Mary Daly’s historicized analogia entis

I’m in the middle of Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, which is far more straightforwardly compelling than her reputation had led me to expect. One of the things I’ve particularly enjoyed seeing is how she ties together, far better than most, ontology, spirituality, and historical progress—though it’s almost impossible to resist putting scare quotes around all three of those terms, since she’s working so hard, and largely succeeding, to put all of them into a new semantic field.

I’ll just give the one example, since it’s likely to be of some interest to the blogosphere, of her surprising appeal to the analogia entis. (It comes in the middle of another surprising claim—that the self-expression of woman-consciousness toward God might, in some sense, have more in common with medieval than with modern theology.) She calls hers a living analogy of being, and says that “the particular aspect of our existence from which we are enabled to draw the analogy is the courage that is experienced in the liberation process” (36).

The idea she’s been developing up to this point is that the whole movement of liberation begins with the experience of or confrontation with nothingness, known under patriarchy by women above all, which is then rejected as the woman steps instead decisively, courageously into being. So the whole process is conceived within an ontological frame. Moving into being involves a transformation of consciousness and also an active opposition to the external structures of patriarchy. And all three of these elements—the movement toward Being, the transformation of consciousness, and the dismantling of patriarchy—are bound together in such a way that you can’t move forward in one without moving forward in the others.

When she invokes the analogia entis, she is beginning to explain how an analogous structure is attributable to Be-ing itself—one of her shorthands for referring to God as a Verb. Be-ing asserts itself precisely over nothing, over nothingness. The experience of courage is a kind of sacrament (though Daly certainly does not use this language) of the self-assertion of Be-ing over non-being. “The unfolding of woman-consciousness is an intimation of [or, she’ll also say, participation in] the endless unfolding of God” (36).

Five important questions about the analogy of being

1. First of all, what is it?  It is not so much a thing as it is a statement about everything creaturely.  It is Erich Przywara’s shorthand for his quite complex understanding of the formal structure of created existence.  As it tends to be used, it can refer not only to Przywara’s understanding of this structure but also to the structure itself.  Thus it is a name both for a theory and for that to which the theory refers. 

It has what one might call a horizontal and a vertical aspect.  In itself, creaturely existence is analogical.  That is to say, it is never identical with itself but is nevertheless not merely nothing.  Such is its incompleteness, its temporality, its provisionality.  Some of what it is definitively is always already present in it, and yet to a perhaps much greater extent what it is definitively still eludes or transcends it.  Przywara expresses this idea in the formula: Sosein in-und-ueber Dasein, essence in-and-beyond existence.  This is the horizontal aspect of the analogy of being.  Or, as Przywara says, it is the inner-creaturely analogy. 

The vertical aspect concerns the creature’s relation with God.  In this case, the transcendence is much more pronounced.  The being of God is infinitely above and yet nevertheless present within creation.  In the final analysis, to say that the creature is not merely nothing is to say that there is some likeness of God that is disclosed in the creature, however limited it may because of our finitude and however effaced it may be because of sin.  However, as soon as one posits such a likeness, Przywara believes it is necessary to remember the dictum of the Fourth Lateran Council, which is in continuity with the ancient Christian tradition of apophasis: namely, that every creaturely similarity with God is surpassed by a still greater–and, indeed, never bridgeable–dissimilarity.

2. What is the warrant for this theory?  Przywara grounds it both in his engagement with the philosophy of Greek antiquity (especially Plato and Aristotle) and also in his interpretation of creaturely existence as it is presented in Christian scripture and tradition (particularly in Augustine and Aquinas).  Thus he finds warrants for it in what have come to be called reason and revelation.  Suppose one rejects the former warrant, with the conviction that it illegitimately imports foreign elements into Christian theology, one must nevertheless contend with the second, which has a certain degree of independence.  One cannot dismiss the analogy of being by denouncing its philosophical foundation, for it is doubly founded, and also demands to be understood as an interpretation of that which God has revealed concerning creation.

3. What is the scope of this theory?  This is in some ways the trickiest question to answer.  For, on the one hand, the theory purports to apply to everything creaturely.  And yet, on the other hand, it says strikingly little.  What it says is precisely this: almost nothing.  To be a creature–in comparison with the fullness of being for which one strives, and especially in comparison with the God who is infinitely above and beyond all things–is to be almost nothing.  But it is necessary to take seriously both parts of this saying.  As radically distant, not only from that which is essential to our own being, but also from the hyperessential reality of God, it is as though–and this is barely an exaggeration–we are nothing at all, mere dust in the wind of the universe.  And yet, creation is precisely such that one can only almost negate it totally, for something remains present within it, even if one manages only to speak of it through a double negation: we are not not. 

So the analogy of being implicates everything but determines very little about it.  It is, therefore, far from sufficient as an account of what it means to be human, to be Christian, or–for that matter–to be Catholic.  Much more extensive use needs to be made of both reason and revelation to fill out a more adequate picture of things as a whole.  The analogy of being cannot claim any clear sense of priority over other kinds of questions, concerning, for instance, the Trinity, or Christology, the destructive effects of sin, or the life of the church.  It is a principle but not necessarily the first principle.     

4. Is the analogy of being toxic for ecumenical dialogue?  It could be.  To the extent that it tends to polarize groups of Christian thinkers who, otherwise, would have much about which they could agree, it is a dangerous bit of theorizing.  However, remembering its limited scope, its double foundation in reason and revelation, and its insistence on the radical alterity of God may help keep the conversation from veering off track. 

5. Is it possible to hold onto what is central to the analogy of being without recourse to the problematic discourse of being, which has become greatly destabilized in our postmodern age?  In a sense, this may be one of Jean-Luc Marion’s most stunning achievements, but I will have to say more on that later!