 Logic/Semiotic By 1902 Peirce had come to identify logic with semiotic itself.40 As he says in Chapter 2 of the Minute Logic, “Logic is the science of the general necessary laws of signs and especially of symbols” (CP 2.93, 1902). Thus, logic can only go about its business by comprehensively dealing with the sorts of signs and their operations that occur in mental operations. The task of classifying those signs is the work of speculative grammar. Speculative Grammar. Earlier, I said that mathematics is where the categories are discovered, but it is in logic that those categories are analyzed.41 Specifically, it is in speculative grammar that semiosis is broken down into its fundamental elements and possible operations, these being, for Peirce, at base the “tri-relative influence” and “cooperation” of a representamen (or sign-vehicle), its object, and its interpretant—altogether known generally as a “sign” (CP 5.484, c. 1906).42 Thus, speculative grammar is that part of logic that may be “eminently” considered semiotic, for, as Francesco Bellucci notes, it “is not simply an analysis of the physiology of logical signs . . ., nor simply an analysis of the signs involved in those . . ., but must comprise a preliminary analysis and classification of all signs whatever.”43 To get some beginning purchase on the classification, let’s take a look at one of the ways in which Peirce describes the sign relations in a letter to William James: A [representamen] is a cognizable that, on the one hand, is so determined . . . by something other than itself, called its object . . . while, on the other hand, it so determines some actual or potential mind, the determination whereof I term the interpretant created by the [representamen], that that interpreting mind is therein determined mediately by the object. (EP 2.492, 1909)

That is, in our experience of mental activity, there is brought before the mind—whether through perception or the imagination—something of a sensible quality (a representamen), that represents some other thing (an object), in a particular way to confer some significance or meaning (an interpretant). For instance, I hear a distinct rumbling sound in my near vicinity (i.e.,

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representamen) that I take as being the forced rubbing together of a chair and the floor (i.e., interpretant), and I presume my interpretation adequately reflects the state of affairs heard (i.e., the object). In this sign, and in any sign at all, four conditions must be met in order for it to signify anything. James Liszka identifies them as such: (1) the representative condition, which means a representamen must correlate with an object, or “purport to be about something”;44 (2), the presentative condition, meaning that the representamen must correlate with the object “in some respect,” or convey the object in some sense;45 (3), the interpretative condition, which means that the sign must determine the representamen in such a way so as to make it understandable to a sign-user, translating it into an interpretant (and, thus, another sign);46 and, (4), the triadic condition, which holds that the relation between representamen, interpretant, and object is a triadic relation, an irreducible, mediating relation “through which each component gets its sense.”47 So, it is in speculative grammar that intelligibility first gains normative requirements for experiences in life: one must have the triadic interconnectedness of a representamen, interpretant, and object to successfully conceive anything. But, as we will presently see, the relations of these three get complicated quite quickly. 1903’s ten-classes of signs. In what has come to be considered a “classic of semiotics,”48 Peirce’s “Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined” (1903) attempts to present a comprehensive presentation of the possible sign classes of his basic triad of representamen, object, and interpretant. In doing so, he also depicts the basic form of semiosis. At this point in his development, he forms three trichotomies: (1) ways of being the representamen; (2) ways of relating representamen to object; and (3) ways the interpretant represents the representamen. A temporal slice of the semiotic process might be pictorially displayed as below (Figure 6.2):49 With respect to (1), the representamen must be either a qualisign, sinsign, or legisign. A qualisign is a “quality which is a sign” (EP 2.291, 1903). Such qualisigns are never disembodied, but their being embodied “has nothing to do with its character as a sign.” The feeling of “smoothness” abstracted from any particular instance is such an example. Second, a sinsign is an “actual existent thing or event that is a sign.” As an existing thing, it presupposes a qualisign that it embodies. A particular thing that is smooth is a sinsign. Third, a legisign is a “law that is a sign.” Being a law, this kind of representamen is general, or applicable across many instances and so requires sinsigns. It includes all conventional representamens, like words, formulae, or logical operations. Further, these signify through “replicas,” or sinsigns. So, the phrase “the table is smooth” is an instance of the general legisign. With respect to (2), the representamen must be related to its object as either an icon, index, or symbol. As an icon, it “refers to the object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own and which it possesses” (EP

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Figure 6.2  Semiosis in General. Derived from The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media by Martin Irvine. Used with permission.

2.291, 1903). This means that an iconic association is one through likeness, resemblance, or similarity to the object. For instance, a portrait is thought to iconically represent a person. Second, indices refer to the denoted object “by virtue of being really affected by the object.” This means that an indexical association is one through causal connection. For instance, smoke is an index of fire. However, analogous to the relationship of sinsigns to qualisigns, indices require icons to function, since smoke can’t be an index for fire unless one first perceives the representamen for “smoke” as iconic for the object “smoke.” Third, symbols refer “by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas,” meaning that the connection of representamen to object is dependent on some mental phenomenon. As an association of general ideas, it will be related through legisigns. For instance, a wedding ring refers through a cultural convention to the object of marriage. And, analogous to how legisigns require sinsigns, so also symbols require indices, since without a causal connection that establishes the existence of the wedding ring as a possible replica (through, perhaps, a goldsmith), there would be no object to represent by convention. With respect to (3), the interpretant must represent the representamen either by being a rheme, proposition, or argument. As a rheme, the interpretant does so as a “sign of qualitative possibility” (EP 2.292, 1903)—that is, it refers to the sign only for its qualities, not to assert information about an object. For instance, an unlabeled painting with various warm colors merely draws attention to the colors and shapes as such. As a dicent, one takes the interpretant

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as referring to the representamen as a “sign of actual existence”—that is, the sign should be viewed as indicating a true or false relationship between subject and predicate. Dicent symbols are also called propositions. For instance, if the painting above were labeled “The Great Chicago Fire of 1871,” then it can be interpreted as a dicent for it makes a claim about representing an actual event. Analogous to the previous two trichotomies in their ordering, dicents always involve rhemes, for qualities must be present in any claim to being a true or false state of affairs. Thirdly, delomes have interpretants that represent the representamen as a “sign of law.” In other words, it is “any conventional sign which reveals the lawlike or habitual character of its object.”50 These are also called arguments. They must be symbols for they refer to general patterns, and their object must be a “general law or type” (EP 2.293, 1903). For instance, my judgment that the picture labeled “The Great Chicago Fire of 1871” does indeed represent its object as a delome, or argument. Like the other two trichotomies, the ordered third here is also dependent on the second, and so also on the first. That is, the argument representing my judgment of the picture only presents upon the propositions that serve as its premises and conclusion. Having presented the trichotomies, Peirce then moves on to indicate all the possible signs that result from their combinations. The following table attempts to summarize these succinctly.51 To flesh out the above taxonomy, consider the following example that makes use of all these signs, though in largely descending order: I am driving in town, not strictly paying attention, when I suddenly see a man crossing the road. Now, I think to myself, “I will hit the man crossing the street if I do not stop. I do not want to hit the man. Therefore, I must stop the car I am driving” (argument). This reasoning is itself dependent on a set of facts about the world, expressed in symbolic form, that I perceive to be true and not false (propositions)—“There is a man crossing the street,” “Striking the man with my car is bad,” “I am able to avoid hitting the man,” and so on. Taking this first proposition, I say it is a “man” crossing the street because the person is in the formal dress—a suit—that conventionally is worn by a professional man, or, at least, it is that which my mind is disposed to connect such an outfit (rhematic symbol). The man in the street, as this unfolds, yells at me, “Stop!” which informs me of a demanding disposition in his person (dicent indexical legisign) at that specific instance (dicent indexical sinsign). After slamming on the breaks and allowing the man to walk the length of the crosswalk, I suddenly hear the distinct sound of a car horn behind me, letting me know there is another car (rhematic indexical legisign) at this specific place and time (rhematic indexical sinsign). Proceeding to move through the crosswalk, then, I look over to see the man gesturing at the large yellow “pedestrian crossing” sign with the classic stick figure intended to resemble

(7) Dicent Indexical Legisign

(6) Rhematic Indexical Legisign

(3) Rhematic Indexical Sinsign: (4) Dicent Indexical Sinsign: (5) Rhematic Iconic Legisign

(1) Rhematic Iconic Qualisign (2) Rhematic Iconic Sinsign

Class of Sign:

Quality Quality Fact Quality

Quality

Fact

Resemblance Connection Connection Resemblance

Connection

Connection

“Any object of experience in so far as some quality of it makes it determine the idea of an object.” “Any object of direct experience in so far as it directs attention to an object by which its presence is caused.” “Any object of direct experience in so far as it is a sign, and, as such, affords information concerning its object.” “Any general law or type, in so far as it requires each instance of it to embody a definite quality which renders it fit to call up in the mind the idea of a like.” “Any general type of or law…which requires each instance of it to be really affected by its Object in such a manner as merely to draw attention to that.” “Any general type or law…which requires each instance of it to be really affected by its Object in such a manner as to furnish definite information concerning the object.”

Represents Object to Interpretant as: Quality

Association with Object By: Resemblance

Definition:

“Any quality in so far as it is a sign.”

Table 6.1  1903 Ten Classes of Signs

(Continued)

-A knock at the door -Ringing of the phone -Demonstrative pronoun, proper name -A street cry, “Papers!” abstracted from instances

-A weathervane -A bullet hole - Photograph replica -A diagram apart from its replicas.

-A spontaneous cry

-The feeling of a color, or its mere possibility -Hardness -An individual diagram,

Examples:

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(10) Delome Symbolic Legisign (Argument)

(9) Dicent Symbolic Legisign (Proposition)

(8) Rhematic Symbolic Legisign

Class of Sign:

Association with Object By:

Convention “A sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas in such a way that its replica calls up an image in the mind which image, owing to certain habits or dispositions of the mind, tends to produce a general concept, and the replica is interpreted as a sign of an object that is an instance of that concept.” Convention “A sign connected with its object by an association of general ideas, and acting like a Rhematic Symbol, except that its intended interpretant represents the Dicent Symbol as being, in respect to what it signifies, really affected by its object, so that the existence or law which it calls to mind must be actually connected with the indicated object.” “A sign whose interpretant represents its object as Convention being an ulterior sign through a law, namely, the law that the passage from all such premises to such conclusions tend to the truth.”

Definition:

Table 6.1  1903 Ten Classes of Signs (Continued)

-A noun

-Narrative -Description -Statement

- Syllogism - Probable cause - Guess

Fact

General

Examples:

Quality

Represents Object to Interpretant as:

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someone crossing the street (rhematic iconic legisign). After acknowledging the man by that particular pedestrian crossing sign (iconic sinsign), I move along, feeling a bit angry with myself (qualisign, though instanced in me right now, so also iconic sinsign) for being so negligent. Now, it is less important to the project here that one be able to discern the role of all of these signs with skill (indeed, I am primarily interested in those bookending the ten classes, as will be seen in the next chapter); what is important to recognize is that Peirce believes the phenomenological content of experience can be formally categorized into such a system, fulfilling the earlier four conditions, and making our experience intelligible. But, the 1903 “Nomenclature and Divisions” was just the beginning of Peirce’s focused explorations of the sign classes. For more specific insights into the sign classes that will be important for the analogia signorum, we must jump ahead to 1908, when Peirce’s sign account comes to what many consider his most mature phase. 1908 sign developments. Peirce’s speculative grammar was to undergo a number of developments over the next five years, including expanding the three trichotomy taxonomy to a ten trichotomy taxonomy, synthesizing his semiotics with his pragmaticism of the mid-1900s, further dividing the interpretant into logical, energetic, and emotional interpretants, and numerous revisions of nomenclature. For my purposes, I am going to explore just three interconnected facets of the 1908 speculative grammar: (1) a description of the triadic relatives under what Francesco Bellucci calls the “third” reform of Peirce’s speculative grammar;52 (2) the directedness of the relatives concerning the formation of habits; and (3) the immediacy of perception under the third reform. In 1904, Peirce expanded his doctrine of signs to include two objects and three interpretants.53 The sign’s relation to the object (as either icon, index, or symbol) was refined to the relation to a dynamic object. The dynamic object is what Peirce described as the “really efficient but not immediately present object” (EP 2.248, 1908). That is, we may understand the dynamic object as what is really externally permanent, apart from and “independent of being represented by the [representamen].”54 This independence does not mean something non-representable, but what something is “regardless of any particular aspect of it” (CP 8.183, 1903). But, between the representamen and the dynamic object in the semiotic process is the immediate object. It is at this stage of the sign process that the particular sense of the object that the representamen conveys to the interpretant is determined, which makes the immediate object “the object as the [representamen] represents it” (CP 4.536, 1906). The trichotomy formed here will produce a sign either of a possible object, an actual object, or a necessary object;55 however, whatever representamen is produced, it is one that is based on a particular

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“idea” of the dynamic object, or a “specification” of the “manner in which the dynamical object is given.”56 But, as TL Short reminds us, that idea may be incomplete or inaccurate to the dynamic object in any number of ways.57 So, take the term “the Apostle Paul”: this development in the object now can distinguish between the Apostle Paul as an object apart from any particular representation of him (the dynamic object), and the manner in which that object is determined as an idea for the sign to represent—of a middleeastern Christian man living in the first century CE (the immediate object). The immediate interpretant can be understood as the breadth of possible meaning that the sign communicates to an interpreter. It is “the total unanalyzed effect that the sign is calculated to produce, or naturally might be expected to produce,” or, “the effect the [representamen] first produces or may produce upon a mind, without any reflection upon it.”58 Bellucci compares it to JL Austin’s illocutionary sense: it is the representamen’s particular force that it represents “as its proper outcome” to the interpreter.59 In contrast, the dynamic interpretant is analogous to Austin’s perlocutionary sense: as an utterance’s perlocution concerns what is achieved by saying something, so the dynamic interpretant is “the effect that the [representamen] de facto determines as its proper outcome.”60 Or, as Peirce says, it is the “effect actually produced on the mind by the [representamen]” (EP 2.482, 1908). The final interpretant, Peirce says, is “that which would finally be decided to be the true interpretation if consideration of the matter were carried so far that an ultimate opinion were reached” (CP 8.184, undated). To go back to the Apostle Paul, the representamen “the Apostle Paul” is a symbol of a determinate meaning written for the reader to understand (the immediate interpretant), and the way the reader actually comprehends that name may be as an idea of a man kneeling on a dirt road with scales over his eyes (the dynamic interpretant). But, both writer and reader know that they do not possess the entirety of all that could be known about the Apostle Paul (final interpretant). From such an example, we see that the semiotic process comes around nearly full circle: the final interpretant is what most accurately represents, and presumably corresponds to, the dynamic object.61 This brings us to our second point. The semiotic process has a directedness to it that moves from dynamic object to final interpretant. But, directedness presumes some sort of end; so, likewise semiosis requires some end to the sign process so that it does not continue on indefinitely. Peirce calls this end the ultimate logical interpretant, which is taken as itself necessary for the significance of signs. As Short explains, “Nothing is end-directed or purposeful that does not face the prospect of success or failure, and, hence, [semiosis] must terminate, or be capable of terminating, in something subject to success or failure – something, that is, in which the sequence of sign-interpretants can be brought to the test.”62 But, further, that directedness is not ultimately

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about enriching the concept for its own sake, but for the concept to be a habit of action.63 In other words, the ultimate logical interpretant is the outworking a concept would have on our conduct, or, more precisely, how it would govern our future activity;64 it says, “If this is true, then these are necessarily the practical bearings for my life.” This function of the sign, then, yields a terminus in purposeful action—“even if only a potential action for a possible purpose”65—for the sign-interpreting activity. In the ultimate logical interpretant is the connection between concept and external world tested and secured, and the community of inquirers reaps the conceptual fruit from any success in the hope of someday securing the final interpretant (or, what can be understood from this aspect as “the interpretant ideally adequate to the purpose for which the sign is being interpreted”66).67 Relating to the third point, the directedness of the semiotic process to fulfil a purpose means that the dynamic object must partake in this process, and it does so—says Wilson—insofar as it “over time determines an interpreter to interpret the sign as referring uniquely to it.”68 As mentioned earlier, there is a kind of “efficiency” to the dynamic object, and we may now clarify that it is the other side of the semiotic coin to the ultimate logical interpretant: for, where the ultimate logical interpretant means an end to the purpose of semiosis in action (and thus avoids an infinite progressus), the dynamic object begins that process (and thus avoids an infinite regressus). But, it might be asked, what prevents an infinite regress of sign-interpretations between sign and dynamic object? The answer here has to do with Peirce’s account of perception and indexicality. Wilson’s Peirce’s Empiricism provides an excellent analysis of this issue, to which I must refer only briefly. Wilson views Peirce’s account of perception to be one of representational direct realism: it takes perception to be a semiotic process (hence, representational); it claims that “the immediate object of the perceptual judgment is generally the real and external object itself” (hence, direct), and it takes most perceptions to be of something real and external (hence, realism).69 The second of these requires further explanation, and so we must introduce some further terms. First, a percept is a sort of “uncontrollable appearance” of something to the ego of a non-ego that combines the act of perceiving and the perceived object.70 While the percept is still a semiotic act, it is not a symbolic act of cognition, but an indexical one—that is, it involves a direct or “dynamical” connection to the perceived object, directing our attention to it.71 This is not a merely passive presentation of the object either; for the non-ego “appears as forcibly acting” on our egos involuntarily.72 But, an assertion of that object’s truth isn’t made by a percept, but by the perceptual judgment. Therein, the percept is given some propositional—and, thus, symbolic—representation uncontrollably by the ego; so, it is here that the non-ego is interpreted as some distinct thing, whether it do so truly or falsely (as the perceptual judgment

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still involves an inferential maneuver, even if unconscious).73 Its interpretation will be dependent on one’s existing belief-habits and other cognitive habits.74 These perceptual judgments serve as the “first premises” of any self-controlled reasoning activity, commencing only after the perceptual judgment is made.75 So, any sort of propositional knowledge we have at all will be predicated upon, and inclusive of, these perceptual judgments (if true).76 This brings us, finally, to the percipuum, which is “the percept as it is immediately interpreted by the perceptual judgment.”77 This is what is cognized after the perceptual judgment has synthesized the percept.78 So, while the percept indexically presents some appearance directly to our consciousness, and the perceptual judgment cognizes it into some distinct phenomena, the percipuum gives “the direct perception of distinct external object and properties.”79 The upshot for the semiotic construal of the beginning of the sign process is that the percept dynamically connects one to a perceived object that, when the perceptual judgment interprets it accurately, the immediate object is really some aspect of the dynamic object, effectively amounting to their identity in the respect signified.80 So, the percipuum endows the semiotic process with the indexical immediacy of its dynamic object when the perceptual judgment is true. Right now, I look to my left and find a sensuous something force itself upon my senses (percept), and I automatically interpret that as a blue book (perceptual judgment), a blue book that I now perceive as in my room to the left of me (percipuum). It was not some infinite series of sign-interpretation that brought the perceived object before me, but the object itself resists me, demanding my attention through the indexicality of the percept. In other words, the book’s reality will not await my imagination’s permission to be signified, but simply presents itself directly; whether I interpret that percept accurately is another question. Logical Critic. The final and most complex classification of the threefold trichotomy of the previous section was the argument, and it is this class that principally concerns logical critic, for therein it “determines the validity and the degree of strength of each kind [of argument]” (CP 1.191, 1903). It does this because only an argument is able to signify a general law, and so is “capable of communicating the content of a complete process of thought” for potential adoption as a habit of conduct.81 The “strength” of those arguments always relates to the degree to which it may be related to its proper object: logical goodness, or “Truth.”82 And, insofar as these arguments express degrees of strength in the real world—about the “Reasonableness” of that which is external to what any particular mind might intend—our own human reasoning will follow suit in regard to the correlative forms of strength. But, before we can talk about the relative adequacy of these inferences to the truth, I must say something more formally about what Peirce takes truth to be relative to sign process. Earlier we saw that Peirce’s basic realism holds

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that what is true, or real, is independent of what any individual mind thinks. But, insofar as a mind may think about the real (dynamic) object, it does so through the representation of signs, and the specific sign that denotes an instance of “conformity of a representation to its object” (CP 1.578, 19021903)—or truth—is the proposition, which was the ninth basic class of the 1903 trichotomies outlined above. This means that, regarding its logical antecedents, any judgment—or inference—made about reality is going to be mediated through these kinds of symbols, which are in turn mediated by the more basic classes of signs through their triadic constituents. But, it also means, regarding its logical consequents, that truth is also concerned—as James Liszka puts it—with the “inferential consequences of a proposition, or [how] the arguments related to that proposition . . . converge toward a certain outcome.”83 In other words, truth is about both the adequate representation of the dynamic object in its symbol as such, but also what is pragmatically elucidated in the “final and valid inferential display of that original proposition.” As such, we must enter into these inferential modes to see how they contribute to advancing toward truth. The first mode of inference is deduction, and it is also the strongest mode. In deduction, or “necessary reasoning,” we consider some “hypothetical state of things” assigned to premises and then, whatever inference we make, consider it “valid if and only if there really is such a relation between the state of things supposed in the premises and the state of affairs proposed in the conclusion” (EP 2.212, 1903). As necessary reasoning, it is also “diagrammatic”—in other words, “we construct an icon of our hypothetical state of things and proceed to observe it.”84 This hearkens back to the notion of mathematics being an observational science: similarly, deduction is fundamentally about observing some iconic representation of an object and making conclusions that must follow from given observed premises about that diagram. Liszka summarizes this procedure as such: 1. The statement of the hypothesis in general terms. 2. The construction of the diagram which is an icon of that hypothesis. 3. Observation of the diagram. 4. The determination that the relation observed would be found in every iconic representation of the hypothesis. 5. Statement of the results in general terms.85 Thus, take one of Peirce’s own favored examples of deduction: A. All the beans from this bag are white. B. These beans are from this bag. C. [Therefore,] these beans are white. (EP 1.188, 1878).

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Following the procedure: (1), One makes the statement in “A”; (2), one reconstructs—or at least imagines—a representation of “A” where, perhaps, a brown, opaque bag of beans is held in one’s hand; (3), one observes in the diagram of “A” that emptying the bag of its contents produces entirely white beans, and “B” is also an image associated with this observation; (4), “B” is imagined in various ways so as to find a consistently determinate relation between “A” and “B,” and, (5), “C” is stated as a necessary conclusion from the previous observations. In short, the major premise serves as a “rule,” and the minor premise is indicative of a “case” for that rule; therefore, what follows for the object in the rule must follow for the object as an instance of that rule in the “result.”86 Induction follows deduction in terms of strength. In induction, one takes it that it is reasonable to infer that an entire class contains a character from its instantiation in some sample of its members (CP 2.624, W 3.326, 1878).87 So, unlike deduction, the first premise serves to indicate some “case,” the second premise is some sort of “result” from that case, and then the conclusion is an extrapolation predicated upon the hope that what is true of some instances of a class will be true of the entire class. Thus: A. These beans are from this bag. B. These beans are white. C. [Therefore,] all the beans from this bag are white (EP 1.188, 1878). Now, as a scientist, Peirce recognized the role of deduction and induction in controlled investigation. Deduction takes some hypothesis and derives the necessary consequences of it if it pertains, and induction aims to show by experimental inquiry that the value put forth by deduction is actually operative in the world; however, neither of these logical operations “introduce[s] any new idea” (EP 2.216, 1903). For that, we need some process for actually “forming an explanatory hypothesis,” and that is the process of abduction. Though abduction is the weakest of the three basic modes of inference, it is also the only way that we produce ideas to be logically investigated. It takes this form: A. All the beans from this bag are white. B. These beans are white. C. [Therefore,] these beans are from this bag (EP 1.188, 1878). Here, Peirce is saying that the first premise advances some known “rule,” and then the second premise advances some “result” that is not a strict observation about the major premise; however, the sharing of characteristics (i.e., both premises have white beans) promotes the idea that the two may possibly

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be related in the fashion suggested in the conclusion. But, again, the sharing of characteristics is not the end of abduction—it is, rather, that it is an idea that can explain facts. In terms of our state of belief, it should lead to that state of quietus that we earlier discovered in aesthetics: “the avoidance of all surprise and to the establishment of a habit of positive expectation that shall not be disappointed” (EP 2.235, 1903). From this, we may admit any hypothesis that could help us achieve this end, but that also requires that it must be “capable of experimental verification,” for only then can it be plugged into the process of inquiry and linked successfully with deduction and induction. In other words, abduction completes—and begins—the scientific method: one creates a hypothesis (abduction), works out the necessary consequences of that hypothesis (deduction), and then verifies or falsifies it by extrapolating from instances of experimentation (induction), which gives us more information to begin the process again (CP 7.220, c. 1901). We thus have the three basic forms of inference. But, I would be remiss if I did not also give voice to what Peirce considers the most important of the “mixed” forms of inference: analogy itself (CP 2.787, 1902). Analogical inference is very useful, and Peirce seems to treat it as stronger than all other forms of inference, excepting deduction (CP 5.589, 1903). This strength it owes to its “double character,” meaning the way that it combines two sets of arguments (CP 2.513, W 2.46-47, 1867/1893). On the one hand, an argument from abduction to a deduction, and, on the other, an argument from induction to deduction. If As are random members of a class, and Bs are random characters of those members, it can be portrayed as below in Figure 6.3.88 Methodeutic. If it is in methodeutic that we begin to wonder about the “general conditions for the attainment of truth” (CP 2.207, 1902), then it is also here we formally enter into concerns about the nature of inquiry, or “the doctrine of how truth must be properly investigated, or is capable of being ascertained” (CP 1.191, 1903). Having said what sorts of signs there possibly may be (speculative grammar), and the sorts of power certain signs have for ascertaining the truth of logical expressions relative to their objects (critical logic), we must now talk of how a community of inquirers should best go about getting to the truth; or, in the more technical language of speculative grammar, methodeutic “looks to the purposed ultimate [logical] interpretant” and considers what signs we ought best to attend “in order to be pertinent to” that interpretant.89 In this branch of logic, the philosopher is concerned with both larger practical problems of an inquiring community (the “economy of research”) and the theoretical concerns of what science ought to be about. For our purposes, I must briefly focus on the latter—particularly, as it concerns the nature of inquiry.

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Figure 6.3  Argument by Analogy. From CP 2.513, W 2.46-47, 1867/1893.

In inquiry, our aim is to come to a settling of the investigating community’s opinion about some matter being asserted (CP 5.377, W 3.248-249, 1877). In other words, inquirers want to get to the point where they can “fix” their belief on propositions. Having those beliefs fixed, the person can rely on the habit to determine future actions for conduct. But, what is the best way to do that? In one of Peirce’s most popular earlier essays, “The Fixation of Belief,” he talks about four methods of securing our beliefs: (1), the method of tenacity, which involves holding to a viewpoint that is preferable because of its personal appeal (EP 1.116, 1877); (2), the method of authority, which involves ceding determination of belief to a higher power or authority (EP 1.117, 1877); (3), the a priori method, which rests on holding to “fundamental propositions” that seem to be “agreeable to reason” (EP 1.119, 1877); and (4), the method of science, which fixes its beliefs according to “some external permanency” (EP 1.120, 1877). The options get progressively better, but Peirce says that only the method of science can make sure that “nothing human” causes our beliefs, and so gives us a means to distinguish “a right and

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a wrong way” for all human agencies involved (whereas, in the other methods, some human impulse or ratiocination is determinative of the normativity of the belief) (EP 1.120-121, 1877). So, while there are some benefits to the other methods,90 the method of science is the most sensible for someone who wants to have secure and long-lasting belief. Thus, a community that is governed by reason—that wants to exercise “self-control” in how its future conduct contributes to its habits (EP 2.337, 1905)—will choose the method of science. The epistemic aim of the inquiring community, then, is a fixed belief extended infinitely into the future: a final opinion (CP 2.693, W 3.305, 1878). In other words, the community hopes for a permanent mental habit about some conceptual matter, forever resisting the inclination to doubt, or the “privation of habit” (EP 2.337, 1905). This opinion aspires to be nothing less than the Truth—that is, to the perfect sign-representation of the real (or, the “final interpretant” of the universe as dynamic object).91 But, as Cheryl Misak rightly says, the “Truth” in view is one that operates as a regulative principle: we cannot presume the truth is something we have descriptive possession of at some point in the distant future, but must presume it as an end of inquiry in order for inquiry to exist at all.92 This leads Robert Lane to sum up Peirce’s account of truth as having a “dual-aspect”—“it has a representationalist aspect, in which a true belief is one that represents the real world, and an investigative aspect in which a true belief is one that would be permanently settled in the minds of those who use the method of science.”93 In saying that investigation “would” permanently settle minds is not to say that it will, for one can’t presume to say what the community will actually land upon in the contingencies of history. The hope, instead, is that “if inquiry relevant to H were pursued as far as it could fruitfully go,” and H was true, then “H would be believed.”94 But, if we are using the methods of science, and have the final opinion as an epistemic aim, what kind of guidelines do we have for the symbols we ought to have? At this point, we converge with where I introduced Peirce back in our first chapter with the criteria of intelligibility based off the pragmatic maxim. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” Peirce presents three grades of clearness to which our conceptions should aim. The first two of these ideas Peirce allocates to specifically Cartesian influence, while the third is his own attempt at coming to greater clarity on matters of scientific conception. Peirce advances clarity in conception as “one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it” (EP 1.124, 1878). An unclear idea is obscure: you don’t know what to do with it. For instance, a child of two wouldn’t have clarity on the nonsense word “tove,” but would on “table”: she can point to one, enunciates the word correctly, and does not mix it up for a chair or sofa. In other words, as Albert

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Atkin summarizes it, this is an “immediate unreflective apprehension” of the idea.95 But, the child probably doesn’t have a distinct grade of clearness—this means that “we can give a precise definition of [an idea], in abstract terms” (EP 1.125, 1878). So, the table as “a flat, hard surface parallel to and elevated above a resting floor” would be an example here, and it is characterized by a reflective assessment of the conditions of the idea. The third, and most important, grade of clearness for Peirce is that put forth in the pragmatic maxim, which has been pivotal in the earlier chapters for my account of pragmaticistic intelligibility: “consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the object of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object” (EP 1.132, 1878). In other words, this is about conceiving the possible effects on conduct. The child grasps some pragmatic meaning for “table” because she knows its effects: it resists her when she bumps into it, it will hold up her cup when she puts it on the surface, she can eat food there, she can’t lift it, and so on. In a sense, this third grade of clearness encapsulates the other two because clarity and distinctness are sensible only through conceivable effects. For Peirce, then, though the first two should not be discarded outright, the last fulfills the needs of methodeutic. In scientific inquiry, the investigator should be attending to those signs that contribute toward the possible conceivable effects that her conception of the object might have on conduct. This, for Peirce, is simply the best way that we have for fixing our belief about what is real. Now, what is it that we hope to ultimately believe about the world? What is the nature of the “real” that we hope to come to adequately represent? For this, we may finally turn to the speculative realm of Peirce’s architectonic: metaphysics. General Metaphysics As rigorously empirical as Peirce attempted to be, he was not opposed to reflecting on the metaphysical. Indeed, he thought that the special sciences (physics, astronomy, geology, engineering, etc.) must have their metaphysical presuppositions clarified and critiqued in order for them to be successful. Therefore, the scientist who ignores metaphysics is vulnerable to the very dogmatism she eschews. As Peirce says, “Find a scientific [person] who proposes to get along without any metaphysics . . . and you have found one whose doctrines are thoroughly vitiated by the crude and uncriticized metaphysics with which they are packed” (CP 1.129, 1905). As such, Peirce invites a careful and critical exploration of the general categories of experience. We have already broached the topic of metaphysics with the application in our previous sections of the notion of the real, or, as Peirce would understand

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it in his basic realism, that which is independent of what any person or community of persons thinks about it, and as pragmatically elucidated by the account of truth by being what the final opinion of the community of inquirers would ultimately be concerning the external world. But, we may then ask, what kinds of things are supposed to be real on Peirce’s account? To this question, Peirce responds that Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds all have (or may have) reality, but that reality is specific to their mode of being. Peirce elucidates these modes in his 1908 article, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” when he talks about the three universes of experience, which we can say are the three major constituents of the experienced total that is the “world.” We saw earlier that Firsts have to do with the qualities of our experience, and are connected to the realm of possibility. In the 1908 article, Peirce continues to affirm this move, stating that the first of our universes of experience is that of “mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet, pure mathematician, or another might give local habitation and a name within that mind” (EP 2.435, 1908).96 These are real, says Peirce, because they are capable of being thought;97 even if no particular mind does instantiate an idea at any given time, it is not the case that it fails to be a possibility for thought as such. But, what distinguishes this mode of being, or universe of experience, in a logical sense is that it allows for mutually contradictory ideas within its realm: thus, it admits of vagueness (EP 2.355, 1905). As vague, possibles deny the principle of contradiction—that is, it may be the case that X or it may be the case ~X.98 Until it comes, it is possible both that tomorrow brings rain and that it is clear all day. Thus, the first universe of experience is indeterminate with respect to the instantiation of qualities in particular states of affairs. If this participation in reality seems a bit disconcerting an admission, we should recognize that all our significations are vague in some sense. In saying, “Please get the cup on the table,” the vagueness of the sentence does not interfere with it being an intelligible expression but rather enables it to cover any number of actual items. The person commanded may think of a mug or paper container, blue or yellow, old or new, empty or full, upside down or sideways, large or small, and so on, yet still accomplish his task. So, the ease with which the sign’s ultimate logical interpretant is carried out, at least in part, is due to the sign being vague. And, since what is cognized is vague, we ought also to recognize its reality as a mode of being; as Peirce says, “Cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, they are synonymous terms” (EP 1.25, 1868). Turning to the second universe of experience, we also come upon the most familiar to most metaphysical accounts: that of existence, or “the brute actuality of things or facts” (EP 2.435, 1908). This is the domain of Seconds,

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or Secondness mentioned earlier. Here, the principle of contradiction is firmly in place, for in this realm things react, resist, and contrast with each other; indeed, it is first here that “other” acquires any concrete sense. There is a space for this quality or that quality, and a time for that feeling and this feeling. Its reality, then, is fairly obvious to contemporary readers: what I perceive before me is not at my whim or fancy of imagination—the book to my left is there whether I or anyone else thinks it is there, or not. The third universe of experience—the domain of Thirdness—is the one that fascinated Peirce the most over his fifty-year writing career, but I will attempt a concise account of its constituents, which Peirce called generals.99 As we saw earlier, the final interpretant is the perfected representation of the dynamic object; it is that which would be believed by the community of inquiry in perpetuity. As such, it is independent of what any particular representation would take it to be. This means that the real is “the state of things which will be believed in that ultimate [or final] opinion” (EP 2.342, 1905). Now, we have good reason to think that some of those things to be believed in the final opinion would be what can be applied to many concrete things, such as laws of nature, which, as we saw in the section on speculative grammar, can only be represented by symbols of a general character—that is, they depict a class or kind that can be applied to multiple individuals. So, since there is some general symbol representing a shared character that applies to some set of objects, and in that it remains of “permanent interest” to the community of inquirers, that character “is destined to be conserved in that ultimate conception of the universe at which we aim, and is accordingly to be called ‘real’” (CP 6.384, 1901). But, even to say “applies” isn’t quite adequate, for generals don’t passively supervene upon existent things of the first or second universes, but instead have the power to be “physically efficient” (EP 2.343, 1905) in the other universes; indeed, Peirce frequently uses the language of governing to depict the way that generals influence the constituents of the other universes.100 We can flesh this out by considering Peirce’s statement, “The rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future” (EP 2.340, 1905). In saying this, Peirce intends truth-aiming expressions to be fully explicated by how they bear on human conduct (as the pragmatic maxim exhorts), but it is human conduct that “is most directly applicable to self-control under every situation, and to every purpose.” In other words, one holds to “a general description of all the experimental phenomena which the assertion of the proposition virtually predicts.” So, when one thinks about any proposition she believes—say, “People sit in chairs,”—she exercises her self-control to practice, into the indefinite future, a kind of conduct upon encountering chairs that can be broadly applicable to them (e.g., don’t stand on them, offer them for someone’s use for sitting, don’t put them on walls or tables

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where they cannot be sat in, make sure there is nothing sharp on them).101 So, we see that the general notion of a chair’s purpose is governing human affairs in the existing universe. And, to connect this to intelligibility, what is intelligible about that proposition is just how the purpose so governs our conduct about the objects involved in the proposition. Without the reality of generals, nothing that we cognize as intelligible could be said to be real itself. Thus, we arrive back at the characterization of the third universe Peirce offers in the “Neglected Argument”: it is that which “comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects, especially between objects in different universes” (EP 2.435, 1908). And, it simply pervades everything in our known world, stretching from the power of individual minds to triadically relate interpretants, representamens, and objects, to the growth of “social movements.” Thus, Thirdness has every right to be real that Secondness does, and this claim cements his anti-nominalism: generals aren’t just names for mental constructs, but have genuine, external independence from the mind that thinks about them. Further, like possibles, generals also have an indeterminacy to them that logically distinguishes them from the second universe, but whereas vague Firsts deny the principle of contradiction, generals deny the principle of excluded middle—that is, “no pair of mutually contradictory predicates are both false of any individual subject.”102 To talk about a general purpose to sit in a chair, for instance, does not determine it to involve sitting in this chair, at this specific moment, at that place; the interpreter may so determine the purpose further in her actual use, but this does not then eradicate the generality of that purpose.103 So, Peirce has argued for the reality of all three universes; it is then a small step to advance what Robert Lane calls basic idealism—that is, the notion that “anything real can be represented in ideas, thought, cognition, etc.”104 Since: (1), the three universes of experience are real; (2), Peirce seems to take it that those three universes exhaust reality; and, (3) there is no reason to admit those universes contain incognizables, then “the totality of things [is] thinkable” (CP 7.563, c. 1893). This must be the case, in fact, for otherwise we would have to admit an insurmountable barrier to scientific investigation erected by the incognizable, as we saw earlier. If this is true, that all real things are representable, then a mere corollary of basic idealism must also be the notion of what I am calling semiotic univocity, or the idea that all reality is representable by the triadic relating of representamen, object, and interpretant. We will turn to this notion most explicitly in the next chapter. But, confessing basic idealism does not mean that all things are now actually objects of thought, but only possibly so, and, further, those thinkable

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objects are still independent of our thought as real.105 Many people might come to truly represent the law of gravity in thought, but their failing to do so won’t make the reality of the law of gravity cease. The same goes for the possibility of a cloudy day, or the actuality of the cup on the desk. Thus, Peirce is able to make his basic realism and basic idealism compatible. Peirce has other things to say about these universes. In fact, their connectedness in the semiotic activity of thought is indicative of a continuity between the universes themselves, which leads us to his metaphysical doctrine of synechism. Broadly stated, synechism holds to the “necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity” (CP 6.169, 1902). So, it doesn’t just show up in metaphysics, but is logically prior to it as a “regulative principle of logic” (CP 6.173, 1902). This bears out particularly in the classes of inference, for the thought that inferences have a lawful character to them that allows for their governing of multiple instances presumes an idea of “true continuity” or a “true continuum” (CP 6.170, 1902), which Peirce understands as that which has “possibilities of determination no multitude of individuals can exhaust” (CP 6.172, 1902). In other words, when a hypothesis (or abduction) is made that attempts to explain a feature of the world, no number of specific instantiations of the explanandum will outstrip the explanans. From this angle, then, synechism is really just the “perfect generality of a law of relationship”—to explain is to act as if the world is generalizable. But, there are further metaphysical implications to the doctrine of synechism, as well; one is Peirce’s hypothesis of objective idealism. The notion implied here is that the world—or, the combination of the three universes—is not filled with entities that may be either mind or body in ontological kind, but rather that we consider “matter as mind whose habits have become fixed so as to lose the power of forming and losing them, while mind is to be regarded as a chemical genus of extreme complexity and instability” (CP 6.101, 1902). What Peirce means by this is that the basic character of our world is about lesser and greater stability of lawful regularities or habits. So, what we typically think of as “minds” can take up certain habits of varying types of conduct and intensity and discard them with varying ease, but “matter [is] mere specialised [sic] and partially deadened mind” (EP 1.312, 1892), meaning that habits tends to be quite fixed in it. So, for instance, a rock will do what it has been doing for the past few millennia, a tree will be less fixed and more variant, and a human being will be the least fixed and the most variant. This shows the sliding scale of objects along lesser to more liveliness of mind. But, what Peirce has in view as “mind” here does not necessarily include, as Lane rightly points out, “intelligence, cognition, thinking, or any other higher mental activity. Nor does it necessarily signal a mind that is the mind of some person or other conscious entity.”106 It has a very wide span and

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variety of instantiations. Indeed, synechism implies the world’s constituents to be analogous in some respect (a point we will return to in the next chapter). In fact, the doctrine of synechism informs nature so broadly that even the constituents of the three universes corporately show its influence on them. For Peirce, Parker says, synechism asserts that “the influence of law, of final causation, governs the unfolding of events in the universe.”107 How is this claim made? A major step is making an abduction based on the earlier sciences in the architectonic: if mathematics discerned the possibility of modes of relating in the triadic relatives, phenomenology discovered the universal categories fit those formal modes of relating in experience, and logic analyzed how those elements function in representation under the ideal of truth, then we can infer that a semiotic extrapolation into the metaphysical realms would conclude that “the three fundamental elements in the ultimate constitution of the universe are chance, reaction, and habit-taking.”108 But, if this might give us the elements, why assume that habit-taking (law) is governing the other two? Peirce thinks that the theory of evolution supplies evidence for such a cosmology: from a cosmic indeterminacy evolved possibilities of Firstness, and then came the dyadic existents and reactions of Secondness, and then the habit-taking of lawfulness, order, and regularity (Thirdness) (CP 1.412-416, W 6.209-210, 1887-1888; CP 6.214-221, 1898). From this view, evolution shows the world to be a place where laws come to be through “the tendency of spontaneous events to take habits.”109 Peirce further extends a triadic metaphysic into the evolutionary process itself in his “Evolutionary Love” (1893). In his view, chance, reaction, and habit-taking aren’t just results of evolutionary stages, but are actually “elements” constituting the mode of evolution operative in the cosmos (EP 1.362, 1893). In the first, chance may be called tychism, which supports the notion of spontaneity and freedom in the world, allowing for minds to act contrary to purposes “that animate them” (EP 1.362-363, 365, 1893). In the second, reaction takes the form of “mechanical necessity” or anancism, which supports the notion of forces driven by fixed laws of logic, of reactions predictably producing a result in the universe (EP 1.362, 369, 1893). In the third, habit-taking takes the form of the “law of love” in agapism, which supports the purposive movement of history; in it “advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among the created springing from continuity of mind.” That element which takes the primary role for Peirce is agapism, resulting in what Peirce calls agapasticism—it is where absolute chance and mechanical necessity are subordinated to creative love in progressive intensity over the world’s history (EP 1.362, 1893). Finding resonances in the Gospel of John, agapasticism corresponds to the operation of “Love” in the cosmos: it is what makes the ideas in the universe grow from states of stagnation, greed, and death into what is good, desirable, and lovely (EP 1.352-355, 1893). Such

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an evolution, Peirce says, is simply what “synechism calls for” (EP 1.354, 1893). Thus, we see the growing predominance of Thirdness—of final causation—in the world, and a projection into an infinite future110 of the entire rule of Thirdness in the universe.111 As it is now and indefinitely into the future, we may understand both ourselves and the world’s inhabitants as “constitutive parts of the cosmic development of reason, and that our various inquiries, conducted well or badly, contribute to the evolution of reason.”112 If, then, the world is such a growth of reason, then it is also itself a semiotic process, a “universe perfused with signs” (CP 5.448n1, 1905). Semiotically, as Parker writes, we can view reality as: both the immediate and the dynamical object of the sign that is the entelechy, the end of semiosis. Truth, conceived in the same terms, is the immediate, dynamical, and final interpretant of that same sign. Here we have an essential identity of object, sign, and interpretant.113

And, in being itself a sign (indeed, an argument [CP 5.119, 1903]), the universe has a purpose, which Peirce terms the summum bonum. It consists in “that process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody those generals which [are] destined, which is what we strive to express in calling them reasonable” (CP 5.433, 1905). But, whose purpose is it that the universe so lumbers toward? Peirce doesn’t mince words: “the universe is a vast representamen, a great symbol of God’s purpose, working out its conclusions in living reality” (CP 5.119, 1903, emphasis mine). The world, then, is something of God’s making, for Peirce; indeed, all three of the universes of experience have God as their “creator” (EP 2.434, 1908). But, what else can be said about this God? Religious Metaphysics Before I attempt to outline Peirce’s understanding of God, we must first get clear on the interrelation between science, religion, theology, and philosophy. We’ll start with how he thought about the relation between science and religion. We’ve already mentioned that Peirce found science to be about, fundamentally, a method of ascertaining truth through close observation (CP 1.232, 1902; CP 6.428, 1893). Religion, on the other hand, doesn’t belong to the architectonic as a science; it is rather a matter of “sentiment” or evolutionarily developed “instinct” that manifests in human beings as a sort of “obscure perception” of something greater and all-encompassing to which the person is somehow a merely “relative being” (CP 6.429, 1893). The power of this instinct unto sociality and practice is remarkable, for Peirce, since it is “the

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idea of a whole church, welding all its members together in one organic, systemic perception of the Glory of the Highest—an idea having a growth from generation to generation and claiming a supremacy in the determination of all conduct, private and public” (CP 6.429, 1893). In the highest religions, that idea develops into the principle of love. In Christianity, which Peirce calls the “religion of love” (CP 6.443, 1893), the determination for conduct—the “living belief”—is a way of life following Jesus’s greatest commandments: love of God, and love of neighbor (CP 6.439-441, 1893).114 The religious ideal it promulgates, then, is that “the whole world shall be united in the bond of common love of God accomplished by each man’s loving his neighbor” (CP 6.443, 1893). Given this ideal, Peirce says that any system of thinking that would “exaggerate differences,” or exclude some Christians from fellowshipping with others, is “immoral” (CP 6.445, 1893). But, given religion’s conservative inclination to trust in the ideals of instinct, it is clear that science’s penchant for progress is going to create tensions in the two “elemental forces” (CP 6.432, 1893). Science tends to discredit the creedal propositions attested to in religion, and religion can’t accept science’s lack of commitment to the propositions it promulgates. For Peirce’s part, a fruitful combination of these into a “religion of science” would propose to keep religion compartmentalized to the creation of ideals and final causes, while science deals with efficient causes (CP 6.434, 1893); in that scenario, he is confident that the religious person “animated by the scientific spirit” could trust that the “deep mystery” of religion would not be adversely affected by how science might change faith’s expression of that mystery (CP 6.432, 1893). Yet, religion’s relation to philosophy and theology has historically not been friendly to such a synthesis. Much of this, Peirce thinks, has to do with the influence of theologians using philosophical ideas to promulgate their particular views. This is wrongheaded, for Peirce, for a number of reasons. First, philosophy (at least that of Peirce’s day) was still in such an “infantile state” that any application of it to matters of conduct generally—and religion, specifically—is “exceedingly dangerous” (CP 1.620, 1898). If philosophy can come to agreement on “scarce a single principle” (due to its historic opposition to the scientific spirit), then human life certainly can’t rest on its decisions. For instance, Peirce uses the example of someone hearing “the call of his Saviour [sic]”; for that person to stop and ponder the religious experience as a philosophical difficulty is “stupid,” or even “disgusting” (CP 1.655, 1898). So, the philosophy of religion may be a worthwhile and interesting science to develop, but it is far from being able to reasonably and consistently inform religion about matters of vital importance (CP 1.620, 1898). But, second, and a fortiori, Peirce thinks theologians have tended to rely on some problematic accounts of metaphysics to advance their ideas, to the

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extent that he thinks they are largely responsible for its “backward state” (CP 6.2, 1898). The theologians’ primary error is this: in their efforts to resist the “religious wavering” in their hearts over its provisional truth, they set out to prove a belief they already have. This quest inserts them by necessity into a universe of discourse of which they have no real comprehension: science (CP 8.109, 1900). But, it’s clear that scientists will find such an attempt to confirm an early belief as morally appalling, and Peirce sides with them on this (CP 6.3-4, 1898). Further, this whole process vitiates religion itself because the theologians desire the assent of others to their metaphysical systems as coextensive with religious faith (CP 6.3, 1898). The consequence is that religion gets “swamped in fallacious logical disputations” and communities of faith get splintered when theological differences come up (CP 6.438, 1893). As Peirce puts it, this is a case where the natural tendency is to the continual drawing tighter and tighter of the narrowing bounds of doctrine, with less and less attention to the living essence of religion, until, after some Symbolum quodcumque [specific creed] has declared that the salvation of each individual absolutely and almost exclusively depends upon his entertaining a correct metaphysics of the godhead, the vital spark of inspiration becomes finally quite extinct.

This is clearly at odds with the principle of love that Peirce believes forms religion’s highest ideal, and the agapasticism that he thinks is the only sensible conclusion from the doctrine of synechism. People being joined together in love of God is precluded by assent to metaphysical doctrines that aren’t commonly held, and the faithful are turned against each other in doctrinal disputations. Thus, theologians don’t fare well in Peirce’s mind. Among their main errors are subscribing to: (1), infallibly true propositions (CP 1.4, c. 1897); (2), a priori truths (CP 2.156, 1902); (3), metaphysical dualisms (CP 1.4, c. 1897); (4), the method of authority (CP 5.379, W 3.250-251, 1877); (5), truth being relative to a universe of discourse (CP 6.216, 1898); and, (6), postulates that have no explanatory potential (e.g., substances) (CP 6.361, 1902). But, though Peirce thinks that the theology of his time is in bad shape, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk about God. So, what is it that can be said of God, for Peirce? His considerations of this matter usually begin with the common or “vernacular” term. And, as those terms usually are, so also the word “God” indicates something vague (CP 6.494, c. 1906); this is important for Peirce because making “God” more precise in many ways lends toward logical errors. For instance, to say that God “exists” limits God to the second universe of experience, and so God should not be said to exist, but should be said to be “real,” as God is independent

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of what any particular mind thinks (CP 6.495, c. 1906). Similarly, God can be affirmed to be infinite, responsible for the creation of the universe, the necessary being, purposeful, omniscient, omnipotent, and infallible (CP 6.494, c. 1906; CP 6.507-510, c. 1906; EP 2.435, 1908); however, we cannot suppose that we are licensed to have more determinate concepts of these than what our experience allows. For instance, how can we say what “the performance of God’s mind” means in considering God’s omniscience? “The question is gabble,” Peirce says (CP 6.508, c. 1906). Yet, we also cannot go the apophatic route in rendering that vague concept something absolutely indeterminate. For one thing, the whole enterprise of science rides on the understanding that one can come to know about the world’s truth. If so, this in some sense is to understand God’s thought, if only “a fragment” of it (CP 6.502, c. 1906). Indeed, a few years before his “Neglected Argument” essay, Peirce was thinking that “analogy suggests that the laws of nature are ideas or resolutions in the mind of some vast consciousness, who, whether supreme or subordinate, is a deity relative to us” (CP 5.107, 1903). Thus, God would be some “analogue of a mind” that can be partially understood when we study the world (CP 6.502, c. 1906). Peirce was convinced, then, that though we may have only “the vaguest analogical notion of the Maker of [visible and invisible things],”115 by admitting as much we still say that some anthropomorphic conceptualizations are permitted both to the world and its creator (CP 8.168, 1903; CP 1.316, 1903). But, why is one led to these vague conclusions about God? Again, Peirce turns to the religious impulse in instinct. As mentioned earlier, instincts are the evolutionary results of common-sense inductive beliefs being developed over many generations. Think, for instance, of the “fight, flight or freeze” instinct: it has probably served to preserve the lives of millions of people as an indistinct sense applicable to many situations, yet there is no exercised and explicit reason that goes into the acts of flying, fighting or freezing (nor, also, does that instinct always accurately judge the situation). Likewise, as the concept of God is produced from instinct, it has a great deal of inferential warrant behind it even if it is not granted infallible truth or specificity (CP 6.496, c. 1906). The atheistic or agnostic scientist errs from the start, then, by presuming that a God to be argued against is something more precise; in fact, Peirce thinks that God, understood in this vague way, is pretty much assented to by everyone, even the atheistic scientists—they just need their minds purged from descriptions that instinct didn’t create (CP 6.496-7, c. 1906). In the “Neglected Argument,” Peirce aims to walk someone through the proper process for coming to belief in God utilizing instinct’s power. In the essay, Peirce renders a hypothesis: if God is benevolent, and if religion does indeed seem to be a great potential good, then anyone’s earnest inquiry into the matter of God’s reality should turn up with some argument

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for it that is available to any particular mind. But, we should be careful as to what Peirce means by this “argument.” As an argument, Peirce is looking for a “process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief,” but that doesn’t mean it’s an argumentation—that is, an argument “proceeding upon definitely formulated premises” (EP 2.435, 1908). Further, in keeping with that argument’s rootedness within instinct, the conclusion is one that should be “directly applicable to the conduct of life, and full of nutrition for [humanity’s] highest growth.” Peirce calls that argument the “neglected argument,” or NA, and he’s confident that it will be “unknown to nobody” once presented (EP 2.436, 1908). The NA’s basic character is this: think about the experience of going for a solitary walk, or perhaps waking from sleep, when the mind has no particular purpose but the “pure play” of ideas. Perhaps, in your mind, you land on a beautiful scene you recently witnessed, or you imagine some interesting phenomena or invent some new object. In your mental wanderings, you may stumble into what Peirce calls “musement,” which is when one considers the relations between the three universes of experience (EP 2.436, 1908). For instance, here you might think of how something like the ability of space travel ever went from a possibility to an actuality, and this might lead you to think about possibilities, actualities, and potentialities in general. Whatever it might be, Peirce advises that one allow the mind to go where it will, neither inhibiting its explorations, tying it down to narrow analyses of one phenomenon or another, nor trying to create an argumentation for some preconceived idea. In the course of this reverie, the mind “will inevitably suggest the hypothesis of God’s reality,” specifically if “God” is understood as the “necessary being” (EP 2.439, 1908). As the muser thinks more about that hypothesis, she will recognize its value and attractiveness for various reasons, including how it is beautiful, how it supplies an “ideal for life,” and how it provides a “thoroughly satisfactory explanation of [her] threefold environment.” Truly, this is a “peculiar” hypothesis to make, for it suggests an “infinitely incomprehensible object”; however, the vagueness of that hypothesis is no implicit argument against its truth, for it can be asserted as true insofar “as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more and more, without limit,” just as any other hypothesis does of its object. So, putting the matter of conceptualization in its proper place, Peirce is confident that the one who seriously reflects on the hypothesis “will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and all the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis” (EP 2.440, 1908). And, to be prepared to deliberately conform one’s conduct to a hypothesis is

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to believe it as a proposition (even if only tacitly); thus, we can say that such a one believes in the reality of God. Importantly, Peirce takes it that this argument is an instance of the first stage of all scientific inquiry: abduction (or, in the essay termed “retroduction”) (EP 2.446, 1908). A conjecture arose as a result of some privation of habit—or doubt—over some matter about the world and looks to be resolved through the activity of musement (EP 2.441, 1908). The “reality of God” has been found to be such an explanation for that matter with “the very highest plausibility” for its potential to meet a host of desiderata for conduct.116 That argument ought now, then, to be tested for its adequacy in contributing to “the self-controlled growth of [the person’s] conduct of life” (EP 2.446, 1908), including working out the logical validity, distinctness and consequence of the NA (i.e., second stage, deduction), and “ascertaining how far those consequents accord with experience, and of judging accordingly whether the hypothesis is sensibly correct, or requires some inessential modification, or must be entirely rejected” (i.e., third stage, induction) (EP 2.442, 1908). If identified as such an inference and with a portion of the process of scientific investigation, Peirce can defend himself against the accusation of special pleading. Thus, Peirce thinks that we have a powerful and pragmatically acceptable argument for God’s reality. And, as a final clarification to Peirce’s concept of God, that reality is not only independent of what you and I may think, but it is also non-identical with the three universes that God creates. Following Michael Raposa in his Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, I take it that Peirce’s three universes of experience—or the “world”—can be taken as an “argument” for God in the sense that it exists as a symbol of its divine object. The Creator/creation relation is one that depicts “the divine mind,” or that analog of a mind we mean by God, as “a vast continuum within which all other realities are embedded as its determinations or singularities, sub-continua of a lower dimensionality.”117 Insofar as inquiry seeks to understand the world, it may also seek to interpret its facts as “representations of . . . divine intentions,”118 as the neglected argument so does; however, it must also follow the neglected argument in the scientific method’s espousal of abduction/ deduction/induction. That method turned to God’s purposes is what Raposa calls theosemiotic. It supposes that the world “is God’s great poem, a living inferential metaboly of symbols”119 to be interpreted, clarified, and rendered useful for conduct toward the end of the principle of love wholly governing the cosmos, that love being what Peirce would say, in agreement with the Gospel of John, is God’s very self (CP 6.287, 1893). How does this all mesh with the rest of the preceding architectonic? Clearly, the hypothesis of the reality of God rests on the synechistic principle that pervades the architectonic. Though it is the fruit of speculation on the

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world’s ultimate ground of explanation and purpose, its reasonableness is dependent on what came before it in the architectonic, which itself must be linked to experience at all levels of its structure. As religious metaphysics goes beyond the immediacy of the three universes of experience, it is also one of the most tenuous of conclusions in philosophy; however, it is a testable hypothesis insofar as the argument’s bearing on conduct may serve as experimental justification for it, and it is a powerfully synthetic hypothesis. What I mean by the latter is that the hypothesis of the reality of God has a significant holistic potential for the good of logical, ethical, and aesthetic forms of conduct—one far beyond most others. And, as Parker surmises, “The more powerful the synthesis a hypothesis effects in our thought, the less stringent we are in requiring practical testability.”120 So, though the hypothesis of God’s reality remains subject to the morals of science, that same inclusion in its morals should give it some room for its explanative and pragmaticistic potential, just as science does for the hypothesis that all matter and energy behaves the same way under similar circumstances (a difficult hypothesis to practically test if there ever was one).121 Thus, the hypothesis of God’s reality is situated clearly in the architectonic and a path to its intelligibility can be proffered and sensibly critiqued. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have told a story about how intelligibility shows up in Peirce’s philosophy. In his mind, the continuity of the triadic relations, and their collective continuity in the various sciences constituting philosophy, ultimately warrants the intelligibility of what comes later in the architectonic—whether it be a theoretical or practical science—even if those other areas of inquiry may contribute empirical data to what comes before. For our purposes, we can see that the intelligibility of religious metaphysics is rooted in the previous sciences of mathematics, phenomenology, logic, and metaphysics in general, which gives it a thoroughly empirical character. As a result, Peirce’s metaphysical philosophy—or, the “philosophy of continuity”—has this relation to the Christian faith: The philosophy of continuity is peculiar in leading unequivocally to Christian sentiments. But there it stops. This metaphysics is only an appendix to physics; it has nothing positive to say in regard to religion. It does, however, lead to this, that religion can rest only on positive observed facts, and that such facts may prove a sufficient support for it. As it must rest upon positive facts, so it must itself have a positive content. A series of plays upon words will not answer for a religion. This philosophy shows that there is no philosophical objection to the

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positive dogmas of Christianity; but the question as to their truth lies out of its province. (CP 8.G.c.1893.5)

So, Peirce sees that his metaphysics leads to “Christian sentiments” (the principle of love, most importantly), even if it can’t support Christianity’s various doctrines a priori. But, he also says that it is not opposed to the “positive dogmas” of Christian tradition, either. On this latter point, Peirce says that their truth lies “outside of [his philosophy’s] province.” As we will see in the next chapter, I think this conclusion can be complicated, for I will argue that the analogia signorum is not only consistent with Peirce’s philosophy as a whole, but also that it can itself stand as an argument having co-extensive interest with, and supporting rationale for, the neglected argument. NOTES 1. I would note that quotations of Peirce’s containing capitalizations of various nouns will be edited to conform to contemporary usage. Thus, a quote like CP 8.181, 1903, “The Object of every sign is an Individual, usually an Individual Collection of Individuals” will be rendered, “The object of every sign is an individual, usually an individual collection of individuals.” 2. In this regard, I can’t do better than Max Fisch: “Who is the most original and the most versatile intellect that the Americas have so far produced? The answer ‘Charles S. Peirce’ is uncontested, because any second would be so far behind as not to be worth nominating. Mathematician, astronomer, chemist, geodesist, surveyor, cartographer, metrologist, spectroscopist, engineer, inventor; psychologist, philologist, lexicographer, historian of science, mathematical economist, lifelong student of medicine; book reviewer, dramatist, actor, short story writer; phenomenologist, semiotician, logician, rhetorician [and] metaphysician[.] He was, for a few examples, the first modern experimental psychologist in the Americas, the first metrologist to use a wave-length of light as a unity of measure, the inventor of the quincuncial projection of the sphere, the first known conceiver of the design and theory of an electric switching-circuit computer, and the founder of ‘the economy of research.’ He is the only system-building philosopher in the Americas who has been competent and productive in logic, in mathematics, and in a wide range of sciences. If he has had any equals in that respect in the entire history of philosophy, they do not number more than two.” Max Fisch, “Introductory Note,” in Thomas Sebeok, The Play of Musement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 17, quoted in Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, (Indianapolis: IUP, 1998), 2. 3. On the list of those who attribute to Peirce influence on their philosophical projects, we can include Karl Popper, W. V. O. Quine, Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Susan Haack, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas. See Brent, A Life, 5–7. Of particular interest to this study, there is good reason to think that Peirce had a great amount of influence on Wittgenstein’s later thought through the latter’s close friend,

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Frank Ramsey, specifically in regard to meaning, truth, logic, and belief. For an excellent analysis of that influence, see Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein (New York: OUP, 2016), 232–280. 4. Kelly Parker, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998). It is worth mentioning that this chapter, in general, makes substantial and unapologetic use of the secondary literature for aid in interpreting Peirce. There are very good reasons for this. First of all, Peirce never wrote a single, complete book; though we have the manuscript evidence that he tried to do so for his philosophy (and other subjects), there was always something that prevented him from doing so (whether it was his volatile personal life, constantly changing ideas, and/or dissatisfaction with his own work). Second, it continues to be a challenge to understand what exactly his mature philosophy is. Scholarship has come a long way since Morris Cohen first published a collection of Peirce’s essays in Chance, Love, and Logic in 1923, but Peirce specialists are still trying to determine the character of the latest twenty years of his philosophy, which involves wading through the majority of some eighty thousand pages of unpublished material. Currently, the Peirce Edition Project (PEP) has seven volumes out of their Writings of Charles S. Peirce, covering up until 1892 (vol. 8). But, with most of the unwritten material covering the final two decades of Peirce’s life, the PEP estimates over thirty volumes will be amassed. The result is that we are not in possession of a definitive edition of Peirce’s work. One can pick up Aristotle’s Organon, or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but access to Peirce’s mature thought is much more obstacle-ridden. For my part, the eight volumes of the Collected Papers (1931–1958), the two relatively recent volumes of the Essential Peirce (1992, 1998), and the Peirce/Lady Welby correspondence recorded in Semiotics and Significs (1977) form the backbone of the primary texts of Peirce’s mature thought; but, even these leave much to be desired when it comes to Peirce’s final decade of writing. Third, I write as a theologian appropriating a philosopher’s ideas toward certain ends; thus, I am not trying to advance a definitive interpretation of Peirce’s mature semiotic thinking, but rather am using the resources available to me to best extend a Peircean viewpoint to a theological problem while also being sufficiently informed about the adequacy of doing so. For the above reasons, then, I am utilizing scholarly commentary on Peirce’s thought to the degree I do: to be sufficiently informed on a difficult thinker, and for key movements in my own project, I have mined the contributions of the “community of inquiry” to grasp the fullest available character of Peirce’s philosophy. For more on the current state of Peirce scholarship (as of 2015), see Atkin, Peirce, 12–15. 5. CS Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Vol. 1, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 22–23. Following scholarly convention, hereafter essays or excerpts from this book will be “EP 1.” 6. Aaron Bruce Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Originality (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016), 24. 7. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 222–223. 8. In the 1900s, Peirce would advance this insight into logic with his development of what he called the “existential graphs,” which were attempts to visually

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model or diagram the process of logical reasoning. Though Peirce never completed a system, the graphs ended up containing an “alpha portion, which corresponds roughly to modern propositional logic; a beta portion, which corresponds roughly to modern predicate logic; and a gamma portion, which offers examples of second-order and modal logic.” See Atkin, Peirce, 190ff. 9. For more on this process of “corollarial deduction,” see CP 7.204, c. 1901; also, for an analysis of Peirce’s forms of deduction, see Francesco Bellucci, Peirce’s Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotic (New York: Routledge, 2018), 203–204. 10. CS Peirce, Historical Perspectives on Peirce’s Logic of Science: A History of Science, ed. Carolyn Eisele (Berlin, de Gruyter & Co., 1985), 1123, quoted in Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 284. 11. For Hookway’s use of the term, see Christopher Hookway, The Pragmatic Maxim (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65. 12. TL Short, Peirce Theory of Signs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66–68. 13. This should not be seen to suggest, however, that Peirce’s philosophy and that of the classical empiricists contain no overlap or lines of connection. In fact, Peirce was significantly influenced by, and adapted some of the ideas of, these figures. As Wilson points out, for instance: (1), Locke’s account of experience was highly influential on Peirce, the latter subscribing to it well into the twentieth century; (2), Peirce praised Berkeley for contributing important work to the theory of signs, propositions, and pragmatism in general; and, (3), Hume’s ideas on instinct, habit, and association did much to develop Peirce’s account of semiosis. See Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, chapters 3 and 4 passim. 14. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A832/B860. 15. Ibid. 16. TL Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62. 17. Parker, Continuity, 20. 18. See also CP 2.690, 1879/1893: they do not “assert positive fact”; CP 4.91, 1893. 19. By saying “reworked and improved” I also acknowledge the multitude of elements that Peirce maintained with Kant in framing the architectonic, including that all phenomenal experience is representation, that the categories of metaphysics are derived from logic (though that logic is derived from the phenomenal presentation of the categories for Peirce), and that one needs to tie rationality to “the ideal one would will for the entire universe.” See Parker, Continuity, 5, 39, 227. 20. Parker, Continuity, 57–58. 21. Parker, Continuity, 41. 22. CS Peirce, MS 901, c. 1885, 21 in Parker, Continuity, 61. 23. This construction of the argument of ”Basis” follows Chapter 5 of Parker’s Continuity, 63–71. 24. For more on this, see Parker, Continuity, 75–100.

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25. Joseph Esposito, Evolutionary Metaphysics: The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Categories (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980), 162–163. 26. Parker, Continuity, 108. 27. We may also call such Seconds “genuine” seconds. On the other hand, Peirce speaks of “degenerate seconds,” as well. These are Seconds that are identified with “internal” relations of reason that are not external facts. For instance: a thing’s identity with itself, reflection upon an internal motive to act, or an “abstract quality of a thing [spoken of] as if it were some second thing that the thing possesses,” say, “sweetness” abstracted from that which is sweet. See CP 1.365, W 6.177, 1887–1888. 28. Esposito, Evolutionary Metaphysics, 163. 29. Parker, Continuity, 108. 30. As with Seconds above (fn 42), Thirds may also be degenerate, and so in two forms. In the first degree of degenerate Thirds (also called “accidental” Thirds), a combinatory event of causes happens apart from an (at least human) intention to do so. Peirce gives the example here of how we seem to automatically place things nearer or farther from each other in time and space (CP 1.383, W 6.187, 1888). So, the result of thinking objects are closer or farther away is treated as a Second, or fact, rather than as a Third. In the second degree of degeneracy (also called “thirds of comparison”), what results from combination in reason is some First, or quality. For instance, how a photograph can mediate between a likeness and an original because of how it resembles the latter. See CP 1.366–7, W 6.178–179, 1887–1888; CP 1.383, W 6.187, 1888; CP 1.538, 1903. 31. Esposito, Evolutionary Metaphysics, 163. 32. I am aware that Peirce’s own preferred spelling for this term seemed to land on “semeiotic” (e.g., CP 1.444, c. 1896; CP 1.284fn, c. 1904; CP 4.9, 1906; CP 8.343, 1908), which is closer in conformity to the Greek term he derived the cognate from (σημειωτική from σημεῖον). But, the scholarly consensus, even in Peirce studies, seems to prefer “semiotic.” Further, Peirce himself seemed to be unsure of his preferred spelling, even suggesting “semeotic” in 1908 (CP 8.377, 1908).Thus, I follow suit with the current trend. 33. Richard Kenneth Atkins, Peirce and the Conduct of Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 152. 34. Ibid., 149, 152. 35. Ibid., 153. 36. Peirce uses the term “ethics” in most treatments of this topic, but I am using his later 1906 designation, “antethics,” since it isolates his own idiosyncratic idea for this science in contradistinction to the more traditional notion of ethics as dealing specifically with “morality, virtuous conduct, right living” and so on (EP 2:377, 1906). For further reflections on the role of ethics in Peirce’s architectonic, see Aaron Massecar, Ethical Habits: A Peircean Perspective. (New York: Lexington Books, 2016), 19–43. 37. It seems it must be this branch by elimination. Seeing as Peirce thinks ethics “can hardly claim a place among the heuretic [that is, theoretical] sciences,” it wouldn’t make sense as a science of review, and traditional ethics must assume a lack

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of self-critical examination of the ideal it decides to follow if it is going to actually acquire an imperative character for determining conduct. 38. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 63. 39. Peirce’s semiotics is often confused or conflated with the “semiology” of Ferdinand de Saussure. However, they should be kept apart, not least of which because Peirce’s account of sign-process is triadic (representamen/object/interpretant) and part of logic, whereas Saussure’s is dyadic (signifier/signified) and mostly a part of “social psychology.” For a useful account to distinguish the two, see Gerard Deledalle, Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 100–113. Also, for a nice selection of primary readings in semiotic thinking from ancient to contemporary sources, including Peirce and Saussure, see D.S. Clarke, Jr., ed., Sources of Semiotic: Readings with Commentary from Antiquity to the Present (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). 40. Before 1902, Peirce tended to see logic as a “part of semiotics.” Bellucci, Peirce’s Speculative Grammar, 189. 41. Parker, Continuity, 41. 42. For the sake of clarity, I use “representamen” as a name for the sign-vehicle or the sign considered in itself, and “sign” for the combination of these three elements. 43. Bellucci, Peirce’s Speculative Grammar, 192. 44. James Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 18; cf. CP 2.228, c. 1893. 45. Liszka, General Introduction, 18. 46. Liszka, General Introduction, 18–19; cf. CP 2.228, c. 1893; CP 5.253, 1868. 47. Liszka, General Introduction, 19; cf. CP 5.484., c. 1906. 48. Bellucci, Peirce’s Speculative Grammar, 259. 49. There are many ways in which semiosis has been iconically reconstructed. For my part, I am here drawing upon Martin Irvine’s model, with some adaptations and additions. See Martin Irvine, The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media, draft of book in progress. Used with author’s permission. A similar rendering can be found on Irvine’s faculty webpage: “CCTP 711 Semiotics and Cognitive Technologies: Technologies of Meaning,” Georgetown University Faculty Profile, 2018. Accessed June 17, 2019, http:​/​/fac​​ulty.​​georg​​etown​​.edu/​​irvin​​em​/CC​​​TP711​/. 50. Liszka, General Introduction, 52. 51. Quotes from EP 2:294–296, 1903. Examples and elucidations from Parker, Continuity, 158–159; TL Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 237; James Liszka, General Introduction, 48–52. 52. Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 286. 53. Ibid. 54. Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 336. 55. Charles Peirce, Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1977), 83.

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56. Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 324–325. 57. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 196. 58. Peirce, Semiotics and Significs, 111. 59. Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 313. For Austin on illocutionary sense, see JL Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 98–100. 60. Ibid. For Austin on perlocutionary sense, see Austin, Words, 101. 61. This is basically what Peirce would call in 1907 his “conditional idealism,” which states that “the immediate object of that conception of things in which minds would ultimately occur, if inquiry were pushed far enough, is the very reality [or dynamic object] itself.” R 322: 20–21, 1907, quoted in Robert Lane, Peirce on Realism and Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 67. 62. Short, Peirce’s Theory of Signs, 172. 63. Ibid., 173. 64. Ibid., 282. 65. Ibid., 59. 66. Ibid., 190. It should be noted that slowing the approach to the final interpretant of a matter can also be due to ethical reasons. As Peirce says, “The perversity of thought of whole generations may cause the postponement of the ultimate fixation.” See EP 2:342, 1905. 67. Ibid., 58–59. Sandra Rosenthal gives a notable summary of how the ultimate logical interpretant relates to the final (logical) interpretant: “The ultimate logical interpretant, though the living, developing link between signs and the universe, represents the intrasystematic unity of any sign system. The final logical interpretant, on the other hand, though an unattainable limit concept representing the static ideal of a habit subject to no further change, nonetheless serves to highlight the dynamics of verification in the maintenance of, or change in, any sign system.” See Sandra Rosenthal, “Peirce’s Ultimate Logical Interpretant and Dynamical Object: A Pragmatic Perspective,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 26, no. 2 (1990): 203, accessed October 5, 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.jst​​or​.or​​g​/sta​​ble​/4​​03202​​​80​ ?se​​q​=1. 68. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 206. 69. Ibid., 188. 70. Ibid., 204. 71. Ibid., 192; CP 4.538, 1906. 72. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 192–193. 73. Ibid., 204. 74. Ibid., 197. 75. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 198; CP 5.181, 1903. 76. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 200. 77. Ibid., 204. 78. Ibid., 202. 79. Ibid., 203. 80. Ibid., 188, 205. In saying that it is some “aspect” of the dynamic object, I disagree with Wilson’s approach that a true perceptual judgment identifies the

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immediate object with the dynamic object. As shown earlier, the dynamic object, taken as a whole, is what is independent of any particular representation, not merely the particular representation that gets it right. 81. Parker, Continuity, 168. 82. Ibid., 169. 83. Liszka, General Introduction, 54. 84. Ibid. 85. Liszka, General Introduction, 58–59. See also CS Peirce, The New Elements of Mathematics, Volume 3, ed. Carolyn Eisele (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), 749. 86. This is also an instance of a “corollarial deduction”—that is, to create the premises of the diagram (the “rule” and “case”) and observe them is to also obtain the conclusion (“result”). See CP 2.267, c. 1903; Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 204. 87. CS Peirce, Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, 7 volumes, ed. M. Fisch, C. Kloesel, E. Moore et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University, 1982–2009). Hereafter, “W” in text body. 88. Derived from CP 2.513, W 2.46–47, 1867/1893. This same diagram also appears in my “Peirce and Analogy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 56, no.3 (2020), 299–325. 89. Peirce, New Elements, 4.62, quoted in Parker, Continuity, 176. Peirce does not have the bracketed term “logical” in the original Carnegie Application of 1902, which is before his taxonomic breakthrough beginning in 1903. Thus, it is more accurate to his mature semiotic that the term be the “ultimate logical interpretant.” 90. For instance, tenacity has a certain “strength, simplicity, and directness” to it that can bring someone substantial peace of mind, as long as they don’t have to put their opinion into the realm of public discourse (EP 1:116, 122, 1877). Authority has a mass appeal and can get to “peaceful” results quickly, as long as it can successfully stifle divergent thinking. The a priori method can make people feel quite secure in their inferential patterns, and can seat us comfortably on what we are inclined to believe without the disturbance of new facts that may offset us (121). 91. Liszka, General Introduction, 99. 92. Cheryl Misak, Truth and the End of Inquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 140. 93. Lane, Realism and Idealism, 13. 94. Misak, Truth, 125. She calls this the “truth to inquiry” conditional. 95. Atkin, Peirce, 33. 96. Such ideas are to be distinguished from an idea as an actual thought. Thus, the former is that which is capable of being represented, say, the very possibility of “oppression,” while the latter is whatever my particular thought is about “oppression.” 97. Also, for Peirce’s concern that there are real possibilities and its value to a pragmatic philosophy, see CP 4.547, 1906; CP 5.453, 1905; CP 5.527, 1905. 98. Lane, Realism and Idealism, 141–142; CP 2.354, 1902. 99. For the roots and development of Peirce’s account of generals with regard to the Scholastic tradition—particularly John Duns Scotus—see John Boler, Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce’s Relationship to John Duns Scotus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963) and Rosa Maria Perez-Teran

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Mayorga, From Realism to “Realicism”: The Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce (New York: Lexington Books, 2007). 100. See, for instance, CP 6.20, W 8.104, 1890; CP 6.87, 1898; CP 6.93, 1903; CP 6.143, W 8.150–151, 1892. For further elaboration on this relation, see Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 50–51. 101. That one exercises self-control in this way is, for Peirce, simply a condition of rational thought. As Vincent Colapietro says, exegeting Peirce on this topic, “A rational mind is one in which habits grow out of signs as the interpretants of these signs, and in turn, self-control grows out of a hierarchy of habits.” See Vincent Colapietro, Peirce’s Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 108. For a thorough examination of Peirce’s perspective on self-control and its relation to a semiotic account of rational consciousness, see Colapietro, Self, 108–118. 102. MS 611: 13, 1908, quoted in Lane, Realism and Idealism, 139. 103. Peirce makes analogous connections to predications in EP 2:350–351, 1905. 104. Lane, Realism and Idealism, 60. 105. Lane, Realism and Idealism, 59. 106. Lane, Realism and Idealism, 71. 107. Parker, Continuity, 206. 108. Ibid., 206–207. 109. Parker, Continuity, 208. 110. It is infinite insofar as the state of affairs has to remain an ideal, since, after all, “the very being of the General, of Reason, consists in its governing individual events. So, then, the essence of Reason is such that its being never can have been completely perfected” (CP 1.615, 1903). 111. Parker, Continuity, 215. 112. Parker, Continuity, 222. 113. Parker, Continuity, 203. 114. For Peirce, such seems to be the “essence of Christianity” that could be called “Divine,” even if he was always suspicious of its creedal affirmations. See letter from Peirce to Reverend John W. Brown, April 24, 1892, quoted in Brent, A Life, 209. 115. MS 284, 1905, quoted in Donna Orange, Peirce’s Conception of God (Lubbock: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, 1984), 72. 116. The “Additament” to this essay, which Peirce added in 1910, further clarifies that the NA can be understood as a “nest of three arguments” (EP 2:446, 1908). First, the innermost argument and circle—the “humble argument”—is the turn from aesthetic encounter with the hypothesis of the reality of God and belief in it to its command upon one’s conduct. Second, and the middle concentric circle, is the NA properly, which pursues a reasoning that the hypothesis is true since it is one that everyone comes to have an aesthetic encounter with if they consider it with liberty and apart from pretense (but it may be called the argument from “free meditation”). The third, and outermost circle, could be called the argument by analogy to scientific method, since it logically explores the similarity between the first stage of scientific inquiry with the humble argument. However, the analogy differs in three ways: (1), the hypothesis of the reality of God is profoundly plausible, which contributes to the

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strength of its claim to truth; (2), and as mentioned, the hypothesis is quite vague and the conceptions associated with it are quite obscure and difficult to imagine (e.g., what does the conduct of an omniscient being look like?); and, (3), the command the hypothesis has over the whole of conduct, if believed, is quite different from the limitations on conduct that other regular hypotheses have. See EP 2:446–447, 1908. 117. Raposa, Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, 144. This sort of picture leads Raposa to think that Peirce is probably best labeled a panentheist as a result (51). Leon Niemoczynski concurs, insofar as we understand this term asserting that “God is fully in relation to the world but still transcends it in some basic respects including breadth, depth, and power. This means that the supreme being of God includes and penetrates the whole cosmos so that all members and facts of the cosmos exist in God’s reality, yet God’s being is more than, and is not exhausted by, those members and their facts.” See Niemoczynski, Religious Metaphysics, 60. 118. Raposa, Philosophy of Religion, 144. 119. Ibid. 120. Parker, Continuity, 225. 121. Ibid

Chapter 7

Analogia Signorum

INTRODUCTION Having examined Peirce’s philosophy, and how it is situated with respect to the idea of intelligibility, I am finally at a place in this exploration to put forth the constructive account of the analogia signorum, or “the analogy of signs.” From my previous analysis of Peirce’s thought, we have learned a very important, overarching proposition from his logic and metaphysics: semiosis is universally applicable to reality. This is a simple entailment of his architectonic methodology: if all real objects of experience are in principle cognizable, are interpretable, then those objects enter into sign-process. As such, semiosis may also be understood to apply to all universes of discourse in a univocal manner, meaning that there is no different or alternate version of sign-process that some universes of discourse participate in while others do not.1 If that is the case, then semiosis can be the common ground—or the basis of proportionality—for connecting not only all linguistic phenomena, but any cognizable phenomena at all. Now, the penultimate section of the last chapter made the argument that Peirce’s theological claims are modest: “The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” gives us an intelligible—if not deductively certain—reason to believe that there is a creator of the three universes of experiences, and so we are presented with an argument for the reality of an ens necessarium, or “God.” However, such an argument does not get us much beyond the reality of God; we can reasonably infer that the world—or the aggregate of the three universes of experience—is created by a God with properties vaguely alike to the God of traditional theism, but the greater specificity characteristic of religious doctrine is something we can only idly “gabble” over (CP 6.508-509, c. 1906). This is because the world is primarily a symbol of the divine mind, 215

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meaning that we are epistemically limited to a sign that is a cosmic convention, rather than an iconic quality, of that which caused it. True, that symbol has iconic and indexical elements—as all symbols do—but the symbol cannot be considered to feature such icons and indices that directly indicate the character of its creator. From this, we do better at getting to intelligible God-talk than the proponents of chapters 3 to 5, but we are also licensed to say far less about its object because the symbol provides no direct link to the character that gave rise to it. Rather, we seem to have a potentially infinite interpretability with regard to the iconic and indexical signs that would lead us to whatever is anchoring the similarity to the “analogue of mind” we suppose God to be. And, this seems to be where Peirce leaves us. But, the story changes, I think, if we allow ourselves some further musing on God. Consider this thought experiment: the Christian believes that there are “arguments’ (not argumentations) that are available to her about God that radically changes the claims of theological knowledge. Those arguments— found in the New Testament gospels, in particular—take the form of testimony to the person of Jesus. Jesus, Christians believe, is the full-embodiment of the divine life in human flesh. They hold to the abduction that the ens necessarium, who created the world, was not content to leave itself known through a symbol of itself; rather, the reality of human sin and need for salvation brought about the active self-disclosure of that necessary, ultimate reality in the person of Jesus. He, it says in the Gospel of John, is the one who “made [God] known” (John 1:18). What is involved in “being made known,” I would hypothetically submit, is the full semiotic reality of God in the person of Jesus. In other words, Jesus’s life has shown us an unprecedented entry of the divine into the world; one that yields the conclusion that God is sign-able, just as Peirce admits—but, my view goes further than Peirce’s in holding that God has affirmed in the person of Jesus that God has fully disclosed Godself semiotically, and further, that that disclosure reveals God as determinate in specific respects (though still in a vague manner). The result is that God is not just symbolically, but also iconically and indexically knowable in the incarnate Son of God as a perceived object; thus, the incarnation is itself an argument—albeit a theological one—for the claim that the univocity of semiosis obtains for both God and creatures. That univocity of semiosis, finally, is the basis of proportionality that anchors the ensuing activity of theological language. This means that the making of signs in reference to God is always in analogy to the concrete person of Christ, and so is always human signing in analogy to divine signing in Christ- an analogia signorum. The chapter has seven sections. The first section will concern itself with what might be thought of as obstacles to bringing together a Peircean philosophy and something like what the analogia signorum proposes. The second section will present the formal structure of the analogia signorum

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and demonstrate how the Peircean elements contribute to its constitution over four phases of argument. The third section will cover an explanation of the analogia signorum’s application, providing an extended example of its use. The fourth section will explicate the theological presumptions of the analogia signorum, also taking care to show its consonance with the biblical presentation of Jesus as the Sign of God. The fifth section will offer some philosophical reflections on the analogia signorum with respect to disparate challenges regarding its claims. The sixth section will argue for the analogia signorum’s superiority over the three perspectives from part II. Finally, the seventh section will, once again, approach the question of intelligibility from the guidelines for analogy set forth in the second chapter. PEIRCEAN OBSTACLES: AN ASSESSMENT The introduction of this chapter has already made claims about the consonance of the analogia signorum with Peirce’s philosophy. As we’ll see in the next section, I hold that the analogia signorum is entirely consistent with— and, in fact, mostly derivative from—Peirce’s semiotics, and that it bears no salient inconsistencies with Peirce’s method, even though it expands on a few of its conclusions. However, a few red flags might come up for readers of Peirce, particularly regarding the role of Jesus. Is that synthesis, it might be asked, really allowable on Peirce’s terms? I would like to take some time to assess a select few of these dissonances, and address their underlying concerns individually. First, it might appear that the use of Jesus as the keystone to this argument would be against Peirce’s understanding of his role in history. Yes, Peirce saw Jesus as calling forth an advance of the principal of love (CP 5.449 fn1, c. 1893; CP 6.293-294, 1893; CP 6.440, 1893), and a resolutely “deep philosophy” of living;2 however, Peirce seemed to think that Jesus wasn’t much interested in the Christian church forming creeds about matters apart from those more practical affairs (CP 6.450, 1895). He also didn’t appear to think we should interpret Jesus as undergoing a bodily resurrection (CP 6.519-20, c. 1906) nor that the recorded miracles are sufficient evidence for his divinity (CP 6.538, 1901). Further, Peirce appeared to take the conclusions of biblical criticism seriously, admitting that it was an open question whether translations of Scripture were consistent with older versions and whether Jesus fits into a traditional theological scheme (CP 7.648, 1903). Finally, Peirce wrote to William James that the Buddha was a superior human being to the “miracle monger of the synoptic gospels,” and in his later life said that, indeed, Buddhism may even have been a superior religion altogether.3

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Yet, the thoroughly considered picture is not definitively in favor of skepticism, either. What Peirce does explicitly say about Jesus is that miracles don’t seem to be sufficient evidence for his divinity, not that Jesus wasn’t in fact divine, or did miracles (CP 6.538, 1901). On the authenticity of Scripture as a witness to Jesus, Peirce admits that he has “never looked into the Biblical criticisms” (6.513, 1906) and confesses that he can’t weigh in on their judgments (CP 7.648, 1903).4 We also can’t forget Peirce’s admission that his philosophical conclusions were “not discordant with traditional [Christian] dogmas” (CP 6.446, 1893) and we can point to how he admitted himself as “one of those who say [with the Nicene Creed], ‘we believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,’ where the invisible things, I take it, are Love, Beauty, Truth, the Principle of Contradiction, Time, etc.”5 Truly, Peirce intends those creedal or dogmatic affirmations to be vague, and we can’t presume those would include an assent to the divinity of Jesus; however, neither does he rule it out. To be clear, I’m not saying that Peirce’s silence on these matters constitutes an argument for a traditional interpretation of Jesus; rather, I am saying that Peirce’s silence does not prevent a hypothetical argument from being made for it. As to some of his scattered remarks on Buddhism, while acknowledging that these do suggest an appreciation for its approach to life and paints a picture of Peirce as something of a religious eclectic, Peirce never makes a claim that the comparison deligitimizes Jesus’s claims (or, rather, the claims made about him). Given the textual evidence, then, I think Peirce’s definitive attitude toward Jesus, if he had one, remains ambiguous, but in that the drift of Peirce’s thinking does not force on us a conclusion about Jesus one way or the other, I think it remains open to the analogia signorum. But, Peirce’s own attitude notwithstanding, our primary concern is with dissonances between it and Peirce’s written philosophy. To our second matter, then, it might seem strange to admit the possibility of a God-man on Peirce’s architectonic. Indeed, the more well-known attempts to synthesize Peirce’s philosophy with a theory of religion tend to be quite naturalistic, insofar as they are apt to write off the revelatory claims of religious testimony and explain interpretations of God as symbols of an evolving created act or semiotic world nature.6 By my lights, however, I see no reason that the irruption of God into the second universe of experience should be preempted by Peirce’s philosophy. This is mainly for two reasons. First, Peirce does not preclude the possibility of the miraculous, of which I would take the incarnation to be an instance (though a unique one). Whether miracles are interpreted as the indeterminate “great wonders” of the patristic period, the interruptions-without-violation into the order of nature of the scholastics, or the de facto violations of natural law of David Hume (CP

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6.540, 1901), Peirce sees no a priori reason to deny their truth (CP 6.514, c. 1906). Indeed, while he is critical both of the metaphysical specificity of the scholastics, and Hume who followed them, he admits that his own doctrine of tychism would not require miracles to conform to the doctrine of the uniformity of nature (CP 6.512, c. 1906). But, Peirce also thinks that miracles shouldn’t have the pride of place in religious arguments that they often do, and for two reasons. For one, they simply aren’t that important for him when compared with how a religion promulgates the principle of love (even though he takes the appearance of miracles to be “intrinsic elements of a genuine religion” [CP 6.446, 1893]). For another, insofar as miracles are isolated, sui generis events, they provide very weak evidence either for sufficiently verifying or falsifying their reality and what they might be intended to justify (CP 6.514, c. 1906).7 So, Peirce affirms that miracles might have happened and are happening, but can’t say that he finds useful arguments for them, or for their utility in reasoning. The analogia signorum, on the other hand, suggests just such a useful argument can be found, at least for the incarnation. Second, Peirce also has no a priori disagreement with the possibility of revelation. Although he concedes that revelations, or divine disclosures to individuals of “sporadic and miraculous” nature, are “by far the most uncertain class of truths there are,” to reject them would be “unphilosophical” (CP 1.143, 1897). To be sure, Peirce has great reservation about claims to their certainty, but he is not singling out revelation as something special on that front; rather, Peirce claims that even revelation is not absolutely certain, just as the axioms of logic, mathematics or causality are not (CP 1.144, 1897); indeed, even direct experience isn’t without the possibility of critique (CP 1.145, 1897). This is merely what is entailed by Peirce’s long-held anti-intuitionism: the degree of justification for a proposition will be established only upon reasoning, not by some other “mode of consciousness” that can directly grasp its truth (CP 1.21-22, 1868). So, it doesn’t seem that Peirce’s philosophy will be amenable to eliminating the claim of the incarnation, which is key to my argument for the analogia signorum. This puts us in a similar position with respect to the first issue mentioned: Peirce may be silent about a positive claim for revelation or the miraculous, but his silence is based on methodological caution, which allows for openness to the positive claim’s possibility. But, this brings us to our third issue: what is there in the analogia signorum to argue for its place in Peirce’s philosophy? In other words, why should Peirce accept it as a legitimate hypothesis? Also, on this account, it may be said, the presentation of God as the person of Jesus brings a sort of over-determinacy to God of which Peirce would likely be skeptical. How can we say, for instance, that Jesus, as God, would specify loving one’s neighbor in a certain way, as he does on the Sermon on the Mount?

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The answer, I think, is to understand the analogia signorum as an abductive argument that can supplement the hope of the neglected argument. As was noted in the previous chapter, the pragmaticistic payoff of the neglected argument is what the Additament of 1910 called the “humble argument”—that is, the experiential encounter with the hypothesis of God has a sort of power over one’s practical affairs that is aesthetically, ethically, and logically compelling. But, it can be argued, against the NA, that this part of the argument is too indeterminate. What is it, exactly, that I should do as a result of my vague idea of God? How does that idea hit the ground, so to speak, when the question of doing comes up—about how we act, and how we share information? Peirce doesn’t seem to provide us with answers that are determinate enough for us to act upon. In this respect, the NA comes up a bit short in the area where it is supposed to be the most meaningful: in our conduct. And this is where the analogia signorum comes in. We could imagine ourselves observing the muser’s cognition at the point in her self-dialogue: “Perhaps,” she says, “this ens necessarium can explain the connections of the universe well enough, but how should I conform my activity to an ‘ideal for life’ (EP 2.439, 1908) that my idea of God conjures, since my idea of God seems too broad to do so? And, how can I judge that my symbolic expressions of this God in any way approximate what this God is like better than others?” At this point, I think one hypothesis that would suggest itself is this one: “If my idea of God is one who is interested in my conduct being conformable to an ethical ideal, and would want me to express propositions about God having to do with that conduct, then God would provide some determination in the Second universe of experience to concretize my actions and link cognition to a perception of God so that I may understand how to live.” Though instinct would not provide the answer to these questions, the Christian tradition poses a hypothesis of considerable aesthetic, ethical, and logical potential: God became part of the second universe of experience as Jesus in order—at least in part—to show us how to live and express the ideal of conduct vaguely propounded in the neglected argument. In considering the testimonies about Jesus of the Christian tradition, the questioner should consider the representation of Jesus there abductively compelling on our three major fronts. First, the aesthetic intensity of the creator’s self-revelation in the form of the creature, and for the sake of love of the creature, arrests the imagination and captures a move of boundless possibility to unite human beings in the sympathy that Peirce was so interested in advancing. Second, the sheer potential for ethical conduct that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus manifests is nothing short of remarkable. His elucidation of the principle of love in his personal actions toward

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his persecutors, his call for neighborly love to extend to one’s enemies, and his profound lessons on the kingdom of God are examples that have a command over personal conduct that sharpens and concretizes action (even if it be exercised with great difficulty). Third, it adds: (1) to the synechistic commensurability of divine and human meanings through the univocity of semiosis a set of determinate, imitable and synthesizable expressions in the form of Jesus’s discourse about God, including God’s love, mercy, grace, forgiveness, power, desires, and so on; and (2) a concrete aegis for conducting our reflective affairs on those matters in Jesus’s own patterns of speech about God. Altogether, then, the analogia signorum provides a compelling hypothesis from its roots in the biblical witnesses, and its pragmaticistic elucidation has been seen in the robust tradition that those witnesses founded (though that tradition is, certainly, not without its errors in understanding its relationship to Jesus, or living out what it understands it ought to do as a result). So then, we can understand the role of the analogia signorum in Peirce’s philosophy in the following way: (1) the NA claims that it can provide an argument for the belief in the reality of God based on instinct; (2) however, the first nest of the argument—the “humble argument”—does not provide determinate parameters for conduct, particularly in the spheres of ethics and logical expression; (3) the analogia signorum provides ethical and logical precision through the determinate reality of the life of God incarnate, Jesus Christ; and (4), therefore, the analogia signorum may be used to supplement and strengthen the neglected argument. To conclude this section, while I believe it is quite accurate to say that the analogia signorum would not be Peirce’s interpretation of an adequate account for God-talk, I believe that it is Peircean in that what it expands upon or determines apart from Peirce’s own, more vague position can be accounted for by either insufficient information or inadequate examination of possibilities on Peirce’s part. In other words, Peirce’s philosophy can be legitimately extended into the analogia signorum on the grounds that it allows for possibilities that Peirce either didn’t consider or prematurely closed off. And, moreover, none of the possibilities suggested harm the core characteristics of Peirce’s philosophy; the analogia signorum remains realistic, empiricistic, semiotically intelligible, objectively idealistic, fallible, pragmaticistic, and intrinsically open to inquiry. So, though it suggests that Peirce’s impressions of Jesus were limited in certain respects, the changes made by the analogia signorum do nothing to damage his philosophy’s overall integrity. As to the consequence of the analogia signorum on a Peircean idea of God, we’ll look at that more closely later on in the chapter.

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ANALOGIA SIGNORUM: STRUCTURE AND PEIRCEAN ELEMENTS We have already seen the basic triadic form of semiosis in the previous chapter. Again, it involves the triadic relation of a sensible quality (a representamen), that represents some other thing (an object), in a particular way to confer some significance or meaning (an interpretant). To refresh, its basic form is below (Figure 7.1): The argument of the analogia signorum can be broken down into four distinct phases. The first phase’s elements have already been offered by Peirce explicitly, and it forms the main buttress of the claim for semiotic univocity: 1 a. All reality is (or, better, would be) cognized through the semiotic process; 2a. God is a real object; 3a. Therefore (from 1a and 2a), God is (or, better, would be) cognized through the semiotic process. The second phase can be indirectly advanced by Peirce’s philosophy: 1b. If the dynamic object is made available to the interpreter’s perception, the resulting representamens to be interpreted will be optimal for inquiry into that dynamic object; 2b. Non-image indices do not make their dynamic objects available to the interpreter’s perception;

Figure 7.1  Semiosis in General. Derived from The Semiotic Foundations of Computing: A Peircean Redescription of Computation, Information, and Digital Media by Martin Irvine. Used with permission.

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3 b. The world is a non-image index of God; 4b. Therefore (from 2b and 3b), the representamens the world produces do not make God’s dynamic object available to the interpreter’s perception. 5b. Therefore (from 1b and 4b), the world does not produce representamens optimal for inquiry into God’s dynamic object. The third phase, however, is advanced by a hypothesis of Christian tradition: 1 c. Jesus is a real object; 2c. Therefore (from 1a and 1c), Jesus is cognized through the semiotic process; 3c. Having an image index of God incarnate means to make God available to the interpreter’s perception; 4c. The Christian faith claims that Jesus is God incarnate; 5c. Therefore (from 3c and 4c), having an image index of Jesus is to make God available to the interpreter’s perception; 6c. Therefore (from 1b and 5c), Jesus ensures that the resulting representamens to be interpreted will be optimal for inquiry into who God is. Finally, the fourth phase advances the analogia signorum properly: 1d. If a given set of representamens is interpreted as optimal for inquiry into a dynamic object (from 1b), then it has interpretive primacy over any other representamens that are not part of that set; 2d. Therefore (from 3b-5b, 4c-6c, and 1d), Jesus Christ gives interpretive primacy to a set of representamens over any other representamens in the world as God’s living [rhematic] iconic sinsign. 3d. An iconic sinsign represents its dynamic object through resemblance, and resemblances of form—or structural relations—of that dynamic object will be represented by the diagrammatic species of iconic sinsign; further, to make symbolic interpretations in language about that diagrammatic iconic sinsign is to claim general interpretants likewise resemble in form—or, are analogous with—the interpretants produced by the diagrammatic iconic sinsign; 4d. Therefore (from 2d and 3d), all theological language subsists in analogy to the unique, living sign of God, Jesus Christ, who is himself in analogy to God as [rhematic] iconic sinsign—in other words, God-talk is established by an analogia signorum, or “analogy of signs,” that has its common proportion in semiosis (3a). Having seen the basic outline for the analogia signorum, I may now proceed to an explanation of each phase.

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Phase 1: Semiotic Univocity 1a. All reality is (or, better, would be) cognized through the semiotic process; 2a. God is a real object; 3a. Therefore (from 1a and 2a), God is (or, better, would be) cognized through the semiotic process. As mentioned above, the claims here flow directly from Peirce’s philosophy, so we can make short work of their explanation. Supporting (1a), Peirce has argued that any cognition is going to take place through semiosis; this, coupled with his stalwart rejection of incognizables, means that any real thing—that is, any object that is independent on what any interpreter may think—would be cognized through semiosis. To speak of “objects’ is only to identify that external permanency that is resistant to whatever we may think—it is not to admit conformity to a particular metaphysics of substance, process, event, or otherwise that would flesh out its content. To say “would be” is toexpress both that this is the regulative principle assumed for the integrity of scientific investigation, and to say that it is not a matter to which the current state of the community of inquirers now lays claim, but which is presumed to follow into the future indefinitely for all real objects. Supporting (2a), Peirce has argued for the hypothesis of the reality of God, claiming that such a resulting belief is warranted based on its potential aesthetic, ethical, and logical fruitfulness. Thus far, we may only understand it in the vague sense to which Peirce ascribes: it does not specify an individual person of a theistic religion. Thus (3a) follows deductively from the premises: if God is in any way to be cognized (whether thought, sensed, imagined, mused upon, worshipped, spoken about, etc.), then God must be capable of being cognized through the semiotic process. As in (1a), we cannot assume that we already are cognizing God, but insofar as we would, it would have to be through semiosis—through the triadic relating of representamen, object, and interpretant. In summary, creature and creator share in the univocity of semiosis. It should be emphasized here that the univocity of semiosis has the following meaning from the viewpoint of pragmaticistic intelligibility: it is just to understand that the two objects that share in that univocity do so in a way that their potentially conceivable effects on practical conduct bear no discernable difference. In application, we can understand semiotic univocity, or univocity of semiosis, as this: two objects that share in semiosis univocally function within the sign-process activity of representamen-object-interpretant with no potentially conceivable difference that plays out in their practical conduct as signifiers. As a real object, God is involved in semiosis just as any other real object is.

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Phase 2: God, the World, and Perception 1b. If the dynamic object is made available to the interpreter’s perception, the resulting representamens to be interpreted will be optimal for inquiry into that dynamic object; 2b. Non-image indices do not make their dynamic objects available to the interpreter’s perception; 3b. The world is a non-image index of God; 4b. Therefore (from 2b and 3b), the representamens the world produces do not make God’s dynamic object available to the interpreter’s perception. 5b. Therefore (from 1b and 4b), the world does not produce representamens optimal for inquiry into God’s dynamic object. Again, like phase 1, the elements for phase 2 are all present in Peirce’s philosophy; however, there are a few conceptual distinctions used here that Peirce made—and some he didn’t—that require explanation. With regard to the first clause of (1b), making a dynamic object available to an interpreter’s perception can be understood as equivalent to making the dynamic object available as a percept to the interpreter. As described in the previous chapter, a percept is some uncontrollable appearance of a non-ego to the ego that combines the act of perceiving and the perceived object. But, we must say more about what this means in the context of signification, and how it might bear out in general criteria for perception.8 We may quote Peirce himself in connection with these: Now what is [the percept’s] logical bearing upon knowledge and belief? This may be summed up in three items, as follows: 1st, it contributes something positive. (Thus, the chair has its four legs, seat, and back, its yellow color, its green cushion, etc. To learn this is a contribution to knowledge.) 2nd, it compels the perceiver to acknowledge it. 3rd, it neither offers any reason for such acknowledgment nor makes any pretension to reasonableness. This last point distinguishes the percept from an axiom. . . . The percept . . . is absolutely dumb. It acts upon us, it forces itself upon us; but it does not address the reason, nor appeal to anything for support. (CP 7.622-23, 1903)

Beginning with the first item, to say that the percept “contributes something positive” is to say that there is some quality or feeling to be taken in. Elsewhere, Peirce will say that these are “complex feelings” (EP 2.419, 1907) or what amount to rhemes;9 however, and moving into the second item, those qualities should not be understood to be representing some other thing.10 Rather, the percept functions to present the dynamic object itself by the complex feelings perceived, effectively “compelling” the perceiver to

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acknowledge it. Peirce himself used the term image for this operation, though he did so with some reservation about the term: one must be on one’s guard against a false impression that it might insinuate. Namely, an “image” usually means something intended to represent,—virtually professing to represent,—something else, real or ideal. So understood, the word “image” would be a misnomer for a percept. The chair I appear to see makes no professions of any kind, essentially embodies no intentions of any kind, does not stand for anything. It obtrudes itself upon my gaze; but not as a deputy for anything else, not “as” anything. It simply knocks at the portal of my soul and stands there in the doorway. . . . I can only get rid of it by an exertion of physical force. (CP 7.619-20, 1903)

Peirce, thus, also addresses the third item here: the percept is not contingent upon reason for its forcefulness to be known. It merely presents itself to the ego. As a Second, it must also harbor a First (the “complex feelings”) as well, but it is not yet a Third to the ego—that is, it is not yet representative of anything (even though it is intrinsically semiotic). But, as we saw in the previous chapter, no cognized percept is ever apart from the perceptual judgement that renders it in a propositional—and so symbolic—form, nor is it apart from the synthesis into the percipuum that registers that dynamic object of the percept as an external object to the cognizer. Moving on to the second clause of (1b), the resulting representamens produced by the percept for a dynamic object are optimal for inquiry for what I take to be a common sense reason: inquiry into any object will be most accurate to that object’s reality if the object may be directly observed. This is because: (1) through the percept, the object is immediately cognized through sensible effects to be rendered in pragmaticistic meaningfulness; and (2) the steady stream of percepts provided in observation renders an ideal standpoint of the “moving picture” (CP 5.115, 1903) for critiquing the propositions that minds offer to represent the dynamic object. Thus, we have an optimal standpoint for critically accurate interpretations of numerous signs when a dynamic object is available to perception. So, if our object is a “coin” and our purpose is to learn its material constitution, then our optimal viewpoint of inquiry into the coin’s material constitution will be immediate and constant perception of that coin through various means of analysis. Hearing the reports of that analysis is not optimal in comparison, even less so would be another’s report of that report. Peirce’s laboratory sensibility is at work here,11 but the principle need not be confined to laboratory conditions. If, for example, I wanted to know what my neighbor looks like right now, I would be best served by being in a condition where his dynamic object would be made available to perception:

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face-to-face interaction. I could hear my friends’ reports on what he looks like, find a description of him online, or even find a photograph, but if I want to get the most accurate information on his likeness now, I will be best served by directly engaging with him. Further, I will consider those other indices, symbols, or general artifacts of his person to accurately represent him only insofar as they were produced as signs from direct encounter with percepts he produces. In other words, the closer that inquiry can get to arriving at signs directly consequent of the percepts my neighbor produces, the more justified I will take my interpretation of those signs to be, ceteris paribus.12 Again, this is an explicit principle of the laboratory, but it is an implied one for everyday knowledge. Moving on to (2b), while we may say that percepts are constituted by a species of index, it is not the case that all indices are percepts. The dicent indexical sinsign, for instance, is an index that points to some actual object that has affected it in a certain way, but it does so by representation, not presentation. Take Peirce’s example of the bullet hole (CP 2.304, 1902): the bullet hole really was affected in some way by the bullet, but the hole does not then present the bullet apart from an act of reasoning about its cause, nor will it provide correction concerning changes in its dynamic object through time. Or, think of a gold ring as an index for the goldsmith who made it: the ring’s existence is an index of its creator’s actual existence—without the goldsmith, there would be no gold ring. But, the ring does not tell me anything precise about its creator, whether short/tall, living/dead, careful/careless, married/ unmarried, right-/left-handed, acting out of compulsion/freedom, and so on. Indeed, the goldsmith might not be human at all. The point, at any rate, is that indices can be those that do not fulfill the basic requirements of the percept, particularly the second two: (1), it does not compel its interpreter to acknowledge the object for which it is a sign; and, (2), it requires an exercise of reason to represent its object. Such indices, then, are what I call non-image indices, insofar as they do not keep with the presentative function that Peirce articulated earlier in CP 7.619-20, 1903. On the other hand, those indices that do fulfill the three conditions—that is, contributing something positive, compelling the interpreter’s acknowledgment, and being non-representative of another object through reason—may be called image indices,13 or be considered synonymous with percepts. To further elucidate this idea, I draw upon Joseph Ransdell to articulate the relation between what he (less economically, but more explicitly) calls a “self-representing iconic sign” and “an other-representing iconic sign” in Peirce’s work on perception, for I think it makes the same essential point that I am making here about distinguishing “image” from “non-image,” respectively.14 In the former case, “if the perception is veridical,” the “form” or quality that is presented to the mind as an intentional object appears as the

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icon for the perceived intended object—in other words, the idea of the object conveyed to the mind internally is just the object presented externally.15 In what is immediately perceived, then, the intended external object and the intentional internal object are not only formally identical, but “materially or individually identical as well.”16 In such a case, one can say that the truly perceived object is a self-representing iconic sign, which is definable “simply as an object, functioning as iconic sign, whose intended object is materially identical with it.”17 In the latter case, an “other-representing iconic sign” does just as it says: it will iconically represent something other than itself (like, for instance, the map presents some similarity to the objective terrain without being the terrain itself). So, those signs which represent apart from a perception will have a hybrid status as both self-representing and other-representing iconic signs, which is to say that the icon that they embody is doubly referred, to themselves and to some other object as well. That is, in such cases the icon is to be thought of as being truly representative both of a certain sensory object immediately perceived (for example, the map) and of some object not in immediate perception (for example, the terrain the map represents).18

This, then, is what I mean by the “image index”: it is possible—and actual when veridical—for the percept to present an icon as identical with a given object “x” perceived, thus as a self-representing iconic sign. For a “non-image index,” it is not possible to have this same presentation of the given object “x” perceived. That these are indices is merely to point out that those icons are presented through some real affectedness by their respective intended objects—that is, the percepts are caused by their dynamic objects. (3b) advances a proposition that Peirce never actually makes, but I believe can be affirmed by his philosophy. The world—or the combination of the three universes of experience—has a creator, and in that sense can be considered at least an index of God, and definitely a symbol of God (insofar as God’s ideas are general). However, like the gold ring’s relation to the goldsmith, the world cannot present God in any definite sense. This is why Peirce so strongly advocates for the vagueness of the term God: insofar as we ascribe to God various symbolic attributes like “being like a mind” or “omniscient” or “purposeful” or “reason,” we can only use these terms very loosely and without depicting specific characters of those properties (like how we may ascribe to the goldsmith “intelligence” as a result of its being indexically signified by the gold ring). In the neglected argument, the ens necessarium can be admitted as a powerfully appealing hypothesis in the abstract in terms of explaining our world, being ethically commanding, and aesthetically appealing, but all such matters remain incredibly unspecified as to what about God governs the explanations, or commands for conduct, or

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is considered pleasing. In Ransdell’s terminology, in being prevented from thinking that the world provides self-referential iconic signs of God, we can’t make definite inferences about how other-referential iconic signs relate to God. Thus, I think that Peirce would agree that—insofar as the world does not afford determinate presentation of God—it is a non-image index. (4b) and (5b), then, follow deductively from the given premises. If the world is a non-image index of God, then it is not going to make God’s dynamic object available to the interpreter’s perception as a percept. And, if this is true, then the world does not produce representamens optimal for inquiry into God, the dynamic object they index. Truly, the hypothesis of the reality of God is an appealing one, but its grounds are abstract and quite indeterminate—instinct simply doesn’t grant us more than this. Phase 3: The Christian Hypothesis—Jesus and Optimal Inquiry into God 1 c. Jesus is a real object; 2c. Therefore (from 1a and 1c), Jesus is cognized through the semiotic process; 3c. Having an image index of God incarnate means to make God available to the interpreter’s perception; 4c. The Christian faith claims that Jesus is God incarnate; 5c. Therefore (from 3c and 4c), having an image index of Jesus is to make God available to the interpreter’s perception; 6c. Therefore (from 1b and 5c), Jesus ensures that the resulting representamens to be interpreted will be optimal for inquiry into who God is. We now bring in the distinctly Christian content of the analogia signorum. Premise (1c) will be unfamiliar to no theologian, and, given the purpose of this book, it is merely assumed as true.19 The bracketing of further inquiry here is also sensible since my main interlocutors on theological analogy all agree to the authenticity of the proposition. Further, like phase 1, one should understand “real object” in a general sense for some permanency resistant to the influence of one’s own or any other mind, in contrast to a fiction.20 (2c) follows deductively from (1a) and (1c): if all reality is cognized through the semiotic process, and Jesus is a real object, then he must be cognized through the semiotic process. Thus, Jesus will be understood through the taxonomic classification that we have earlier outlined. Regarding (3c), to say something briefly about the term “incarnate,” I understand this along the traditional—if fuzzy—denotation of “become flesh.” That is, an incarnate being is something that, following Athanasius, is “embodied”—that “come[s] to be and appears in” a body.21 In Peircean terms, we might say that something incarnated is, at least, some living thing

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in the second universe of experience—that is, existence. Thus, we could say that, at the time of writing this sentence, my elder brother is incarnate, but his sixth child is not (being a mere possibility). If that is the case, then saying that God is “incarnate” is to say that God is, at least, some living thing in the second universe of experience. If one grants that hypothetical, then it makes sense to say that one may have an image index of God incarnate, which amounts to an index that fulfills the three conditions of the percept: (1) something positive is contributed to cognition of God; (2) one is forced to acknowledge that incarnate status as complex feelings; and (3) being God incarnate does not require a representative semiotic act with which to infer that status, but God simply presents Godself as such. Therefore, having an image index of God incarnate means to make God known to an interpreter’s perception. Arriving at (4c) we come to perhaps the most contentious premise ever formulated in the history of human thought. But, like (1c), I will sidestep the harrowing debate over the truth of this proposition since there is prior consensus of its truth among my interlocutors from part II, if taken in the vague sense of some identity with the God of the Bible manifest in Jesus Christ and the creator of the world. As I mentioned in the introduction, insofar as this is a work in philosophical theology—and not philosophy of religion—there are certain premises I merely presume to obtain, even if I can acknowledge that I require robust, sizable brackets for what has been tabled. Given the identity relation of Jesus Christ with God incarnate, we can then say that the material conditional in (5c) follows: having an image index of Jesus Christ is to make God available to the interpreter’s perception. The experienced witness of Jesus Christ in the flesh, in his earthly ministry, is tantamount to the perception of God in the world. Therefore (6c) also follows deductively from the combination of premises (1b) and (5c): Jesus Christ is a sufficient condition for optimal inquiry into who God is because he has presented God’s dynamic object to the interpreter’s perception. This leads us directly into phase 4 of the argument. Phase 4: The Analogia Signorum Proper 1d. If a given set of representamens is interpreted as optimal for inquiry into a dynamic object (from 1b), then it has interpretive primacy over any other representamens that are not part of that set; 2d. Therefore (from 3b-5b, 4c-6c, and 1d), Jesus Christ gives interpretive primacy to a set of representamens over any other representamens in the world as God’s living [rhematic] iconic sinsign. 3d. An iconic sinsign represents its dynamic object through resemblance, and resemblances of form—or structural relations—of that dynamic

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object will be represented by the diagrammatic species of iconic sinsign; further, to make symbolic interpretations in language about that diagrammatic iconic sinsign is to claim general interpretants likewise resemble in form—or, are analogous with—the interpretants produced by the diagrammatic iconic sinsign; 4 d. Therefore (from 2d and 3d), all theological language subsists in analogy to the unique, living sign of God, Jesus Christ, who is himself in analogy to God as [rhematic] iconic sinsign—in other words, God-talk is established by an analogia signorum, or “analogy of signs,” that has its common proportion in semiosis (3a). We now enter what can be considered the basic argument for the analogia signorum itself, and so the basic structure of how one should understand theological analogy. The first clause of premise (1d) has been stated before in (1b): having access to the dynamic object in perception amounts to the optimal interpretive position for inquiry into that dynamic object because of the set of available representamens to be interpreted. If so, then we can say that that set of representamens has interpretive primacy over other representamens not acquired from the optimal standpoint. What I mean by “interpretative primacy” is this: to be a representamen with interpretive primacy over another representamen is to rank that representamen at a higher grade of privilege toward inquiry into its dynamic object than another representamen, giving it a greater potential for epistemic warrant and the capacity to override interpretations of lower-ranked signs. In most cases, this will be because the former representamen is closer in a series of affected connections to the dynamic object than the latter representamen. For instance, we would consider the sound of a smoke alarm as having a lower grade of privilege to inquiry into its dynamic object, fire, then would the appearance of smoke. In the case of the appearance of smoke, we consider it more likely that there is indeed the presence of fire than the sounding of a smoke alarm (thus, higher epistemic warrant), and that the absence of the smoke alarm sounding would not deter the decision to judge that the fire is actually present if the smoke appeared (thus, it overrides lower-ranked signs). This is not the case for the converse: the sounding of a smoke alarm would not give us the same urgency about the existence of a fire than the appearance of smoke (thus, lower epistemic warrant), and the sound of the alarm going off without being able to identify the appearance of any smoke would bring into doubt the smoke detector’s proper functioning, not whether the smoke is really connected to a fire (thus, the incapacity to override). So, to say that a given set of representamens has interpretive primacy over any other set of representamens is to place it at the highest level of interpretive primacy, making those representamens of highest epistemic

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warrant and overriding any other representamens if conflicts of interpretation arise. So, putting it together, if one is able to perceive the silver coin, then she will be in the optimal position for inquiry into that coin, and, if she is in the optimal position of inquiry, then the representamens she may possibly interpret from that position about that coin will have higher epistemic warrant and overriding capability over any interpretants that are not the result of that position. Thus, whatever she might learn about the coin apart from the privileged position of perception and the observances she can make directly may be considered both of less importance to knowledge than what perception offers and may be overridden if contradicted by her observations. This moves us to (2d), which begins the integration with the previous phases of the composite argument. Since Jesus is an object that allows for optimal inquiry into God’s dynamic object over the world’s three universes of experience (owing to his role as providing image indices of God), then that means he also possesses interpretive primacy over any other object in the three universes of experience. This entails that Jesus Christ provides representamens that have both higher epistemic warrant than any other representamen provided by the three universes of experience, and that interpreted inconsistencies between those sets of representamens will cede accuracy to the representamens of Jesus Christ. As a result, we may taxonomically affirm that Jesus Christ is the (rhematic)22 iconic sinsign of God—that is, as signifying God, Jesus is the unique embodiment of the quality, or “form,” of divinity. This interpretation takes its cue from Andrew Robinson’s work in his God and the World of Signs, which views Jesus’s whole life as “an iconic qualisign of the presence of Israel’s God.”23 However, I think that Robinson mischaracterizes the iconic qualisign, for Peirce is clear that the iconic qualisign cannot act as a sign unless it is embodied as a sinsign (EP 2.291, 1903)—otherwise, it is a “mere logical possibility” (EP 2.294, 1903), and Robinson clearly intends Jesus Christ to be an actual sign.24 Thus, it is better to say that Jesus Christ, as God incarnate in the second universe of experience, is the unique iconic sinsign of God, for there is no perception of any quality without its instantiation in the universe of reaction and resistance. Further, in that Jesus in the unique embodiment of divinity, one ought not to say that Jesus is an iconic legisign of divinity, for Jesus’s person does not signify through replicas as a general type (as words, trees, mountains, or even human beings might); there is only one Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.25 Coming upon (3d), we also arrive at how the course of argumentation interfaces with analogy. But, before engaging in that specific overlap, we must first zoom out for a moment to understand what Peirce means by an analogous relation. We already saw that, in one sense, “analogy” is a form of

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“mixed” inference in Peirce’s thinking. But, he also understands analogy as something more basic to cognition than the explicit act of inference we saw earlier. Indeed, for Peirce, the very act of argumentation relies on analogical relatedness, for the claim that one can make an argument and declare that it has deductive validity, statistical probability, or reasonableness in general must presume that its “inferred conclusion is true because in any analogous case an analogous conclusion would be true” (CP 5.130, 1903). Without analogous relations, in other words, reasoning would be hamstrung before it could begin because it could not admit its conclusions generally. How does that work? While I argue this at length elsewhere,26 the fundamental idea has to do with how analogous relations are captured in diagrams. Now, sinsigns, as has been mentioned, are representamens that are existing things. And, icons concern a similarity—an “identity of characters” (CP 1.365, W 6:177, 1890)—between a sign and the object it represents; however, the species of icon that concerns “resemblance of form”—or similarity of structural relations—between two things, is the diagram (CP 7.498, c. 1898). Further, it is the diagram that expresses the object by “represent[ing] analogous relations in their own parts” (CP 2.277, 1903, emphasis mine). If that’s the case, then the first clause of (3d) states the following proposition: to interpret a representamen as diagrammatically representing the dynamic object is to assert that the representamen resembles in form the dynamic object, and so is analogous to that object in some specific sense. For instance, say I’m listening to a cello performance of Bach’s “Prelude in G” on my computer; as an individual performance, I take it that the sound heard through my computer’s speakers resembles in form—or is analogous with—that heard in the studio during the actual recording. Thus, the computer’s auditory rendering of “Prelude in G” is a diagrammatic iconic sinsign of that heard in the studio during the recorded performance. Further, other recordings of “Prelude in G” that one hears will have a manifestation likewise analogous to each other and to the recording of the “Prelude in G” on my computer—the discrete interpretants of these performances then create a sort of composite or general idea of a “Prelude in G” (CP 7.498, c. 1898). And, when that general idea of “Prelude in G” becomes experienced as useful in some way, the habit that is developed out of that usefulness may be “strengthened” to form a mental habit, or conception, of “Prelude in G” (CP 7.498, c. 1898). So, perhaps one may want to write a concerto for stringed instruments—in doing so, she thinks that it would be good to include a cello in the piece, for she wants some instrument to fill in a counterpoint that straddles the tenor and bass ranges. In so doing, she might employ her conception of “Prelude in G” to help develop the concerto. Of course, this isn’t the entirety of her conception—or “intellectual purport”—of “Prelude in G,” for that involves the “total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible

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different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol” (CP 5.438, 1905)—in this case, the symbol being some concept of “Prelude in G.” This brings us to the third clause of (3d). Insofar as we may use language to speak, write, and so on about anything, we would use conceptions, which are themselves mental habits that utilize general ideas for practical effect. Now, if we employ language to talk about a diagram—say, “Prelude in G” playing in the background right now—we should be employing conceptions that we suppose are contingent on general ideas that the utterer and the audience share (i.e., we both know what “Prelude in G” sounds like). In other words, the linguistic exchange about the iconic sinsign for “Prelude in G” is predicated upon a resemblance of form—or analogy—between the interpretants of those general ideas that the interlocutors have with one another. Bringing the two clauses together, we see the kind of “double analogy” or “analogy of analogy” that structures the exchange: the general idea of the object that the linguistic conceptions are contingent upon is analogous to the general idea serving as the interpretant of the diagram, and the latter’s form in turn is analogous to the form of the dynamic object. We are, therefore, now ready, at last, to make the theological pronouncement in (4d). In that we affirm that theological language follows the structure of semiosis, as any other language—or system of symbols—must, all theological language, if veridical, subsists in analogy to the unique, living sign of God, Jesus Christ, who is himself in analogy to God as diagrammatic iconic sinsign—in other words, God-talk is grounded in an analogia signorum, or “analogy of signs,” that has its common proportion in semiosis. What this means can be understood in a two-part structure: first, the interpretants produced from God-talk are general ideas that are analogous with the general ideas that would be produced by experience and reflection on the person of Jesus Christ; second, the person of Jesus Christ, as diagrammatic iconic sinsign of God, produces general ideas that are analogous with the general ideas that would be produced from God’s dynamic object given in perception through Jesus Christ. Throughout the two-part structure, it is semiosis that ensures the movement of intelligibility. So, first, just as the ideas employed in our conceptions of God-talk arise by semiosis, so also the ideas employed in our conception of Jesus arise by semiosis, and, second, just as Jesus’s life is understood in general ideas through the process of semiosis, so also we would understand God in general ideas through that same process of semiosis. In short, and perhaps verging on caricature, to signify God in speech is to signify Jesus in speech, and for Jesus to signify is for God to signify. Thus, using Aristotle’s formula of analogical proportion as our base, the figure below may depict the analogia signorum (Figure 7.2).

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Figure 7.2  Analogia Signorum.

THE ANALOGIA SIGNORUM IN APPLICATION In this book, the example that introduced us to the problem of God-talk was the proposition ‘God loves me”; it seems only appropriate, then, that we now attempt to make this statement intelligible through the analogia signorum as interpreters (thus, proceeding from left to right in Figure 7.2). First, we acknowledge that when we read, hear, or in some other way process the statement “God loves me,” we unite the lexical meanings of the words in a grammatical chain that produces a series of rhematic and dicentic symbols—that is, we have an assortment of general ideas that are associated with the words we use that conjure complex qualities and some assertion about their connection with their real objects. So, some set of perceptual qualities are tied to “God loves me”—it could be visually based (as in the view of a great mountain vista), primarily bodily sensitive (as in the feeling of a warm embrace), a vague sense of safety and purpose, and so on—and then some mental representation that these icons are “true” or “real.” But, so also is a set of general ideas linked to the lexical meanings of “God,” “loves,” and “me.” This may produce in us meanings that are not employed in the grammatical sentence—for instance, thinking of “God” may bring forth an idea of creation, which it does not explicitly elicit in “God loves me.” At any rate, the analogia signorum acknowledges that the concept produced by exposure to the term “God” is variable both in its different instantiations and when contextualized in various sentences. The result may diverge from a very definite to a very vague concept, depending on the person cognizing it. But, at all times, that concept is semiotically processed. Secondly, the analogia signorum injects the normative criterion for the concept that is semiotically processed: only insofar as the concept—or a component thereof—may be a pragmaticistically intelligible and reasonable inference from Jesus’s life can the concept be admitted as accurate to the object “God.” This is a consequence of the proportional relation established by the semiotic process, making both Jesus as sign of God and human concepts as signs of Jesus analogically commensurate. To say, then, that “God loves me” is accurate of the dynamic object is to claim some sort

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of analogical similarity with the concept arriving from general ideas derived from the divine object of Jesus’s life. So, if one thinks of the associated general ideas that inform the concept of Jesus’s love—say, the crucifixion, the raising of Lazarus, his dining with taxpayers and sinners, his interaction with Mary Magdalene, his words of comfort to his disciples, and so on—and that concept can be found to resemble in form what is represented in “God loves me,” then we can admit that the concept is intelligible. This is because Jesus is a concrete being who has determined the character of love in a particular way that bears specific effects in habits of action. So, for instance, Jesus’s friendship with his disciples determines love to have a character of self-sacrifice; it is not a love that won’t pay another’s debt, or will feint when pressed by hardship. Nor is it the kind of love that excludes others for the sake of one—rather, it is a love that is given for many. Further, as John 15:12-14 elucidates, that great love does not hide its meaning in some transcendent, incognizable effect, but is made intelligible in the act of giving one’s life for a friend—such an act has deep meaning because it is immanently imaginable and concretely possible. Thus, the character of God’s love takes on intelligibility both in expression and as an ideal for conduct. Third, the analogia signorum holds that Jesus is the diagram of God, presenting God to human perceivers through percepts in image indices; as such, from the view of his interpreters, he resembles in the various attributes he manifests the attributes ascribed to God. Its presumption is that, when we say “God loves me,” we are trying to convey information about the divine creator through mediation in that creator’s perfect icon, Jesus Christ. The semiotic aim here is that God’s act of loving me, if it were to be understood in the final opinion, would be the same concept that would arrive with the final opinion of Jesus’s act of loving me. Again, if the iconic sinsign is the presentation in the second universe of experience of the divine quality as a sign of itself, then Jesus’s life is an iconic sinsign of God. This, of course, does not mean that we would ever arrive at the final opinion, but it is the regulative principle that controls our inquiry into who God is. So, the love of God as an intelligible concept has its lynchpin in the similarity of the rhematic qualities of Jesus’s love, which then is concretized in specific dicentic instances of its arising, and finally influences our habits as delomic/argumentative laws. But, it might be asked, what about other attributes that are traditionally ascribed to God that even Peirce admits? What do we make of something like omnipotence, which Jesus did not obviously manifest but that is ascribed to God all the same? In such a case, I think the answer involves being clear that “omnipotence” does not have a precise pragmaticistic meaning, just as Peirce avers (CP 6.509, c. 1906)—people don’t know the practical effects of something “all-powerful,” even along the lines of

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an inductive extrapolation. But, it may be a reasonable inference about God insofar as the narratives about Jesus depict a life without any definite limits; we read about a being who, in some form, was the mediator for all things being created (Jn 1:3), could call upon legions of angels (Mt 26: 53), instantly healed the sick and lame (Mt 4:24), commanded evil spirits (Mk 5:1-13), took upon himself the sins of the world (1 Jn 2:2), could instantly appear somewhere (Jn 20:26), rose from the dead (Lk 24:1-12), and even conquers death itself (1 Cor 15:26). Though theologians would want to distinguish, and argue about, the extent to which a hypostasis of the Trinity did these things, the point is that Jesus reveals these acts of God, iconically giving determinacy to the dynamic object of God’s power. So, it again follows the path of interpretation for the analogia signorum: modern people having ideas of “omnipotence” are normatively constrained in those concepts by their idea of Jesus’s life, which is gathered by reading the Scriptures’ representation of Jesus in written symbolic form; in turn, that constrained interpretation is thought to present an idea in conformity to the idea of God. Conversely, the path of the object’s determination of the sign can be understood as follows: God’s omnipotence is given fullest expression in the revelation of Jesus as diagrammatic iconic sinsign, providing grounding percepts for associated inferences from his actions and sayings that render commensurate ideas in human interpreters about omnipotence. The same pattern follows for any other symbolic representation in Godtalk, whether it be God acting, intending, making, seeing, moving, turning, sending, etc. Ideas about such things are all going to be made semiotically commensurate through Jesus mediating between human interpreters and God’s dynamic object. We do not start with some a priori concept that tightly defines divine being, action, relations, and so on; instead, our ascriptions to God are always made as inferential steps from God’s self-revelation in Jesus, who is that true “analogue of mind” of which Peirce was seeking to catch a fragment, but has been disclosed to human beings in fullness as the Son of God made flesh. But, again, any resulting symbolic rendering of those divinemaking attributions is the output of larger inferential steps from the iconic conjuring that the witnesses to Jesus produce, and must be made with extreme caution, humility, and open-mindedness. That means that there should be an inverse relationship between confidence in our inferences and the number of inferential steps made from the person of Jesus as witnessed to by those who perceived him directly as the diagrammatic iconic sinsign of God. This should render metaphysical statements about God the least sure, for they are on the back end of inquiry. When those inferential leaps are taken as certain metaphysical axioms, then theological mistakes of great proportions occur, as we have seen in chapters 3 to 5.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE BIBLE AND THE ANALOGIA SIGNORUM Theological Presumptions and Biblical Consonance As mentioned in the introduction, the analogia signorum carries with it some theological presumptions prior to the method it employs. The aim of this section is to deal with a few explicitly while also providing some supporting rationale from Scripture for them. I do not intend for this address to be exhaustive, or for it to take on the character of a “proof”; rather, the idea is to supply an abductive rationale that remains open to inquiry and common sense. As such, we’ll only be taking a brief look at three of these commitments, though I think they are the essential points to address. The first to be addressed, as it should be, is the presumption that the Scriptures are an accurate witness to the person of Jesus. The argument for the analogia signorum presupposes that the writers of the New Testament texts are reliable and truth-bearing interpreters of Jesus’s life and ministry, since their texts convey through legisigns the reports of eyewitness judgments of God’s percepts through Jesus. Internal to the Scriptures, of course, there are numerous examples of authors attesting to their writings’ authenticity;27 as far as extrinsic evidence is concerned, however, I can only say that there are running debates in critical scholarship about what can be considered accurate information. For my part, I follow Richard Bauckham’s approach to Scriptural reliability in that the gospel writers, in particular, “present their gospels as based on and incorporating the testimony of the eyewitnesses [to Jesus’s life and ministry]. The literary and theological strategies of these writers are not directed to superseding the testimony of the eyewitnesses but to giving it a permanent literary vehicle.”28 I trust that the harmonies between the final opinion of Jesus’s life and ministry and the message transmitted through the biblical witnesses are consistent and strong enough to uphold the analogia signorum; argumentation for that thesis, however, would require another treatise. The second to be addressed is the presumption that we should find justification in the Scriptures that Jesus is a unique source of knowledge of God. And this, it seems to me, is what we find, particularly in the Johannine and Pauline writings. For instance: 1. Jesus claims that one’s knowing him is tantamount to knowing the Father (Jn 8:19; 14:7); 2. Jesus makes the claim that he alone uniquely knows the Father as he came from and was sent by the Father (Jn 7:29); 3. Jesus claims that he knows the Father, whereas the world does not (Jn 17:25);

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4. Jesus is attested to as making known the Father, and only he is able to do this (Mt 11:27; Lk 10:22); 5. Jesus discloses the words of God (Jn 3:34), which he has heard from the Father (Jn 8:26-28; 15:15; 17:7, 14); these words are true (Jn 8:40; 12:4950) and enduring (Lk 21:33); 6. Jesus reveals the Father (Jn 1:18), and speaks of what he has seen with the Father (Jn 8:38); 7. Jesus judges according to what he hears from God (Jn 5:30); 8. Jesus’s words are authorized by, and his works are a coextension of, the Father (Jn 14:10); 9. truths that the Spirit discloses to the disciples are Jesus’s, which are from the Father (Jn 16:12-15); 10. the disciples confess that Jesus knows all things, which leads them to believe he came from God (Jn 16:30); 11. Jesus discloses various attributes and works of God, including: wisdom, power, righteousness, sanctification, redemption (1 Cor 1.24, 30); grace in kindness (Eph 2:7); 12. Jesus makes known the mystery of the will of the Father (Eph 1:9, Col 2:2-3), and carries God’s eternal purpose (Eph 3:11-12); 13. Jesus provides access to the Father through the Spirit (Eph 2:18); 14. Jesus is himself the “riches of the glory” (Col 1.27) and “wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:2-3) that is God’s mystery; 15. to disagree with Jesus’s words is to show conceit and a lack of understanding (1 Tim 6:3); to deny Jesus is to deny the Father, and to confess the Son is to confess the father (1 Jn 2:23-24); and 16. knowledge of Jesus mediates God’s “divine power [that] has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pt 1:3-4). What appears to be the theme of these examples is that Christ’s efforts to disclose God the Father present his unique mediatory status to the extent that, as John 14:7 makes clear, knowing Jesus is effectively knowing God the Father. Some consequences of this with regard to human actions appear to include: 1. receiving or hearing Jesus is effectively hearing or receiving the Father (Mt 10:40; Mk 9:37; Lk 10:16; Jn 13:20); 2. glorifying God yields the glorifying of Jesus (Jn 11:4; 13:31); 3. seeing Jesus is seeing the Father (Jn 12:45; 14:8-11); 4. believing Jesus means to believe and abide in God who sent him (Jn 12:44; 1 Jn 4:15); 5. rejecting Jesus is rejecting the Father (Lk 10:16); and 6. belonging to Jesus is belonging to the Father (Jn 17:10).

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But, the running proportionality between Father and Son also extends into Jesus’s personal actions as like his Father’s: 1. Jesus assigns a kingdom to his disciples as the Father assigned a kingdom to the Son (Lk 22:29); 2. as the Father loves Jesus so also Jesus loves his disciples (Jn 15:9); and 3. as Jesus knows and is known by the Father, so his disciples know and are known by Jesus (Jn 10:14-15). And, in turn, Jesus makes divine actions intelligible through the parabolic; for instance: 1. just as a shepherd does not will to lose his stray sheep, so God does not will to have one of his little ones perish (Mt 18:14); 2. just as people give good gifts to their children, so also God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Lk 11:13); and 3. just as a judge deals swiftly, so will God (Lk 18:7-8); Finally, there are commandments for disciples that should be in some way commensurate with an action of God’s: 1. as Jesus abides in the Father’s love by keeping the Father’s commandments, so also the disciples will abide in Jesus’s love if they keep Jesus’s commandments (Jn 15:10); 2. the disciples should be perfect as God is perfect (Mt 5:48); 3. the disciples should forgive as God forgives (Mt 6:14); and 4. Jesus prays that his disciples be one as he and the Father are one (Jn 17:11, 21-23). Thus, it seems to me that Przywara’s and Rahner’s language of Jesus as God’s “self-expression,” and Balthasar’s as God’s “self-exposition,” is quite apropos: Jesus appears to be nothing less than the expression or exposition of divine self-disclosure. Where Jesus acts, there the Father is acting also; where Jesus speaks, there the Father speaks also. In short, the perception of Jesus is nothing less than the perception of the God of Israel. To know one is to know the other, and this is presupposed in how Jesus teaches the disciples to respond to his ministry. Third, the analogia signorum clearly has a high Christology: Jesus isn’t just a symbol for the human ethical ideal, nor even a mere creature sent by a deity to convey a particular message; no, the analogia signorum holds to the orthodox position that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God—that is, Jesus is not just another member of the class of things belonging to the three

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universes of experience, but is their divine creator in human flesh. So, the Scriptures witness: 1. Jesus is the Word, and the Word is God through whom all things were created (Jn 1:1-3; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2); 2. Jesus is “the only God,” who is at the Father’s side (Jn 1:18); 3. Jesus is “the true God and eternal life” (1 Jn 5:20); 4. in Jesus the “fullness of God is pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19; 2:9); 5. through Jesus “we may become ‘partakers of the divine nature’” (2 Pt 1:3-4); 6. Jesus claims that the Father is in him and he is in the Father (Jn 10:37-38; 14:10-11); 7. Jesus’s judgment is never only his own, but also his Father’s (Jn 8:15-16); 8. the believer cannot be separated by worldly challenges from the love of Jesus, which appears interchangeable with the love of God (Rom 8:34-39); 9. Jesus is considered “God over all” (Rom 9:5); 10. Jesus is the “image” (εἰκὼν) of God, in whose face is “the knowledge of the glory of God” (2 Cor 4:4-6; Col 1:15); 11. Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint [χαρακτὴρ] of his nature” (Heb 1:3); 12. to be filled with the love of Jesus is to be filled with “all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:18-19); 13. Jesus is essential to the operations of ministry as are the Father and the Spirit (1 Cor 12:4-6); 14. grace and peace, love, eternal comfort, and good hope through grace follow from both Jesus and God the Father (1 Cor 1:3; 1 Tim 1:2; 2 Thess 2:16-17); 15. it is “God in Christ” who forgives (Eph 4:32); 16. imitating God is interchangeable with walking in Jesus’s love (Eph 5:1-2); 17. Jesus is of the “form of God” (Phil 2:6); 18. Jesus is before all things, heir of all things, holds all things together, reconciles all things through himself (Col 1:17, 20; Heb 1:3); and 19. Jesus and God are interchangeably “Savior” (1 Tim 2:3; 4:10; 2 Tim 1:10; Titus 2:13). Though these are more explicit references to the divinity of Jesus Christ, it is not difficult to find more veiled, contextual allusions to that status in the Scriptures that can be drawn along the lines of the semiotic taxonomy. The transfiguration, for instance, can be understood to highlight the iconicity of Jesus’s life as divine. In this case, the synoptic gospels present to the reader

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accounts of an experience that is clearly intended to convey the parallels between the God of Israel and Jesus (Mt 17:1-13; Mk 9:2-13; Lk 9:28-36): (1) the event occurs on a high mountain, which is where the OT revelatory events frequently occurred (e.g., Mount Sinai); (2) the narrative arrives soon after a declaration of Jesus as the Messiah and of witnessing the power of the kingdom; (3) the presence of the cloud is just as the Sinaitic theophany (Ex. 19:16-19); and (4) the voice from heaven speaking of Jesus alludes to the voice of God giving the law (Ex. 24 ff).29 The impression here is that the disciples who accompanied Jesus were seeing a manifestation of divinity right before their eyes that could not fail to find analogous resonances with icons from stories of their tradition. For a second example, the allusions to the throne of God can be understood as rhematic symbolic legisigns. As Bauckham writes, “The role of the divine throne in the highest heaven symboliz[es] the sole sovereignty of God over all things, a role which it has already in the Hebrew Bible.”30 As such, Bauckham concludes, a literary use of seating one on the divine throne of God would be “one of Judaism’s most potent theological means of including such a figure in the unique divine identity.”31 And this is just what the early Christians did, often with reference to Psalm 110:1, where a “Lord” sits at the right hand of the God of Israel and is given power over all the former’s enemies (e.g., Mt 22:41-46; 26:64; Eph 2:6; Heb 12:2; Rev 3:21).32 The semiotic upshot here is that, as a rhematic symbolic legisign, the throne of God is a sign that is supposed to convey a set of associated ideas having to do with the divine identity—that is, rhematic interpretants like authority, sovereignty, worship, obedience, power, and height are indexed to Jesus to form a concept exclusive to the God of Israel. In that Jesus is the proper “heir” to this throne, he is included in the divine identity, and so the throne with reference to Jesus suggests a specific delome, a deductive argument: Only the God of Israel sits on the throne with all power and authority; Jesus is sitting on the throne with all power and authority; therefore, Jesus is God. Other taxonomic examples could be offered here, but I trust the point has been made. Christ’s role as the “only mediator” between God and human beings (1 Tim 2:5) is not merely pointing to his use as an extrinsic instrument, but signifies God’s irruption into the world in the form of the Son. As a result, the emphasis is on both self and expression in “self-expression.” A Specific Biblical Challenge: Transcendent Gifts of Knowledge? A particular concern that might arise over the analogia signorum would be its affirmation of empirically bound significations that are inclusive of created and divine domains (through semiotic univocity). A critic might suggest that

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this commitment puts the analogia signorum at odds with the transcendent character of revelatory knowledge as depicted in the Scriptures. The critique may go as follows: It seems that the Scriptures present a knowledge of God— especially of Jesus—that has entirely divine origins. If one looks at Jesus’s ministry, she can find instances where knowledge seems to be the result God’s direct mediation. For instance, when Peter acknowledges Jesus’s messianic status, Jesus says this was revealed not through “flesh and blood,” but by “my Father who is in heaven” (Mt 16:17); also, in the post-resurrection sequences of Luke’s gospel, the two disciples on the Emmaus road are “kept from recognizing” Jesus (24:16) until “their eyes were opened” when he broke bread with them (24:31), and later Jesus appears to the eleven disciples to “ope[n] their minds to understand the Scriptures” (24:45). To these, we might also add the knowledge of the kingdom that Jesus discloses in parables: it appears that the understanding of these parables is through divine mediation. But, perhaps the strongest evidence for such a view is from 1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Therein, Paul stresses that a “hidden wisdom of God” (2:7) is imparted first by God “through the Spirit” (2:10). That Spirit is juxtaposed to the “spirit of the world” (2:12), and is necessary so that “we might understand [εἰδῶμεν] the things freely given us by God.” That understanding is delivered “in words [λόγοις] not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting [συνκρίνοντες] spiritual truths to those who are spiritual” (2:13). The “natural person,” on the other hand, “is not able to understand” those truths because she is spoken of as someone who cannot behold the glory of God in reading the old covenant with her hardened mind unless Christ softens it (3:12-18); further, Ephesians records Paul praying that the members of the church in Ephesus would receive from God “a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of [God]” in order to know what their inheritance is in Jesus Christ (Eph 1:16-19). So, all together, how can the analogia signorum account for this divine gifting of knowledge that is distinct from what the world offers? In response, I would argue that the dynamics witnessed to in the Scriptures convey a dependence upon semiotic univocity rather than a challenge to its sufficiency to convey revelatory knowledge. This is because the fuller picture of the tension describes a two-part problem: on the one hand, the parabolic mode of dispensing that knowledge was intentionally obfuscatory; on the other hand, the person’s doxastic status prevented that knowledge from being understood. But, that two-part problem only makes sense if the semiotic univocity presupposed by the analogia signorum is already intact because, first, a parabolic mode would be unnecessary if divine knowledge came through an entirely unnatural mode of signification, and, second, to be in unbelief about a matter is to presuppose that one has understood the proposition—or dicent symbol—asserted as true or false.33

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In the former case, in the explanations of his use of parables to his disciples witnessed to in the synoptic gospels oriented around the parable of the sower, Jesus says that he speaks in parables in order to prevent his general audience from comprehending his words (e.g., Mt 13:10-17, 34-35; Mk 4:9-20; Lk 8:9-15, 10:23-24). And, when he tells the disciples that they are “blessed” because they have “eyes that see” and “ears that hear,” there is no reason to presume they have some hidden, spiritual capacity to “truly” understand the parable that God has implanted within them; rather, he proceeds to explain what the parable of the sower means—or, as Mark 4:34 says, “privately to his own disciples he explained everything.” Thus, the challenge to comprehension is the vagueness of the mode of expression, not a missing component in expressive signification—or, semiotically, Jesus had to pragmaticistically clarify the immediate interpretants so that the disciples could make successful inferences, but those interpretants do not need to be informed by any class of sign that is formally different than those occurring, as it were, naturally. Indeed, at times Jesus appears to think the disciples should be able to penetrate the meaning of the parables without a particular explanation, for he seems to hold them responsible for gathering the general idea from this earlier explanation. Thus, for instance, Jesus wonders at Peter not comprehending his parable about defilement (Mt 15:15-17; Mk 7:18). Therefore, I see no reason to take Jesus’s use of parables to be indicative of a transcendent signification made only apparent to the faithful; rather, Jesus hides and illuminates through natural forms of expression that vary in their degree of vagueness.34 The perspective takes on another layer when we consider the matter of unbelief. It is clear that unbelief impedes one’s ability to understand Jesus’s signs. For some instances: (1), when Jesus admonishes his disciples to beware the Pharisees, he causally links their inability to believe this warning to their unbelief regarding his earlier miracles of feeding the multitudes (Mt 16:5-12); (2), when Jesus walks on the water and calms the storm, the author comments that this astounded the disciples because they didn’t believe—“their hearts were hardened” about—who Jesus was from the sign of the feeding of the five thousand (Mk 6:45-52); (3), among the people in general, Jesus’s signs are not sufficient for belief because their hearts have been hardened, presumably by God if the prophecy of Isaiah 6:10 is taken into account (Jn 12:3643); and, (4), the disciples on the Emmaus road are “foolish” and “slow of heart to believe” the prophets and how they testify to Jesus and his mission (Lk 24:25-27). Indeed, unbelief seems to be so corrosive to making correct judgments about Jesus and his words that Jesus, on certain occasions, ceases any miraculous activity altogether because of it (e.g., Mt 13:57-58; Mk 6:56). Thus, like the use of parables above, the reason why spiritual knowledge is impeded is not due to an insufficiency in the semiotic process, but to some privation that affects accurate inference caused by unbelief. So, that obstacle

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occurs, not in opposition to the formal semiotic structure, but within the process of semiosis: in the area of judgment (or inference). Thus, the combination of this two-part response, I propose, enables us to address the passages referenced above. If the parable represents a privation due to the utterer’s expressions being overly vague about their reference (a sort of objective privation), and unbelief represents a source of privation in the hearer’s willingness to receive the expression or what the expression is contingent upon (a sort of subjective privation), then these other passages may be given explanations in keeping with semiotic univocity. Peter’s admission of Jesus as Christ (Mt 16:17) is the gifting of faith, or the revoking of unbelief in a possible proposition known through Jesus’s teaching; the Emmaus road disciples may have had a combination of unbelief in a resurrected Jesus (Lk 24:25) and have been confused by Jesus’s physical presentation, whose vague identity was only brought into focus with the breaking of bread (Lk 24:30-31, 35)—in a sense, Jesus’s presentation of his resurrected body as sign of his person was made parabolic and then explained in the breaking of bread; finally, the illuminative act to “open” the minds of the disciples to the Scriptures can be taken, even if it is as a divine gifting, as the directing (or indexing) of their minds to the Scriptures in order to understand the references to Jesus in the Hebrew Bible (Lk 24:44-47)—there is no need to suggest a new formal class of signification, or directly intuitive means of their comprehension. With regard to the Pauline texts, the imprecision of the “understanding” that the Spirit offers to the spiritual person could be taken in many different ways; however, the juxtaposition to the “natural person” in 2:14 highlights what I think is the essential difference: it reads “the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” As Gordon Fee points out, “the implication is not the psychikos persons are simply incapable of understanding the things of the Spirit, but that, because of their being ‘merely human (i.e., without the help of the Spirit), they ‘reject’ the things of the Spirit.”35 That is, the natural person cannot judge correctly because of her unbelief in the spiritual things presented to her in semiotic processes; the spiritual person, however, is led into correct judgment—indeed, she “judges all things”—because she has the aid of the Spirit’s power to correctly interpret the propositional status of spiritual truths. The same dynamic can apply to 2 Corinthians 3:12-18 and Ephesians 1:16-19: in the former, the hardened minds of the Israelites represent their unbelief that only the turn to Christ can relieve; in the latter, Paul prays for the development of knowledge in the saints at Ephesus who have become known to Paul through their faith (1:15)—this suggests not some new capacity for understanding, but a deepening of their understanding through faith in the hope, riches, and greatness

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of what is “worked in Christ.” In other words, Paul hopes that the Ephesians will come to better perceive, know, and trust Christ who made himself known through the world’s semiotic processes. So then, by my lights, there is no need to presume that the Scriptures have in view a supernatural mode of signification. God’s revelation has made use of the semiotic process to make Godself known in Jesus Christ, and the impediments to that process utilize it either in a particular way (in objective privation of the vagueness of expression) or impede the contingent judgments of inference (in the subjective privation of unbelief).

SOME PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE ANALOGIA SIGNORUM Peirce’s Cosmogony and Christian Protology: A Conflict? One matter that could concern us is how the Christian understanding of God’s eternal plenitude meshes with Peirce’s speculations, particularly as they present in his brief cosmogonical writings. The criticism goes as follows. Traditional Christian theology holds that God has no lack of determinacy, sufficiency, or satisfaction in God’s self; as such, creation is an entirely free, contingent event and has no part in realizing God’s nature in a process of development. Peirce’s cosmogony, however, does not seem to take quite this view with his ens necessarium. As presented in a section of his “Additament” to his article on the neglected argument (CP 6.490, c. 1910), the Ens necessarium should be understood as a “pure mind” that has the capacity to create thought, and that thought would appear in time as “having a character related to the habit-taking capacity”—that is, as ordering or arranging thought in a particular way. If, as Peirce seems to hold, the three universes of experience begin in a “state of utter nothingness” (or undifferentiated potential, or “unlimited possibility” as he says elsewhere [CP 6.217, 1898]36) that the creator provides a “tendency” to differentiate and determine into developing and growing habits, then it would seem to mean that: (1) God does not then create all that is real because the primordial potentiality seems not to be so created; and (2) God is subject to some growth as a result of the development of the tendency itself (as Peirce seems to hold [CP 6.466, 1908]). In response, I would say that affirming these propositions would not necessarily contradict a Christian biblical theology. In the first regard, insofar as we maintain that God is not the result of some irruption out of absolute non-being (which is not what Peirce espouses),37 there seems to be room to agree that a primordial possibility of uncreated, inchoate Firstness might be consistent with a picture of the Genesis protology. Indeed, Genesis 1’s statement that

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the earth was “without form and void” is taken by some scholars to be most accurately representing a primordial chaos over which God imposes order38— if accurate, this might justifiably be considered the undifferentiated general potential of Peirce’s first stage of cosmogonic evolution. In the second regard, there doesn’t appear to be any particular barrier to thinking that God might be subject to some growth from a biblical standpoint. Even if we don’t go the route of affirming a growth in God’s persons, we could easily enough admit some growth in God as a result of his relating with the universes of experience God creates. But, if one does wish to counter these propositions, I see no particular problem for the overall philosophical coherence of the analogia signorum in doing so. This is because, again, Peirce’s God must be conceived vaguely— and a vague conception may entertain mutually contradictory propositional details, especially in regard to God and creation. As Peirce says, a vague concept is “liable to be self-contradictory in those respects in which it is vague” (CP 6.496, c. 1906) and so, with Douglas Anderson, I think that any advancement into a determinate position on matters as these should be exercised with caution.39 Personally, I prefer to think that God is the creator qua efficient cause of the Firstness that characterizes the inchoate potential of the world’s beginnings, and this in distinction to an interpretation like Anderson’s that takes Peirce to be affirming an independent reality to that potential that God “enables” or “empowers” for its own autonomous development.40 But, it remains the case that the analogia signorum can be theologically indifferent to whether the void of Genesis depicts nothing at all (and so demands creatio ex nihilo), or is the inchoate, amorphous beginning of the first universe of experience that we know today. Likewise, I prefer to think that God does not grow insofar as God’s purposes change or that key characteristics of his persons alter, based on some affirmations about the love of God within the relations of Father and Son (e.g., Jn 17:24), the revelatory character of Jesus Christ (e.g., Mt 13:35), and the purposes of those chosen in Jesus Christ from “the foundations of the world” (e.g., Eph 1:4); however, again, I cannot say that even those purposes might not grow or become more determinate over time in some sense. What is important is that the analogia signorum, in positing Jesus as having interpretive primacy for God in semiotic univocity, is unaffected by these considerations; rather, the analogia signorum is in a position to be informative about the reasonability of those inferences because it precedes that theological/metaphysical speculation in the architectonic. Peircean Categories as Trinitarian Vestiges? Andrew Robinson’s aim in God and the World of Signs (2010) is not so much a focus on Peirce’s semiotics as adequate for rendering the Christian

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tradition intelligible as it is about how Peirce’s semiotics and evolutionary cosmology can broadly elucidate theological concepts and methodologies in the Christian tradition. While there is much of interest in the book, and many fruitful trajectories for exploration in the interface between Peirce’s philosophy and Christian thought, I am going to focus on a particular correlation that Robinson posits: Peirce’s universal categories are vestiges of the Trinity. Thus, Robinson appears to take Peirce’s philosophy as a specific resource for clarifying the Trinitarian relations revealed in Scripture, and for making a claim about the parallels of “creaturely knowing” being “ground[ed] in the being of God” those vestiges suggest (GWS, 300-301). After a brief exposition of the respective analogs as found in Chapters 3 and 5 of Robinson’s book, I will problematize their correlations. Put simply, Robinson’s “semiotic model of the Trinity” holds that the Son is to be correlated with Secondness, the Father with Firstness, and the Holy Spirit with Thirdness insofar as those categories highlight a “distinctive character” of their respective persons (GWS, 80). The Son is so correlated with Secondness because: (1a) the Son as being other than the Father is resonant with the feature of reactivity, or otherness that Secondness embodies (GWS, 63); and (2a) the Son as the Word of God mediates or conveys Thirdness (rationality or reason) only by the Holy Spirit (which is Thirdness) (GWS, 71). The Father is correlated with Firstness because: (1b), the Father has “ingenerateness,” and so an underived existence like Firstness (GWS, 72-73); and (2b), the Father, due to his ingenerateness, is unbegotten or not eternally generated, but does eternally generate the begotten Son, and this is an analogy to how Firstness has logical priority and is unprescindable from Secondness, whereas the Son is logically posterior and is prescindable from Firstness (GWS, 79). The Spirit is correlated with Thirdness because: (1c), the Spirit is the “source of life,” which suggests the purposiveness and “capacity for interpretation” characteristic of Thirdness (GWS, 85); (2c), the Spirit is understood biblically in terms of love, freedom, knowledge, reason, and source of intelligibility, and these have overlap with Peirce’s emphasis on Thirdness in his agapasticism (GWS, 86-87); (3c), those attributes justify the Spirit’s role as mediator, which is a category of Thirdness (GWS, 87); and (4c), the Spirit is logically dependent as a “procession from” the Father and Son, and this is as Thirdness is logically dependent upon Firstness and Thirdness (GWS, 94). Altogether, Robinson wants to call these correlations vestiges because they give a stronger sense of connection than he thinks “analogy” offers: whereas the latter to him (and somewhat idiosyncratically, considering the traditional understandings of analogy) connotes a similarity that is not inherent or intrinsically real in the objects compared (GWS, 257), the former notion of vestige connotes an “imprint” of God upon the world in the “very act of creation” (GWS, 260).

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Thus, for instance, the otherness of creation is an imprint of the otherness of the Son and Father (GWS, 261). In terms of problems, what troubles Robinson’s suggestion about the categories being “distinctive character[s]” of the divine persons is that they simply do not map clearly onto the Trinitarian persons, if one makes efforts to look closely at both their biblical operations and Peirce’s characterizations of the categories.41 Indeed, Robinson’s claims about the persons creates dissonances for the fullness of each of the divine persons. Take the following examples. First, consider how the person of the Father: 1. assures a future action, as when God the Father promises the sending of the Spirit (Acts 1:4); 2. rewards as a result of certain behavior, as when Jesus tells his disciples that the Father rewards those who give in secret (Mt 6:4); 3. reveals knowledge consistently with his will, as when the Father discloses knowledge to children hidden from the wise (Mt 11:27), and gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask him (Lk 11:13); 4. gives both to creatures and to his Son, as when the Father gives the Spirit to the Son (Jn 3:34-35), and when it is claimed that all good things come from the Father (James 1:17); 5. judges, as when it says the Father judges according to deeds (1 Pt 1:17); 6. confers authority, as when the Son is given authority by the Father (Mt 28:18); and 7. predestines to a pattern of life, as when the Father predestines conformity to the “image of the Son” (Rom 8:29). These are all marks of the category of Thirdness, with no mention of the Spirit as a mediator for those ends. Second, notice how the Son knows the Father without mention of the Spirit (Mt 11:27); how the Son receives glory and worship and does not merely redirect it to the Father as if he were a pure index to the Father’s Firstness (e.g., Jn 5:23, Jn 11:4,; Mt 14:33); how the Son loves and gives himself without mention of the Spirit (Gal 2:20); or, how the Son has himself given understanding so that believers may know the truth (1 Jn 5:20). These are also marks of Thirdness. Finally, note how the Scriptures often do not enunciate features of the Spirit’s Thirdness: consider that the Spirit is one often spoken of as being sent and authorized by the Father and Son (e.g., Jn 14:15-17, 15:26-27), but Thirdness has the role of governing Firstness and Secondness; that Jesus speaks of the Father teaching him, but not the Spirit (Jn 14:31); that the Spirit does not have a predictable, explainable operation but is mysterious (Jn 3:7-9); that the Spirit does not contribute new knowledge, but mediates what is heard spoken by the Son and Father (Jn 16:13); and in general,

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how the Spirit testifies to the Son (Jn 15:26), which seems to be a function of Secondness. The point of this response is not to argue against the particular ways in which Robinson has accorded characteristics to certain divine persons that go along with the categories,42 but to point out that the divine persons clearly have overflow into the categories outside of the partitions he sets up.43 Though it is true that the Father is distinct from the Son as unbegotten, and Robinson believes this only points to a logical priority between the two though they remain ontologically dependent as “Father” and “Son” (GWS, 79-80), Firstness may both be prescinded from Secondness logically and be ontologically independent of Secondness because Firstness may go unrealized as a possibility (say, that Jesus had 9 disciples and not 12). So, in contrast to the Trinity, there are Firsts that don’t become Seconds, but there is no Father without the Son. Though it is true that the Son can be seen as an “other” from God the Father, there is no reason to say that the Spirit might not show this otherness just as much as the Son, or to say that that otherness is primordially more true of the Son than the Spirit.44 Moreover, to say that the Son’s mediation between God and the world is only grounded by the Spirit (GWS, 71) is exegetically unwarranted: though the Spirit certainly has various roles for mediating knowledge, power, and well-being, the simple dependence relation is nowhere to be found and would, I think, be impossible to tease apart from the Son and Spirit’s persons. Finally, though the Spirit’s role as mediator and bearer of various aspects that would corroborate Thirdness are scripturally present, they are by no means specific to its person, nor do the Spirit’s characteristics become exhausted by Thirdness, as has been shown earlier. So, we could chalk up these inaccuracies mostly as indicative of Robinson’s lack of engagement with the complexity of the divine persons. But, I think what mainly leads to the inadequate imagining of these partitions has to do with missing the architectonic structuring of Peirce’s philosophy. What I mean by this is that Robinson’s interest seems to be about interpreting Christian theology according to a Peircean paradigm without doing the corrective work that Peirce’s philosophy demands upon the theological scheme. Indeed, I think that if Robinson recognized Peirce’s reasons for constraining his metaphysics and philosophy of religion as he does—especially with regard to the vagueness of God—he would not think a simple synthesis between the categories and their creator would be so forthcoming. It is one thing to argue that God, in Jesus Christ, presents himself semiotically (as the analogia signorum does), and quite another to think that one can provide argumentations for the universal categories to be conceived of as neatly modeling God’s Trinitarian being.45 Thus, by my lights, a semiotic model of the Trinity as Robinson envisions is not warranted by an empirically minded philosophy such as Peirce’s.

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Fine Points on Analogy: Predicate Schemes and Association A final reflection to be taken up here hearkens back to chapter 2. Therein, Ross’s account of analogy presents analogical similarity as being context dependent upon overlapping predicate schemes for homologous words in sentences. It may appear, then, that this is at odds with the similarity between iconic signification and conceptual interpretants that is espoused in the analogia signorum. On Ross’s scheme, it seems, there is room for associating homologous words apart from any bearing of descriptive similarity between those words and an objective referent. So, perhaps the “love of God for human beings” and the “love of human beings for human beings” has no particular meaning to be gathered from their respective objects, but it is only insofar as they contrast with one another in our linguistic use that they carry such a meaning. Then, does that present a problem for the analogia signorum’s notion of analogy as a resemblance of form, as Peirce says? The answer is, I think, dependent on making a distinction within Peirce’s semiotic. We might call the first distinction symbolic analogy. In symbolic analogy, we could say we are interested in the class of signs that have to do with representamen-object relations that are symbols—that is, those signs that convey via an association of general ideas through legisigns, which are always going to include the conventional signs that words are. Insofar as we should think analogically about words and sentences, then working through their similarities using homologues will make use of the predicate scheme system and semantic contagion that Ross suggests. Agreeing with him, there is no particular reason to assume that one use of “love” in the above example is the more primordial, or that a set of contrast terms ideally matches with a referent a priori (whether a physical object, relation, or law). We should instead analyze our conventional uses of the terms to search out whether they relate analogically: so, we can employ and compare the contrast terms within sentences to see to what extent they do so. However, the second distinction would argue that a similarity to the referent is important—this is what I call iconic analogy. In iconic analogy, we are working with a class of signs that have to do with the representamenobject relations that are icons—that is, those representamens that convey their object through some similarity of characteristics. As said above, this is also what Peirce most directly associated analogy with himself as a “resemblance of form.” In this kind of analogy, the question is whether the structural relations of homologues are similar with respect to each other and to the objects that direct their being interpreted as such. “Love,” in this case, then would be assessed for the different ways in which it conjures those structural relations in the cognizer and that purport to be similar in form to the object “love.”

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So, we can think about the analogy of “God’s love for human beings” and “a human being’s love for another human being” along the following lines: (1) as involving a symbolic analogy, the similarity between the legisign conventions of the two phrases can be compared in their predicate scheme relations—thus, our use of God’s love and human love can be assessed linguistically; and (2) as involving an iconic analogy, there will be a resemblance of form between the sense-based iconic characters that love conjures for the mind and the dynamic object that causes them (thus, thinking of God’s love stirs in us rhematic interpretants that hypothetically resemble the character of the dynamic object, God), and another resemblance of form between the relations that the two respective phrases bring about in cognition (thus, thinking of the characters that God’s love conjures in comparison with the characters that human love conjures). Together, one analogy provides a check on the juxtaposing analogy: the iconic analogy grounds the symbolic analogy in sense-experience by anchoring it to perceived relations indexed in the world, and symbolic analogy reins in iconic analogy by situating words in propositional contexts and providing details about the subtleties of their proportionality by comparing linguistic uses through predicate schemes. Without iconic analogy, symbolic analogy isn’t grounded in sense-experience; without symbolic analogy, iconic analogy lacks the means to assess the degree of resemblance in conventional use. THE ANALOGIA SIGNORUM AS SUPERIOR MODEL OF INTELLIGIBILITY So then, having, I trust, tied up some loose ends, how does the analogia signorum succeed where the other three models of God-talk fail? I think a helpful way to begin is to consider the fourth lecture of Peirce’s 1903 Harvard Series entitled “The Seven Systems of Metaphysics.” In that essay, Peirce briefly addresses a number of speculative philosophical systems that omit or over-concentrate upon one or more of the three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Some examples: (1) Hegelianism overemphasizes Thirdness at the loss of Firstness and Secondness because of the allpervading reality of reason that deductively synthesizes everything into itself as stages of thinking without remainder of possibility or true freedom (EP 2. 180, 1903; CP 6.305, 1893);46 (2) Berkleyianism overemphasizes Firstness and Thirdness to the loss of Secondness because it admits of only souls and ideas in souls while denying that there are facts in the world resulting from objects resisting each other (EP 2:180, 1903; CP 5.81, 1903); and (3) what Peirce calls “Ordinary Nominalism” emphasizes Firstness and Secondness to the loss of Thirdness because there are no generals in the world that cannot

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be reduced to material realities—so, general concepts have no true object that they isomorphically represent (EP 2.180, 1903). I would like to follow this pattern, for I think that the three approaches to intelligible God-talk presented earlier manifest problems that, on the main, tend to produce a similar orientation that neglects one of the fundamental categories, and this leads to their failure. This is not to say that the issues are with respect to only that category—indeed, in that they all admit some form of essentialism and dualism, they fail to be attentive to all three categories; however, it is to say that each paradigm leans toward a predominant form of misconception. Let’s see how this happens. Analogia Entis: The Failure of Conceiving the Quality of Being (Firstness) To refresh from chapter 3, the basic issue for the proponents of the analogia entis view was what I called the proportionality problem—that is, Przywara, Balthasar, and Rahner all have difficulties capturing what the commensurable relation can possibly be between God and creatures. Any proportionality proposed would result in some concept—whether strictly or in some indirect manner—to be utilized for applying both to creatures and God, but that undermines the simplicity of God’s being. To remedy this problem, do we need to admit of a univocity of being instead? Is it that the sense in which one supposes any attribution to God from creaturely language is on the same plane, and so we in fact have a notion of being common to God and creatures? Peirce would respond with a definite “no.” The reason he would give is that “being” contains no definite content even if understood univocally. Peirce comes to this conclusion very early on in his 1867 essay “On a New List of Categories.” Therein, he points out that the notions of substance and being are, respectively, “the beginning and end of all conception” (EP 1.2, 1867); however, in that substance points to an “it” and being to “what is,” they denote idealized ends of a cognitive spectrum to be determinately filled by the intermediating three categories (at this time labeled quality, relation, and representation) (EP 1.6, 1867). Substance’s role is just a generalization for the act of presentation of a particular something to the awareness: that presentation has “no connotation at all, but is the pure denotative power of the mind” (EP 1.1, 1867). Thus, there is no content to substance, for that would require some predication. Being, on the other hand, refers to the “is” that is supposed to unite the subject and predicate as a copula in a proposition, bringing together some quality represented by the predicate and some asserted term represented by the subject (EP 1.4, 1867). Like substance’s “it,” the “is” of being also “plainly has no content” as it merely serves the role of linguistic junction; however, unlike substance, it presents the opposite side of

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indeterminacy as able to connect a substance to all characters whatsoever (EP 1.2, 1867). Thus, it is not that one has some concept of being that forms the basis of distinguishing qualities, but that “being” follows upon distinguishing some character to be linked to a particular subject term. This treatment might lead one to think that being is still a proper universal category, but Peirce himself would rescind it (and substance) from his new list within the year, as “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” would reckon them properly as incognizables.47 Insofar as the use of the copula unites a subject and predicate, the result is a limited truth claim about distinct qualities possessed by a discrete subject, not about being as such. To think the latter would, at least, be a fallacy of composition. From a semiotic perspective, then, a concept of being seems to function as the goal to the concept of the final interpretant of the real: it’s a limit concept for the epistemic state of the community of inquiry in the indefinite future about the entirety of real objects. As that goal for an ideal for inquiry, it has no definite content, and, thus, to presume that we cognize it as a basic intelligible for thinking about the accidental features of the three basic categories is to invert the order of knowledge. There is no particular rhematic icon that can distinctly portray being, so there is a fortiori no possible way for there to be an analogous sense of it to be proportionately grasped between any two objects. So then, we see that the problem of the analogia entis is actually a doubly compounded one: (1) it presupposes that there is some intelligible quality that being has to be discerned a priori by human cognition; and (2) it supposes that that quality has two distinct senses for creaturely and divine being that is bridged by the proportionality in question. So, the pronouncement upon the analogia entis is that it is fundamentally a failure to conceive its own beginning: there is no quality or Firstness that presents itself to distinguish being from anything else. Its function is as an incognizable limit concept and is therefore “not part of cognition proper.”48 And, it is not, then, intelligible because it has no concept to be used for affecting any form of practical conduct. Therefore, an analogia entis is doomed to failure from the start. The analogia signorum, on the other hand, has no such presupposition about being, and does not utilize a concept of being to explain the role of Jesus Christ as sign of God and his function as keystone to analogical language. Grammatical Analogy: The Failure of Conceiving Indexicality (Secondness) The Grammatical Thomists seem to be the most reflective about the challenges of analogy, and with good reason: they had the fortuitous vantage of looking back upon the debates of the first half of the twentieth century to

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understand the challenges to an analogia entis. However, the turn to a grammatical performance leaves just as much to be desired. The formal description of God that these Thomists inherited was never challenged, only the supposed ontological principle bringing together creaturely and divine being. The hope that recourse to a syntactical framework would solve the problem of intelligibility—most rigorously defended by Victor Preller—simply does not address the problem of understanding, which I attempted to stress with Searle’s thought experiment of the Chinese room. Therein, it was found that granting such a syntactic framework would not assure any way to form intelligible utterances, writings, or other symbolic forms of representation. By my lights, this points to the Grammatical Thomists’ error being fundamentally a failure of conceiving Secondness—specifically, the views lack a recognition that symbolic meaning can be intelligible only if it is associated with indices, or spatiotemporal locations for iconic signs to be embodied in the world of existence and to resist, or react against, each other. Human beings learn because they meet resistance in an external world that says “No!” to the whims of imagination. The baby understood what affection means because the mother held her warmly and securely; the child understands what hot means because the fire he tried to grasp impressed upon him a concept with physical consequences; and the theologian knows the principle of non-contradiction because she has experienced that something is not A and ~A at the same time. All such symbolic conventions are preceded by, and given content through, empirical indices. What the Grammatical Thomists cannot provide is any empirical indexicality for their syntactic frameworks or linguistic performances—they remain entirely indeterminate, for no experience has been indexed to their symbols or linguistic performances. The people in the God-room can conjure no determinate conceptual content for their God-talk as a result. They may pass down their syntax with its rules, but it can never pass itself off as more than as a made-up exercise about shapes, noises, or gesticulations. Thus, its meaning is merely intrinsically justified according to the arbitrary rules of a game invented by an equally arbitrary authority. This method places itself squarely among those that Peirce railed against in “The Fixation of Belief”: (1) it asks those involved in God-talk to follow, without comprehension, a tradition of linguistic performance (method of authority); (2) without external justification, conformity to that tradition appears to be a matter of affective intensity (method of tenacity); and (3) the method supposes a syntactic framework that bridges divine and creaturely boundaries on non-empirical (and, thus, incognizable) grounds from the beginning of its argumentation (a priori method). The analogia signorum, however, has none of these problems with Secondness. It finds in Jesus Christ’s unique indexicality the empirical foothold for the acquisition of percepts of God, and situates him as iconic sinsign

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of God’s divine quality. As this living sign, Jesus is the external permanency that resists the arbitrary judgments of any particular person. The qualities that Jesus indexes in his person are able to be connected through the analogia signorum to conventional symbols that constitute our concepts, which in turn may be symbolically expressed. In other words, our God-talk is meaningful to us because there are distinctly conceivable effects to our practical conduct in Jesus’s words and actions to which our own words and actions refer. Jesus’s Secondness, then, assures us that the divine being is, in some way, continuous with the anthropomorphic conceptions of divine being to which we are inevitably constrained. The Grammatical Thomists cannot admit such a foothold because they leave no room for the empirical presentation of the divine being in the world—simplicity, construed through metaphysical essentialism and dualism, doesn’t allow it. Without God being in some sense indexically present in the world, there is no way to intelligibly connect the creature’s and God’s syntactic frameworks. God-talk can only be an incoherent conjecture without hope for affecting our conduct in this life, and leaving no idea for what it would look like in the future life. Therefore, grammatical analogy should rightly be dismissed. Analogia Fidei: The Failure of Conceiving Jesus’s Representability (Thirdness) Barth’s tracing of the analogy of faith in his Church Dogmatics evinces what I would suggest is an issue of moving from the relational per se to the relationally regular—specifically, his focus on the relationship between God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ with human beings presents a roadblock to the regular conceiving of that relationship, and thus of its coherent articulation. As such, the main problem for the analogia fidei is one of Thirdness: the representability of God’s revelation in concepts that are commensurate with natural significations is never provided solid anchoring. This is unfortunate as, from my perspective, Barth comes the closest of any of the interlocutors to making a salutary departure from the orbit of essentialism and dualism. His troubles with Firstness are attenuated by his turn away from a concept of being and his acknowledgment of multiplicity in God (even if he thinks it must be held in dialectical tension with simplicity); also, his troubles with Secondness are less pronounced than the Grammatical Thomists because he is willing to place substantial emphasis upon the person of Christ, a person in the natural realm of experience able to index a divine referent (even if that person’s attributes of freedom, covenant-partnership, and love are conceptually opaque). Further, Barth wants and has a “concept” of God to be filled in by the forms of the Word of God. But, unfortunately

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his dialectic is never able to land those concepts on any solid ground since he fervently wants to guard that concept from any natural tampering, false utilization, or idolization. In effect, the continuum between experienced interpretant and object is broken: the sign’s power to signify is broken for understanding as soon as it is proffered as a datum for it. Thus, Barth’s ideas can’t withstand the gravitational pull of essentialism and dualism: the concepts he suggests cannot consistently be held to have any conceivable effects for practical conduct. The analogia signorum has no such scruples about representing Jesus’s divine qualities as continuous with concepts formed in the world of natural experience. Indeed, it recognizes their synechistic connection as imperative for intelligible expression. The result is that a predicate like the love of God is both (1) commensurable in some sense with love as a typical expression used by human beings and (2) that predication’s generalization is potentially just as real as the rhematic relations that make it originally perceivable in Jesus Christ. This means that the love of God may be shared knowledge among individuals, but to different degrees and to different approximations to the divine love disclosed in the God-man. But, in contrast to a natural theology that would presume that love can be inferred apart from disclosure in Jesus Christ, the analogia signorum mandates that the content of love must pass through Jesus Christ to gain authentic determinacy, for, as phase 2 pointed out, the world is constituted only by non-image indices of God; Jesus Christ, however, provides percepts of God, making him the object of interpretive primacy. Thus, Barth is correct to turn our attention toward Jesus Christ, but he had too much philosophical baggage from the classical and Kantian tradition to allow him to articulate an intelligible connection between Jesus, God, and human beings. In sum, we see the deleterious consequences within theologies that fail to reflect what John Deely calls a “semiotic consciousness”—that awareness which the human animal, in using signs as every animal must, achieves with the intellectual realization that the being proper to signs consists in triadic relations, invisible as relations to sense perception, transcending every subjective boundary, and upon which every achievement of human knowledge depends.49

The neglect of this understanding, of the reality and pervasiveness of signs and sign-process in the world, renders theology, as an attempt to represent some “achievement of human knowledge,” as a discipline necessarily inadequate to its task. Without the recognition of the human being as a “semiotic animal”—not a mere res cogitans—theology will never be able to make sense of how we could know God, for “it is only through the action of signs that there are objects known.”50

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CONCLUSION: ASSESSING THE ACCOUNT ACCORDING TO THE GUIDELINES We may now, finally, come to our examination of the guidelines to analogy presented in chapter 2. How does the analogia signorum fare with respect to their requirements? 1. Determinate vertical and horizontal relations must be secured for intelligible analogies: To review, horizontal relations are intended to capture the classical understanding of “similarity” insofar as the source and target of an analogy have properties, relations, or functions that are alike. Vertical relations, on the other hand, track the kind of associations that exist between phenomena within a specific source domain to be applied or compared with a target domain’s associations. The analogia signorum can give determinacy to both of these relations. The horizontal relations comparing, say, a creature’s power to God’s power are both commensurate along the taxonomic classification of signs (iconic sinsign, indexical legisign, delome, etc.) and their constituents (dynamic object, immediate interpretant, representamen, etc.). The sorts of signs that God’s power, for instance, in the person of Jesus Christ produces may be of an order far beyond a creature’s power, but its effects are intelligible semiotically, just as the creature’s powers are. Vertical relations can likewise be so determined. God’s power and God’s goodness, for instance, may be semiotically scrutinized in the person of Jesus Christ: how does Jesus speak or act when using his power, and how does he relate that to his mission, and the goodness of God? These answers will be semiotically construed, and then analogized through commensurate dynamics between creaturely goodness and power. We can ask questions like: does Jesus’s goodness govern his use of power? Does Jesus’s goodness sometimes require a measure of power to be used? Does Jesus use his power to extend goodness in some regard? And so on. So then, the analogia signorum has resources to identify vertical and horizontal relations through Jesus’s actions, and it does so without being subject to a essentialist or dualist theology that would subject its conclusions to the arbitrary requirements of simplicity. 2. Similarity is multivalent, and discerning those valences is crucial for discovering the strength of an analogy: The multivalence in view has to do with identifying the kind of “similarity” that analogies might be utilizing. That similarity may be systems-based, goal-based, description-based, symmetry-based, and vertical association-based (to name major views from chapter 2). The analogia signorum is able to discern these differences. For instance, consider Jesus’s “friendship” with the disciples:

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how is that friendship analogous to the disciples’ friendship with Jesus? We can distill descriptive similarities and differences readily (e.g., how does Jesus opt to spend time with his friends? What does table fellowship look like to him? How does he approach learning about the death of his friends?). Goals may similarly be compared (e.g., Why does Jesus befriend the disciples? And how is that different from why this or that disciple befriends Jesus?). These may lead to questions of systematicity and symmetry (e.g., Is it better to say that Jesus’s friendship with the disciples is more of a mentoring relation than friendship among equals?) And, the vertical associations may also be clarified (e.g., is Jesus’s friendship logically entailed by his mission? Or, perhaps is it casually related to his will?). The signs of Jesus will help to clarify and give inferential support to these questions. Lacking signs that pragmaticistically clarify the questions will reduce clarity and inferential support. 3. An analogy should aim for structural isomorphism: a one-to-one correspondence in its features: Finding close parallels between God and creatures so that relationships can be determined to be structurally isomorphic is not a problem for the analogia signorum. Indeed, Jesus seems to presume that a number of such isomorphisms exist, as when he commands the disciples to act according to his own exemplary action (e.g., Mt 5:48; 6:14; Jn 15:10; 17:11, 21-23). In these cases, teasing out what degree disciples can “forgive” one another as God forgave them (Mt 6:14), or how they can be “one” as Jesus and the Father are “one” (Jn 17:11) will require reflection and further exegesis. But, insofar as the reader is attempting to understand Jesus’s signs in analogy with those of normal human beings, she has a concept of what the identity is that has practical bearing on conduct, based on the divine target being commensurate with the human source. Without simplicity’s a priori commitments meddling with the interpretive scheme, this frees up the effort to find the proportionality and degree of isomorphism for later metaphysical speculation. 4. Determining the association is important both for distinguishing more or less relevant similarities, and clarifying analogical relatedness of homologous symbols: As the analogia signorum follows the Peircean ordering of knowledge and semiotic theory, it is able to distinguish between types of association and similarity. It can distinguish between whether an analogy might stress the descriptive physical features of two objects or the relations of two objects by being attentive to whether iconic or symbolic features are in view in the analogy, for instance. And, as it recognizes the reality of forms of Firstness and generals of Thirdness, it doesn’t need to force their respective analogs into molds of only feelings, concrete objects, or general laws. With respect to this criterion, then, on the one

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hand, whether a property of God entails, causes, explains, or correlates with another property can be achieved and reckoned as real with respect to God’s identity. Further, one can question ascribing a similar vertical relation to a proportional vertical relation in creatures. On the other hand, Peirce’s recognition that symbols are the associations of general ideas through human convention can embrace Ross’s concern that analogical similarity between homologous words be based upon semantic relatedness; however, Peirce’s simultaneous recognition that icons resemble the form of their objects allows for a basic correspondence between the significations of the mind and their external objects, and between icons themselves. So, in the former case, Peirce can admit that God’s desire and human desire are going to be partitioned differently with respect to contrast terms when in actual use and result in the substitution of different linguistic symbols, but, in the latter case, Peirce can also admit that the iconic relations associated with human desire may resemble those of God because Jesus’s experiences are narrated in such a way that they bear resemblance to how our own desires are narrated. 5. Inferential potency affects the mapping procedure’s cogency and needs to be assessed: By employing an empirical method, inferential potency is not stymied by a priori commitments to essentialism and dualism, which would deny such potency before it can be assessed. Instead, the analogia signorum embraces pluriform representational possibilities by centering them in the living person of Jesus Christ, not a pseudo-concept of being, shared formal syntax with opaque rules, or dialectically impenetrable relationship between Jesus and God. Indeed, as Romans 5:8 says, we know God’s love because “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We know what God is like because God’s true likeness makes known that it’s the kind of love that dies not just for his friends, but for his enemies. As such, the resulting concepts are freed to be used inferentially in innumerably different ways. For instance, if the character of God’s love through Christ is one that involves Christ’s death for his enemies, how ought then Christians to act with regard to their enemies in imitation of Jesus? Or, what might that mean pastorally for those who have committed heinous crimes and seek forgiveness? We might go on here, but the point is that the analogous proportionality has application to instances outside of its immediate context, or, in the case of Romans 5:8, is allowed its extensive effects as a general outcome of divine action. And, all of this bears conceivable effects for practical conduct. 6. Regarding the horizontal and vertical relations, successful analogies will require compensation by the other paired relation if one relation is weak: Though a purely formal analogy from creatures to the divine is out of place, some blending of material analogies with formal analogies may

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be appropriate with the analogia signorum. For instance, a weak material analogy (stressing the horizontal) might be to say that human beings are to human jealousy as God is to God’s jealousy; however, current colloquial use of “jealousy” might greatly obstruct an exegetically sound understanding of divine jealousy. As such, supplying some formal reflection on the relation between the presentation of divine jealousy and the love, mercy, and grace of God in Christ would help to show the discontinuities of divine and human jealousies while pinpointing overlap that is relevant for the soundness of the analogy. On the other hand, a weak formal analogy (stressing the vertical) might be to say that since human justice entails distributing punishment on offenders, so also divine justice entails distributing punishment to offenders; however, finding more horizontal characteristics of God’s grace, mercy, and forbearance in Christ would likely suggest the weakening of the entailment relation initially proposed. So, the analogia signorum is able to use the dynamics of compensation with analogical inferences and thus can sensibly pronounce theological judgments on, and corrections to, God-modeling efforts. 7. Familiarity with vertical and horizontal features of source and target is contingent on empirical data: The analogia signorum should excel at establishing this familiarity because of its commitment to Peirce’s empirical methodology. The possible classes of signs are the first cognizables that have come through the gates of perception providing entry from the phenomenological realm, and those signs must show themselves potentially effective to practical conduct in order to exit the gate of purposeful action. If an analogy is maintained that has a proportionality that is not empirically significant, then it must be rejected, which is just what we must do with any proportionality relying on a concept of being, the formal meaning of a linguistic practice, or any expression that merely relies on “faith” in Jesus. These views, in fact, all put the cart before the horse. The analogia signorum, however, admits the signs as they are because they are legitimate results of the divine percepts that Jesus produces. Surely, the interpretations of such signs must be critically assessed, but no prior definition of God need obscure how the classes of signs are familiar to human perceivers and interpreters. In summary, the Peircean resources of the analogia signorum, and the account of the analogia signorum itself, are able to meet the guidelines of analogy set forth in chapter 2. By extension, it also turns out to be the case that the analogia signorum can provide us with the pragmaticistic intelligibility that we’ve been seeking from the beginning. God-talk is intelligible from the perspective of the analogia signorum because that perspective allows believers to interpret the person of Jesus Christ in the external world

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(his “person” and “work”) as the source of particular semiotic effects such that we can conceive of how those effects also affect practical conduct. Thus, we can say with intelligibility that Jesus acts in determinate ways, tells stories with outcomes for human actions, and lives in a manner that can be conceivably followed in various respects. In sum, God is known intelligibly and analogously as provoking explicit theoretical and practical effects. Therefore, the analogia signorum provides a means of entry into theological discourse and language by a semiotic medium that translates divine action—and also the notion of that action, as occurring “through Jesus”—into intelligible signification for human beings to perceive, interpret, conceive, judge, communicate, criticize, and creatively adapt.

NOTES 1. This is not to say that different universes of discourse won’t signify in predominantly different ways. For instance, mathematical objects signify, and yield interpretants, differently from textual or physical objects; however, they all undergo semiosis. 2. Letter from Peirce to William James, March 13, 1897, quoted in Brent, A Life, 261. 3. Peirce to James, March 13 1897; Peirce to James, December 25, 1909, quoted in Brent, A Life, 261, 314. 4. With such questions of biblical and theological authenticity, Peirce says that “I fear I shall not be able to follow them far into this deep and dark exploration.” 5. MS 284, 1905, quoted in Orange, God, 72. 6. See, for instance, Robert C. Neville, Ultimates, on the former, and Robert Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Philosophy and Theology, on the latter. 7. Peirce here mentions the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius as an interesting case. Though Peirce is inclined to believe its liquefaction miraculous, what is strange is that the miracle should occur at various anticipated intervals (which might suggest some characteristic lawfulness at work). 8. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 194. 9. Texts like CP 4.539, 1906 and Peirce, Semiotics and Significs, 85, 162 show that Peirce changed the nomenclature from “rheme” to “seme” from 1906 onward. Peirce did identify the index as a “seme” in 1902 (CP 2.283), but seemed to have temporarily abandoned it by 1903. The final taxonomy, then, allows that a seme can technically be an icon, index, or symbol. See Bellucci, Speculative Grammar, 316. 10. Wilson, Peirce’s Empiricism, 191. 11. Something very similar is implied by John Polkinghorne with reference to the privileging of experiments in science for knowledge of the world: “though the laws of nature are always operating, experiments are events in which they are specially readily discerned.” The reason why, I would submit, the experiment presents a situation in which there are “readily discerned” features of the world is because of the phenomena

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being presented to the observer’s perception. See John Polkinghorne, Science and Theology: An Introduction (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 98. 12. By saying ceteris paribus I mean to suggest that accommodations ought to be made for extenuating circumstances, say, of my neighbor going through an elaborate effort to disguise himself. 13. In using the term “image index” as distinct from “image,” I distinguish, respectively, the sense of “image” in CP 7.619, 1903 spoken of earlier with regard to percepts from Peirce’s designation of the first class of hypoicon (CP 2.277, 1903), the taxonomy of which he was experimenting with around the same time (though the nomenclature did not last). So, the reader should not suppose these are synonymous uses of the term. 14. Joseph Ransdell, “The Epistemic Function of Iconicity in Perception,” in Studies in Peirc’s Semiotic (Lubbock: Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism, 2005), 57, Arisbe revised e-print available at http:​/​/www​​.iupu​​i​.edu​/​~ari​​sbe​/m​​enu​/l​​ibrar​​y​/abo​​ utcsp​​/rans​​dell/​​​EPIST​​EMIC.​​htm. 15. Ibid., 57. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 58. 19. And, insofar as I understand the basic trajectory of biblical scholarship on the historical Jesus at this point in time, the contemporary evidence and scholarly consensus affirms, as E.P. Sanders says, “almost beyond dispute” that a person, “Jesus,” lived in Nazareth, was baptized by John the Baptist, had disciples, taught in the area of Galilee, preached the kingdom of God, and was executed by the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate. Obviously, much is contested about what is claimed for him in the biblical writings, but that such a person lived seems to be beyond reasonable doubt, even for scholars fairly critical of traditional Christianity. See EP Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 10–11. 20. I think Barend van Heusden’s reflections on semiosis are useful for further elucidating the notion of a fiction. Therein, he offers a “tentative definition” of the real as “that which forces us to deal with semiotic contradictions.” In other words, reality presents us with some compulsion to come to grips with mutually incompatible possibilities of semiotic activity. A fiction, on the other hand, has no such compelling force. If Lewis Carroll decides that the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass “believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” there is nothing to compel dissent from it as a fiction of literature (despite Alice’s consternation). See Barend van Heusden, “Aesthetic and Artistic Semiosis: A Peircean Perspective,” in Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications, and Connections, ed. Vincent Colapietro et al. (New York: De Gruyter, 1996), 242; Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 207. 21. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 53. 22. Technically, iconic sinsigns are always rhematic (see Table 6.1/Appendix), so there isn’t a need to provide the parenthetical; however, for the sake of clarity, it is included.

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23. Andrew Robinson, God and the World of Signs, 123. Hereafter, “GWS” in text body. 24. Robinson does acknowledge that “a qualisign cannot signify without being somehow embodied, and in that sense there is some overlap with the category of sinsign” (122); however, he seems to bypass this point entirely in the rest of the work in failing to recognize that insofar as Jesus is any sign of God, he must be so as an existing thing. So, we might be able to say that the unique essence of divinity that Jesus has as God incarnate is the iconic qualisign of divinity (since the divine quality is just the sign of itself), but we must say that Jesus’s existent person is an iconic sinsign of that divine quality. 25. But, to say Jesus is an iconic sinsign is not to rule out that he does not also signify other sorts of sinsigns. For instance, Jesper Tang Nielsen argues that Johannine Christology presents Jesus as a dicentic indexical sinsign of God. Jesus is an index because he derives from the Father, he is a sinsign because “his concrete being makes him a sign,” and he is a dicent because he signifies a meaning that claims veridicality. The analogia signorum can agree with this, but in affirming the divinity of the person of Jesus, it more primordially situates him as the iconic sinsign of God. See Jesper Tang Nielsen, “The Secondness of the Fourth Gospel,” Studia TheologicaNordic Journal of Theology 60, no. 2 (2006), 132–133, accessed June 9, 2017, doi: 10.1080/00393380601010227. 26. See my “Peirce and Analogy,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 56, no. 3 (2020), 299–325. 27. For instance, Luke’s address to “Theophilus” of his close examination of Jesus’s life in his gospel (Luke 1:1–4); John’s closing line in his gospel about his testimony being true (John 21:24), and in his first epistle of nearly the same (1 John 1:1–4); and Revelation’s introductory statement about the accuracy of what was seen in his visions (Rev 1:1–2). 28. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 472. 29. W.L. Liefeld, “Transfiguration,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove: Inner Varsity Press, 1992), 839. 30. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 161. 31. Ibid., 165. 32. Ibid., 172–173. 33. One might argue in response that the “unbelief” in the relevant passages is not so much about unbelief in a proposition that is hidden within the parabolic statements of Jesus, but it is about unbelief in who Jesus is that prevents an understanding of the parables. To rejoin, I would say that this still supposes semiotic univocity with respect to judging Jesus’s claims about himself, or the signs that testify to his identity, because the judgments about Jesus still involve questions about veridicality. 34. This seems to get a little bit more complicated with the respective witnesses to Jesus’s foretelling of his coming death and resurrection. For instance, in Mk

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8:31–34, Jesus discloses these events “plainly,” and Peter appears to understand, at least partially, what he says, for he rebukes Jesus. Jesus’s response to Peter—“Get behind me, Satan!”—must presume Peter’s partial comprehension to make sense. In Luke 9:43–45, the disciples don’t understand Jesus’s pronouncement, but they understand it enough to be “afraid to ask him about this saying.” What “conceals” their understanding is not entirely clear; perhaps it is Jesus’s way of saying it. But, even if the concealing event is a spiritual event, there is no reason to think that this is some spiritual, intuitive knowledge, for any reader of the gospel can understand the saying if they’ve read to its end. Luke 18:31–34 is probably the most clear suggestion of the disciples being entirely unaware of what Jesus is saying because “the saying was hidden from them,” but, again, that there may have been spiritual occlusion of the judgment need not suggest an issue of signification in general. 35. Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, ed. F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 116. 36. For a further analysis of Peirce’s concept of this state of “unlimited possibility,” including its likely roots in the philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling, see Niemoczynski, Religious Metaphysics, 48–53, 118–121, 132–134. 37. Though I have written extensively about this problem elsewhere, the basic issue with the notion of being coming from absolute non-being (apart from the efficient causality problem) is that a possibility of a state of absolute non-being is a false concept: it can’t be imagined, for any possibility is already something real, or something that has being distinct from what anyone may think. Thus, the state of absolute non-being is an impossibility. For more on this, see my “Could Ultimate Reality Be Indeterminate? Inverting the Demands of Robert Neville’s Argument,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 39, no. 2 (2018), 4–18. See also Lorenz Puntel, Structure and Being: A Theoretical Framework for a Systematic Philosophy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 444–446, from which I derive my basic critique on absolute non-being. If taken out of context, Peirce could be interpreted as saying that he has such a view of absolute nonbeing in mind when he talks about this “utter nothingness”; however, as Nicholas Guardiano points out, just because it is a homogenous, undifferentiated, and general potential does not yield it has no being—rather it contains “all being” as that potential. See Nicholas Lee Guardiano, “The Categorial Logic of Peirce’s Metaphysical Categories,” The Pluralist 10, no. 3 (2015), 322, accessed August 10, 2018, doi: 10.5406/pluralist.10.0.0313. 38. Catherine Keller, for instance, has developed a protology out of what she sees as the biblical scholarly consensus “for decades” that “the Bible knows only of the divine formation of the world out of a chaotic something.” For a greater examination of that biblical evidence, see Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4, 103–123. 39. See Douglas Anderson, “Realism and Idealism in Peirce’s Cosmogony,” in Conversations on Peirce, ed. Douglas Anderson and Carl Hausman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 168–169. 40. Ibid., 173–175.

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41. Indeed, even Peirce’s well-known quote from 1866—that a symbol’s triadic elements form a “trinity [that] agrees with the Christian trinity” (W I: 503)—headlining Chapter 2 of Robinson’s book does not suggest such an easy mapping to Trinitarian persons. In that quote from Lowell Lecture XI, Peirce speaks of the elements of a “symbol” (or general sign) being an object, interpretant, and ground, the latter of which is the quality or respect in which the sign relates to its object (Bellucci, 194). So, at this early stage in the semiotic the representamen is not one of the basic triadic elements that it will be in the later stages. In application to the Trinity, Peirce in 1866 compares the Son to the interpretant, the Father to the object, and the Holy Spirit to the ground; but, Robinson would compare the Son to the representamen, the Father to the object, and the Holy Spirit to the interpretant, and analogously the Son to Secondness, the Father to Firstness, and the Holy Spirit to Thirdness (GWS, 319). We can see here, thus, two problems apart from the more detailed accounts of the categories above: (1) Peirce’s division for the semiotic analogues to the Trinity in 1866 do not correlate with the later semiotic account that Robinson utilizes; and (2) the categories do not map to the semiotic triad as Peirce envisioned (that is, Firstness = Sign, Secondness = Object, Thirdness = Interpretant). Though Robinson does admit that one should not “attach much importance” to the correlations of 1866 as they are early in Peirce’s development (GWS, 61), I continue to think that he doesn’t recognizes the degree to which Peirce’s account seems to be at odds with his efforts to locate the vestiges, as I attempt to show. 42. Though, we could quibble here. For one, Robinson is incorrect in saying that agapasticism has an emphasis on creative love and freedom due to its being driven by Thirdness (GWS, 233–234); rather, what makes agapasticism genuine is that it properly incorporates tychism for ever new creative possibilities. A form of evolution that is totally dominated by Thirdness would be anancasticism, which is what Peirce associated with Hegel’s philosophy (EP 1:362–363, 1893). 43. Robinson seems to be aware of this, particularly when he mentions how the work of Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg also suggests that there is considerable overlap in phenomena associated with Secondness with the Spirit and Thirdness with the Son. Thus, it is disconcerting that he ignores these differences for the sake of “support[ing] the general shape of [his] argument” (GWS, 267–268). This suggests to me that Robinson is more interested in fitting the persons into the preestablished molds of the categories than he is in honestly discerning the adequacy of the categories for distinguishing the persons. 44. Indeed, there is reason to believe that the Spirit might best be understood as a more adequate Second as one preceding the Son in logical ordering. First, the Spirit is over the waters at the beginning of creation (Gen. 1:2); second, Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit (Mt 1:20); third, as Peter Leithart points out in his commentary on Revelation, in view of the incarnational ordering of “Father, Spirit, Son” utilized in 1:4–5, we may say that “the Father eternally begets the Son through the Spirit. The Spirit is the Love by which the Father begets the Son, the Love through with the Son loves the Father.” Thus, it doesn’t seem to me that the otherness of Secondness is monopolized by the Son or is his distinctive trait. See Peter Leithart, Revelation 1–11,

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International Theological Commentary, ed. Michael Allen and Scott Swain (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018), 86. 45. As I hope is clear above, this does not mean that the three categories would not have some conceptual purchase on God; on the contrary, the hypothesis of the analogia signorum is that they do, and would even hopefully be able to perfectly mirror the divine in some indefinite (eschatological?) future. In terms of the metaphysical conjectures that might result from the analogia signorum’s semiotic determinations, I am inclined toward Gary Slater’s utilization and extension of the “absolute Firstness” and “absolute Thirdness” in his “nested continua model” of religious interpretation. Although my project is not Slater’s, and the analogia signorum would require a different view on these categories than what Slater propounds (not least of which would be the addition of “absolute Secondness” and its synthesis with the person of Jesus Christ), there is definite appeal in working through divine ascriptions of transcendent, creative activity in terms of absolute Firstness, and universal purpose, rationality, and governance in terms of absolute Thirdness. For more on Slater’s approach to these categories, see Slater, Nested Continua Model, 183–191. 46. See also CP 5.38, 1903 and CP 8.268, 1903. Though, Peirce also thought at times that Hegel’s totalization of Thirdness didn’t actually result in a genuine Thirdness that advanced realism about generals—instead, it remained nominalistic (CP 1.19, 1903). 47. Parker, Continuity, 9. 48. Parker, Continuity, 9. 49. John Deely, Augustine & Poinsot: The Protosemiotic Development (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2009), iv. 50. Ibid., 207.

Conclusion

In Part II of his book The Problem of Christianity, Josiah Royce captures one of Peirce’s pivotal contributions to philosophy. Royce writes that Peirce was able to show him that the dual opposition between perception and conception prevailing in “a great part of the history of philosophy” is because of the failure to come to terms with the reality of interpretation that mediates and synthesizes those two realms.1 Even Kant, Royce says, wasn’t able to avoid the “classical dualism with regard to the process of cognition”: sense was a power to perceive, and understanding and reason were powers of conception.2 The realm of things and the realm of ideas remained separate, as a result. If, instead, we come to recognize the reality of these realms’ interpenetration— of our cognitive capacities functioning within a process of mental expressions or signs that we receive and address to others and ourselves3—then “every problem, every antithesis, every expression of mind, every tragedy of life, is a sign calling for interpretation.”4 Notwithstanding Royce’s less-than-comprehensive understanding of the details of Peirce’s semiotics, the above insight is fundamentally on point, and can be applied to the problem of this book. The problem of religious language, I hold, has been an unsolvable conundrum for Christian theologians who subscribe to metaphysical essentialism and dualism (which, unfortunately, appears to be no small percentage of them). This is because they have, by and large, implicitly maintained the total distinction between the realm of conception and the realm of perception. For Plato, that was the distinction between the realm of heavenly, intelligible forms only apprehended by reason, and the earthly realm of the material perceived by the senses; for Aristotle, the distinctions were slightly modified to be the principles of actuality—forms—comprehended by the intellect, and the stuff of change and potency—matter—experienced by the senses, but inherently 269

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unintelligible; for Kant, that was the distinction between the universal categories of the understanding, and the intuitions of sensibility from the world of appearances. These dualisms have been inherited by Christian theologians, and their theologies have suffered for it as a result by failing to make God-talk intelligible (which I have attempted to make clear through the course of this book). This unintelligibility is primarily because experience has been sundered by a false division: the world of thought and the world of objects are two different, exclusive realms that cannot be explained by a mutually connecting process. As a result, what is deeply bound up with our experience of the empirical world (our language) is ineluctably separated from an object beyond experience (God). The analogia signorum isn’t beholden to this division. It holds instead that the cognitive realms of perception and conception are inextricably bound up together through semiosis. In doing so, it posits that the sign-process is actually a function common to all reality, including the real object that is God. In other words, God and human beings are equally involved in sign-process, and any proportionality suggested between them in the form of analogy is going to entail a proportion between signs in their taxonomic classification. The theological lynchpin for this claim is in the self-disclosure of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth—it is in him that the Christian witness poses an argument for God’s sign-ability, for God’s being known in the process of semiosis. This being the case, the analogia signorum holds, it also means the refutation of the barriers to intelligibility that have been erected by metaphysical essentialism and dualism, chief among them being the ascription to God of simple being. But, in concluding this work, I would like to return briefly to two questions that were left open in chapter 2. The first is this: what do we now make of “proportionality”? Given our examination of the Peircean architectonic, what would the analogia signorum have us think about it? Is analogy ultimately about discerning a univocal concept that is common between a pair of analogs (as Scotus averred), or is proportionality at base a sort of irreducible cognition of similarity that has no deeper common factor (as Cajetan argues)? The second is this: what does the analogia signorum make of Hesse’s claim that Aristotle may have gotten it wrong about the requirements of univocity for definition? Is it the case that univocity is the “outlier,” whereas analogy is how predication normally functions when we induce to universals for scientific knowledge? I may answer these questions in the following way. As a result of the Peircean architectonic on which the analogia signorum depends, we can diagnose Aristotle’s treatment of coming to scientific knowledge in intuition to be missing the semiotic process that mediates sense perception to memory to experience, and then finally to intuiting the universal. Whereas Aristotle

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treats an experience of sense perception as a sort of repository that gathers the intelligible form, or universal, and so presumes a univocity of experience to inform the intuited universal, Peirce’s architectonic recognizes that sense perception is always couched in semiotic processes, and so the experience that leads to the formation of a general concept is going to involve a variety of significations of empirical realities that are not univocal in all their features. As such, all predications will be the result of blending those analogous significations—those significations that have a “resemblance of form”—in a sort of vaguely determined abstraction. So, my conception of “causality,” or “chair,” or “resistance,” or “house,” or whatever general feature of reality, will be the product of abstracting those general signs. Therefore, in answer to the second question, the analogia signorum sides with Hesse’s hypothesis, if understood broadly: indeed, the definition of concepts always takes place through setting up perceived proportionalities cognized through analogous instances of semiotic classification. In answer to the first question, it takes neither solution as simply the case, but it leans toward Scotus. Cajetan’s claim that proportionality is a sort of metaphysically irreducible class of cognizable, and something that is directly perceived, is false. In support of Scotus’s univocity, Peirce’s architectonic also espouses the notion that discerning a proportionality between analogates involves the aim of discovering a univocity of element(s) within that proportionality; however, that’s only the case insofar as we understand that univocity to be an equivalence between the potentially conceivable characters or effects that have bearing on practical conduct that the element(s) of the proportionality between the source and target tout as analogous. Thus, for instance, “God loves the creation as a mother loves her son” contains a proportionality in “loves” that is complex and not immediately reducible to an obvious univocity of features; however, we may still seek to understand and assess how adequate the proportionalities we suggest are to one another. Is God’s love best understood as a stern compassion, an affectionate embrace, a critical disciplining, a watchful concern, or something else? If one is to suppose that the interpretants may be assessed here for their adequacy to their object, then we would also need to suppose that the proportionalities may approach a hoped for univocal feature, however abstract, that yields no discernible difference in pragmaticistic intelligibility. Indeed, if theology thinks of itself as an inquiry into who God is, then it seems it must hope that there is such an available univocity, in some respect, to be discerned. Does this last point mean, then, that there is ultimately a univocity of being, as Scotus suggests, between God and creatures? Is it that “being” is a “concept that is univocal to [God] and to a creature” rendering a notion that is “included in both of them”?5 I believe the trajectory of the analogia signorum suggests that this be answered in the affirmative; but, at any determinate

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point in this inquiry, being must be a regulative principle, not an a priori, material postulate for theology. Theologians may hope that the examination of proportionalities in analogous language by a community of theological inquirers may eventually come upon a final opinion as to what sign or set of signs can be cognized as “common” to God and human beings. But, that the final opinion, or final interpretant, will be just God’s dynamic object, must be understood as the most extreme of hopes, and it should make us tremble to contemplate its possibility. Yet, such is the Christian’s hope, it seems; at least, this appears to be a consequence of what Paul implies: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). As a closing matter, what does this mean for Christian theology, if the analogia signorum is (vaguely) accurate? At the least, it must mean that theologians have to develop a “semiotic consciousness,” as Deely has said.6 This is not to admit that theologians haven’t gone some distance in doing so,7 or that there are not those who have landed somewhere in the proximity of a semiotic consciousness without yet awakening to it;8 however, it is to say that the vast preponderance of theologians—in my experience—are lamentably bereft of any recognition of the importance of sign-process for their discipline. And, lacking that recognition, their projects, if they intend to have bearing upon achieving theological knowledge, will remain hindered. Indeed, I think it reasonable to even say that theology needs to be rethought in light of semiotics, if the analogia signorum is correct (or approximately so). So, then, what would Christian theology look like it if were to become fully semiotically conscious? Surely, I can only hint at the consequences of such a “semiotic theology” here. First, Christian theology will look different in practice. Abandoning metaphysical essentialism and dualism in the efforts of God-modeling would, of course, be necessary. And, as a result, Christian theology will come to different conclusions about God than it has previously. But, different conclusions about God are only the tip of the iceberg (granted, that tip is very significant); the methodology, categories, and conceptions employed for theological reflection themselves would have to change. To say the least, that will be a formidable task to accomplish. Second, Christian theology will have to revise its doctrinal commitments. A Christian theology that subscribes to the analogia signorum will have to abandon doctrines that are not pragmaticistically intelligible, or that do not have any notable semiotic role. This will impact not just the doctrine of God, but any Christian doctrine. As a result, doctrinal confessions may be thinner and vaguer than they were in the past, especially about matters of which we have very limited experience; however, the analogia signorum may also give more concreteness to doctrines that survive the revising process, especially as they affect reasonable conduct.

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Finally, Christian theology will be sensitive to empirical inquiry. If Christian theology is to remain a tenable discipline, it must take seriously the contributions of scientific study, especially as it affects how we understand the process of signification. Theologians who have comprehended the analogia signorum, but continue to permit the false dichotomies of the earthly and intelligible realms, of perception and conception, of matter and form, of phenomena and noumena, or whatever preferred dualism, into their theological work offer no aid in coming to know the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ. To adapt a phrase from Paul: “Their end is self-delusion, their god is their idol of perfection, and they glory in the unintelligible, with minds set— paradoxically—on things that cannot signify” (cf. Phil 3:9).

NOTES 1. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 277. 2. Ibid., 278. 3. Ibid., 290. 4. Ibid., 351. 5. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, Q1.26–27. 6. For Deely’s massive, provocative, and, in my opinion, paradigm-shifting examination of the history of philosophy from the perspective of the development of a semiotic consciousness in intellectual history, see his Four Ages of Understanding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 7. As Deely makes clear in his Augustine & Poinsot (A&P), most notable would be the “protosemiotic” developments seen in the figures of Augustine and John Poinsot, who were productive in both theology and philosophy. In the case of Augustine, he seems to be the first to have discovered in the late fourth century that the sign had a triadic structure, as when he says in Book 2.1 of his On Christian Teaching that “a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses.” But, as Deely remarks, while this led to the notion of the sign being understood not merely as the ancient notion of the linking of causal phenomena (semeion), but as a representation of both nature (phusis) and culture (nomos) (A&P, 3–4), Augustine failed to recognize that the pervasiveness of signs stretched into the “interior word,” or mental conception of external signs (A&P, 19–21). In the case of Poinsot, his Treatise on Signs in 1632 was the first to find the sign as worthy of a “distinctive area of investigation” (A&P, v). In particular, he argued that the triadic relation of the sign-process is the “only one form of being that meets the requirements of being indifferent to realization within any and all other division of being, subjective or objective” (A&P, 67–68). Yet, Poinsot’s work would remain “protosemiotic” because he neither worked out a taxonomy of “sign activities,” nor the consequences of his theory of signs for the overall philosophical enterprise (A&P, 29). See further On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (New

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York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Deely, John Poinsot, Tractatus de Signis: The Semiotic of John Poinsot, trans. John Deely (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1985). 8. I believe a great number of theologians could be allocated to this position, including some of those critiqued in Part II (which only goes to show that proximity to a semiotic consciousness does not entail greater accuracy in theological claims). But, a more recent example of particular note would be the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. In the development of his “generalized empirical method,” one can see something of a nascent consciousness of the importance, if not the centrality, of signprocess in his thinking. Indeed, the employment of a scientific, empirical method in matters of theology (as in his Method in Theology) finds a clear parallel in Peirce’s architectonic. However, it’s also clear that Lonergan still had some way to go to truly awaken to semiosis. This can be seen in his breakthrough work, Insight. Therein, he goes some way toward a triadic conception of the sign when he says that “meaning seems to be a relation between sign and signified” (Vol. 3, 5); yet, this also shows that he doesn’t recognize that meaning itself is encapsulated in sign-process, which reckons his notion of the sign explicitly dyadic. His address of the “image” later in the book makes this clear. There, he says that the image can be understood as an image itself (as “the sensitive content as operative on the sensitive level”), as a symbol (the linking of intellectual activity to an “unknown known”), or as a sign (the linking of the intellectual activity of “interpretation” to the image, offering its “import”) (Vol. 3, 557). In so setting up matters this way, he doesn’t appear to recognize that the presentation of any character to the senses, or any intellectual activity, involves mediation through triadic relation—in other words, he misses the pervasiveness of interpretation, and therefore sign-process. His writings after Insight do not suggest any notable improvement, but rather cements the notion of a presemiotic slumber. In his Halifax lectures on Insight, later called Understanding and Being, for instance, the sign appears to remain a dyad that requires an interpreting mind to formally give it “intelligibility” (Vol. 5, 223). But, even his most thorough treatment of signs (that I’m aware of) in Article 3 of the recently released The Redemption bears a similar notion to what came (slightly) before in Insight. In that article, in addition to what is said above, it’s also clear that Lonergan seems to follow Augustine in thinking that signs are always things sensible, or external to the mind that confers formal intelligibility. To be clear, for Lonergan, signs are very important: without them “all tradition, and all progress would disappear” (Vol. 9, 289); yet, it is also clear that: (1), one’s interior experiences are distinct from the signs that embody them; (2), signs are “perceptible objects” (291); (3), the account of the sign is situated in a dualistic metaphysics of matter and form; and, (4), signs “affect” our faculties, rather than perfuse them (293). These are unfortunate admissions, especially in that Lonergan concludes this article with such a promising statement: “The Word of God made flesh by his flesh manifests, expresses, communicates not only what belongs to human nature but also what belongs to the divine person,” and, as a result, “Christ’s signs are compared to others analogically” (295). But, speaking of analogy, one could say a similar thing about its treatment in Lonergan’s writings. Here, the Collected Works reflect quite a lot of the use of the term,

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but there isn’t much reflection on the operation of analogy (or, “similarity” or “likeness” [Vol. 12, 17, 179]) itself. On the one hand, Lonergan admits that an “analogy of being” points to what “underpins and goes beyond other contents” of what would distinguish univocal from analogous concepts (Vol. 3, 385–386), and this appears to look a bit like where Peirce would land on “being” as lacking any concept, but being a regulative ideal for inquiry. Further, God is known mediately by analogies “drawn from natural realities” (Vol. 12, 171), which also means that one must “go beyond the metaphysical analogy of being” to have some understanding of the divine life—for instance, one’s own “existential autonomy” is analogous to the divine processions (173, 179). On the other hand, it’s also clear that Lonergan remains in the grip of metaphysical dualism and essentialism, as when he says that “proper” knowledge of something is understanding of its essence, and “analogous” knowledge is understanding by “proportion” of a thing’s essence and existence (Vol. 5, 201–202). It is this sort of claim that leads me to continue to ponder how one who follows the Fourth Lateran Council’s “still greater dissimilarity” (as Lonergan does [Vol. 12, 17]) can reconcile a progressive empirical method with an ever-transcending essence. In my view, it can’t be done—it must be rethought with a semiotic consciousness. See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Volume 3, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Volume 5, Understanding and Being, ed. Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Volume 9, The Redemption, ed. Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan: Volume 12, The Triune God: Systematics, ed. Frederick Crowe and Robert Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007).

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Index

a priori, 9, 15, 82, 120, 162, 164, 200, 205, 218–19, 237, 251, 254, 259–60, 272; pure, 166–68; method, 190, 211n90, 256 abduction, 188–89, 196–97, 203, 216 actuality, reality of, 175, 193–94 actuality/potentiality, dualism of, 6–8, 34–35, 91, 269 agapasticism, 197, 200, 248, 266 analogia entis, 5, 12, 69-92, 93nn1–12, 94n22, 95n32, 97, 99, 129, 130–31, 133, 136, 140, 143, 145–46, 156, 253–55; Barth’s critique of, 129–31; as ontological principle, 69–70 analogia fidei, 5, 13, 129-156, 156n5, 256–57 analogia relationis, 130, 136–39, 145– 46, 154 analogia signorum, 11, 14, 162, 183, 205, 215-262, 264n25, 267n45, 270–73; account proper, 230–34; application of, 235–37; argument for, 222–34; a biblical challenge to, 242–46; biblical consonance of, 238–42; its conformity to guidelines, 258–62; formal representation of, 235; Peircean obstacles to, 217–21; philosophical challenges to, 246–52; its superiority to other models,

252–57; theological presumptions of, 238–42 analogy: and abstraction, 31–32; of advent, 149–52; Aristotle and, 21, 24–26, 27, 30–31, 33–36, 38, 41, 57, 150, 234; articulation model of, 50–53; as associated meaning, 27–29, 63n21; of attribution, 29–30, 32, 57, 64n26, 71–72, 79, 100, 117–19, 130, 134–36, 144–45, 149; Catholic/Protestant debate on, 5; and cognitive access, 47–48; cognitive science approaches to, 12, 42–46; and composition and division, 32; formal, 39–40, 49–50; grammatical, 12–13, 97-125, 254–56; of having being, 81–82, 88; iconic, 251–52; of inequality, 28–29, 100, 135; material, 39–41, 49, 61; of meaning/ proportionality, 55–57; models of, 21–66; modern philosophical approaches to, 12, 46–58; as nongeneric likeness, 27–28, 30, 37; Peirce’s view on. See Peirce, Charles Sanders; and plurium ad unum, 101; as popular answer to God-talk, 4–5; of proper proportionality, 28, 30–33, 86, 90–91, 95n32, 115–16; Scotistic critique of, 31–32; and 287

288

Index

simple apprehension, 31; structuremapping theory of, 42–44, 46–47; subsymbolic, 47, 61; symbolic, 251– 52; theological, 1, 4–5, 9, 11–14, 21, 69, 93n1, 97 105, 129-130, 131, 139, 156n5, 162, 229–31; and unius ad alterum, 101–2 analogy of being. See analogia entis analogy of faith. See analogia fidei analogy of relation. See analogia relationis analogy of signs. See analogia signorum anancism, 197 Anderson, Douglas, 247 Anderson, James F., 91 Anselm, 17n37 antethics, 168–69, 172, 174–75, 208n36 apophaticism, 13, 90, 94n17, 129, 154, 201 Aquinas, Thomas, 4, 9, 17n37, 28, 70, 73, 81, 84, 86, 95n35, 96n40, 97119, 125n5, 149 architectonic, See Peirce, Charles Sanders Aristotelian philosophy, 5–6, 9–11, 17n37, 27, 30, 33, 36, 98, 150 Aristotle, 5–10, 12, 21, 24–27, 30, 33–38, 41, 57, 63n8, 70, 73, 85, 91, 95n33, 103–4, 206n4, 234, 269, 270 Athanasius, 229 Atkin, Albert, 24, 191–92 Atkins, Richard Kenneth, 176 Augustine, 17n37, 70–71, 73, 142, 273n7, 274n8 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 12, 70, 75–80, 84, 86, 88–90, 93n11, 94nn16–19, 130, 240, 253 Barth, Karl, 13, 75, 93n11, 129156, 157n15, 256–57; Kantian presuppositions, 131–32 Bartha, Paul, 12, 49–53, 58–61, 66nn64–65

basic idealism, 195–96 basic realism, 165, 186–87, 192–93, 196 Bauckham, Richard, 238, 242 beatific vision, 114 beatified, 117, 119 being, concept of, 71-89, 90, 92, 136, 254, 256, 260–61; possession of, 80–81, 87–88 Brandom, Robert, 62n6 Burrell, David, 12, 97–98, 103–13, 125n12 Cajetan, Thomas, 12, 21, 27–33, 35–36, 57, 64n25, 86, 93n1, 99–101, 144, 270–71 Chinese room, 108, 112–13, 255 classical empiricism, 165–66, 207n13 coenoscopy, 162, 168 combination, 170–71 conception, 22–23, 62n6, 167, 170–72, 191–92, 233–34, 269–73 continuity, 174–75, 196–97, 204–5 deduction, 187–89, 203, 207n9, 211n86 Deely, John, 257, 272, 273n7 delome, 180, 182, 236, 242, 258 diagram, 223, 231, 233–34, 236, 278 Diller, Kevin, 147–48 equivocation, 27–33, 57, 63, 144; mere, 54–55 essence fallacy, 5–6 essentialism and dualism, 5–6, 9–11, 90–91, 95n32, 161, 253, 256–57, 260, 269–70, 272–73, 275 esthetics, 168–69, 172, 176–77 extrinsic denomination, 29, 64n25 faith, 13, 83, 114, 116–18, 129-136, 139-140, 143-146, 149-150, 153, 155, 162, 245, 261 final opinion, 191–94, 236, 238, 272 Firstness, 175, 197, 246–50, 252–54, 256, 259, 266n41, 267n45

Index

Firsts, 173–74, 193, 226, 250 form/matter dualism, 6–9, 26, 36, 98, 269–70, 273 Fourth Lateran Council, 70–72, 75, 77, 90, 150, 275n8 Frege, Gottlob, 18

289

habit, 176, 183–86, 189–91, 196–98, 207n13, 210n67, 212n101, 233–34, 236, 246 Hanley, Catriona, 7, 16n18 Hesse, Mary, 12, 33–42, 45, 49–53, 58–61, 64, 66n68, 270, 271 Hochschild, 27–33, 37, 63n21, 64nn25– 26, 123 Holyoak, 12, 44–45, 48, 59, 60, 65nn56–58, 66n62 homonymous terms/words, 27, 29, 31, 53, 55, 60 Homo quaerens, 4

idolatry, 2, 146, 273 image index, 223, 225, 228, 230 incognizables, 163, 167, 195, 224, 254–55 index/indexicality, 14, 72, 178–80, 181, 183, 185–86, 216, 223, 225, 227–30, 249, 256, 262, 263n13, 264n25 induction, 34–35, 188–89, 203 intellect, 16n8, 102, 111, 115–20, 126n26 intelligibility, 11–12, 14, 16n4, 37, 41–42, 58, 60–62, 69, 87–88, 107, 114–15, 117, 119–20, 124, 129–30, 140, 145, 148–49, 154, 162–63, 166, 174, 178, 192, 195, 204, 215, 217, 224, 234, 236, 248, 255, 262, 270, 271, 274; guidelines for, 12–13, 21, 58–62, 69–70, 90–92, 123–24, 153– 55, 161, 217, 258–62; importance for theological discourse, 3–4; of linguistic expressions, 22, 62n6; and meaningfulness, 24; pragmaticistic, 22–24, 58–62, 62n6, 92, 124, 155–56, 192, 224, 261–62, 271–72; syntactical, 114, 119–20 interpretant, 12–13, 177–80, 181–82, 183–85, 195, 198, 222–24, 231–34, 242, 244, 251–52, 257–58, 262n1, 266n41, 271–72; dynamic, 184; final, 184–85, 191, 194, 198, 210nn66–67, 254, 272; immediate, 184, 244, 258; ultimate logical, 185, 193, 210n67, 211n89 interpretive primacy, 223, 230–32, 247, 257 intrinsic denomination, 86 intuition, 34–36, 111, 131, 144, 151, 153, 163, 167, 270 irrelevance, 2, 90, 146, 152, 154, 161 Irvine, Martin, 179, 210n64 isomorphism, 45, 47–48, 59, 91, 92, 115, 124, 154, 259

icon/iconicity, 178–79, 181 183, 187, 227–28, 233, 236, 254, 262

Jesus Christ, 12–14, 73–79, 82–83, 88–90, 93n11, 116–18, 121, 129–33,

Gelpi, Donald, 5–6, 9, 16, 18 Gentner, Dedre, 12, 42–47, 50, 59, 65n44 genus, 27, 30–31, 34–36 God: as creator, 2, 10–11, 103–4, 135– 38, 198, 201, 203, 215–16, 236, 241, 246–47; as ens necessarium, 215–16, 228, 246; as real object, 224; as semiotic object, 222, 224; as simple/without genus, 7, 9–11, 84–88, 91–92, 95n32, 96n40, 98–99, 102–5, 107–13, 124, 125nn5–6, 135, 141–43, 145, 149, 152, 154–55, 157n21, 253, 256, 258, 270; as “source and cause,” 4, 99; as sovereign, 2, 242; typical attributions of, 17n37 God-room, 112–13, 122–23, 255 Goodman, Nelson, 126n18 Grammatical Thomism, 12, 97-99, 107109, 111, 123-124, 254–56

290

Index

138–40, 146–47, 150–51, 153–55, 157n15, 161, 216, 221, 223, 230–32, 234, 236, 239–47, 250, 254–62, 267, 273–74; divine identity of, 216–17, 241–42; as exposition/expression of God, 78–79, 240; as iconic sinsign of God, 223, 230–34, 236–37, 255, 258, 264n23, 264n25 Joachim of Fiore, 70 John, Gospel of, 197, 203, 216 Johnson, Junius, 79 Johnson, Keith, 139, 157n15 Johnson, Mark, 47, 61 Jüngel, Eberhard, 149–52, 157n32, 158n33 Kant, Immanuel, 120, 125n11, 131–32, 166–68, 206n4, 207n19, 269–70 La Montagne, D. Paul, 131–32, 147–49 Lane, Robert, 191, 195–96 legisign, 178–80, 181–82, 183, 232, 238, 242, 251–52, 258 linguistic nonsense, 2 literalism, 2 logic, 31–33, 71, 74, 105–6, 122, 148– 49, 215, 219 Lonergan, Bernard, 274n8 lumen gloriae, 117 Maimonides, Moses, 16 maior dissimilitudo, 71–72 McFague, Sallie, 2 McInerny, Ralph, 12, 97–103, 105, 107–13, 125 meaning-relevance, 54, 56–57, 66n68 metaphor, 25, 51, 54–55, 66, 86, 105, 110, 125n5, 132, 148, 152, 161; as improper proportionality, 30, 95n32; primary, 47, 61, 96n36 metaphysics, 9–11, 13, 15, 31, 33, 71, 74, 93n11, 100, 131, 162, 168–69, 175, 193–205, 207n19, 215, 224, 250, 274n8

methods of fixing belief, 190–91, 211n90, 255 Misak, Cheryl, 191, 206n3, 212 multiconstraint, 44–45, 48 Neoplatonic philosophy, 10, 17n37, 27 Nielsen, Jesper Tang, 264n25 nominalism, 120, 163, 165, 195, 267n46 non-image index, 222–23, 225, 227–29, 257 object, of sign, 12, 172, 177–88, 191–92, 194–96, 198, 202–3, 205n1, 209n39, 216, 222–30, 232–36, 251, 253, 257, 266n41, 270–71; dynamic, 184–87, 191, 194, 198, 210n76, 211n95, 222–23, 225, 227, 229–35, 237, 252, 272; immediate, 184, 186, 198, 210n76, 211n95 Palmer, Steven, 43–44, 58 Parker, Kelly, 163, 168–69, 197–98, 204, 207n23 participation, 6, 12, 28, 69, 72–74, 76– 79, 88–89, 99–100, 109, 117, 121, 124, 126n20, 134–36, 140, 144, 146, 150–51, 153–54, 161, 193 Paul, the apostle, 79, 184, 243, 245–46, 272–73 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 11, 13–14, 18, 22, 24, 62, 161-213, 215-222, 224229, 232-233,236-237, 246-255, 259261, 262nn3-9, 262n13, 265nn3637,266nn41-42, 267n46, 271, 274n8; architectonic of, 11, 13, 162–64, 166–67, 168, 169, 172, 192, 197–98, 203–04, 207n19, 208n36, 215, 218, 247, 250, 270–71, 274n8; categories of, 162–63, 167, 169–70, 173–75, 177, 192, 197, 207n19, 247–50, 252–57, 266n41, 266n43, 267n45, 270; on Christianity, 199, 204–05, 212n14, 217–19; on classification of signs, 177–80, 181–82; cosmogony

Index

of, 246–47; empirical philosophy of, 161–66, 192, 204, 260–61; general metaphysics of, 192–98; on inference by analogy, 189, 190; and Kant, 166– 68; logical critic of, 186–89; logic/ semiotic of, 177–92; mathematical philosophy, 164, 169–171; methodeutic of, 189–92; neglected argument of, 202–4, 220–21, 228, 246; on normative science, 175–92; phenomenology of, 171–75; religious metaphysics of, 198–204; scientific methodology of, 163–66, 189–92, 212n116; speculative grammar of, 162, 171, 177–86, 189, 194; ten classes of signs of, 180, 181–82, 183; on theologians, 199–200 percept, 174, 185–86, 225–30, 237–38, 255, 257, 261, 263n13 perception, 11, 33–34, 74, 147, 164, 173–74, 177, 183, 185-86, 198–99, 220, 222–23, 225–32, 234, 240, 257, 262n11, 263, 269–71, 273 perceptual judgment, 164, 173–74, 185–86, 210n80 percipuum, 186, 226 perfection-terms, 105–7, 109–12, 123 phaneron, 165, 171, 174–75 Plato, 6, 9, 24, 63n8, 70, 73, 269 Platonic philosophy, 5–6, 9, 17n37 possibility, 175, 193, 197, 202, 246–47, 250; as real, 193, 196, 211n96 potential for generalization, 50–53, 60 potentiality, reality of, 175, 195 pragmaticism, 22, 62n5, 183 pragmatic maxim, 22, 24, 171–72, 191–92, 194 predicate schemes, 54–57, 60, 251–52 Preller, Victor, 12, 97–98, 113–23, 145, 255 prior association, 50–51, 53 problem of religious language, 2, 5, 269 proportion, 27, 30–32, 39, 79, 86, 91, 94n19, 95n32, 100–102, 105, 123, 139, 223, 231, 234, 270, 275n8

291

proportionality, 12, 27–28, 30–33, 36, 38, 41, 55, 57, 63n8, 71–73, 75, 79, 84, 86, 88, 90, 95n32, 97, 100–102, 105, 109–10, 115, 135, 144–45, 149–50, 155, 215–16, 240, 253–54, 259–61, 270, 271 proposition, 116–18, 121–22, 164–65, 167, 170, 172, 186–87, 191, 195, 201, 203, 207n13, 219–20, 226, 245–47, 252–53, 264n33; as dicent symbol, 179–80, 182, 235–36, 243 protology, 246–47, 265n38 Przywara, Erich, 5, 12, 69–76, 80, 84– 86, 88–90, 93nn7–11, 94nn17–22, 129, 240, 253 Pseudo-Dionysius, 17n37 qualisign, 178–79, 181, 183, 232, 264n24 Rahner, Karl, 12, 70, 80–88, 90, 94n22, 96, 240, 253 Ransdell, Joseph, 227–28, 263 Raposa, Michael, 203, 213n117 real, meaning of, 165, 186–87, 191–93, 224, 229 regulative principle, 21, 62, 111, 191, 196, 224, 236, 272 relations: dyadic, 167, 170–71, 174, 197, 209n39; horizontal and vertical, 37, 37–41, 45, 49–50, 51, 58–61, 84–86, 91–92, 123–24, 143, 154–55, 258–61; monadic, 170–71, 174; real, 87, 96n40; triadic, 170–72, 175, 178, 183, 187, 195–97, 204, 209n39, 222, 224, 257, 273n7, 274n8 representamen, 177–80, 183–84, 195, 198, 209n39, 210n42, 222–26, 229–33, 251, 258, 266n41 rheme, 179–80, 181–82, 183, 223, 230–32, 235–36, 242, 252, 254, 257, 262n9, 263n22 rhythm, 71, 73–74, 76, 88–89, 145

292

Index

Robinson, Andrew, 18, 232, 247–50, 264n24, 266nn41–43 Rogers, Katherin, 17n37 Ross, JF, 12, 46, 53–58, 60–61, 66n67, 111, 251, 260 Royce, Josiah, 269 scientia dei/divina, 113–14, 117 Scotists, 31–32 Scotus, 16n8, 28, 30–31, 212n114, 270–71, 273 Scripture, 75, 116–17, 129, 145–46, 153, 217, 218, 238–42, 248 Searle, John, 108, 113, 118, 255 Secondness, 175, 194–95, 197, 248–50, 252, 254–56, 264, 266nn41–44, 267n45 Seconds, 173–75, 193–94, 208n27, 208n30, 250 semantic contagion, 54, 111, 251 semiology, 209n39 semiosis, 11–14, 177–86, 196–98, 206n4, 208n32, 209nn39-40, 211n89, 212n101, 215–16, 221–37, 242–46, 262n1, 263n20, 270, 274n8; model of, 179, 222; univocity of. See semiotic univocity semiotic consciousness, 257, 272–73, 274n8 semiotic univocity, 11–13, 195, 216, 221–22, 224, 242–43, 245, 247, 264 Short, TL, 165–66, 176, 184 sign, 11–14, 18n40, 24, 162-163, 170, 175–187, 189, 191–93, 198, 205n1, 207n13, 208n36, 209n39, 209n42, 210n67, 212n101, 215-217, 223–229, 231–237, 242–246, 251, 254–259, 261–262, 264nn24–25, 264n33, 266n41, 269–74; conditions of, 178; self-/other-representing iconic, 227– 28; triadic relation of, 178 sign-vehicle. See representamen similarity, 2, 4, 12–13, 31-33, 37-41, 43-61, 69, 71–72, 75–77, 84–86,

90–92, 93n7, 95n32, 97, 102–4, 119, 123, 125, 131–35, 138, 147–48, 150–55, 179, 212n116, 216, 228, 233, 235–36, 248, 251–52, 258–60, 270, 275n8; direct, 44–45; feature matching as, 52; formal, 52; imperfect, 102–3; literal, 43–44; parametric, 52–53; physical, 38; proportional, 31–33; relational, 44– 46; semantic, 48; structural, 47–48; syntactic, 51 sinsign, 178–80, 181, 183, 223, 227, 230–34, 236–37, 255, 258, 264nn24– 25; diagrammatic iconic, 223, 231, 233–34, 237 Smith, Linda, 109 Smith, Linsey, 42–43 Spencer, 149–53, 157, 158 Steinhart, Eric Charles, 12, 46–48, 53, 59, 61, 66n62 structural indiscernibility, 46–47 substance, 7–10, 35, 70, 74, 79, 86, 96n40, 100, 103, 224, 253–54 symbol, 4, 22, 40, 52, 74–75, 82–83, 96n40, 112, 124, 177, 179–180, 182, 183–85, 187, 194, 198, 203, 215–16, 228, 234, 240, 262n9, 266n41, 274n8 symmetry, 46–48, 59, 258–59 synechism, 162, 196–98, 200 systematicity, 43, 45, 50–51, 59, 259 tanta similitudo, 71–72, 94n17 taxonomy, 180, 183, 241, 262–63, 273 Thagard, Paul, 12, 44–45, 48, 59–60, 65n58, 66n62 theological commitments, 1, 14–15 thing-in-itself, 167 Thirdness, 175, 194–95, 197–98, 226, 248–50, 252, 256, 259, 266nn41–43, 267nn45–46 Thirds, 174, 193, 208n30 Tracy, David, 3, 16n4 transcendental, 7, 80, 99, 122; argument, 7

Index

293

transcendentals, 16n8, 116, 119-120 transference, 48–49 Trinity, 18, 70, 82, 86, 116, 142, 237, 248, 250, 266n41 tychism, 197, 219, 266n42

univocity, 4, 11, 13, 16, 27–28, 30, 33–36, 83, 99, 216, 221, 224, 253, 270–71; of being, 253, 271; of semiosis. See semiotic univocity unmoved mover, 7–8, 85, 95n33

unintelligibility, 5–9, 13, 22, 54, 91, 108, 122, 124, 155, 161, 175, 269– 70, 273 universes of experience, 193–98, 202–4, 215, 228, 232, 241

Vosniadou, Stella, 43–45, 59 Whitehead, Alfred North, 24 Wilson, Aaron Bruce, 164, 185, 207n13 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 125n1, 206n3

About the Author

Rory Misiewicz teaches Humane Letters at Philadelphia Classical School (PA). After working in the health professions, Misiewicz pursued studies in theology (MA, Bethel Theological Seminary) and philosophy (MA, Fordham University), the synthesis of which culminated in his doctoral studies at Princeton Theological Seminary and the present work. His research focuses on philosophical theology, particularly matters of religious language, theological method, semiotics, and American pragmatism (especially Charles Sanders Peirce). He and his family live in New Jersey.

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