Christology: Analogy or Identity?

A Dialogue About the Current Controversy

[This is an experiment with the dialogue form. It is addressed to those who are interested in the current controversy over the limits of “analogy” and the appropriateness of speaking of “identity” in Christ’s person or between God and the world. It is also addressed to those who were confused or troubled by my previous piece, “Crisis of a House Divided,” where I indicated an unhelpful way in which analogy has come to function politically in the world of theology today. I also recommend that readers check out Andrew Kuiper’s response to my piece. Image credit: Kelly Lattimore Icons]

I. On Analogy and the “Christian Difference”

Metaxu: What’s wrong with analogy?

Dialektike: Um, excuse me?

Metaxu: Sorry, I kind of jumped into it I guess. It’s just that the question is on my mind a lot these days. What I mean is that I hear a lot of young theologians today are taking issue with the analogy of being. There’s that book by Jordan Wood that everybody is talking about, The Whole Mystery of Christ, where he says that creation is Incarnation, and that God and the world are “identical” somehow. I’m no expert, but that sort of language makes be uncomfortable. And I read a post recently which complained that an unsurpassable analogical “gap” or difference between creature and Creator had become a key feature of some sort of vaguely sinister political alliance between neoscholastics and the ressourcement people. I recognize that as a point where they agree, but I thought that was just because analogy just is Christian (or Catholic at least) metaphysics? So what’s wrong with analogy? Can you help me out a bit?

Dialektike: OK, so a few quick points. First, this isn’t just a Jordan Wood thing or some recent fad. The idea that we need to seek a deeper ground of commonality or unity between God and the world (beyond the “absolute difference” of Creature and creator as such) is the whole point of sophiology, which has been around since Soloviev and Bulgakov. Then there were the really interesting criticisms made by Eberhard Jüngel, which I’m not sure have ever really been answered. And we could go further back to Marcilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Meister Eckhart… and many of the mystics really.

Second, what exactly do you mean by analogy? The article you mentioned suggested that analogy had become a shibboleth (or marker of in-group belonging) despite the fact that there isn’t full agreement on what it means. Not that these are entirely unrelated, but are we talking about how our language works, or doing fundamental metaphysics? And everybody has their own version, and they differ profoundly. There’s analogy of attribution, proper proportion, pros hen etc. We’ve got good old Cajetan, Pryzwara’s “ever-greater” difference, Balthasar’s “concrete analogy of being,” and even David Bentley Hart’s recent monism.

Metaxu: Well. I was never clear on what the sophiologists were after. And I do certainly find the version of analogy expressed in Hart’s recent lectures confusing; it raises for me a lot of the same puzzles and concerns as does Wood’s Maximus book.

Dialektike: As it should! The presence or absence of the term “analogy” isn’t the primary point; we should concern ourselves not with names but with the underlying realities. Hart’s monism, with its unitive impulse, has more in common here with Bulgakov (and Wood) than it does with Cajetan, certainly, or probably even Pryzwara.

Speaking for myself, the dissatisfaction with analogy is first and foremost about how the term functions (vaguely, but with normative force), and secondarily about certain specific versions of analogy which set up a certain type of unsurpassable boundary between God and the world, which is a problem because, and this is my third point…

Metaxu: Let me stop you there. I’m not an expert in all the versions of analogy, or the complicated history. But I take your point. Let’s say I mean by analogy the idea that although there is some commonality between God and creatures, there is a unsurpassable difference (you can call it a “gap” or “hiatus” if you want, maybe even a diastema if we’re feeling a little Greek) which rules out ever speaking of “identity.” God and the world are never altogether the same, or altogether different. We can’t speak of equivocity (as if they had nothing in common) or univocity (as if we could say something of both as if they were in the exact same sense), but we are always in the “between.” Creation participates in God, but it can never be God, full stop. Analogy is a way of speaking and a fundamental metaphysics, and the former because it is the latter.

I think a really good way of putting it (and notice that this is part of the Church’s magisterium!) is the Fourth Lateran Council: “For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.” (Denzinger-Hünermann §806)

My understanding is that this reflects the discovery of radical transcendence, which is the signature achievement of Christian (and Jewish) thought. In the pagan world, the gods were never really separate from (or beyond) the cosmos. When they weren’t simply part of the cosmos, they were connected with its origin through some theogonic process of primordial conflict or emanation. Think about gnosticism, for instance. Biblical faith, by contrast, introduced the notion of free creation. You’ve got to read your Sokolowski…

Dialektike: There’s something to that, but while it’s not false per se, it’s a little one-sided.

Isn’t an equally plausible way of telling the same story that the pagan world always resisted the idea of a true, or complete, union between God and creation? Isn’t this the tragic sensibility which pervades the Greek world, dramatized as the limit imposed by fate and the futility of grasping after the life of the gods? The idea that the First Principle, the One, might include in its very identity (rather than as a product of its operation on the Unlimited in its function as Limit) Difference or the Many was unthinkable for Plato, as his comments show in the Parmenides: “if [Zeno] demonstrates that that which is One is itself Many… I will be astonished at that” (126b-c) Even where, as in Aristotle’s “thinking of thinking” (Metaphysics, 12.1074b) we have in some way the inclusion of difference within the First Principle itself, this identity seems foreclosed from below (or its human appropriation is at the very least ambiguous, and thus the controversy over De Anima III.5). For while certainly not a beast, the human is not a god either, and thus incapable of the life of continuous contemplation which defines the divine life and otherwise seems to define us (Nicomachean Ethics 1177).

Thus the Neoplatonists, far from compromising it, insisted on the One’s radical transcendence (we could say, its absolute difference which is no difference in particular), which was the flip side of its presence. They thus concluded that participation can only take place on a level below that of the One itself (the second hypostasis, the realm of Intellect/Being, or even the third hypostasis of Soul). Although the One is present to all things, the reverse cannot be said. Participation, in its effects, always involves modal diminution. There can be to total reciprocity. If Plotinus does speak of some sort of mystical “identity” with the One, this is not one which includes “us” or “the world”; immersed or lost in the One’s purity, there is no longer any “we” or “world” to speak of.

I can’t get into the problem of emanation vs. creation in detail here, but suffice it to say that no clear distinction is easily identifiable (and Plotinus would certainly not characterize emanation as unfree). And isn’t precisely what gets the gnostic theogony going, at least in some instances, the radical difference/transcendence (and ungraspability) of the highest God (the Father in distinction to to the Demiurge)?

In sum, if you understand analogy to say that we are always in the “between,” neither identical with God[s]/the One nor completely different, this is so far from stating “the Christian difference” that it could be a description of the Greek way of thinking in general, or the logic of Neoplatonic participation in particular!

Metaxu: Now that you put it that way, I do recall that for some of analogy’s champions this seems to be a feature rather than a bug. The Radical Orthodoxy types, for instance. They would happily own analogy’s link to the Greek or Neoplatonic metaphysical tradition, where too radical transcendence and immanence go hand in hand.

Dialektike: You’re right, of course. Isn’t it… interesting that analogy is invoked sometimes as the ultimate break with the pagan world and sometimes as the fundamental case of their continuity?

But don’t get me wrong, I didn’t necessarily mention this similarity as is a knock against analogy. Generally, I think we should spend less time worrying about “the Christian difference” (in the abstract), or the lack thereof, and more time simply carefully thinking through the logic of Christian dogma. Whatever similarities and differences emerge can take care of themselves.

II. The Problem of Christology: A Single Subject (Subsistent Unity)

Dialektike (cont.): This brings me to my central concern, which I simply cannot put off any longer. Earlier, I was interrupted just as I was getting to my third point. I was going to explain to you why I think the idea of an unsurpassable gap between Creator and creation (as set out by some, if not all, versions of analogy) was a problem, when you jumped in to helpfully clarify which sense of analogy you had in mind (namely, the very one I was worried about). This will also be the reason I think “identity” between creation and Creator is something we not only can, but must say (in one case at least; more on that later).

Metaxu: I’m curious. Please continue.

Dialektike: My central concern is Christology. That was the third point I was getting to. I’m worried that the analogical gap (hiatus/diastema), if it is held to be fundamental or unsurpassable, will forbid us from saying what we are confessionally obligated to say about Christ. Namely, I am worried about a form of Nestorianism, or a division of Christ’s person. This is the unwitting upshot, I fear, of this form of analogy, or would be if its adherents were consistent. I’m worried, that is, about a subtle denial of the Incarnation, a denial that concretely humanity and divinity, creature and Creator did in at least one case come together in a subsistent unity (or hypostasis). I further hold (and this will require an additional step) that the only way to account for this subsistent unity—which Christ is—is one that also entitles and obligates us to speak of humanity and divinity as (hypostatically) identical.

But first I want to make sure we are on the same page, which requires retracing our steps for a moment. We defined analogy as a way of understanding the relation between creature and Creator which is pitched between univocity and equivocity, and we specifically laid it down that the sense of analogy in question was one which forbade any talk of “identity.”

Metaxu: That’s right.

Dialektike: I further take it that your exclusion of “identity” talk was not merely a way of specifying what analogy meant. It did not mean to leave the question open of whether there might be other forms of the relationship between Creator or creation, ways which might after all involve their “identity.” You were saying that analogy was the shape of the relationship between God and the world. Analogy is fundamental and unsurpassable.

Metaxu: Yes, that’s what I mean.

Dialektike: OK. So this entails that analogy should also apply to Christology. We should be able to understand the type of unity which the hypostatic union is through analogy. We will not be entitled—or required—to say that humanity and divinity are “identical” in Christ.

Metaxu: That all sounds right to me. In fact, I feel like Christology is precisely where I’m on solid ground. Doesn’t the Council of Chalcedon insist that there are and remain two natures in Christ? Not only that, but specifically “without confusion, without change”? That fits nicely with an analogical “gap” or diastema, if you like. That’s why we aren’t monophysites! Now that I think of it, the Chalcedonian formula mirrors analogy perfectly. Neither univocity (“without confusion, without change”) nor equivocity (“without separation, without division”).

Dialektike: Hold on a second. There’s already a bit of a problem here. It seems to me that a gap, hiatus, or diastema is precisely an instance of separation or division.

Metaxu: Well that depends on what we mean by separation and division.

Dialektike: And by analogical gap, which I’m still not clear on. But this is why we need to keep following the dogmatic history. Because these things get further specified. What we’re hitting on now is the fact that the four Chalcedonian adverbs do not actually provide a positive description of the hypostatic union. These are all negative descriptions: without x, without y. This is a wish list of features an orthodox Christology (or metaphysics of the hypostatic union) would have, but it is not yet such a Christology. And in the absence of a positive theory, it is not even clear what exactly is being negated. What counts as separation, as confusion? And so on. And so maybe your version of analogy could fit the Chalcedonian formula, if that’s where things had ended. It’s hard to say.

But it’s not where things ended.

Metaxu: Oh no, is this where you’re going to bring in all this “Neochalcedonian” stuff?

Dialektike: Not yet, actually. Chalcedon isn’t just the four adverbs; it isn’t just its negations. Saying we don’t have anything positive is another way of saying that we haven’t yet specified the sense in which Christ is one. On this matter, Chalcedon does say one very important thing:

“the two natures [come] together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.”

This is the famous language of hypostasis.

Metaxu: I’m not sure if I get it. What does this add? And what does hypostasis mean? Doesn’t it just mean there’s one guy we’re dealing with, Jesus?

Dialektike: Well, in the philosophical context everyone shared, a hypostasis meant subsistence, the concrete, individual existence of something.

Metaxu: Of what exactly?

Dialektike: Well, a given nature. Human nature is a universal, and it is instantiated in many different individuals. Hypostasis gets at the human nature as existing (subsisting) concretely in and as Peter or Paul.

Metaxu: But wait a second. Chalcedon specifies two persisting natures, humanity and divinity. If they are both existing concretely in Christ, then wouldn’t that imply two subsistences? Two “hypostases,” if I’m understanding you right?

Dialektike: Now you’re getting it. Chalcedon was a compromise formula, and so it’s not surprising that basically nobody was happy with it. It was a more or less universally assumed truth that, so many natures, so many hypostases. And so those advocating strongly for Christ’s unity before Chalcedon, like St. Cyril of Alexandria, were comfortable speaking of “one nature of the Incarnate Logos.” One nature, one subsistence or person. Those arguing for two natures, quite logically, concluded that there must by two hypostases (persons) in Christ. Not because Christ was two different guys (Nestorianism was never that crude), but because logically there had to be two subsistences if there really were two natures. These two subsistences were still “within” an overall union, but they were concretely and metaphysically distinct.

Metaxu: That last position kind of makes sense actually. In fact, I don’t quite see what’s wrong with it. Aren’t Christ’s humanity and divinity in some sense metaphysically distinct? And what exactly does it mean to say that there are two natures but only one subsistence?

Dialektike: Welcome to the mess left by Chalcedon! We’ll have to get into the aftermath later. Suffice it to say that nobody knew what it meant and almost everyone hated it!

III. Can Analogy Do Do Any Christological “Work”?

Dialektike (cont.): But let’s hold fast to one thing, which is enough for us to move forward: however this is the case, humanity and divinity come together in Christ is such a strong sense that there is only one concrete subsistence, one fundamental reality. We’re no longer just speaking of negations, of the four Chalcedonian adverbs. This is a subsistent unity, the unity of a this.

Now let’s get back to your attempt to understand Chalcedon through analogy. What you were suggesting is that Christ’s two natures are analogically related to each other, and that their relation in Christ (if analogy is fundamental and unsurpassable) can be explained without going beyond the strictures of analogy.

Metaxu: Yes.

Dialektike: OK, I admit I’m a bit confused. Usually when we speak of analogy, we are saying that some one word is being used analogically in two different applications. The senses are related but not the same. For example, “health” when predicated of an animal (which can or should be healthy) and when predicated of medicine (which causes health). Or “being” of God and creatures. But what’s the one term we are applying in two related ways here? “Nature”? That doesn’t seem right. We aren’t trying to figure out how nature is used in the two cases, but how the natures themselves relate, right?

Metaxu: Well, isn’t it the analogy of being? The being of Christ’s humanity and the being of Christ’s divinity are analogous?

Dialektike: That doesn’t make sense either, for a couple of reasons. First of all, the analogy of being stipulates that all uses of the term “being” are analogous, and so this doesn’t help us get at anything particular to Christ. The being of my humanity and the being of God are analogous, according to you, but I’m not an instance of the hypostatic union. Second, we just established following Chalcedon that Christ’s humanity and Christ’s divinity are not just “analogous” but are one reality, one subsistent unity. This seems to be saying something more than is contained in the analogy of “being.”

Metaxu: I guess we are using “analogical” in a broader metaphysical sense which isn’t connected to the use of a particular word. As in, a type of relation where the two terms in question are neither wholly the same nor wholly different.

Dialektike: Right, but I guess I’d want to ask same or different in what respect? In being? In which sense of being? In substance? Mode? We know that “identity” is excluded, but it still seems a bit vague. But we can leave that aside for now.

What I want to repeat is this. Insofar as they are analogically related, in the way you understand an analogical relation, the two terms are two, no? That is, in stating that things are analogically related, we do not thereby state them to be one being.

Metaxu: I don’t understand.

Dialektike: What I mean is this. Perhaps two things which are analogically related can be (in addition to being analogically related) one being, or a subsistent unity. (It’s hard for me to say, since I still don’t know exactly what you mean by analogical relation except that it is one about which we can’t use language of “identity” [or presumably the other pole: “absolute difference”]). But this is not included in or explained by them being analogically related.

An analogical relation is not one which requires or involves that sort of unity, namely a subsistent unity, the unity of being a this, a single subject, one concrete existence.

It can’t require this, since according to you, both the nature of this insect here and my nature have an analogous relation to God. Yet neither I nor this insect constitute one being with God. We aren’t the hypostatic union.

Metaxu: I guess so, but where are you going with this?

Dialektike: What I’m saying is that your calling the relation of humanity and divinity in Christ an “analogous” relation doesn’t and can’t explain the fact that they are one being (one subject, a subsistent unity) in the sense stipulated by Chalcedon. Maybe in addition to them being a subsistent unity, they are also analogically related, whatever that means for you. But the latter does not explain the former.

Metaxu: So what?

Dialektike: It seems to me that you have two options here. Let’s try the first. You could say, as I was suggesting above, that in addition to the analogical unity Christ’s humanity and divinity have, they also have a subsistent unity. Would you say that a subsistent unity is deeper or more profound than a merely analogical unity?

Metaxu: Sure.

Dialektike: So you don’t actually hold, as you claimed you did, that analogy can explain the hypostatic union or that it is unsurpassable. Because now the hypostatic union is being explained not only by a relation other than analogy, but by one which is metaphysically more intense or profound, if you will, than provided by analogy. You don’t actually believe that analogy is the fundamental and unsurpassable shape of the God-world relation.

Metaxu: What’s my other option?

Dialektike: You could say that “analogical relation” is a broad category, so broad that it can include within itself the relation of being one being, a subsistent unity. A subsistent unity is still within analogy’s scope.

Metaxu: This sort of makes sense to me. Because I still want to say that even if divinity and humanity are one being in Christ, they are neither identical nor absolutely different. We’re still between the shoals of univocity and equivocity.

Dialektike: OK, but listen to what you are saying now. You are saying that analogy can include within itself a metaphysical relation of subsistent unity. That is, while God and a creature (Christ’s humanity in this case) can’t be “identical” and “wholly the same” they can be “the same being” or subject. Analogy, then, may exclude “identity” and “absolute difference,” but it does not exclude, for instance, an account where God and the world (let’s imagine, instead of just Christ’s humanity) form a subsistent unity, a single concrete reality! Your definition of analogy no longer excludes what most people would understand by pantheism!

Furthermore, my earlier objection still stands: you can say if you want that the subsistent unity of Christ’s natures is still an instance of analogy, but analogy isn’t doing any work here to explain the hypostatic union. Why is the analogous unity a subsistent unity here (in Christ) when it isn’t in the (also analogous) unity between my humanity and the divine nature? You’re going to have to go outside analogy for that.

Metaxu: OK, but isn’t that the case for any analogical relation?

Dialektike: Perhaps, but say more.

Metaxu: You (or Aquinas I guess) have given the example before of health. Health is analogously in the animal and medicine. Saying the word “health” is being used analogously here doesn’t tell us how health (the analogon) stands metaphysically with reference to the various analogates (animal/medicine etc.).

Dialektike: Right. You mean that the metaphysics (and the concrete sense of analogical unity) is given by the web of causal relations, not by the mere fact that we are dealing with analogical predication. The science of medicine can be the cause of health (not in itself and absolutely, but when deployed to heal), whereas the animal instantiates health (and its nature is the measure of health).

Metaxu: Exactly.

Dialektike: So in this case, to know what sort of analogical unity we are dealing with, we need to unfold the nexus of causal relations. This means that we would need to spell out the difference between the analogical unity my humanity has with divinity and the analogical unity Christ’s humanity has with his divinity. Presumably by specifying the difference between the efficient causality at work in creation in general and whatever causality is involved in the hypostatic union.

Metaxu: Yes.

Dialektike: But is merely to admit that in all cases (not just Christ) analogy itself is not itself a metaphysical account. It is merely a denial that a term is being deployed in a univocal or equivocal sense. If we wish to speak of an analogical unity, the sense is given by an account of the causal relations at work between the analogates, not by analogy itself. In that case, you’re admitting that analogy is not the fundamental or unsurpassable account of the God-world relation. It is not just that it isn’t in Christ; it isn’t anywhere. Analogy itself has no metaphysical content.

IV. Analogical Christology Or Analogical Anxieties

[Metaxu, frustrated, pauses to gather his thoughts]

Metaxu: No, it still does. Remember, we stipulated that analogy means there is a gap (hiatus, diastema) and that the two realities were neither identical nor absolutely different.

Dialektike: You’ve been trying to assert that, yes. But I don’t see where you are getting it. Remember, you weren’t able above to identify which two terms were being used analogously. So you admitted you had taken analogy beyond a question of predication to a broader metaphysical account. Then you went back to analogy in terms of predication, in your discussion of health. Now you’re going back to the metaphysical sense again.

So let’s be clear. When analogy is used in the traditional sense of predication, what analogy excludes is clear: univocity or equivocity in terms of semantic meaning or mode of signification. These are excluded by virtue of what the analogical mode of signification is (there’s an identifiable three-term disjunction). If we want to speak of the metaphysics of the situation or specify concretely the mode of signification, we do not think harder about “analogy; rather, we proceed to an account of the analogates and the causal relations between them.

Famously, this is a problem when one of the analogates is God. Wisdom is predicated of God and creatures, and primarily of God. But if we lack an understanding of God and the exact nature of the causality at work in the divine communication of wisdom to creatures, then when we use the word “wisdom,” its “mode of signification” will be that of creatures, as Aquinas explicitly says (ST I.13.3.co). But doesn’t this suggest the meaning of all our language, theology included, is confined to this world? As Victor Preller put it, doesn’t this mean that “all that man ‘sees’ (or understands) in this life is the world”? (Divine Science and the Science of God, 208.) Doesn’t it lead to the dismal conclusion of Stephen Mulhall:

“language [is] essentially incapable of putting us in touch with the reality of God.” God “is utterly transcendent with respect to the world we users of language inhabit, and in relation to which our words attain and maintain whatever meaning or sense they possess.” (The Great Riddle, 5).

Does it even make sense to say that our words refer to God if their mode of signification is that of creatures? Can a statement have definite meaning if it doesn’t for its user? In my opinion, these are questions that Thomists struggle to answer.

In any case, if you are using analogy in this traditional predicative sense, it seems to me that you haven’t actually excluded anything metaphysically. Maybe you are saying we know that God’s causality is never such as to result in identity or absolute difference, but if we know this, it is by knowing something about God’s causality, not about analogy per se.

If, on the other hand, you’ve left the traditional predicative sense, then what entitles you to make exclusions? You’ve essentially admitted that analogy has no positive content, but what gives it even the negative content you want? Why is it the case that there’s a gap? That there can’t be “identity” or “absolute difference”? What counts as univocity or equivocity is clear, in the case of traditional predicative analogy (there’s a clear disjunction). But it’s not clear what counts as identity or absolute difference, in this metaphysical sense. There’s a vagueness about these terms (and the idea of a “between”) which is not “analogous” to the disjunction between analogy, univocity, and equivocity in the traditional predicative discourse.

It seems to me that once analogy comes unmoored from its original predicative context, such that it is supposed to be directly metaphysical, it becomes sheer assertion, and not even clear assertion at that. This, it seems to me, is a prime example of what Wittgenstein refers to as “language going on holiday.”

But in any case, I think we’ve established that analogy in the sense you are using it has no positive content of its own, and thus it cannot explain or further determine the nature of the hypostatic union in Christ.

This means that there is no such thing as an analogical Christology.

One can hold, if one wishes, that whatever Christology we end up having does not “violate” analogy (again, assuming we broaden “analogy” sufficiently to allow for the subsistent unity of being a single subject. In which case, again, analogy does not exclude what most people worried about “pantheism” would call “pantheism”). But analogy will not help us actually elaborate this Christology. It will not actually be the fundamental metaphysical description of what is going on with Christ.

And this is actually what we find, when we study Christology. No one on any side of the patristic debates during the conciliar period actually tried to build a Christology based on analogy. There are all kinds of medieval theories, whose relative merit we could debate (is there one esse in Christ or two, are supposita the same as hypostases etc.). Or there’s Hart’s recent book, which uses language of modality, genos, and a metaphysics of spirit. But none of these are theories articulated in terms of analogy, even where the theologians in question have a positive attitude towards the analogia entis.

Now perhaps many of these theories are driven by similar worries to the ones you have expressed under the name of “analogy” (about needing a “gap,” an “asymmetry,” avoiding “identity” etc.). We would need to ask about what exactly is the worry, specify its ground or justification, etc. I hold that what we will find is that the degree to which these worries are erected into fundamental principles is the degree to which they fail as an expression of orthodox Christology, the degree to which they struggle to say that humanity and divinity in Christ are really a single subject or subsistent unity (we will have to discuss this later when we discuss “identity” in more detail).

It’s not that an analogical Christology is something conceivable, but heretical. Again, there is not such thing as an analogical Christology and could not be. What there are is theories which are marked by the worries which are at the bottom of talk about “analogy.” The actual positive content of any Christology comes from outside “analogy,” but the worries associated with analogy (its stipulated negations) can become regulative principles which exert pressure on a Christology in a Nestorian direction.

Metaxu: Wouldn’t it would be easier to just say that Christ is an exception? And that our worries about a “gap,” “asymmetry,” and “identity” are worries about extending Christ’s special metaphysical status to other creatures?

Dialektike: It would indeed. But think what you would be admitting: you would be admitting that analogy is in fact not the fundamental and unsurpassable shape of the God-world relation, for it does not hold in the case of Christ. And you would further be admitting that there is no reason not to drop anxieties about a “gap,” “asymmetry,” and “identity” in the case of Christ and the hypostatic union, as long as we keep them in place elsewhere.

Metaxu: I might be able to get on board with the first part of that, but the last suggestion still makes me uncomfortable.

Dialektike: Yes, I don’t think this formulation captures the intuition you are following either. But maybe this intuition is not something which can be brought to coherent expression.

V. Balthasar and the Question of First Principles

Dialektike (cont.): But I think we are in a position to understand a few famous remarks by Hans Urs von Balthasar on this subject.

The first is something he said about Pryzwara’s theory of analogy: “It is hard to see how such an understanding of analogy can sustain a Christology” (Theo-Logic II: The Truth of God, 94). Or again, “It is no accident that Przywara never produced a Christology” (Theo-Drama III: Theological Dramatic Theory, 221). I think we can understand this now in two senses (whether this is quite what Balthasar himself meant is not important). On the one hand, it is hard to see how a theory of analogy based on the notion of an “ever greater difference” (note that the “ever” here is Pryzwara, not Fourth Lateran) can account for the subsistent unity and single subject which Christ is. There will be a consistent Nestorian impulse. On the other hand, it is hard to see how one can develop any Christology, we saw, from a theory of analogia entis, since this has no positive content of its own (due to the fact that it has to apply to all beings).

The second remark is Balthasar’s response to this problem: his famous notion of Christ as the “concrete analogy of being.”

Metaxu: That sounds cool, but what does it mean?

Dialektike: I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does. I’m not sure Balthasar did. Apparently, it is not intended to mean that Christ “overcomes” the gap between Creator and creature, but that he is in some sense the measure or enactment of it.

Here’s the fuller context:

“Christ can be called the ‘concrete analogy of being',’ analogia entis, since he constitutes himself, in the unity of his divine and human natures, the proportion of every internal between God and man.” (A Theology of History, 69-70).

I’m not saying we understand this statement better in the sense that we understand what he meant, but that we understand the motivation for saying it. Balthasar’s formula expresses the dilemma: the most clear thinking of those committed to the analogia entis recognize that Christ cannot be understood to be an “instance” of analogy (as if he could be subordinated to a general concept), but it feels wrong to say that the principle of Christ is something other than the principle which holds for the cosmos as a whole.

The idea of a “concrete analogy of being” is a formula which tries to hold these two sides together. Christ somehow “ratifies” or “measures” analogy. This is sometimes expressed as the idea that Christ (or the Incarnation) is the analogy or proportion between creation as itself analogical and the Ur-”analogy” of the life of the Trinitarian persons. Analogy squared!

Metaxu: Now you’ve really lost me.

Dialektike: Don’t worry, I’m lost too. After all, this would make Christ, in the Incarnation, an analogy to himself as the Son. But how does this not introduce two Sons, the one of the economy and the one of God’s inner life? How is this not another form of Nestorianism (albeit perhaps an original one)? And does it not make the possibility of any determinate meaning to our language about God even more remote?

But in any case, I’m asking whether this is really a thought, or rather the expression of an empty wish. Is this anything more than an expression of the difficulties one finds oneself in when one insists on making worries about a “gap” or avoiding “identity” one’s first principles, rather than Christ’s person and the conciliar dogma concerning him?

Is it not simpler to say that Christ is no instance of analogy because analogy is not the whole truth of his Person, any more than it is the truth of the cosmos, the Truth he is?

Metaxu: I see the difficulty here. But while I’m starting to realize the difficulties with my original commitment to (or at least my definition of) analogy, I still have a lot of questions about your language of “identity.” I still don’t see why we have to say that about Christ, or how it is compatible with Chalcedon’s insistence on two natures “without confusion.” Maybe I’m not ready any longer to make its rejection a first principle, but I don’t see why I have to sign on to that language.

Dialektike: That’s where things will really get Neochalcedonian. But it’s getting quite late; I think we’ll have to deal with that question tomorrow.

Until next time…

[cut to the sun rising through an open window]