Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Reinhard Hütter
Author:Reinhard Hütter [Hütter, Reinhard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
D. SEEKING TRUTH — WISDOM AND CONTEMPLATION
CHAPTER 10
“The Wisdom of Analogy Defended” — From Effect to Cause, from Creation to God
Non enim possumus nominare Deum nisi ex creaturis.
Summa theologiae I, q. 13, a. 5
I. Introduction: Two Protestant Objections to Analogical Predication of God in Thomas: Anthropomorphism (Pannenberg) and Apophaticism (Jüngel)
It is not altogether insignificant for the shape of the theological dispute over the analogia entis in the twentieth century that the arguably two most eminent German Protestant theologians of their period, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel, in their early formative years as theologians both deeply immersed themselves into the doctrine of analogy. Maybe their early immersion into this (for Protestant theologians) rather unlikely topic is not accidental, since after all, in Basel, Switzerland, each sat at the feet of the last century’s greatest master of Protestant theology. And ever since, each — although one more than the other — remained a close reader of that master’s opus magnum, the Church Dogmatics. And so it happened that Wolfhart Pannenberg as well as Eberhard Jüngel wrote their respective Habilitationsschriften on the topic of analogy, Pannenberg’s bearing the title Analogy and Revelation1 and Jüngel’s bearing the title On the Origin of Analogy in Parmenides and Heraclitus.2
And interestingly, neither Pannenberg nor Jüngel ever left the topic behind. Rather, each one in his respective opus magnum — Jüngel in his God as the Mystery of the World3 and Pannenberg in his Systematic Theology4 — develops his theology in marked contrast to what he holds to be profoundly problematic in the concept of analogy as it is used to predicate truths about God and, beyond that, to organize all theological knowledge itself.
There is something rather striking about the early Pannenberg’s and Jüngel’s respective accounts of the dangers of a theological use of analogy in what they identify as Thomas Aquinas’s account of analogical predication. It is not that they differ somewhat in their respective post-Barthian assessments (which might be expected), but that their accounts of the use of analogy in Thomas and of the putatively detrimental theological problems arising from it are indeed diametrically opposed to each other. In a nutshell: The early Pannenberg of the unpublished Habilitationsschrift regards analogical predication in Thomas as a subtly camouflaged version of univocal predication. Analogy allegedly always presumes a “common logos” between creature and Creator. Hence, for Pannenberg the very concept of analogy itself entails “the structure of ‘spiritual assault’” upon the mystery of God.5 If consistently employed in theology, analogical predication of God along Thomas’s lines must unavoidably end in anthropomorphism — the mystery of God ineluctably drawn into the conceptual closure of the human mind and thus compromised in and eventually emptied of its infinite transcendence.
Jüngel, in contrast, regards Thomas as fatally implicated in the apophatic entailments of the analogy of attribution. Similar to Kant’s account of analogical predication of God at a later stage, he sees already Thomas’s account haunted by one central aporia culminating in the question “whether God is speakable only as the one who actually is unspeakable, and can be made known actually only as the one who is actually unknown.
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