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“Finding Truth About What God is Like:
The Doctrine of Analogy Reconsidered Pragmatically”
2011 SAAP Paper Submission
Aaron L Pratt
University of Oregon
[email protected]
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Grant that there exists an infinite being who we call God, who radically transcends
human experience, and who is nonetheless vitally important to sustaining the existence of all
things. Such an assertion immediately begs a question: how is it that we can give something so
foreign and unknown a name, then go on to embellish our understanding of its being by speaking
of its face or its will, or make any claim to its abounding goodness and righteousness? A.J. Ayer
and other positivists in the analytic movement of the mid-twentieth century claimed that all of
these pronouncements are not in fact logically defensible, as the propositions themselves cannot
pass the test of empirical verification.1 Theological assertions cannot be true nor false, and so are
without meaning. Yet theologians responding to the claims of these analytic philosophers argued
that experience plainly shows that theological propositions not only are made, but are
pronounced in meaningful ways. E.L. Mascall, in Existence and Analogy, unapologetically
asserts that
It is, I would maintain, transparently clear to anyone whose judgment is not shackled by a
predetermined dogma that, if two men respectively affirm or deny that God exists, they
are in fact disagreeing about the nature of reality, and not merely expressing different
emotional or aesthetic attitudes….In spite of all that has been said by positivists, logical
and other, we do in fact find ourselves talking about God, and talking about him in a way
that is significant.2
If Mascall is right, then the procedural question still remains: how is it logically defensible to say
anything about God? Is there any standard by which we can be assured of the truth or falsity of
such propositions? It is one thing to arrive at a logical conclusion that some prime mover or
essential Being exists, and something quite different to say that God is “our Father.” What
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logical framework can allow for such detailed descriptions of the infinite which rely upon
language that is first and foremost finite?
One of the standard theological answers to this question revolves around Thomas
Aquinas’ description of a “logic of analogy” that can be used as a foundation for painting a
clearer picture of the Divine. Drawing upon Aristotle’s description of analogy as a middle way
between univocation and equivocation, Aquinas and his subsequent commentators all the way up
through the 1960s and 70s clarified a standard form of theological proposition that utilizes
relations between terms to explain their meaning and to determine the validity of analogical
propositions. Analytically-minded theologians, however, maintain that the logic of analogy
cannot assist in the debate over whether or not theological propositions are true, but that its only
bearing is on whether they have meaning or not.3 It is my opinion that such a move gives up the
fight too easily, and that the logic of analogy ought not to suffer because it is ill fit to postivistic
conceptions of truth. In this paper I will argue that the Doctrine of Analogy is better served by
William James’s pragmatic method and theory of truth, which, with his special emphasis upon
relations in experience and the directedness of belief, provides a set of criteria for deeming
analogical assertions true or false, as well as meaningful or meaningless.
In his lecture “What Pragmatism Means,” James sets the groundwork for an
epistemology that can interrogate and evaluate analogical claims about the Divine. The
“pragmatic method” that he describes is characterized by the interpretation of this or that idea
“by tracing its respective practical consequences.”4 One accomplishes this interpretation by
asking the question “What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather
than that notion were true?”5 The focus of a pragmatic inquiry, or rather, according to James, the
real underlying focus of every inquiry,6 is upon “what conceivable effects of a practical kind the
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object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must
prepare.”7 The truth of an idea, then, will be concerned primarily with effects, what he terms the
“practical cash-value,”8 in phenomenological experience, rather than causes in the world or
rationalistic, analytic principles. In “Pragmatism and Religion,” James “cashes out” his meaning
concerning truth, stating that “On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if
consequences useful to life flow from it.”9 Thus if theological propositions fulfill the criteria of
practical effectiveness James sets out, then they can be definitively called “meaningful.”10
How the effects of an idea are evaluated constitutes the pragmatic theory of truth, which
James lays out in his essay “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth.” Here he states that the answer
to the question guiding the pragmatic method is that “True ideas are those that we can
assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not.”11 The
pragmatic theory of truth combines coherence and correspondence theory, and in so doing treats
each in a slightly unconventional way: coherence is necessary, but it is not coherence simply to
other ideas in one’s head, but the whole of one’s experience; correspondence is required, but
what the idea corresponds to is not just a “state of affairs,” but the dynamic, cash-value effects in
one’s life. There is nothing stagnant about pragmatic truth; it “happens to an idea,”12 and then
becomes verified through what James terms the “function of agreeable leading.”13 This is the
process of relating a notion to the activities and interactions with one’s environment, the strength
of which justifies calling the idea true.14 This agreeable leading does not always mean arriving at
some perfectly instantiated outcome of an idea; in fact, for the most part the circumstances of
experience impede the full-on empirical15 verification of effects that certainty would require. In
these cases, certainty must be set aside; truth, however, need not be. As James says in “The Will
to Believe,” “When as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not
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thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence.”16 James
justifies this faith in the existence of truth through the pragmatic method itself: “where faith in a
fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running
ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can
fall.”17 Acting upon a claim, or working to verify it in experience, therefore comes after at least
hypothesizing its truth; the more corroboration in experience, the more certain the truth becomes.
James himself gives a justification for all true beliefs based upon a certain kind of faith;
yet his application of this theory to religious beliefs in particular only deals with those ideas in
the broadest sense.18 Still, given pragmatism’s broad application to inquiry in general, it may just
as well be applied to more specific objects and methods of philosophical interest. It is
appropriate, then, to pragmatically consider whether or not analogy can be deemed a valid
structure for true assertions in theological discourse, and a better foundation for an understanding
of the Doctrine of Analogy.
As was stated previously, the Doctrine of Analogy is a Thomist system of predication for
making assertions about the characteristics of God. What is at stake in this doctrine is the ability
to say more about God than that God is a prime mover, or first cause, or the essence of Being, all
rather bland conclusions to many other philosophical arguments. The Doctrine of Analogy
instead helps to cast a more nuanced image of the Divine, to assert for example that God is good,
or that God is like a mother, or that God “speaks.” The sense for terms like “good,” “mother”
and “speaks” have their origins in finite experience; the logical purpose of analogy is the
maintenance of some semblance of those finite senses when those terms are applied to a referent
that transcends the finite.
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Thomas Aquinas, beginning with Aristotle’s description of meaning, founds his logic of
analogy upon the understanding that analogical terms provide a middle ground between univocal
and equivocal assignments of sense. Instead of stating that a single predicate has the same
meaning when applied to two different subjects (univocation, e.g. “cold water” and “cold
weather”), or that the predicate has as many senses as there are subjects it can be applied to
(equivocation, e.g. “rock face” and “rock opera”), an analogical term is predicable of different
subjects that somehow stand in relation to one another (e.g. “healthy food” and “healthy
body”).19
Within the doctrine, Aquinas explains two types of analogy: multorum ad unum (of many
to one) and unius ad alterum (of one to another). This division was made by Cajetan, a medieval
commentator on the work of Aquinas, and explained by R.M. McInerny in The Logic of Analogy.
Multorum ad unum, also called “proportionate analogy,” describes a relation of the two subjects
of the analogy to a certain abstract quality in the same proportion.20 Frederick Ferre, in
Language, Logic and God, furtherexplains that “both terms possess the common characteristic
formally, but in the way appropriate to their distinct natures.”21 An example of the way this type
of analogy is used theologically is given by E.L. Mascall in Existence and Analogy:
Assuming that life is an analogous and not a univocal concept, it is asserted that
cabbages, elephants, men and God each possess life formally…but that the cabbage
possesses life in the mode proper to a cabbage, the elephant in that proper to an elephant,
the man in that proper to a man, and finally God in that supreme and by us unimaginable,
mode proper to self-existent Being itself.22
The analogy, stated plainly, is “Human life is to human nature as divine life is to divine nature.”
Speaking mathematically, “life” stands in relation to an essence by the same ratio in all cases; it
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is just “multiplied” based upon the subject (or “analogate”) it is applied to. The meaning of the
term is changed when it is applied to God to accommodate God’s nature, but it is still intelligible
insofar as one has a conception of the ratio or proportion of the original, finite term to the finite
nature and a grasp upon the relation between the finite and infinite. One must rely upon the other
type of analogy employed in this doctrine to achieve such an understanding.
In analogy unius ad alterum, or “analogy of attribution,”23 the meaning of the
comparative term is completely univocal and can only be said to be possessed formally by one of
the analogates (the “prime analogate”). The analogy is constructed based on the experience of
the quality as it is represented in the prime analogate, which stands in some sort of relation to the
other analogate such that the quality can be said to exist in both by virtue of their relating.24 In
the theological context, Mascall relies upon “causal creativity” to relate God and God’s
creatures.25 Given this relation, it is possible to formulate an analogy that can reasonably assert
some quality of God:
When we say that God and Mr. Jones are both good or that they are both beings,
remembering that the content which the word “good” or “being” has for us is derived
from our experience of the goodness and the being of creatures, we are, so far as analogy
of attribution is concerned, saying no more than that God has goodness or being in
whatever way is necessary if he is to be able to produce goodness and being in his
creatures.26
This analogical assertion (God and Mr. Jones are good) is constructed first through the
apprehension of given qualities of the finite being (Mr. Jones). Given that such qualities exist in
the created thing in the world, it would follow that whatever caused that thing must at the very
least be characterized by the ability to create those qualities to the degree that they are in fact
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instantiated. What the analogy shows, then, is that insofar as God created Mr. Jones and made
him good, to that same degree must God be good.
Thus the two types of analogy work hand in hand: analogy of attribution characterizes the
degree of relation between the infinite and finite, and the analogy of proportionality asserts
predicates based upon an understanding of that relation. Mascall concludes that “Without
analogy of proportionality it is very doubtful whether the attributes which we predicate of God
can be ascribed to him in a more than a merely virtual sense; without analogy of attribution it
hardly seems possible to avoid agnosticism.”27 Analogies of attribution allow for predication
based upon a predetermined relation, but are not specific regarding the degree to which the
subject-predicate relation holds at the transcendent level. Analogies of proportion assist in this
regard by giving an account of the degree of predication based upon the individual natures of
each analogate. Thus one can build an argument with analogical proposition that fit this logical
framework: for example, “God is good as God’s creation is good, insofar as 1) God created it,
and 2) the goodness predicated of God is in proportion to God’s nature just as it is in proportion
to the nature of God’s creation.”
The Doctrine of Analogy provides a model for ascribing predicates to transcendent
subjects that is based upon relations, as well as a certain degree of equivocation and uncertainty.
Yet the Doctrine begs a significant question: how is the degree of likeness to be evaluated? This
question forms the foundation for the two critiques lodged by Mascall and Ferre against
proportionate analogies: first, Mascall argues that in asserting a relation, one is also asserting
how that relation is determined, an assertion that leads to an infinite regress of questioning that
cannot be stopped by any scientific or analytic method.28 The second critique is that because the
nature of God is considered beyond the ken of human beings, analogies of proportion have not
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one but two variables: “x1 is to man’s nature in much the same way as x2 is to y.”29 Ferre opines
that not only does this type of analogy render no new “knowledge,” it opens the possibility for
“the wildest equivocation on the basis of the infinite gap which yawns between the analogates.”30
These criticisms, concerning the unsettling nature of an infinite regress of explanation
and the ineffability inherent in the Transcendent, are both substantively grounded in analytic
epistemology, where the supremacy of naturalistic, correspondence-oriented empiricism and
verification through scientific investigation are fundamental postulates. Yet if one were to
instead consider theological analogies through the lens of James’s pragmatic method and criteria
for truth (i.e. verifiability and agreeable leading), then the analytic criticisms no longer seem
daunting. Because pragmatism is a universal method, characterizing the structure of response at
work in any indeterminate situation, there is no problem of infinite regress for explaining the
method of evaluation. The method used to investigate experience is always going to be the
pragmatic method, whether one is contending with what God is like or what to have for dinner,
and so it needs no antecedent justification. Furthermore, because proportionate analogies are
inherently vague when it comes to ascribing a precise equivalence between two subject-predicate
relations, these propositions can only be said to indicate the direction in which truth may lay. An
analogy is useful in that it provides an agreeable leading for experience based upon a recognized
relation of some likeness. This path for future action must be verifiable (i.e. subject to further
experience and inquiry) without necessarily having to be verified. On this view, the criticism
about the uncertainty inherent in the analogy is acknowledged, but deflated in its impact upon the
use (i.e. truth) of an analogy.
James’s pragmatism, in addition to unproblematically taking into account the uncertainty
that is inherent in theological analogies, also offers an apparatus for the application of these
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propositions to everyday experience. Ascribing predicates to the Divine is normally considered a
project that only offers insights upon one side of the analogy (i.e. the transcendent side).
However, in situating the Doctrine of Analogy in pragmatism, the more immanent side of the
relation requires attention as well, as it can benefit just as much from filling out a portrait of the
Divine. Consider the proportionate analogy “good is to Mr. Jones as good is to God” and its
supporting analogy of attribution “Mr. Jones is good because a good God created him” in terms
of their cash value: what actionable information do these notions give? First, they establish some
notion of how God is good relative to the divine nature (good in an infinite way) and the role of
creator (good in a formal way). But secondly, it also gives an idea about how Mr. Jones is good
that is dependent upon an understanding of likeness he has to the divine. If experience shows
Jones to be radically unlike God for whatever reason, then the analogy cannot hold; on the other
hand, if he is like God, then he and those like him (a further relation), can be considered good.
The latter of these two options has potentially beneficial effects upon action: if one assumes that
other humans are good, well-meaning and altruistic, he or she will foster relationships with them,
rather than shutting him or herself off from society. Thus the theological proposition has
practicable information, in addition to the theoretical insights into God’s character.31
This is the key to the pragmatic method: each new idea, each new understanding of the
nature of the Divine must have some effect upon individual experience, some activity that it
proposes, something more than just a snapshot (albeit a blurry one) of the One. It is not enough
to say that “God is good as humanity is good.” One must seek out the proof of this in the world,
or at the very least act as if it were the case. This is what James himself argued for in his
concluding lecture in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he asserts that “the science of
religions may not be an equivalent for living religion.”32 He argues that theology offers “new
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facts” about the world, and that because “different events can be expected in it, different conduct
must be required.”33 This is James’s own “thoroughly ‘pragmatic’ view of religion,”34 one that
emphasizes both theoretical consideration of the transcendent and the real-world psychological,
biological and agential phenomena that such considerations yield. As he states in “What
Pragmatism Means,” “Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we
can rest.”35 No assertion can be static, no theory un-acted upon; otherwise, James himself will
cry “foul!” and the claim will be tossed out.
Utilizing James’s philosophical framework as a resource for the Doctrine of Analogy
means acknowledging and understanding the role of religion in everyday experience; otherwise
the analytic charge of “nonsense” may still be leveled. It is clear that theological language has
import in the lives of those who use it, and that the details provided in analogical assertions
contain more “cash-value” in life than do the amorphous, uninteresting claims of a “first cause”
or “pure Being” suggested by less inductively-minded philosophers. The key, then, is that this
specific information about a God that stands in relation to humanity, sharing in that relatedness
some qualities that we can at least begin to understand and act upon, this information must be
pursued and borne out in the experience of individuals as long as its truth will allow. As long as
theologians can keep this last consideration in mind, avoiding the dangers of assertive
intellectualism, as well as the assumption of certainty in propositions about that which remains
transcendent, the Doctrine of Analogy will bear fruit as a characteristic linguistic and logical
instrument for the expression of what the Divine is like.
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Bibliography
Ayer, A.J. Language, Truth and Logic. Mineola NY: Dover, 1952.
Burrell, David. Analogy and Philosophical Language. New Haven: Yale UP, 1973.
Ferre, Frederick. Language, Logic and God. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
James, William. Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. Intro. by Ayer, A.J. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1978.
---. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Dover Publications,
1956.
---. The Writings of William James. Ed. by John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1977.
Mascall, E.L. Existence and Analogy. London: Archon Books, 1967.
McInerny, R.M. The Logic of Analogy. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961.
Palmer, Humphrey. Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1973.
1
See A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Mineola NY: Dover, 1952), 115 and Frederick Ferre, Language, Logic
and God (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 18.
2
E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy (London: Archon Books, 1967), 94.
3
See Ferre 76; David Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), 23, 32-33; and
Humphrey Palmer, Analogy: A Study of Qualification and Argument in Theology (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1973), 141, 156-61.
4
William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” in The Writings of William James, ed. by John J. McDermott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 377.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 379.
7
Ibid, 378.
8
Ibid, 380.
9
William James, “Pragmatism and Religion,” in The Writings of William James, 461.
10
A.J. Ayer, in his introduction to a double volume of James’s Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1978), argues that on James’s account the meaningfulness of religious statements only refers to
personal feelings, not any real state of affairs: “We are left with the impression that the pragmatic content of the
belief in God’s existence consists merely in the feeling of optimism which it induces. If, as he claims, ‘the
hypothesis of God’ works satisfactorily, it is not that it explains anything that could not be explained without it, but
just that for the most part, in James’s view, religious believers lead more satisfactory lives” (xx-xxi). This is a
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commonly leveled charge against pragmatism in general (that it is overly concerned with sentiment, not fact) that
James addresses in his essay “The Pragmatist Account of Truth and it Misunderstanders” (in The Meaning of Truth,
104-7).
11
William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” in The Writings of William James, 430.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid, 431.
14
In “The World of Pure Experience,” James asserts that “any kind of relation experience must be accounted as
‘real’ as anything else” (in William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, Lincoln NB: University of Nebraska
Press, 1996, 42).
15
Radical empiricism, the idea that all inquiry must be directed towards individual experience (as it is generated
from experience in the first place), is a foundational claim of James’s overall philosophy, which is why he uses this
as the standard method of verification. Rationalism or mysticism could be two other systems for verification.
16
James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956) 17.
17
Ibid, 25.
18
In “Some Metaphysical Questions Pragmatically Considered,” “Pragmatism and Religion,” and “What
Pragmatism Means” all include some discussion of the Divine; however, this discussion is mostly directed to the
grand concept of an ordered universe, and does not deal in the specifics of attributes of God.
19
The Greek term ανάλογως originally denoted a mathematical relation of proportion or ratio. For explanation of
definitions and relations of univocation, equivocation and analogy see Mascall, Existence and Analogy, 97 and
Ferre, Language, Logic and God, 68-9.
20
R.M. McInerny, The Logic of Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 81.
21
Ferre, Language, Logic and God, 71.
22
Mascall, Existence and Analogy 104.
23
It should be noted that this second type of analogy is much different from the analogies that are used in everyday
speech (i.e. proportionate analogies). These latter analogies have much more rhetorical significance attached to
them; analogies of attribution, on the other hand, are logical devices for building synthetic statements that describe a
true relation between a given predicate and multiple subjects.
24
See Mascall, Existence and Analogy, 102 and Ferre, Language, Logic and Argument, 70 for explanation of
analogy of attribution.
25
Mascall, Existence and Analogy, 102.
26
Ibid., emphasis added.
27
Ibid, 113.
28
See Mascall, Existence and Analogy, 108, and Ferre, Language, Logic and God, 72.
29
Ferre, Language, Logic and God, 73.
30
Ibid.
31
All of this, however, still raises questions about how exactly such claims could be challenged, and whether it is
possible to avoid radical relativism through the myriad interpretations that are possible. One possible solution is to
require verification not just through a single individual’s experience, but through a community of inquirers working
together to test and evaluate analogical assertions and interpretations of this nature.
32
William James, “Conclusions [to the Varieties],” in Writings of William James, 761.
33
Ibid, 781.
34
Ibid.
35
James, “What Pragmatism Means,” 380.