Beyond The Sublime (Part 2)

Modem Theology 22:1 January 2006
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE

AESTHETICS OF THE ANALOGY OF
BEING (PART TWO)
JOHN R. BETZ
He is hidden in order that you might seek him; and in order that you
might not cease in your search once you have found him, he is infinite.
Thus it is said . . . "Seek his face evermore" (Psalm 105:4).
Augustine1
In Part I of this essay (Modern Theology, July 2005) it was argued that modern
and postmodern theories of the sublime, as typified, respectively, in Kant
and Jean-Luc Nancy, go hand in hand with modern and postmodern doc-
trines of immanence; and that what these philosophers understand by the
sublime (and, by implication, the infinite) invariably functions as an aesthetic
seal on one kind of totality or another: either the totality of reason, which
can permit nothing foreign to its domain (and therefore recuperates any
momentary foundering or dispossession in refusal of all ecstasy), or the total-
ity of an explicit ontological nihilism, which refuses all transcendence and
any transcendent meaning for the sake of a purely immanent experience of
"this world here". It was argued, therefore, that what these philosophers
denominate as sublime is ultimately nothing of the kind; for in either case
the sublime discloses nothing beyond the pseudo-infinite of one's own ratio-
nal or existential possibilities, which is to say mutatis mutandis that the
modern and "post"-modern sublime amount to the same thing.
It was also argued that the modern and postmodern sublime rest upon
possible interpretations of the relation between the beautiful and the sublime,
and that both of these interpretations typically construe this relation in terms
of violence. But whereas in Kant the strife between the beautiful and the
sublime is still productive, serving a higher, rational telos, postmodern aes-
John R. Betz
Theology Department, Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210, USA
2006 The Author

Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 John R. Betz
thetic theory explodes all teleology in the name of a fundamentally violent

ontology. Indeed, faithfully following Nietzsche, the conflict between the
beautiful and the sublime is here but a reflection of the violence of being
(which is manifested, specifically, in a violent understanding of the relation
between essence and existence); and, when it comes to polemic, it is precisely
this aesthetic (ontology) that is directed against beauty, analogy, and the
formal structure of theology. To be sure, the postmodern sublime, backed up
by postmodern ontology, has become a powerful figure of the postmodern
"deconstruction" of Christianityto which contemporary theology could
very well adopt an air of sublime indifference. But the postmodern sublime
is also instructive, bringing to the fore what is only implicit in Kant (and
what, for theology, must always be true), namely, a coincidence of aesthetic
and ontological questions. The postmodern sublime thus presents an oppor
tunity for theology to present its own understanding of aesthetics, specifi
cally, to formulate its own understanding of the relation between the
beautiful and the sublime and, with it, its own understanding of the relation
between aesthetics and ontology.
Needless to say, a theological, specifically Christian aesthetics (of the kind
proposed in the following) will not sacrifice beauty, like Iphigenia, to the
sublime violence of being (which is the fundamentally pagan mytho-
cosmology subtending so much postmodern philosophy);2 rather it will wish
to save beauty from an all-consuming sublime, and with it the doctrine of the
goodness of creation. But neither will it collapse the difference between them
in such a way that the sublime is simply an intensification of the beautiful.
Instead, it will maintain their difference as one of analogyanalogy, not in the
ordinary sense of the term, which underscores their ultimate similarity, but
in that particular sense of which derives from Aristotle and
underscores their ultimate difference.3 In this case, as we shall see, the rela
tion between them reduces neither to the strife of an immanent cosmos (as
in Nietzsche and Deleuze), nor to the "syncopation" of immanence (as in
Nancy), nor to a productive strife immanent to the faculties of the rational
subject (as in Kant), but points beyond the immanent tensions of creaturely
being to a God who is beyond all analogyand thus witnesses to that ven
erable doctrine of the analogia entis as articulated so brilliantly (if perhaps too
gnomically) in the last century by the German Jesuit, Erich Przywara.
Accordingly, the sublime is not an aesthetic detour to the univocal imma
nence of the "same" (as is inevitably the case with the modern and "post
modern sublime), but the aesthetic intimation and promise of a real
transcendenceand, with it, the intimation and promise of a real infinite.
Indeed, the theological sublime witnesses not to a pseudo-infinite (the corol
lary of the pseudo-sublime), which reduces the infinite (were it possible) to
one or another kind of immanenceand thus to one or another philosoph
ical idolbut to the God revealed in Scripture, whose thoughts are too vast
to be counted and too wonderful to be grasped (Psalm 40:5); to the God of
2006 The Author
Beyond the Sublime: Part Two 3
Anselm of Canterbury, "than whom nothing greater can be thought" (quo

maius cogitan nequit); to the God of Ignatius Loyola, who is "ever greater"
(semper maior), not to mention the God of Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine,
Dionysius, Maximus, and Aquinas, all of whom affirm God's ultimate
incomprehensibility. In short, the difference between the theological sublime
and the various modern and postmodern philosophies of the sublime
(which, properly speaking, no longer merit the name "philosophy" at all,
given the absence of any seeking and the absence of any transcendent
Sophia) is that the theological sublime is that of the Psalms; it is a sublime
that ends not in oneself, but in song.4
But if one is to respond to modern and postmodern "philosophies" of the
sublime with an aesthetic interpretation of the analogia entis, one must first
acknowledge that no theological doctrine of the twentieth-century has
been more feverishly contestedand less understoodthan this one.5 Thus,
before one can venture to show that the analogia entis lies at the heart of the
relation between the beautiful and the sublime (or that the relation between
the beautiful and the sublime is an analogue of the analogia entis), one must
first address the most common theological and philosophical criticisms of the
doctrine, which stem from Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. Then, assuming
the success of this rebuttal, I will undertake a brief reconstruction of Przy-
wara's actual doctrine, based upon the original 1932 text, Analogia Entis; at
which point I will take up its aesthetic implications, i.e., the possibility it offers
for a theological understanding of the beautiful and the sublime, and thus for
a response to the aesthetic (ontology) of "post"-modernity.
Karl Barth and the "Invention of Antichrist"

What is most striking (and regrettable) about Barth's condemnation of the
analogia entis is the disparity between his rhetoric, which could scarcely be
more strident, and his scant understanding of Przywara's doctrine: "I con-
sider the analogia entis to be the invention of the Antichrist, and think that
because of it one cannot become Catholic."6 Similarly, he says, with typical
fiery rhetoric, "No correspondence and similitude of being, no analogia entis-,
for the being of God and that of man are and remain incomparable .. ."7 But
if one is to avoid treating Barth as abruptly (and unfairly) as he treated
Przywara, one must acknowledge that his polemic stems from a legitimate
concern that is directed at the heart of the Catholic Church: namely, that the
analogy of being establishes the relation between God and creatures (which
has been broken by sin) prior to and independently of faith in Christ (as a
matter of the very being of the creature).8 In the words of von Balthasar, "He
accuses [the Catholic Church] of possessing a systematic principle that is not
in itself Christ the Lord but an abstract theorynamely, the analogia entis
from which one can determine the relation between God and creatures in
advance, according to a prior philosophical understanding (i.e., of natural
2006 The Author
4 John R. Betz
theology), so that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ appears ultimately

as the fulfillment of an already existing reality and knowledge."9 In other
words, "The place that Christ assumes in fulfillment of [such a system] is
already designated in advance: in an ontology that is prior to the order of
revelation and cannot be shattered by it."10 In Barth's view, then, the analo-
gia entis becomes the measure, the yardstick, of any possible revelation; what
is worse, it supposedly replaces Christ as the analogy between God and crea-
tures, suggesting that creaturely being is always already, in its fundamental
structure, disposed to divine revelation, that it is, in short, fundamentally
"Mariological"; whereas for Barth one can speak of analogy only because of
God's relating himself to us in Christ despite our fundamental unprepared-
ness. If, therefore, one is to speak of analogy at all, one must speak of an
analogia (fidei) relationis, an analogy established by Christ alone, in whom
God relates to us in a way that is analogous to the way that he relates to
himself in eternity.
The force of Barth's rhetoric, his alpine thunder against the hills of Rome,
is undeniable (aside from the mtonymie mistake of identifying Przywara's
philosophical theology with the doctrine of the Catholic Church). Indeed, it
echoes his fundamental conviction that theological reflection is possible only
after the fact of God's self-revelation, specifically, God's self-revelation in
Christ (in keeping with a Lutheran-Reformed suspicion of natural theology
in general).11 Accordingly, the problem with the analogia entis is that it sup-
posedly determines the being of God (and the being of the creature) in
advance of God's self-interpretation (John 1:18), i.e., his self-correspondence
[Entsprechung] in Christ (which simultaneously reveals in Christ, who is vere
homo et vere Deus, the true nature of the human being, which was hitherto
obscured). And given this assumption, he naturally concludes that Catholic
theology, no less than liberal Protestantism, though for different reasons, has
lost its Christological focus. What is more, it supposedly elevates an abstract
concept, i.e., "being", above the God who, as Lord, alone determines what
can be said about himself in the sovereign event of his self-revelation, an
event which (to borrow a phrase from the late Schelling) is strictly unvor-
denklich. This is not to say that Barth denies the legitimacy of theological
attempts to speak about the being of God (since he does so explicitly in II/l
of the Church Dogmatics), or that he denies analogy tout court (since he explic-
itly affirms an analogiafideior relationis). Rather, it is to say that for Barth the
being of God is not to be theorized independently of God's self-revelation
in Christ (following Luther's rejection of every theologia gloriae); and, con-
versely, that Christ must be the starting point for any theological ontology.
Admittedly, it may be unconventional to present Barth's dogmatic-narrative
theology in ontological terms, but according to Eberhard Jngel these are the
considerations that set the Church Dogmatics in motion, which can be defined
throughout its fugue-like variations as a sustained attempt to think the being
of God in its movement, i.e., the movement of self-correspondence in the event
2006 The Author
of revelation. And in this respect one can speak, albeit guardedly, of a

Barthian ontologyan ontology that is intended to reverse the metaphysi-
cal priority of being to action (operan sequitur esse), and of reason to faith,
which one supposedly finds in Catholic theology generally and in the
doctrine of the analogia entis in particular.12
Unfortunately, even if Barth has a point (which has exerted a profound
influence upon Protestant theology ever since), and even if there is an unde-
niable brilliance in identifying the analogia entis with what the Reformation
understood by "good works" (since it allows him to reformulate the doc-
trine of justification against it in terms of his analogiafidei),the solecisms in
his critique are so numerous (and have been repeated so often) that an entire
book would be required to sort them out.13 For this reason one owes a debt
of gratitude to von Balthasar for his book on Barth, which is dedicated in
large part to a defense of his embattled mentor and of Catholic theology in
general.
Although the best defense of the Analogia Entis would be the recommen-
dation that one read it,14 a preliminary response would have to point out the
following. Firstly, the analogia entis is not a variant of natural theology for the
simple reason that it obtains, for Przywara, "precisely in the domain of
the supernatural and the genuinely Christian"; indeed, it applies as a correc-
tive even to certain speculative audacities of Barth's own "dogmatic" theol-
ogy.15 Secondly, Catholic theology, following Aquinas, has never
subordinated God's "action" to his "being", since God is the "pure act of
being"; and given that God's (eternal) act and being are one, it follows that
his actions ad extra (in human history) are as much a consequence of his
eternal act as they are a consequence of his eternal being. Least of all has it
ever referred God and creatures to a common "being" in which both partic-
ipate, one in an absolute, the other in a relative fashion (not even Scotus can
be accused of this, since his ens univocum is only a concept). In fact, it was
precisely to avoid this suggestion that Thomas revised Aristotle's pros hen
analogy (analogia attributionis), because the good or the being or the wisdom
that can be said of God and creatures per analogiam is obviously not a tertium
comparationis that is other than God himself.16 In any case, the notion that
Przywara is somehow guilty of what Aquinas unambiguously avoided is
preposterous, simply because for Przywara, as for Thomas, God is Being
(and certainly not caught within the genus of some ens commune).
Thirdly, on a more polemical note, Barth's own attempts to talk about the
being of God betray an ominous proximity to Hegel (and to what Przywara
calls "theopanism") to the degree that any knowledge of God on the part of
the creature is necessarily a moment of God's own self-interpretation, and
the creature is absorbed without remainder into the trinitarian process of
revelation.17 (Admittedly, Barth, unlike Hegel, affirms the gratuity of crea-
tion, but, as Gustav Siewerth has pointed out, their difference in this matter
is only apparent: for if creation is no longer in its own natural integrity an
2006 The Author
6 John R. Betz
"image of [divine] aseity", if it is a "pure relation", then it is ultimately

"indistinguishable from God's own ideality and inner life"; in which case
God himself is caught within the tension of creation, and Barth's theology is
nothing but a speculative "logic" cloaked in "fideistic" language, an "hereti-
cal" play of "pure ratio" with the Word of God.)18 That is to say, for Barth,
not only does God's revelation shatter our attempts to conceive him, reduc-
ing them like the world of Ecclesiastes to so much vanity, but it occurs only
through a complete overpowering of the creature, whereby the creature as
a secondary cause (causa secunda) is obliterated, in keeping with the tendency
of Reformed theology in general.19 And because of this dialectic, which is
mitigated in the Church Dogmatics only in that God ends up working every-
thing alone (whereby the form of his theology mutates, ironically, from
dialectic to identity), Barth never attains an analogical perspective, in spite
of his analogiafidei(relationis). Indeed, for all of its impressive bulk, and
despite Barth's best intentions, his theology teeters between contradiction
and identity: on the one hand, the world stands in contradiction to God (to
the point of the most extreme Manichaeism, as in the second edition of the
Rmerbrief)', on the other hand, the creature is but the site, the placeholder,
of divine revelation, to which it contributes nothing. To be sure, the middle
is supposed to be held by the analogiafidei,which unites (without confusing)
"the divine and human logos in faith" (and how carefully does Barth try to
sidestep any sudden rapprochement with Schleiermacher!).20 But since the
act of faith is ultimately only an act of divine self-revelation "from above",
since the creature is but a "cavity" ["Hohlraum"] of "human darkness", and
since the most one can say of this cavity is that it "can become light"for,
apparently, the consequence of the fall was to return the human being to a
state of pure potentiality, indeed, to the state of nothingness from which it
cameand since even this possibility is strictly a "divine possibility", the
act of faith necessarily becomes a moment of the Trinity's own life as
Father [Offenbarer], Son [Offenbarung], and Holy Spirit [Offenbarsein]?1 In
short, Barth has no analogy. As Przywara puts it, "The rhythm that is
expressed by the word analogy [in Barth's theology] is the rhythm of God
alone."22 And thus, in Przywara's view, Barth's Calvinistic "theopanism" (as
follows from the Reformation's doctrine of God's sole agency and sover-
eignty), together with his residual Manichaeism (which almost demands a
divine solution, a kind of divine self-recuperation in order to make good on
a fall that was absolutely willed from the start), makes his theology ever so
close to being a form of trinitarian Gnosticism (in spite of his claims to the
contrary).23
Finally, as for Barth's criticisms of the analogia entis as an attempt concep-
tually to lay hold of God independently of his self-revelation, one can only
reiterate that they have no warrant whatsoever in view of Przywara's actual
doctrine. As Przywara explains in a text written in 1927, several years prior
to Barth's anathema, "analogia entis means neither a calculation of God nor
2006 The Author
a limiting of God within the limits of the creature, but a reverent looking to
God as the one whose self-condescension is already [what constitutes] this
creation as creation".24 Indeed, "seen from the standpoint of a Catholic analo-
gia entis, the creature in its totality offers a perspective within analogy that
exceeds all analogya perspective regarding the God who transcends all
analogy-, and in this respect the creature [shows] its receptive preparedness
for Him: so that in its ultimate essence it is already, as it were, what [is
signified in the words of Mary]: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord: may
it be done unto me according to thy Word!'"25 As it happens, Barth was
acquainted with this exact text and cites it in KD 1/2, 15.26 Instead of affirm-
ing it, however, he expressly rejects it, seeing in it, together with Karl Adam's
theology, the anathema of a "Menschwerdungskosmos" (Przywara's term), i.e.,
a creation that is from the start intended for the incarnation and for the
unmerited elevation of the creature (despite its sin) to the heights of par-
ticipation in the divine nature, to the point of cooperation in the work of
redemption. Leaving aside the political aspects of Adam's theology, which
rightly merit censure, one would think it a wonder of the first order (to any
Christian) that Barth could possibly reject such a notioneven the notion of
cooperating in the fulfillment of redemption, which is what every Christian
is commissioned to do (cf. Mark 16:15; Phil. 2:12; Col. l:24f.)but he does.
And it is here perhaps more than anywhere else that one can see precisely
what it is that he rejects in rejecting the analogia entis, namely, any openness
whatsoever of the creature to God, and thus any natural desire (desiderium
naturale) for God.27
But if this is what is meant by the analogia entis, then it is the faith of the
Catholic Church, and so Barth is right to identify Przywara with it; it is also
the faith of Scripture (cf. Eccles. 3:11a) and the unanimous faith of the Church
fathers. Thus, in rejecting it, if indeed it is to be rejected, Barth is quite con-
sistent in rejecting the Catholic Church as "heresy".28 But, of course, every-
thing hinges upon this "if".29 Finally, as for Barth's suggestion that the
analogia entis puts God at the disposal of the creature and its concepts, one
must repeat that the analogia entis is precisely the principle that excludes this
possibility from the start, vigorously reinstating the distance of transcen-
dence over against every immanentizing philosophy and theology that
would compromise it (from Schleiermacher and Hegel to Ritschl and
Harnack). In short, with the principle of the analogia entis, Przywara's inten-
tion was to dispose his contemporaries to ever more humble service of an ever
greater God, whose "depths" no creature can fathom apart from the Spirit (1
Cor. 2:10f.).30
Unfortunately, one can only be so clear (though, admittedly, Przywara's
idiosyncratic "prose", which is as dense and logical as Barth's is prolix and
rhetorical, is at times so convoluted and inspissated as to be nearly indeci-
pherable); and thus Przywara's elucidations were eventually drowned out
(if they were ever read) by the ensuing windstorm of inter-confessional
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8 John R. Betz
debate. For, among Barth's confreres, the mere concept of the analogia entis
had provoked a long-standing Protestant suspicion of natural theology, and
Przywara's doctrine seemed to be its latest and most refined instantiation.31
Indeed, from the perspective of the Reformation and its doctrines of sola
gratia, solafide,etc., it seemed that Catholic theology had once again over-
looked the fallenness of the world and the sole efficacy of grace and faith
because of it, suggesting (ontologically) that we are related to God by nature
apart from grace, and (noetically) that we can know him apart from faith.
What is more, the analogia entis seemed to imply a metaphysics of substance
into whose pre-theological structures even grace was made to fit, becoming
an infused quality in the Christian (perhaps even in the non-Christian)
instead of an extrinsic righteousness (iustitia aliena) that is imputed by faith
to the Christian.32 In short, it seemed to codify the difference between
Catholicism and Protestantism as one between a metaphysics of substance
(onto which Christianity was grafted) and a properly Christian gospel of
salvation by the relation of faith; which is why Barth eventually adopted an
analogiafidei(relationis) against Przywara's analogia entis?3 Worst of all, it
seemed to usurp the singular role of Christ as the mediator (1 Tim. 2:5),
theoretically bridging the gap between the status corruptionis and the status
gratiae, so that, as Bonhoeffer puts it (though he was an admirer of Przywara
and readily acknowledged his brilliance), God is always already "in-and-
beyond" the world, whether one is "in Adam" or "in Christ".34
Fortunately, there were attempts at clarification, most notably on the
Catholic side, by von Balthasar and Shngen, among others;35 and essentially
what they tried to show is that of course creaturely being is analogical, as is
implied by the doctrine of the imago Dei (Gen. l:26f.), otherwise the being of
the creature is either identical to the being of God or wholly alien (and not
just estranged) from him.36 Furthermore, the analogia entis has to be implied
in Barth's doctrine of the analogiafidei,precisely to the degree that the order
of salvation presupposes the order of creation; as Shngen puts it, "... there
can be no analogiafideiwithout the 'external ground' of an analogia entis."37
In any event, there is no need to exclude the possibility that the analogia entis
leaves room for an analogiafidei.3*For the analogiafideiis no more compro-
mised by the analogia entis than the order of grace is compromised by the
order of nature. Nor is the difference between these orders compromised by
the fact that God is "in-and-beyond" creation whether one is "in Adam" or
"in Christ", since, for Przywara, the nature of this "in-and-beyond" is itself
analogical (in the sense of an ultimate dissimilarity); and thus God's imma-
nence to creation as the Creator (cf. Acts 17:28) is in no way to be confused
with the saving immanence of his very own Spirit to the believer (1 Cor. 6:19),
which Paul announces as the mystery of the Gospel, "hidden throughout the
ages and generations" but now "revealed to his saints" (Col. 1:26).
According to such an analogical understanding of the relationship between
nature and grace, the "in-and-beyond" applies in the first instance (logically,
2006 The Author
not historically) to the order of salvation (or, to be more exact, to the order
of glory, when God will be "all in all", i.e., fully immanent to his creation
even while he infinitely transcends it), and in the second instance, only per
analogiam, to the order of nature. To summarize the relationship between
nature and grace in Scriptural terms, as Przywara does, it is the relationship
between "'In him we live and move and have our being'" (Acts 17:28) and
"It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). In other
words, Przywara sees the order of grace as the fulfillment (through Christ)
of what is foreshadowed by the order of nature (in spite of its corruption).
And for this reason, though these orders remain within an analogical inter-
val that stresses the ultimate difference between them, they cannot be sepa-
rated in any violent or ultimate way. As Przywara puts it, in God these
orders, "in their objective essence", are one and inseparable, "given that the
supernatural gift of 'participation' is simply the unanticipated and unmerited
completion of that analogous [gleichnishaften] 'participation' which is the
essence of nature"; and so "the 'participation in the divine nature' [is to be
understood] as the blessed crowning of 'in him we live and move and have
our being.' "39 For Przywara, then, the relationship between nature and grace
is neither dialectical (as in the early Barth), nor is it confused (as is inevitably
the case with the Barth of the Church Dogmatics, who mitigates the dialectic
only through an unwitting identity, inasmuch as for him faith is solely a work
of God, to which we contribute nothing); it is analogical, i.e., proportional
(as are, for Augustine, the Old and New Testaments), and at the heart of this
analogy is Christ, without whom there is no analogy.m
But in spite of the many attempts at clarification, both Catholic and Protes-
tant (on the Protestant side, the contributions of Emil Brunner, who was
famously rejected by Barth for similar reasons, are some of the more note-
worthy), Przywara continued to feel misunderstood; and so he responded
in 1940 with a further clarification of his position entitled, "Die Reichweite
der Analogie als katholischer Grundform" (the title itself, one will note, is
already somewhat unapologetic).41 Years later, recalling the controversy in
1952, he speaks of a "grotesque distortion", and goes on to say with evident
sarcasm, "If [his] clarification had been accepted, the show would have been
deprived of its 'favorite carnival puppet.' "42 He then gives a summary of his
doctrine that is worth citing in full:
Analogia entis is an abbreviated way of stating what the IV Lateran

Counciland thus a Christianity that was still onedefined in 1215:
that even in the most extreme regions of the supernatural (as was here
at issue in the trinitarian mysticism [of Joachim of Fiore]), "one cannot
note any similarity between Creator and creaturehowever greatthat
would obviate the need always to note an ever greater dissimilarity."
Thus analogia entis in no way signifies a "natural theology"; on the
contrary, it obtains precisely in the domain of the supernatural and the
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10 John R. Betz
genuinely Christian. Nor does it signify a "theological-philosophical

doctrine, according to which the created world is ordered to God," still
less does it signify a comprehensible ontological nexus between Creator,
creation, and creature. On the contrary, analogia entis signifies that what
is decisive in "every similarity, however great," is the "ever greater dis-
similarity." It signifies, so to speak, God's "dynamic transcendence," i.e.,
that God is ever above and beyond [je-ber-hinaus] "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. My dear
friendsfrom Karl Barth to Shngen to Haecker to Balthasarhave
apparently never grasped that "analogia," according to Aristotle, is a
"proportion between two X" (see my Analogia Entisi).43
It is curious that Przywara should have felt misunderstood even by von

Balthasar, who remains in a sense his closest disciple, with regard both to
his basic metaphysical intuitions and to the magisterial breadth of his
analogically-minded assimilation of philosophy and culture, which approx-
imates the "grandeur", as von Balthasar puts it, of Przywara's own late work
(cf. Mensch: Typologische Anthropologie and Humanitas!).u Of more immediate
interest, however, is what Przywara goes on to say about his debate with
Barth: "During the great debate with Karl Barth on religion in Mnster in
1928 I already emphasized that nothing can be derived from the analogia
entis, and that 'Rome would have to condemn me as the greatest heretic' had
I intended to derive all Catholic dogmas from the analogia entis, as Barth
imaginedand which would have necessarily made me, as he and I said in
jest, 'the pope's pope.' "45 For, "if the analogia entis (and the Mariology that
Barth saw in it) is a 'fundamental Catholic principle,' then it is never a 'prin-
ciple' as such, but rather a 'general structure of something purely and obvi-
ously factual.' It stands, then, as I have always emphasized, as a 'suspended
middle' between the absolute transcendence of the God of Calvin,
Kierkegaard, and Barth, and the absolute immanence of the God of Schleier-
macher, Ritschl, and Harnack.'Analogy,' understood as a genuine relation
between two X, wipes out at the root every 'derivation'whether deductive
or inductive."46
Indeed, if the analogia entis can be called a principle, it is that of an explicit
"reductio in mysterium" (Przywara's phrase), a ruthless reduction of all prin-
ciples (and of all philosophies!) to the mystery of their own inconclusiveness
(cf. 2 Cor. 10:4-5): to the mystery, which is evident to any honest philosophy,
that creaturely being and knowing can in no way ground itself (in spite of
the undying dream of Descartes and Kant and Hegel and Husserl and
Carnap and Russell, et al., i.e., in spite of the dreams of Continental and ana-
lytic philosophy); that the creature is, on the contrary, radically suspended
both ontically and noetically (in ways we shall see), and therefore cannot,
2006 The Author
except by a Promethean force of delusion, attain to any pure starting point.

In this respect (which Barth apparently never considered, having shunned
from the outset any dialogue with philosophy), the analogia entis (indeed the
entire first half of the Analogia Entis) is, notwithstanding its constructive
ontology, an apologetic deconstruction of modern philosophy, what is more,
an explicit praeparatio evangelica, which deconstructs all modern systems in
order to lead thought itself (past unwarranted pride) into the unfathomable
mystery of an ever greater God.47 For all its complexity, this is the apologetic
intention of the analogia entis, which Przywara employs equally, as a via
media, against the panlogism of Hegel and the dialectic of Barth. He then
concludes his 1952 reflection with the words, "If this is the 'invention of
Antichrist' [...] (and if this expression is something other than the 'com-
radely sottise' I have long taken it to be), then my dear old friend Karl Barth
should enroll himself in the school of the old Greek monks and relearn from
them the meaning of the phrase, 'discernment of spirits.' ' ,48 One may there-
fore conclude with von Balthasar "that nothing whatever can be found of
that ogre Barth has made of the analogy of being", and one "can flatly deny
Barth's charge . . . that it tries to 'overpower' God (since the analogy of being
is precisely the 'principle' that was formulated to exclude and immobilize
any such attempt to usurp God, and that from the very roots)". 49
Such is the ironic detail that undermines the rhetoric of the Church Dog-
matics from the start, which blazes a furious path away from a Church iden-
tified with a theology it scarcely understands. 50 One can even turn the tables
on Barth and claim with Przywara that Barth's theology is itself Promethean;
that the rhetoric of distance and human impotence veils a secret longing for
identity (in the tradition of Luther's "theopanism"): "Before God, the human
being ultimately makes himself as nothing in such a way as to absorb God
into himself and in this way to become 'like God.' " 51 Admittedly, this is a
bit hyperbolic and applies more to Barth's early dialectical theology than to
the Church Dogmatics (and in 1922 it was precisely the former that Przywara
had in mind); for Przywara, however, this is an inevitable consequence of
Barth's rejection of analogy: that his theology is, in the end, a Janus-faced
theology of dialectic and identity, which is only superficially mitigated by
his adoption of an analogia fidei (for reasons we have seen). To be sure, Barth
eventually toned down his critique of Catholic theology, due in large part to
Shngen and the conciliatory efforts of von Balthasar. But it is notable that
he never revised or withdrew his condemnation of the analogia entis (after
all, the entire edifice of his dogmatics, as a Protestant dogmatics, depends
upon it: omnis determinatio est negation?1 In which case he (apparently) never
grasped what a first reading of the relevant texts should have revealed: that
among his contemporaries it wasirony of ironiesPrzywara who bore "the
greatest affinity to his own pathos". 53 For, as von Balthasar goes on to say,
"both took a stand against Kantianism and Hegelianism, against Schleier-
macher 's (or the modern) method of immanence, against every scheme by
2006 The Author

12 John R. Betz
which the human being, whether devout or not, might attempt to lay hold
of the living God".54 Unfortunately, von Balthasar 's noble clarifications
arrived too late; the rhetoric of the hour had already prevailed.
Martin Heidegger and "Onto-Theology"

If one is to defend the doctrine of the analogia entis, however (whether for
the sake of a Christian ontology, or for its relevance to a Christian aesthet-
ics, or simply in order to set the record straight), one must recognize that it
has been vigorously contested not only by Barth, but also by Heidegger and
a legion of postmodern French philosophers. In short, one must come to
terms with criticism on two fronts: on the one hand, the theological criticism
that the analogia entis forces God into the categories of a pre-established meta-
physics, which obviates the need for revelation (Barth); on the other hand,
the criticism that the analogia entis is paradigmatic of "onto-theology" and
the "metaphysics of representation" (Heidegger et al.). We have already
dealt with the first front and shown that it approximates Don Quixote's
advance against the windmills. The only exception to this would be Barth's
apparent "late" teaching that "the analogia entis misconstrues the difference
between God and human beings in that it overlooks God's proximity".55
Aside from the fact that this too misses the point (because, unlike Barth,
Przywara is happy to affirm the notion of infused grace), it represents a com-
plete reversal of Barth's earlier criticism, namely, that the doctrine compro-
mises the "infinite qualitative difference" between God and human beings.56
Indeed, whereas Barth formerly criticized the analogia entis for compromis-
ing God's transcendence, in a complete about-face he now criticizes the same
doctrine for too radically emphasizing it. At one level, this would suggest a
belated discovery of what Barth apparently missed on his first reading, and
could have discovered even from the book's preface, namely, that the analo-
gia entis is a negative theology in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius.57 At
another level, it would suggest a further misunderstandingnot only of the
analogia entis, but of the apophatic tradition in general. For as with any mys-
tical theology, God's radical transcendence, far from being undermined by
God's radical proximity, is in fact a function of it. In other words, as Przy-
wara frequently points out, following Augustine, the analogical interval (the
maior dissimilitudo) is experienced precisely within an experience of God's
utmost intimacy (in the tanta similitudo)just as the via negativa (authenti-
cally understood as an experience!) is possible only upon the basis of a prior
via ajfirmativa.58 It would thus seem that here too Barth missed the point, and
thus never grasped the measured beauty of Catholic doctrine in this regard,
which can affirm equally God's profound immanence to the creature and at
the same time God's radical transcendence of the creature, in Przywara's
terminology, which derives from Augustine, both God "in us" and God
"beyond us."59
2006 The Author

But if it is acknowledged that the analogia entis is a form of negative the-

ology, which expresses a dynamic rhythm between affirmation and negation,
praise and silence, then magically both fronts are already diminished. For
not only is it not what the early Barth makes it out to be, it is also not what
Heidegger makes it out to be: for it is neither a closed metaphysical system,
which subordinates the living God, who reveals himself in the sovereign
event of his self-revelation, to being, as Barth implies; nor is it a scheme in
which God simply grounds beings as the highest being (ens supremum) in a
causal hierarchy as the causa prima, which occludes the difference between
Being and beings (as Heidegger would lead one to believe). These are
caricatures. For, according to Przywara (who in this regard simply follows
Aquinas), God does not "have" being as creatures do, much less is he sub-
ordinate to some category called "being". Rather, he is being; he is being
itself (ipsum esse subsistens), whereas creatures "have" their being from him.60
In the technical language that stems from Aquinas, whereas the being of God
is a "real identity" of essence and existence, the being of creatures is consti-
tuted by a "real distinction" (distinctio realis) between essence and existence.61
And for this reason, given this ultimate difference in spite of all similarity,
however great, for Przywara the relation between God and creatures is nec-
essarily one of analogy, indeed, a relation of ever greater dissimilarity. In the
formulation of the fourth Lateran Council (1215), of which Przywara's own
doctrine is, in its intention, nothing but an explication: " . . . one cannot note
a similarity between Creator and the creature, however great, without the
necessity of noting a greater dissimilarity between them".62 Such is the basic
rhythm of the analogia entis, whose implications will be developed below.
For now it suffices to show that the difference between Being and beings
(between God and creatures) is not compromised by any similarity or any
doctrine of participation, sincein the face of every similarity, however
greatcreaturely being is always suspended before the factum of its own
gratuity.
Of course, postmodern theologians like John Caputo would remind us that
this is to underestimate "the radicality of Heidegger's criticisms", from
which Przywara's Thomist metaphysics is by no means exempt.63 For even
if Gilson is right to insist that Aquinas' existential metaphysics of God as the
pure act of being represents a novum vis--vis every classical and modern
metaphysics of being qua essence (from Plato to Aristotle to Hegel), neither
Aquinas nor, presumably, Przywara has gone so far as to think the ground
of the possibility (which Heidegger was apparently the first to think, repeat-
ing the kind of grandiose claims one finds in Hegel) of the distinction
between Being and beings that Heidegger variously calls the "Dif-ferenz", the
Unter-Schied, the Austrag, etc. Indeed, according to Heidegger, even the meta-
physics of God as the "pure act of being" occludes a more original under-
standing of truth () as an emergence into the "open" of what was
"hidden" (-), as "un-concealment" [Un-verborgenheit], as "Lichtung",
2006 The Author
14 John R. Betz
etc., etc., so that even the existential thought of Aquinas (and by extension
that of Przywara) is a form of metaphysical "self-deception" that is subject
to a more radical "deconstruction". And, of course, given its centrality to
every Thomist metaphysics, the same holds true of the doctrine
of the analogia entis, which, far from revealing the truth of the difference
between Being and beings, is precisely the metaphysical doctrine that most
obscures it. As Heidegger tells us, "That which 'is' [das Seiende] 'corre-
sponds'; in what it is and how it is, it serves as an effect, it submits to the
dominant cause as what is caused . . . Analogy belongs to metaphysics, and, at
that, in two senses: 1. that that which is [das Seiende] itself 'corresponds' to
the highest being [dem hchsten Seienden]; 2. that things are thought and
explained with regard to correspondences, similarities, and generalities.
When one thinks from [the perspective of] Being itself [Seyn selbst], however,
analogy has no more hold."64
In response to Heidegger's critique one would do well to repeat,firstly,that
God is not "a" being among beings, not even the highest being, but rather
Being itself (and it is in this sense that God is, in the words of the first Vatican
Council, "ineffably most high above all things");65 secondly, that the analogia
entis, as Przywara understands it, ultimately explodes all similarities,
however great, in the name of an ever greater dissimilarity. Admittedly, this is
not to deny similarity tout court, nor is it to deny that God is the Creator and
ultimate "cause" of creation, though it may seem more radical to do so in the
name of an ultimate nihilism; it is simply to note that the final word of the
analogia entis is not similarity but difference (in the tradition of Pseudo-Diony-
sius). Heidegger's central criticism, however, would seem to remain: that the
doctrine of analogy does not think difference qua difference, but obscures it.
Indeed, it supposedly obscures that primordial difference which first reveals
the event [Ereignis] of Being [Seyn] qua history [Ge-schichte]which for Hei-
degger, the etymologist, always resonates with notions of destiny [Ge-schick]
and fate [Schicksal]just as Barth thinks that the analogia entis obscures the
event of God's historical self-revelation.
With regard first to Barth, one must repeat that for Przywara the analogia
entis is a principle that applies (in the context in which it arose) precisely to
the matter of historical revelation, specifically, as a corrective to the specu-
lative claims of Joachim of Fiore's trinitarian theology of history.66 Where
Joachim threatened to dissolve the immanent Trinity into the sequential eco-
nomic ages of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the fourth Lateran
Council, following Peter Lombard, introduced the principle of analogy in
the formulation noted above. The principle of analogy is thus intended pre-
cisely to safeguard the transcendence of God with regard to and in the midst
of his historical self-revelation; and in this respect it applies not only to
Joachim or to Hegel, forcing in each case a reductio in mysterium, but even to
more recent speculative theologies, which (following Barth) take the eco-
nomic Trinity as revealed in historyas opposed to a timeless "metaphysi-
2006 The Author
cal" God outside of it, who may be Trinity or notas their explicit point of
departure. But surely, if the analogia entis functions as a kind of regulative
principle with regard to revelation, a Barthian will object that it has precisely
thereby usurped the role of revelation, indeed, that an extra-biblical philo-
sophical principle is ultimately accorded more weight and authority than
revelation itself.
In response to this (at face value) legitimate criticism, it would objectively
suffice to say that, for Przywara, as a Roman Catholic, the edict of the fourth
Lateran Council (and the analogical principle it contains) is a matter of
revelation, i.e., a matter of God's continuing self-revelation through the
Church's inspired (and therefore authoritative) teaching. Admittedly, today
such reasoning is not likely to be accepted; nor, certainly, will a Barthian be
satisfied by the explanation that the analogia entis is a principle based in the
revelation of creation, as Przywara also understood it: namely, as an ontologi-
cal articulation of the factually "suspended" nature of creaturely being, and
an epistemological articulation of the factually "suspended" nature of crea-
turely knowledge (to which I will advert in the following section). If, there-
fore, one is to respond to Barthian criticism with any measure of success, one
must do so on its own terms; one must point out that the analogia entis is a
fundamentally biblical doctrineas biblical as the doctrine of the Trinity
itself. Indeed, it is simply an articulation of the God revealed in Scripture and
proclaimed by the Church fathers: a God who, in the words of Augustine,
is "more inward than my inmost part", but, at the same time, "higher than
my highest"; a God who is at once so radically immanent to his creatures
that there is no where tofleefrom him (Ps. 139), but at the same time so tran-
scendent of them as to be beyond all they could ever imagine (cf. Isa. 55:8;
66:1; 1 Cor. 2:9ff.).67 In no sense, therefore, is the analogia entis an abstract meta-
physical formula concocted independently of revelation (at worstif this is
something culpableit is the genial metaphysical formula of an apologetics
developed in light of revelation). Rather, it is a way of stating the rhythm of
revelation, which can be found everywhere (a posteriori^ in types and
shadows: in the history of philosophy (as we shall see) and, yes, even in the
structure of creaturely being. Indeed, for Przywara (as for Paul and the entire
Catholic tradition), creation itself bears witnessand it does so unavoidably;
for it cannot deny what it is. And what it says of its being, and what Augus-
tine discovered upon reflection about the nature of the creature is that it is
and it is not (est non est)-, in fact, it is not even what it is (which can be said
of God alone), for "what we will be has not yet been revealed" (1 John 3:2).68
As for Heidegger's criticism that the analogia entis obscures the difference
between Being and beings, one may readily acknowledge that these criti-
cisms are weighty if "Nothing" is absolute; if potentiality is ultimately prior
to actuality; if the difference between Being and beings (and the possibility
of the distance of creation) were not already inscribed within Being itself qua
difference, i.e., as the unity-in-difference of the persons of the Trinity; and if
2006 The Author
16 John R. Betz
death is the final word and we live toward nothing and for nothingbut
still "care". But, of course, everything hinges upon this "if", which Heideg-
ger's dogmatic assertions obscure.
Heidegger's own philosophy is itself subject to deconstruction (as I
attempted to show in Part I); and what such deconstruction reveals is an
underlying aesthetic prejudice for the sublime against the beautiful, which
translates into an ontological prioritization of potentiality over actuality, of
the indeterminate over the determinate, and thus, ultimately, of the potentia
pura of the creature (which is hypostatized as Being) over the actual, deter-
minate plenitude of God himselfin a sudden reversal of two-thousand
years of metaphysics since Plato. Indeed, the whole of Heidegger's ontology
(of the dynamic between Being and beings) can be understood in terms of
a dynamic between the sublime and the beautiful, which attests to an
inevitable intersection of aesthetic and ontological questions.
At the same time, following Przywara, it is easy to show that Heidegger's
philosophy can be understood in terms of a "secularized theology", specifi-
cally, as a "secularized Carmel". 69 For example, the ternary structure of
his late philosophybetween Being's "concealment", the "Lichtung" of its
"unconcealment", [Entbergen], and its ultimate "return into the mystery of
concealment"is but a secularization of the classical rhythm one finds
between the kataphatic and the apophatic in the theology of the Areopagite
(and mutatis mutandis in John of the Cross): the theology of a God who pos-
itively reveals himself, but is ever more hidden in "superluminous dark-
ness". 70 Indeed, according to Przywara, Heidegger's understanding of the
relation between Being and beings is formally that of the revelation of God
"in-and-beyond" beingseven if this "Being" is ultimately "Nothing". And
thus Heidegger's "difference" ultimately manifests the same formal rhythm
of the difference that inhabits the analogia entis. As Przywara puts it, "In the
mystery of his self-revelation, God is 'revealed' in the 'tanta similitudo,' in his
'ever so great similarity' to the creature.... But, ultimately, within such 'sim-
ilarity, however great,' and within every revelation, he is always the one who
is 'ever more dissimilar' (in the maior dissimilitudo)."71 But if this, mutatis
mutandis, is the formal rhythm that inhabits Heidegger's "theology", as
Przywara points out, "the center does not hold" (as, in similar fashion, it
does not for Barth); for the rhythm is overtaken by an ultimate dialectic
(which is but a secularization of the dialectic one finds in Luther): between
the "titanism" of a revolutionary, who "projects" himself into the world and
whose being is adamantly a "being-in-the-world" in defiance of all tran-
scendence (just as Luther was the monk who abolished monasticism), and
the "passive mysticism" of one resigned to the ultimate mystery and sole-
sovereignty [Alleinwirksamkeit] of fateof Schicksalwhich holds both Being
and beings in its sway.72
The best defense of the analogia entis, then, is to show that Heidegger's
own philosophy is a secularization of it and, more generally, a seculariza-
2006 The Author
tion of theologyhence the "advent" of Being; hence the poet as the "shep
herd" who awaits the advent of Being; hence the kenosis of Being in beings,
etc., etc. But along with Heidegger's criticisms one must acknowledge
another set of objections, which are current among his French disciples. For
example, one might object that the doctrine of "ever greater dissimilarity"
does not overturn the ideology of representation but simply extends its
power to infinity so as to place difference in restraints all the more surely.
Indeed, one might object that analogy, as one of the "four iron collars of rep
resentation" (in Deleuze's phrase), can never succeed in thinking difference
as such, since it binds all differences to an ultimate identity or concept and
thus to the iron "grid of necessity".73 In response to this objection, one must
reiterate, firstly, that "difference" (for Przywara and for Christian theology)
is not something transcendentally prior to God, as though one could trump
God simply by saying that "difference" makes him possible, since God is dif
ference, namely, the difference in eternity of a triune love (as John Milbank
has pointed out).74 Secondly, one will note that for Przywara the analogia entis
is not an exemplarism in the classical sense, stemming from Plato, but more
fundamentally a proportion of mutual otherness ( ), fol
lowing Aristotle's definition in the Metaphysics. Accordingly, far from
binding creaturely being to an economy of similitudes, the analogia entis
stresses the radical difference between God and creatures. This is not to deny
a positive relationship between God and creatures, which is expressed in the
"pros"-, rather, it is to situate this relation within the space of an abiding alter-
ity. Accordingly, for Przywara, whatever may relate creatures to God in the
form of an analogia attributionis, i.e., the naming of God as the source of crea
turely goodness, wisdom, being, etc. in the pros hen analogy, is always
already qualified by an analogy of proportionality (analogia proportionalitatis),
whereby the "positive similarity of the ad aliquid unum is led beyond itself
into the 'dazzling darkness' of the Areopagite".75 Przywara's analogia entis is
ultimately a proportional rhythm between two different analogies: between
a tanta similitudo expressed in the analogia attributionis and a maior dissimili-
tudo expressed in the analogia proportionalitatis.
For Przywara, then, it is not that creaturely being has a sure footing in
analogy (as Barth imagined); nor is it that analogy straps being to an ulti
mate identity or concept (as Deleuze, following Heidegger, claims). On the
contrary, the analogia entis suspends creaturely being between a final insu
perable difference, which has the form of , between the crea
ture's own nothingness and the Creator out of nothingso that the being of
the creature always comes to it as a novelty, a miraculum, in a way that is not
wholly dissimilar to the perception of beings (on the anxious background of
nothingness) in Heidegger. Furthermore, as we shall see, the analogia entis
radically suspends the creature between its own essence and existence in
such a way that this difference (which is the very dynamism of becoming)
is always already inscribed in any supposed self-identity. As a result, the
2006 The Author
18 John R. Betz
creature cannot even claim to be what it is, which belongs to God alone, since
it is ever and only infieri.And all of this is the function of a difference that
is truly radical, because it goes all the way down; and it goes all the way
down in order to explode in the process all identities for the sake of an
upward ascent (Phil. 3:13)not an ascent to an ultimate identity or concept,
but an ascent through the differences of glory (2 Cor. 3:18) to the eternal,
primal difference of a triune love. To be sure, Heidegger speaks of difference,
but ultimately there is none, since Being is but the Being of beings (as was
discussed in Part I). Likewise, French postmodern philosophy claims to be
a philosophy of "difference", but this "difference" is ultimately but the uni-
vocal "difference" of bare existents (devoid of any transcendent essence or
purpose) throughout an entirely immanent and univocally meaningless
surface. Consequently, given their fervent denial of transcendence (aside
from a momentary, dislocating experience of "anxiety" or the "sublime",
which amounts to the same thing and constitutes that meager form of post-
modern "ecstasy" which goes nowhere and reveals nothing), Heidegger and
French postmodernism can offer nothing but an ineluctable return to the
various identities of "pure immanence". By contrast, rather than reducing
creaturely being to immanence and glorying in it together with the modern
prelates of Dionysus (Nietzsche, Deleuze, Lyotard et al.); rather than "crown-
ing" time with eternity, becoming with being, and thus collapsing essence
into existence (which, according to Deleuze, is the meaning of Nietzsche's
"eternal return", whereby the postmodern dialectic between essence and
existence, not unlike Barth's own dialectic between God and creatures,
mutates, ironically, into an ultimate identity), the analogia entis prohibits any
such reduction of the tension between essence and existence, the "ideal" and
the "real", and thereby forcibly maintains the openness of creaturely being
unto its source ("which transcends every source") and its end ("which tran-
scends completion").76 Indeed, rather than incarcerating creaturely being in
the name of libertfor the freedom of immanence can also be the mask of
slavery (cf. John 8:34)the analogia entis forces one to acknowledge the
radical openness of creaturely being, laying the groundwork, as it were, for
that properly ecstatic, joyful movement into that truest of differences, which
is the eternal difference of an ecstatic triune love. If anything, therefore, binds
creaturely being to the iron "grid of necessity", it is not analogy, but the
prison of postmodern philosophy, which effectively binds one to the imma-
nent "freedom" of one's own will, curved resolutely upon itself, and to all
the hellish impossibilities that this entails.
But, of course, still lingering amid these criticisms is the hallowed refrain,
the sacred chorus sung by the devotees of Heidegger and Derrida, that
the analogia entis belongs to the "metaphysics of presence" and "onto-
theology"which is a short way of saying (and convincing oneself) that one
is authorized to stop thinking about it. If one is perchance able to stop the
c(h)ant, one is then told that the analogia entis is a metaphysical prop for the
2006 The Author
theater of representation and the panoptic oppression that this inevitably

entails; since creaturely being is not a real other after all, but simply a fallen
representation of an eternal truth to which it is ultimately referred.
The simplest response to this charge is to point out the typical postmod-
ern mistake (following Nietzsche, whose authority is unquestioned) of iden-
tifying Christianity with Platonism. As it is, postmodern criticisms of
Christianity generally (and perhaps willfully) disregard one of the most basic
revelations of Christianity, which radically distinguishes it from Platonism,
namely, the immanence of transcendence, i.e., not only the kenotic imma-
nence to creation of the infinite, but, more particularly, the kenotic
indwelling of Christ in the Church.77 Indeed, postmodern criticisms invari-
ably fail to appreciate the manner in which, by virtue of the incarnation and
the gift of the Holy Spirit, the visible body of Christ, the totus Christus, is
what is represented (John 14:7-9). (Admittedly, it may be difficult to perceive
the infinite in the finite, as it was for Philip (John 14:8); the problem, however,
lies not with the objective reality of Christianity, but with one's capacity of
perception.) Finally, even though Christianity at times resembles Platonism
(as especially in the early Augustine and Dionysius), postmodern criticisms
fail to appreciate (1) that the Christian cosmos, which is centered in the com-
mercium admirabe of Christ on the Cross, turns the tables on every hierar-
chical Platonic exemplarism, i.e., every "aristocracy" of representation (as
the words of the Magnificat attest: Luke 1:52), and that therefore the "slave
revolt" of Christian morality implies a corresponding revolt in metaphysics;
(2) that Thomas's doctrine of secondary causes (causae secundae) was
intended precisely to qualify the exemplarism of Augustine's early thought,
i.e., to highlight the dignity of the otherness of becoming (which a strict Pla-
tonism denigrates) and, in particular, to highlight the freedom of the human
being from God, wherein in part (almost ironically) the imago Dei consists;
and (3) that the analogy of being is marked by an ultimate dissimilarity
between God and creatures, which guarantees not only a certain autonomy
of the human being, but the human depth that love requires. In short, such
criticisms fail to appreciate that the analogy of being is not an economy of
representation, which curtails difference, but an economy of love, which
demands it.
In the final analysis, therefore, the analogia entis turns out to be an analogy
of love (analogia caritatis), whose philosophical form ( ) is ful
78
filled in the sonorous words of the Psalmist: "Abyssus abyssum invocai.,"
According to this definition, God is neither constrained by this otherness,
nor is this otherness somehow constrained by God; rather, God freely calls
it into being as other. To be sure, the "relation" that is expressed in the pros
depends solely upon the prior love of God, which no creature can fathom.
Yet, at the same time, while the creature is dependent upon God, it is also
in some sense a real, independent "other", one might even say, an abyss into
which God calls. Thus, not only is God himself beyond representationhe is,
2006 The Author
20 John R. Betz
after all, infinitebut so too is God's image. 79 This is not to say that the
analogy of being, as a proportion of mutual otherness, is a proportion of
mutual negation (which would reduce otherness to a dialectical species of
identity). Rather, it is to say that the analogy of being is a fertile proportion
that allows for the possibility of an infinite lovea love that, as infinite,
never rests in an accomplished presence, but is forever drawn onward by
the mysterious absencei.e., depthof presence itself. In the words of
Augustine, which Przywara is fond of citing: "He is hidden in order that you
might seek him; and in order that you might not cease in your search once
you have found him, he is infinite."80 In other words, for Augustine, who
resists charges of "metaphysics" and "onto-theology" far more easily than
is realized (or at least is acknowledged), God is never given without remain-
der in an objective presence, but only as the one who exceeds my every
grasp, who is "more inward than my inmost" and "higher than my highest". 81
In fact, if God were comprehensible, for Augustine it is axiomatic that this
would not be God (si comprehendis, non est Deus).82 But if theology, as the
science of love, eludes the grip of deconstruction, if it cannot be reduced to
a metaphysics of presence, then neither can the analogia entis, for it itself is
nothing other than a mystical theologyone in which difference is forever
maintained (as the possibility of love) and union is at once accomplished
and deferred (as the rhythm of analogy itself).83
This, then, and not Derrida's diffrance, is the rhythm, the measure, the
"analogy" of all thingsnot because there is no deferral, and not because
there is no difference, but because the analogy of being, so plagued by mis-
understanding, is none other than an analogy (a proportion) of love,
wherein two natures otherwise different are nonetheless related (
). And from this perspective, finally, it should also be clear why Przy
wara's doctrine is grounded ultimately not in an abstract principle (as Barth
feared), but in the hypostatic union of Christ, in whom the creature discov
84
ers the entire breadth of the analogical interval. In any event, the analogia
entis is a far more subtle doctrine than its rhetorical representations on the
85
part of theologians and philosophers would suggest, and so demands to
be considered in its own rightnot only with regard to the possibilities it
offers for a theological ontology vis--vis postmodern ontology, but with
regard to the possibility it offers for a proportional, i.e., analogical, under-
standing of the beautiful and the sublime. Indeed, as long as theology has
not abandoned philosophy and ontology, as long as it has not retreated
entirely into cultural-linguistic models of Christianity and forsaken the
question of being, there is arguably no doctrine that is better able to main-
tain theology's philosophical front against its critics, and to offer a counter
aesthetic that is at once more beautiful and more sublimewhich, in our
own day, retains a certain regard for beauty even in the absence of the good
and the true, and is thus perhaps the most compelling testimony to its
truth.
2006 The Author

Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being

In Part I we saw how aesthetic theory is inevitably informed by ontological
considerations and vice versa; in particular, we saw how a violent, post-
modern ontology (which can conceive of being only in terms of a conflict
between essence and existence) leads to an equally violent aesthetic: one in
which the beautiful is conceived in terms of form, determination, and
essence, and the sublime is conceived as the chthonic irruption of the
indeterminate, of difference, of the sheer fact of existence.86 We have also
seen how this postmodern dialectic between essence and existence mutates
into identity, in a way not dissimilar to Barth's theology, and thus witnesses
to a postmodern oscillation between "existence against essence" (mirroring
its violent aesthetic doctrine of the "sublime against the beautiful") and
"existence as essence" (which is the crux of Nietzsche's "eternal return"
and the Promethean gesture par excellence: a forcible reduction of being
to becoming, of transcendence to immanence, and a corresponding
usurpation of the divine "I Am" who alone is an identity of essence and
existence).
By contrast, one finds in Przywara a more humble ontology, a creaturely
ontology, and thus the possibility of a different aesthetic. For here the rela-
tion between essence and existence is not one of dialectical strife, which
mutates violently into an illegitimate identity, but that of a dynamic and
peaceful tension. In fact, according to Przywara, it is this tension that defines
creaturely being as such (making every postmodern flattening of this tension
a kind of atheist's wish-fulfillment or ignorance of the real). For what crea-
turely being is, in scholastic terms its quiddity or formal essence, not only
informs the fact of its existence, but is also that to which existence is contin-
ually underway. Its essence, in other words, is at once immanent to its exis-
tence and beyond it (or transcendent), so that existence itself is only given
as the coming to be of essence. Thus Przywara speaks of "a tension (that can
never be mastered in thought) between a being that is 'such' [so] and 'there'
[da], yet whose 'such' in fact always remains 'to be attained,' so that in its
purity it is never really 'there.' "87
Several things are worth noting here. Firstly, this formulation should be a
sufficient rejoinder to postmodern charges that theology affirms a doctrine
of fixed essences, since they are forever given only as deferred; and if it is
alleged that they are nevertheless fixed in the divine mind, one need simply
reply that they are fixed in God's infinity, which defies their own completion
(following Gregory of Nyssa). Secondly, while this formulation bears an
undeniable similarity to Aquinas, it also takes his thought further to the
degree that the real distinction is stated in expressly dynamic terms. For, as
Przywara points out, creaturely being is not simply composed of essence and
existence, but of a tension internal to the real distinction itself, whereby
essence is at once immanent to existence but nevertheless mysteriously
2006 The Author

22 John R. Betz
beyond it. In other words, creaturely being is never identical to its essence,
i.e., never in complete possession of itself, but fundamentally ecstatic.88
Indeed, it is this tension that accounts for the peculiar movement of the crea
ture, gives it wings, so to speak, signaling its own proper dignitynot as
something fallen from the "real being" of an ordo essentiarum, but as becom
ing, as a genuine other of the divine life that nevertheless participates in it
analogically ( ).89 Thus Przywara defines creaturely being
as a "unity-in-tension" [Spannungseinheit] of "essence in-and-beyond exis
tence" [Sosein in-ber Dasein] in relation to the being of God, who is prop-
erly an identity of essence and existence.90 And it is this relation between
becoming (in the sense of "essence in-and-beyond existence") and Being (in
the sense of a divine identity of essence and existence) that constitutes the
most basic analogy between God and creatures, as well as the basis of the
creature's participatory movement in Deo in Deum.
According to Przywara, however, this basic form of the analogia entis
stands in need of further analysis; for the tension of creaturely being (under-
stood as "essence in-and-beyond existence") itself constitutes a kind of
analogy; and in order to distinguish this analogy from what he calls the "the-
ological analogy" (between God and creatures), one might call it an "imma-
nent analogy", whose basic form is that of an "immanent dynamic middle".91
According to this sense of analogy, which derives from Aristotle's further
definition of analogy as something "intermediate" (
),92 creaturely being is dynamically "suspended", so to speak, between
"essence in existence" and "essence beyond existence" (just as Aristotle
understands as something between and ).93 Thus,
for Przywara, creaturely being is ultimately an analogy in a double sense:
on the one hand, in the "immanent analogy", it "is" only as suspended
"between" "essence in existence" and "essence beyond existence" (just as it
is suspended "between" its potentiality and itsfinalend); on the other hand,
in the "theological analogy", whose full implications we have yet to expli
cate, it is suspended "between" absolute identity and absolute difference,
and finally, "between" nothing and the creator out of nothing. Such is the
complexity of the matter, and it is precisely in the intersection of these two
"analogies"the "immanent" and the "theological"that Przywara locates
the analogy of being.
Before proceeding further, however, it is important to note that, according
to Przywara, "essence in-and-beyond existence", understood as the basic
formula of a creaturely metaphysics, is not conceived a priori but is inferred
from the manifest tensions of creaturely thought and exhibited in a real suc
cession of historical philosophies, as, for example, in the tension between
Plato's eidos (which may be rendered as "essence beyond existence") and
Aristotle's morphe (which may be rendered as "essence in existence"). And
inasmuch as this formula describes a living tensionand is emphatically not
the a priori formula of a timeless metaphysicsit is manifest in every his-
2006 The Author
torical oscillation between an (idealist) philosophy of essence and a (realist)

philosophy of existence (e.g., mutatis mutandis, in the tension between
Descartes and Pascal, Kant and Hamann, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Husserl
and Scheler, etc.). What is more, it can be found at the basis of any conceiv-
able philosophical methodology, inasmuch as one is compelled to begin
either with essential, transcendental determinations (as in Kant) or with the
sheer existence and objectivity of the real (as in Scheler); and it is in view of
this dialectic that Przywara speaks of a necessary methodological tension
between a "meta-noetics" and a "meta-ontics."
But if this tension is inevitable, as Przywara claims, then there is no pure
meta-ontics any more than there is a pure meta-noetics; for just as no meta-
ontics can fail to consider the role of consciousness and intentionality in our
perception of being, no meta-noetics can fail to consider the gratuity of being
to consciousness.94 Thus Kant employs the most traditional of ontic cate-
gories in his supposedly rarefied, transcendental table of the categories. Thus
Husserl (for all his transcendental phenomenology) cannot help but affirm the
givenness of being and the intuition of the categories themselves (not to
mention the readiness with which he speaks of regional "ontologies").95 In
fact, even the "act" of consciousness, the starting point of an ostensibly pure
meta-noetics, is already informed by the venerable ontic categories of
potency and act.96
According to Przywara, however, none of this should be surprising; for if
one goes back to the fundamentals of logic and attends to the analogy in Aris-
totle's treatment of the principle of non-contradiction, one discovers pre-
cisely such a chiasm of its ontic and noetic forms: just as something cannot
at the same time and in the same respect both be and not be, so too some-
thing cannot at the same time and in the same respect be both true and not
true.97 Indeed, in this fundamental principle of logic one discovers the yet
more fundamental principle of analogy; and for Przywara this provides not
only a basis in thought for his own doctrine of the analogia entis, which makes
short shrift of all pure idealisms and all pure realisms, but a measure of
explanation, rooted ultimately in the ontological constitution of creaturely
being (as "essence in-and-beyond existence"), for the peculiar oscillations
that define the history of philosophy. The choice, then, is not between a meta-
noetics and a meta-ontics, but "between a meta-noetics as the methodolog-
ical starting point of a meta-ontics, and a meta-ontics that is finally reflected
in a meta-noetics".98 For neither is ever pure in itself (in spite of the dreams
of scientific positivism, on the one hand, and those of a rigorously pure tran-
scendental idealism, on the other), but ultimately correlated; what is more,
each is ultimately implied in the other [Ineinander]. And it is this tension, this
"analogy", between consciousness and being, idealism and realism, philoso-
phies of essence and philosophies of existencewhich ultimately reflects the
ontological tension of creaturely beingthat defines a creaturely metaphysics
that is reducible to neither.
2006 The Author
24 John R. Betz
Thus, at the heart of the "immanent analogy", which we defined above as

something "intermediate", is an analogy in the further, richer, and more mys
terious sense of a correlated otherness ( ). On the one hand,
this fuller sense of analogy provides an intimation of Przywara's later doc
trine, which is already the positive core of his analogia entis, namely, his grand
vision of a Christian metaphysics of commercium, interpntration, and
love.99 On the other hand, inasmuch as it reveals an inevitable correlation of
opposites intrinsic to thought itself, this fuller sense of analogy demolishes
every form of scientific and philosophical purism, which would deny the
radical "suspendedness" of creaturely being and knowledge in an attempt
to "be God".100 In other words, it functions like the law does for Luther
(which apparently escaped Barth's attention), laying bare at the level of phi-
losophy every self-righteous and erroneous claim to purity (i.e., identity),
whether in the brazen form of German idealism or in the subtler, but no less
Promethean form of analytic philosophy. In short, it strips thought of every
presumption, showing that the rhythm of analogy and all the incomplete-
ness and indeterminacy it entails can be found even at the heart of logic. This
not only makes Przywara oddly contemporaneous with Godei; it also sup-
ports the view of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock that truth itself, as
correspondence (adaequatio), is not a matter of analysis to the point of an ulti-
mate identity, to something that can be mastered (the dreams of analytic
philosophy notwithstanding), but properly understood in terms of analogy,
specifically, as the formal immanence of the real in oneself as other than
oneself.101 Indeed, it suggests that truth itself is not something fixed, not even
in eternity, but ultimately a reflection of the reciprocity of love, which never
ends (1 Cor. 13:8).
Leaving aside for now these further implications of Przywara's doctrine,
which he develops in his monumental late work, the analogia entis (under-
stood in this fuller sense of ) suffices to show that the ques
tion of truth cannot be separated from ontology, inasmuch as the tension
between a meta-ontics and a meta-noetics (which inhabits every epistemo
logica! inquiry from the start and can be relaxed only by a kind of
philosophical self-deception) always already points to the objectively prior
102
tension between essence and existence. Furthermore, just as the meta-ontic
and meta-noetic are never given in their purity, but only in relation to one
another (in keeping with the demands of a creaturely metaphysics that
disallows every absolute idealism as well as every absolute positivism/
pragmatism), there is no creaturely cognition, desire, or feeling that does not
imply a regulative objectivity, respectively, of the true, the good, and the
beautiful.103 In short, subjective act and objective intuition go together (
); and for this reason truth is never simply an immanent lin
guistic event, an illusory application of human constructs to an unknowable
reality that transcends them (as in Kant), but an illumination of the one in
the other, which is to say, that the event of truth is analogy.
2006 The Author
Przywara's analogy of being, which at face value appears to be a purely

abstract metaphysical doctrine, is therefore nothing of the kind, but
grounded in a concrete phenomenology of finite being and consciousness.
In this respect, one must bear in mind that his Analogia Entis was conceived
at least in part as a response to Husserl's increasingly transcendental phe
nomenology; that it begins precisely as a phenomenological investigation
like Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, which was published only a few years earlier;
and that Przywara's first reader was none other than his friend (Husserl's
assistant) Edith Stein, who was in many ways Przywara's only intellectual
companion. 1 0 4 What distinguishes Przywara from Husserl and Heidegger,
however, is that the analogia entis is also an explicit metaphysics of transcen
dence. Thus, within the rhythms of the immanent analogy (which may be
discovered at a purely phenomenological level), he hears the undeniable
echo of a greater analogy: the theological analogy. Accordingly, the imma
nent analogy is not simply the "suspended middle" of a dynamic rhythm
between consciousness and being (viewed from a noetic standpoint), or
between "essence in existence" and "essence beyond existence" (viewed
from an ontic standpoint), but points with a certain inevitability upwards,
beyond itself, to the threshold of its own rhythms, so that the immanent
analogy (ana in the sense of ) is ultimately intersected and determined
by a theological analogy (ana in the sense of ). 1 0 5 Indeed, the immanent
dynamic tension between being and consciousness, which has the form of
, attests ultimately to a mutual correlation qua coinherence
of the transcendentals themselves; and thus Przywara discovers at the level
of finite thought a final, inescapable correlation (which the history of phi
losophy bears out) between a modern, metaphysical transcendentalism (e.g.,
in Kant) and a classical, transcendental metaphysics (e.g., in Plato and Aris
totle). 106 But the implications of the immanent analogy go further inasmuch
as this set of correlations implies yet another correlation of the a priori and
the a posteriori (in the form of the a priori "in-and-beyond" the a posteriori);
and still further, inasmuch as it points to a correlation of theology and phi
losophy (in the form of "theology in-and-beyond philosophy"). 1 0 7 Hence the
final form of philosophy, according to Przywara, is neither a phenomenol
ogy nor a "realogy", but a "relationology" in the sense of a correlated oth
erness. 1 0 8 And inasmuch as philosophy's own history exhibits this tension
between a (classical) transcendental metaphysics and a (modern) meta
physical transcendentalism, and at the very least a pervasive tension
between philosophies of essence and philosophies of existence, it points
beyond itself and any illegitimately supposed autonomy to a rhythmic
archetype (i.e., to theology), and ultimately to the mutual love and corre
109
lated otherness (analogy!) of God's own life.
There is, of course, nothing novel in the argument that immanence testi
fies per vestigia to transcendence (this, after all, is what makes Przywara's
doctrine resemble standard conceptions of natural theology). What is novel
2006 The Author

26 John R. Betz
about his argument is that the concept of analogy (which Heidegger dis
missed out of hand) is implied in phenomenology; what is more, that phe
nomenology itself is simply a methodological "re-tracing of the way" (in the
original sense of "method") of a fundamentally ontological tension between
essence and existence.110 Consequently, every postmodern attempt to get
beyond scholasticism, i.e., the real distinction and the full breadth of its
implications, turns out to be a particular permutation of it.111 (For example,
while Heidegger's early philosophy purports to be a rigorous philosophy of
existence, beginning with his analytic of Dasein in Sein und Zeit, the language
of essence inexorably returns in his late work with its emphasis upon the
"Wesen" and "Anwesen" of "Seyn".) In short, what the analogia entis illumi
nates, in the name of a creaturely metaphysics, modern and postmodern phi
losophy tend to obscure: either in the name of an explicit philosophy of
existence, which refuses every notion of transcendent essence, or in the name
of an explicit philosophy of essence, which resolutely brackets out existence
in the name of a pure "phenomenological reduction" to consciousness.
Admittedly, Aquinas never developed the distinction between essence and
existence to the extent that Przywara does, specifically, as a tension between
essence "in" existence and essence "beyond" existence. Nevertheless, Przy
wara takes his doctrine to be a consistent development of Aquinas' thought
in this regard, especially inasmuch as it illuminates the dynamic structure of
creaturely being. Whereas in Aquinas creaturely being is characterized by a
"real" distinction between essence and existence, chiefly in order to empha
size its sheer gratuity and abiding difference from the being of God, in Przy
wara it is characterized more specifically by a dynamic tension between
essence "in" existence and essence "beyond" existence, which may be
abbreviated as essence "in-and-beyond" existence. Most basically, what this
gnomic formula means is that creaturely being is "in becoming" (infieri),or
112
that it only "is" as becoming, specifically, as a "coming to be" of essence.
In other words, its essence is never given without surfeit, but only as
deferred (with an eschatological horizon); and for this reason it is ever in fieri
toward what it "is". As the apostle says, "what we will be has not yet been
revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him,
for we will see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). Or, to borrow an image from
Gregory of Nyssa, who in turn borrows from Paul (Phil. 3:13), creaturely
being only "is" in its "being stretched forth" () into God, the
Logos, in whom it finds its essence. By implication, therefore, "what" crea
turely being is, its quiddity or essence, cannot be determined in any ultimate
sense apart from Christ, the true image (Heb. 1:3). All that can be determined
is that its being is "in becoming"; that it is not in possession of what it "is"
(hence Augustine's cor inquietum); and that, in this modest sense, its "being"
is fundamentally "open" to Being.113
To be sure, it is precisely such an openness to Being that Barth disputes
as though the analogia entis orders creatures to God and establishes an intel-
2006 The Author
ligible "ontological nexus" between them apart from gracesince for him
fallen nature must first be blasted open by the dynamite of revelation. For
Przywara, however, following the entire Christian metaphysical tradition,
becoming is only intelligible in relation to Being; and, as such, its very lack
already constitutes a kind of promise (and if this is problematic, surely it is
problematic only if nature is the work of some other God).114 Indeed, not only
is becoming unintelligible apart from Being, the former cannot be fulfilled
apart from the latter (which is not to compromise the gratuity of grace for
reasons noted above). For not only are all rational creatures implicitly moved
by the desire to find themselves (their essence) in Christ, the Logos, but they
can find themselves only through that specific self-transcendence that is the
movement of love, whereby the self that ceaselessly loses itself ever again
finds itself as given (Matt. 10:39). The ultimate essence of the creature as
"essence-in-and-beyond-existence", which is first revealed in the self-offer-
ing of Christ and the gift of his resurrection, is therefore love. And in this,
finally, one discovers the metaphysical paradox of the Gospel, as stated by
that eminent wayfarer, John the Baptist: that creaturely being grows toward
its end, ironically, to the degree that it diminishes: Ilium oportet crescere, me
autem minui (John 3:30).115
Przywara's principle of "essence in-and-beyond existence" thus accom-
plishes two things. On the one hand, it establishes the radical mutability of
the creature as it trips over itself on its way to itself (as something at once
given and deferred). On the other hand, it shows that this mutability, that
immanence itself, is fundamentally ecstatic, that it is fundamentally open
to something beyond it (potentia oboedientialis); and as such it serves as a
metaphysical praeparatio evangelica. For it indicates that the properly ecstatic
essence of the creature, as "essence in-and-beyond existence", cannot be
fulfilled except through that specific and only perfect form of self-
transcendence which is love; to which the novelty of the Gospel to a fallen
creation (lacking the power to attain its end) comes as metaphysical good
news: that the self-transcendence of love that is required for the creature's ful-
fillment (by nature) is also given by virtue of faith in Christ (Rom. 5:5).
Indeed, with his Spiritand with the Father (John 14:23)Christ himself, in
the form of the most profound "in-and-beyond" (Eph. 4:8-10), becomes the
power of the creature's own fulfillment and ascent; so that the one who
abides in him, as Gregory of Nyssa says in the Life of Moses, is the one who,
paradoxically, moves most swiftly toward one's end (which is none other
than, forgetting oneself, to find oneself in God). Thus, as revealed by the Gospel,
the transcendence to which immanence points (by way of remotion) turns
out to be not only beyond it, but also within it (by kenosis); and it is precisely
within this chiasm of immanence and transcendence that Przywara locates
the analogy of being: so that the tension of creaturely being in the immanent
analogy ("essence in-and-beyond existence") points to and is fulfilled by
the tension of the theological analogyby a God who is himself "in-and-
2006 The Author
28 John R. Betz
beyond" creation, i.e., at once immanent to creation, yet excessively, abun-

dantly beyond it (Deus excessus, Gott berschwang).116
To summarize: we have seen thus far what Przywara means by the "imma-
nent analogy" of creaturely being; specifically, we have seen that it is con-
stituted by a suspended "middle" (analogy in the sense of ) and that
this "middle" is at the same time an upward "opening" to transcendence
(analogy in the sense of ). In short, we have seen that mutability, which
has the form of "essence in-and-beyond existence", is fundamentally
"geared toward" transcendence. But if this is so, if immanence is strictly
analogical, and if the "immanent analogy" is underwritten (supponitur) by
the grace of the "theological analogy" (in the Logos and his perpetual kenosis
of transcendence), then this does away entirely with the postmodern myth
of "pure immanence"which is, after all, simply another myth, akin to
Kant's "pure reason".117 In fact, far from being pure of transcendence, imma
nence turns out to be saturated by it, as the apostle says (Acts 17:28).118 Specif
ically, howeverand this is what distinguishes Christian theology from
most Platonic doctrines of participationit is saturated by the omnipresent
humility of the Logos, who descends ad inferos and in this way, according to
this measure (Eph. 4:7-10), reveals himself to be "the innermost depth and
the most profound interior of all that is".119 Indeed, it is in this "way" (John
14:6), in the analogy which Christ himself is (as the proportion of mutual oth
erness), that the gates of immanence are opened with finality (Ps. 24; Matt.
16:18); in this way that every autonomous subjectivity is forever solicited by
love (Rev. 3:20), as Paul (Col. 1:27; 2 Cor. 13:5; Phil. 4:5), Augustine, Teresa
of Avila, and all the saints so profoundly realized; in this way that imma
nence is shot through with transcendence not simply as the goal of its eksta-
sis, but as the ever-hidden kenosis of love, which makes transcendence more
immanent than immanence itself (following Augustine's interior intimo meo).
The final tension of the theological analogy, therefore, is not simply a
tension between "in" and "beyond", but more profoundly a tension between
"above" and "below", "form" and "chaos", "light" and "darkness", indeed,
"heaven" and "hell"; all of which is summed up in proto-Christological
fashion in the saying of Heraclitus: "The way up and down is one and the
same" ( ).120 Far, then, from being "pure" of tran
scendence, as certain postmodern philosophies contend, immanence is thor
oughly under-mined by it, in such a way so as to be suspended between the
immanence of transcendence (i.e., its kenotic presence to creation) and the
proper aseity of this same transcendence.121 Indeed, the creature is sus
pended as a "middle" not only between its own potentiality and end (in the
immanent analogy), but between Deus interior and Deus superior (in the the
ological analogy), i.e., between God "in us" and God infinitely "beyond us".
And in this sense the being of the creature is truly enclosednot by a post
modern nothingness, which would simply be a final glorification of imma
nence, but by the infinite God of Augustine (cf. Ps. 139) and Thomas Aquinas,
2006 The Author
a God who is not only "above all things by the excellence of his nature" (and
as the goal of creation) but "in all things as the cause of their being". 1 2 2
The final form of the analogia entis is thus, for Przywara, an intersection of
two analogous "analogies", each of which has its own proper rhythm and
can be summarized as follows: just as, in the immanent analogy, the crea
ture's essence is "in-and-beyond" existence, in the theological analogy God
is "in-and-beyond" creation. The all-important qualification, however, which
constitutes the greater dissimilarity (the maior dissimilitudo) between them,
is that whereas creaturely being is always a contingent "unity-in-tension"
["Spannungseinheit"] of essence and existence, for Przywara (following
Thomas), God is "in-and-beyond" creation as an absolute identity of essence
and existence. To be sure, creaturely being is similar to God by virtue of its
participation in God's Being; otherwise it would not " b e " at all. But it
remains fundamentally more dissimilar given not only that its being is given,
but that God "Is" who he is (Exod. 3:14), whereas creatures are forever becom
ing who they "are". 1 2 3 Thus, following Aquinas, Przywara emphasizes that
any participation of creaturely being in God's Being is ultimately not accord
ing to a direct proportion (analogia proportionis), whereby the creature's
essence participates directly in the essence of God (in the manner, say, that
1 is related to 2), but according to an indirect relation of proportionality
(analogia proportionalitatis), whereby the relation of essence and existence in
creatures is analogous to the relation (or rather identity) of essence and exis
tence in God (in the manner, say, that 6 is indirectly related to 4, viz., as,
respectively, 2 x 3 and 2 2). 124
And this, wonder of wonders, is what Barth took for the "invention of
Antichrist": a doctrine that asserts what he himself did, namely, the "infinite
qualitative difference between God and human beings". Admittedly,
Przywara, following such authorities as Paul (2 Cor. 6:16; Col. 1:27) and
Christ himself (Luke 17:21; John 14:17-23), is not loathe to speak of God's
immanence to the creature; for, according to his metaphysics, creatures only
become who they are " i n " God as the source of their actualization. But God
does not thereby cease to be distinct from creaturely becoming. On the con
trary, it is God's very distinction from creatures that allows for the possibil
ity of their own actualization. As Pavel Florensky puts it, God is the "constant
quantum" to their "variable quantum", the "actual infinite" that is at once
the "domain of their change" and the ground of their "potential infinity". 125
So understood, the sublime depth of the divine infinity, which is "relayed"
in the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 2:10f.), is the ground of the creature's own progress
"from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18), whereby the measure of the creature's
increase in beauty is, finally, not so much the degree of union attained as the
degree to which God is intimately experienced as beyond us (following
Gregory of Nyssa's reading of Exodus 33). Far, then, from compromising the
difference between God and creatures (as Barth imagined), the analogy of
being forcibly holds it open; and it does so with regard to an ultimate gen-
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30 John R. Betz
erosity: for the sake of an asymptotic ascent of the creature to the threshold
of its origin, where its speculations break off of necessity into the silent ado-
ration of the Giver of beingand not into some form of modern or post-
modern auto-affection. It is the theoretical measure, one might say, of
authentic religious experience. For here one experiences that every analogy of
attribution gives way to a suspended analogy, an analogia proportionalitatis,
which defies comprehension, and one grasps oneself as one "is": as sus-
pended between nothing and the Creator out of nothing.126 This is how Przy-
wara concludes section 6 of his Analogia Entis, and this is why he can claim
elsewhere that the analogia entis is simply an explication of the theological
doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.127
The Theological Sublime

And here, finally, one attains a vantage from which to address the question
of a theological sublimenot according to a postmodern reading of Kant,
which reduces the sublime to the fissuring of subjectivity, nor according to
a postmodern ontology derived from Heidegger, which reduces the sublime
to the syncopation of immanence, but according to a metaphysics of the
analogy of being.128
Although my account of the sublime is more brazenly metaphysical than
that of Bauerschmidt or Crockett, my sympathies lie, as will become
clear in the following, with the former. I have already stated my dis-
agreement with Crockett's reading of the Kantian sublime, in compari-
son with which my reading is far more traditional. Our differences
regarding a theological sublime, however, are more fundamental, given
my contention that the theological sublime, indeed any account of the
sublime, cannot be separated from ontologyin this case the ontology
of the analogy of being. This is not to say that Crockett does not broach
the subject of ontology. For example, he says that this "sublimity is the-
ological, because it concerns us ultimately; it has to do with being and
non-being..." (p. 102). But his "theological" sublime, like the post-
modern sublime on which it is based, does not break free from the
bounds of immanence (cf. p. 29); on the contrary, it is conceived
expresslyin good transcendental fashionthrough the bracketing of
transcendence (cf. p. 107). It is conceived, furthermore, as part of a "the-
ological critique of all determinate forms of theological expression",
including the word "God", which, because it is a concept and subject to
the play of signification, evidently cannot refer to a "transcendental sig-
nified" (p. 106). Thus, God himself falls prey to this version of the "the-
ological" sublime, only to be replaced by the postmodern god of the
unpresentable, the formless as such, which solicits [sollicitare] all form
and all positive, "ecclesial" theology. Of course, the postmodern meta-
physical dogma implicit in this reading, which stems from Heidegger, is
2006 The Author
an elevation of possibility over actuality, which translates into a priori-

tization of the sublime over the beautiful, and ultimately of death over
life (cf. p. 110). Moreover, it implies a usurpation of God's eschatologi-
cal judgment by the potentia pura of the creature, which now presumes
to interrogate and shake to the foundations all positive revelation
indeed, to hold God himself hostage by the power of its own nothing-
ness. Postmodern philosophy thus shows itself to be the last holdout of
the Enlightenment, a final attempt to rid itself of transcendence (con-
strued as some ultimate "presence"), so that it can proceed unburdened
with its own critical projects, say, "a new world order, a global village,
or a universal economic market" (p. 112)before acknowledging (?) the
truly sublime God of Augustine, the God of Ps. 139, before whom no
creature can set up shop in some alleged autonomous sphere, even if it
be an Archimedean point so slippery as that of "the sublime" or "dif-
france". Granted, Crockett says that his reading "pursues the most neg-
ative of negative theologies in an apocalyptic w a y . . . " (p. 112), which
would seem to give his "secular postmodern theological thinking" (p.
29) squatter's rights within the theological tradition. Yet it is a reading
that has little in common with the apophatic tradition, because it con-
strues the sublime (apophatic) either in the absence of the kataphatic
(i.e., as pure negativity) or in dialectical opposition to it, whereas the
apophatic tradition has never stated categorically that "God is not an
object of experience, transcendent or otherwise" (p. 30)since to do so
would be to deny that Christ is the "exact imprint of God's very being"
(Heb. 1:3) in whom "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Col.
2:9)but always employed the apophatic in relation to the kataphatic
in the service of God's ever greater glory. In fact, inasmuch as Crockett
conceives of the sublime in dialectical opposition to the beautiful, his
reading is precisely not open, as a truly negative theology would be, to
the possibility of their identity in Goda God who is beyond every
dialectical opposition of form and formless (which obtains only in the
realm of the creature) and, it almost goes without saying, is not held
hostage to it. Instead, rather than opening out into the possibility of tran-
scendence, Crockett's reading inscribes the sublime fully within the
bounds of the finite subject (p. 30), in which "God" appears in wholly
anthropological terms "as the force of the negative imagination" (ibid.).
But, of course, the question naturally arises: can this be the sublime than
which afar greater can be conceived, the sublime of a God whose angels
alone are too wonderful to be described (Judg. 13:18)? Can the sublime
only deconstruct? Can it not, must it not, also inspire? In spite of Crock-
ett's excellent readings of Kant in light of Heidegger, Deleuze, Lyotard,
et al., I must therefore concur with Bauerschmidt (with one friend
against another) that a theological, specifically Christian sublime has to
do not simply with the unpresentable and all its deconstructive impli-
2006 The Author
32 John R. Betz
cations (which, taken by itself, would privilege a Reformed aesthetics of

the sublime, which translates into a doctrine of grace overriding nature,
of faith overriding reason), but with the givenness (in the form of "in-
and-beyond") of the unpresentable in what is presented, or, one might say,
with the givenness of the sublime in the beautifulwithout thereby relax
ing the tension between these terms (the impresentable and the pre
sented, the sublime and the beautiful), but precisely maintaining it,
inasmuch as their form remains strictly analogical (in the sense of
). Or shall the postmodern sublime, in cutting this tension, be
so determinate, so stable, as to exclude this admittedly surprising pos
sibility? Surely, a theological sublime, if it is to be a Christian sublime,
must look to Christ, in whom the unpresentable God is presented, and not
set any conceptwhether it be Seyn or the "unlimited" or the "form
less" or das Nichtsabove him. For the sublime, too, can be an idol
which by definition prevents one from seeing the living Godand
perhaps none has ever been conceived that is more refined or more intel
lectually alluring than this one (since it serves as a banner of intellectual
freedom, of one's independence from authority, and of one's right to
deconstruct any authority that would claim one's obedienceeven if
this authority should be that of a perfectly beautiful and sublimely infi
nite love).
According to Przywara's analogical metaphysics, the sublime appears ini

tially from the perspective of the "immanent analogy" in the epektasis of the
creature after its own essence, in the more, as it were, that the creature never
is, since its essence is always "in-and-beyond" it; and since, moreover, its exis
tence is always only a gift and never something in its possession. It appears,
in other words, from the vantage of the creature's radical ontological "sus-
pendedness", which in the absence of God would constitute either a tragic
Romanticism characterized by a longinga Sehnsuchtthat will not be sat
isfied; or a tragic, quasi-Romantic moralism as in Kant (to the extent that the
infinite is not a positive reality, but inscribed wholly within reason itself as
the infinite demand of the creature's own "moral progress"); or a form of
macabre Romantic existentialism of the kind one finds in Heidegger (for
whom that which lies "beyond" the creaturethe Wesen des Seynsis
encountered as nothing but the creature's own annihilation).129 Fortunately,
what saves this initial appearance of the sublime from final tragedy, as it
wereand thus saves an otherwise healthy Romanticism from darkly
rounding in upon itself in an ultimately negative construal of the infinite
is that it appears in intersection with the theological analogy (from above)
in terms of a dynamic, asymptotic ascent in Christ of becoming to infinite
Being. Indeed, as we shall see, Christ redeems and fulfills the native onto
logical tension of the creature, i.e., he fulfills the analogia entis, as the
archetype and end of creaturely being (John 1:3; Col. l:15f.), because he is
2006 The Author

the gift of the infinite (in a double sense!); and so it is first "in Christ" and with
regard to Christ that the sublime properly appears in terms of a positive infi-
nite as the "transcendence of immanence".
But inasmuch as the theological sublime is understood in terms of the
analogia entis, it is not simply a "mathematical" sublime of eternal progress
in Christ (2 Cor. 3:18), but also a "dynamic" sublime, which is manifested
within and according to the rhythm of the "theological analogy". In other
words, the theological analogy not only redeems the tension of the imma-
nent analogy but also provides the proper measure of the immanent analogy
and of every progress in infinitum. As Augustine puts it, so well as to be
worth repeating, "He is hidden in order that you might seek him; and in
order that you might not cease in your search once you have found him, he
is infinite."130 Such is the proper measure of the analogia entis as experienced
by the saints and by every genuine mysticso much so that if it is not expe-
rienced, if the saint or mystic does not run up against God's incomprehen-
sibility in a proper experience of the sublime (in the etymological sense of
sub-limine, "beneath the threshold"), and thus return ever anew to the rhythm
of the theological analogy, then whatever is experienced is precisely not infi-
nite and therefore (according to Augustine) not God.131 Indeed, however
proximate God is in his beauty (pulchritudo tarn antiqua et tarn nova)i.e.,
however present he may be and however intimately he may be experi-
encedhe is always that much more sublime (semper maior). Which is to say,
according to the terms of a genuine theological aesthetics, that God is at once
comprehensible and incomprehensible, beautiful and sublime. For the one
who is near (Phil. 4:5), who assumed flesh in Christ (John 1:14), who was
"seen" and "heard" and "touched" (1 John 1:1), in short, the one who has
revealed himself and made himself known (John 1:18), is the same who "dwells
in unapproachable light" (1 Tim. 6:16) with "clouds and darkness round
about him" (Ps. 97:2), who calls "darkness his hiding place" (Ps. 18:11), and
says, "my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than
your thoughts" (Isa. 55:9) and, in that sublime image, "Heaven is my throne
and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for
me, and what is my resting place?" (Isa. 66:1). Thus, for theology, the beau-
tiful (understood as a feeling corresponding to God's proximity, his given-
ness, his friendliness in his creatures) necessarily goes together with the
sublime (understood as a feeling in view of God's sheer immensity and utter
incomprehensibility)just as, for Augustine, God is at once freely immanent
to the creature (interior intimo meo) and supremely transcendent of the crea-
ture (superior summo meo).132
For a theological aesthetics, therefore, the beautiful and the sublime are
not dialectically opposed (mirroring a postmodern dialectic between the
determinate and the indeterminate, beings and nothingness); still less are
they defined in terms of conflict (in keeping with a pagan ontology of strife);
rather, they are analogically related within a proportion of mutual otherness
2006 The Author
34 John R. Betz
(in the sense of ). To underscore the aspect of relation one

could say that the sublime, though it exceeds the bounds of representation,
is also in the beautiful inasmuch as every experience of the beautiful is
always pervaded by the sublime wonder over its sheer facticity, its sheer
possibilityas one might wonder over the sheer gratuity and inexplicable
novelty of Mozart's music, i.e., over the fact that such an arrangement of
notes is, in fact, possible.133 (And in this respect, given that even the most
defined experience of the beautiful is pervaded by the sublime miraculum of
its gratuity, a theological account of the sublime is not all that different from
the Heideggerian aesthetic of Nancy.) To underscore the aspect of difference,
however, the sublime not only reveals the gratuity of created beauty, but also
interrupts it in the name of an ever greater beautyin the way, say, that
revelation disrupts every autonomous rationality in the name of an ever
greater Logosthe beauty of one whose essence is to be and whose beauty
is sublime.
And here, finally, one begins to see how ontology and aesthetics coincide
(in keeping with the scholastic doctrine of the convertibility of the tran-
scendentals): in an analogy between a real ontological distinction between
essence and existence and a real aesthetic distinction between the beautiful
and the sublime, each of which points beyond itself and its creaturely tension
to a prior and inscrutable identity in God. For in God, whose essence is to
be, there is no beauty that is not also sublime; just as there is no fittingness,
no convenientia, no pulchritudo of redemption that is not also incomprehen
sible, even to the angels (cf. 1 Pet. 1:12), as the apostle says: "O the depth of
the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his
judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Rom. 11:33); and, similarly, "no
eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human mind conceived, what God has
prepared for those who love him . . . " (1 Cor. 2:9). The language of Christian
ontology thus translates directly into the language of Christian aesthetics;
and the latter, inasmuch as it is a matter of subjective feeling, translates into
the language of genuine Christian faith (in reflexive corroboration of what
every child knows): that God is simultaneously to be loved in his intimacy
and revered in his majestyjust as Augustine and Newman speak of a
"fearing love and a loving fear", and thereby avoid the dangers of reducing
God to the terms either of a pure immanence (without reverence) or a pure
134
transcendence (without love).
Thus theology and postmodern philosophy can be agreed that ontologi
cal and aesthetic questions coincide. They can also be agreed that ontology
passes into aesthetics, and that aesthetics, in turn, passes into ethics (in the
minimal sense of one's comportment in life); in which case postmodern phi
losophy still clings to the vestiges of what it denies (viz., the mystery of the
coincidence of the transcendentals). But, of course, they quickly divide.135 For
postmodern ontology (as we saw in Part I), the sublime testifies to a chthonic
rupture of essence, as if the order of being were an illusory surface contin-
2006 The Author
ually betrayed by a more profound violence (which is perhaps the meta-

physical dogma of postmodernity).136 In the case of a theological ontology,
on the other hand, of the kind articulated above, the sublime bears witness
to the analogy of being. We saw thisfirstlyin the "immanent analogy", where
the sublime appeared as the moment of transcendence, i.e., as the moment
of "essence beyond existence", within the "analogy" between "essence in exis-
tence" and "essence beyond existence"just as the beautiful could be said
to represent the moment of "immanence", i.e., of "essence in existence",
within this same "analogy". It also appeared within the immanent analogy
in terms of the sheer gratuity and unrepresentability of existence qua exis-
tence. In other words, it appeared as an aesthetic register of the sheer "fac-
ticity" of creaturely being, which has no sure footing whatsoever, but is
strictly ex nihilo (and in this respect, bracketing any notion of a creatio, a the-
ological doctrine of the sublime bears a certain similarity to the aesthetico-
ontologies of Heidegger and Nancy). The sublime appeared secondly in the
"theological analogy" as the moment of difference within the analogical inter-
val between God and creatures. It appeared, that is, as the moment when
beauty gives way to sublimity, when the friendliness of God in his creatures
gives way to reverent distance, when the most proximate experience of his
immanence gives way to an experience of his unspeakable transcendence
or, in the language of the Areopagite, when kataphatic praise gives way to
apophatic silence.137 In sum, we found that the sublime registers the moment
of interruptive difference and transcendence within an analogical interval
between immanence and transcendence in both the immanent and theolog-
ical analogies.
Given, however, that the sublime is always experienced within an analog-
ical interval (in keeping with the whole of the Christian apophatic tradition),
one must emphasize that it is not to be found outside itin the name, say,
of a supposedly more radical postmodern apophaticism, which denies all
affirmation and is, consequently, indistinguishable from an "a-theological"
nihilism. For that matter, the more radically one construes the sublime in
negative terms, to the point of negating all analogy, the more surely it
appears in terms of the creature's own nothingness, its own formlessness, its
own potentialitas pura, whereby the sublime is invariably distorted into an
idolatrous glorification of immanence qua immanence (as we saw in Part I).
As experienced within the analogical interval between kataphasis and
apophasis, however, the sublime witnesses to the fact that immanence is
never pure, but fundamentally ecstatic (cf. Rom. 11:36). Accordingly, as a
moment within the immanent analogy of creaturely being (i.e., as a moment
within the tension between "essence in existence" and "essence beyond exis-
tence", which postmodernism collapses and denies), the sublime points
beyond the tensions of the immanent analogy to the Being of God himself: to
an identity, which is as unthinkable to postmodern philosophy as it would
be to Greek metaphysics, of form and infinity, order and profundity, beauty
2006 The Author
36 John R. Betz
and sublimity, indeed, one could say figuratively, of Apollo and Dionysus.
And here again the immanent aesthetic distinction between the beautiful and
the sublime is related to the immanent ontological distinction between
essence and existence. The only question is how one is to interpret this dis
tinction: whether one is to view the distinction as violent or as analogous. In
which case beauty is either tragic, doomed to be swept away by the sublime
of Hegel and postmodernity, or it participates analogously in what it reveals.
And if the beautiful and the sublime are analogous, as theology must
contend, if they go together ( ), how much more do they go
together in God. Indeed, the final word of a theological aesthetics is not that
of a grating opposition between essence and existence, the beautiful and the
sublimestill less that of a violent reduction of one to the otherbut a
dynamic and irreducible tension between them, which points by way of
analogy, past the tensions of immanence, to that peaceful sea in which beauty
discloses depth and depth gives itself to be seen as beauty.
And yet, a theological account of the sublime not only takes one beyond
the world in an ascent to the mystery of its origin (cf. Phil. 3:13f.) but, fol
lowing the incarnation, returns one to the bounds of immanencenot, cer
tainly, to the immanence of reason and an experience of its own apotheosis
(as in Kant's dynamic sublime), nor to a final glorification of immanence as
such (as in Deleuze and Nancy et al.), but to an immanence that is now seen
as subtended and pervaded by the omnipresent humility of the Logos, who
knows no limit.138 In other words, the Christian sublime consists not simply
in an epektasis of the creature in infinitum (the "transcendence of imma
nence"), but also in a shocking divine kenosis (the "immanence of transcen
dence"). As Bauerschmidt puts it (following von Balthasar), "The sublime
archetype is in the form; one might say that the form is the 'real presence'
139
of the archetype." (And this, certainly, is where Barth's meteoric rhetoric,
as a reflection of the novelty of the incarnation, has its proper place). Accord
ingly, a Christian account of the sublime is not simply about the unpre
sentable as the highest "onto-philosophical" term of the creature's vocabulary,
but also about the extraordinary and unforeseeable gift of the impresentable
in what is presented: in Christ and in his Church. And in this regard one
must speak not only of the marvel of the incarnation, but of the continuing
marvel of the Eucharist and the marvel that those who receive Christ become
temples of the Holy Spirit, indeed, tabernacles of the entire Trinity (John
14:23). In a word, one is faced with the wonder that the infinite God indwells
those who believe in him (cf. 1 Cor. 6:16). But more shocking still is the extent
to which God empties himself out of such love, to the point of appearing sub
contrario in the form of the "Logos-sarx" (John 1:14) and the "Logos tou
staurou" (cf. 1 Cor. l:18ff.); to the point, moreover, of assuming the form of
a slave (Phil. 2:7) and even of sin (2 Cor. 5:21). For this reason, one must
repeat, Christianity cannot be reduced to a so-called "metaphysics of pres
ence"; for it is precisely through such divine kenosis that the imagination is
2006 The Author

offered to the incomprehensible (1 Cor. 1-2). To be sure, the kenosis of God,

which culminates in the Cross and the descensus ad inferoswhich Hegel was
right to see as the window of true speculationdestabilizes every fixed
notion of deity, pointing ultimately not to any static self-presence, as to a ter
minus of reflection, the "god" of "onto-theology", but to the dynamic mutual
offering of a triune love, a love so perfect that it never rests in itself, but
always in another.140
But, then again, in fulfillment of the "immanent analogy", the Christian
sublime appears not only in the kenotic "immanence of transcendence" to
the point of Christ's death on the Cross (Phil. 2:8) and his descensus ad inferos
(Eph. 4:9), but also in the breaking open through Christ's death, resurrection,
and exaltation (Phil. 2:9) of immanence to transcendence (cf. Heb. 9:12). On
the one hand, priority certainly belongs to the first movement (the "imma
nence of transcendence"), inasmuch as it is the condition and sine qua non of
every creaturely ascent, i.e., that without which any epektasis of the creature
in infinitum is strictly an impossibility, a merely regulative and ultimately
tragic idea without any objective warrant in der Sache selbst. At the same time,
however, it is precisely in the opening of transcendence (by grace from
above), to the satisfaction of every natural creaturely longing (from below),
that the proper telos of divine kenosis is made manifest. As Christ says to the
disciples, as though disclosing to them the joy for the sake of which he
endured the humiliation of the Cross (cf. Heb. 12:2): "In my Father's house
there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that
I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2).
If, therefore, one is to locate the Christian sublime one must perforce locate
it in Christ and his Cross, i.e., in the crossing of these two movements: the
"immanence of transcendence" (from above) and the "transcendence of
immanence" (from below). As Christ says, "No one has ascended into heaven
except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13; cf.
Eph. 4:10). Indeed, for this reason, as the way of the infinite into thefiniteand of
thefiniteinto the infinite (cf. John 14:6)and just as Christians were once called
followers of the "Way" (Acts 9:2)he is the fulfillment of Jacob's ladder, the
true "house of God", and the true "gate of heaven" (Gen. 28:12f.). Indeed, it
was of Christ, the incarnate Logos, that Heraclitus was speaking when he
uttered that greatest of pagan oracles, "the way up and down is one and the
same" ( ); of Christ that Jacob was dreaming when
he saw "a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the
angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Gen. 28:12); and of Christ,
the incarnate Way, that Lao Tzu was teaching when he taught of the Tao.141
Or, to summarize the sublimity of Christ in the language of John the Baptist,
the greatest of Jewish prophets (cf. Matt. ll:llf.), and of John of Patmos (Rev.
5:6ff.), the greatest of Christian visionaries, Christ is the offering of transcen
dence (subjective and objective genitive!), and therefore he alone, beyond every
type and shadow, is worthy to be called the "the lamb" of God.
2006 The Author
38 John R. Betz
As the one who alone is "the way" of the infinite into the finite and of
the finite into the infinite, and who alone therefore is the "offering of tran-
scendence", Christ is utterly without analogy; and this is why, if no one were
to acknowledge him, even the stones would cry out (Luke 19:40). Indeed,
this is why, metaphysically speaking, he is the Lord, "the Most High,"
seated "high above" on a throne (Ezek. 1:26; Rev. 4:10). But if, in the lan-
guage of the first Vatican Council, Christ is "ineffably high above all things"
(in Przywara's translation, "beyond sublime" ["ber-erhaben ber alles"])1*1
and if everything is "beneath his feet" (Eph. 1:22), it is also Christ who
upholds all things from below (by his humility) and even fills all things
(Eph. 1:22), so that in him God is properly limitless. In the words of the
Psalmist, which are so central to Augustine's theology, "If I ascend to
heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take
the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even
there your hand shall lead me, your right hand shall hold me fast..." (Ps.
139:8-10). To be sure, this was said prophetically of Christ, who by his
descent is present even to the dead, and by his ascension is seated at the
right hand of the Father, with power and authority over all things (Matt.
28:18), as the res significata of the allegory of Joseph (Gen. 41:40). Thus it is
that Christ, the power of God (1 Cor. 1:24), is properly ubiquitous; thus it
is that Christ is the beginning and end of creation (Rev. 1:8; Col. 1:16); and
thus it is that Christ, as the one who is without analogy, grounds, redeems, and
fulfills the analogy of being.
He grounds it in that the "way" in which (in the theological analogy) he is
"in-and-beyond" creation is the archetype of the way in which (in the imma-
nent analogy) essence is "in-and-beyond" existence. Indeed, in this "way"
his eternal movement of love (from above) is the archetype of all creaturely
movement (from below), so that all creaturely movement, even when it is
"way-ward", betrays the structural marks of that love, which goes forth from
eternity to death on a Cross (Phil. 2:8), that love "which moves the sun and
the other stars", and that love which finds its fulfillment when its noble
image likewise goes forthas when "On a dark night, my house being now
all stilled ..."; as when " . . . at midnight... 'Look! Here is the bridegroom!'
. . . and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet"
(Matt. 25:6ff.); and as when the sons of Israel return in homage to their once-
forsaken brother, who is, to everyone's utter amazement, now exalted over
all the earth, in order to obtain (eternal) life from him, along with the rest of
the world, which had already come (Gen. 41:57-42:lff.). And, finally, he
redeems dina fulfills the analogy of being, i.e., the dynamic longing of creation,
which as a consequence of the fall "was subjected to futility" (Rom. 8:22), in
that the possibility of the creature's ascent "from glory to glory" (2 Cor. 3:18),
hitherto an impossibility, is suddenly freely given (Isa. 55:1)and the infinite
life of God is, so to speak, extendedaccording to the particular measure, the
"analogy", which Christ himself is: according to an ineffable kenosis "into
2006 The Author
the lower parts of the earth" and an equally ineffable ascent "far above all
heavens" (Eph. 4:10): "But each of us was given grace according to the
measure of Christ's gift. Therefore it is said, 'When he ascended on high he
made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to men.' (When it says, 'He
ascended', what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower
parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one who ascended far
above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things) (vv. 9-10). When, there
fore, the members of the Church sing the Sanctus, when they sing that heaven
and earth are full of God's glory, and when they sing in tongues, in myster
ies, they do not understand (1 Cor. 14:2,15), they sing not of themselves, but
of the one who fills all things, of the one who is in them (to the degree that
they receive him)nearer to them than they are to themselvesand yet
always infinitely, immeasurably beyond them.
Such, then, is the proper measure of the Christian sublime and of every
progress in infinitum: "He humbled himself Therefore God also highly
exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name that at the
name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under
the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the
glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:9-11). For it is in Christ, who is at once
kenotically immanent to creation and majestically seated beyond it, that tran
scendence knows no bounds (cf. Eph. 1:23); in Christ, that God offers himself
and we are offered back to God (2 Cor. 5:18)pace Nancy, the real "sublime
offering"; in Christ, the "Ana-Logos", that all things are "gathered up" in
loving obedience to the Father (1 Cor. 15:28); and, finally, in Christ that the
analogy of being is fulfilled as an analogy of love, whereby two natures oth
erwise different are nonetheless related ( ), to the point of
being in one another (John 17:21-26); and thus in him that transcendence ana
logically pervades immanence, that the sublime is in the beautiful, that "God
is all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28).
Thus, beyond the many fascinating stories about the "analogy of being",
like so many "myths and old wives' tales" (1 Tim. 4:7; cf. 1 Tim. 1:3-7,2 Tim.
4:3-4), the analogy of being turns out to be not only a fundamentally Chris-
tological doctrine, but also a fundamentally ecclesiological doctrine, inas
much as its proper subject is ultimately (in Przywara's phrase) "God in
Christ in the Church". Indeed, properly speaking, the analogy of being is
something that can be understood only from within the supernatural
analogy that the Church itself is, inasmuch as its members live in Christ as
he lives in them ( ). For it is only in the Churchin the sense
of a dynamic reciprocal relation of love between body and head, bride and
groom, whereby the two are onethat the natural longing of creation after
its own essence is fulfilled: when the creature (essence in-and-beyond exis
tence) finds itself, its essence, in love with the God who in Christ is in-and-
beyond creation. All of which may be summarized in aesthetic terms as
follows: the transcendent sublimity of Christ (which is ultimately an iden-
2006 The Author
40 JohnR.Betz
tity of beauty and sublimity) is "in-and-beyond" the immanent beauty of the

members of his body,143 who in turn discover their own euer increasing beauty
and glory (2 Cor. 3:18)in realization of their own proper sublimityin him
who is properly infinite, whereby "becoming" is first in truth (John 14:6) a
moving image of infinite Being.
NOTES
1 Jo. ev. tr. 63, 1: "Ut inveniendus quaeratur, occultus est; ut inventus quaeratur, immensus
Unde alibi dicitur, 'Quaerite faciem ejus semper' " (Ps. 105: 4). More literally: "The one to be
discovered is hidden so that he might be sought; and in order that he might [continue to]
be sought, once he is discovered, he is immense. Wherefore it is said [elsewhere] 'Seek his
face always/ "
2 To be sure, the order of the Christian cosmos, centered in the sacrifice of Christ on the
Cross, would appear no different; it too would seem to be an economy of sacrifice, accord-
ing to which the justice of God the Father is placated by the sacrifice of the Son. What dis-
tinguishes the real-life sacrifice of Christ from ever pagan myth, however, is that in the
case of Christ's sacrifice (which becomes a transparency of the original order and purpose
of creation), the entire meaning of sacrifice is transformed (fulfilling the sacrificial
economy of ancient Israel) into the voluntary gift and self-offering of love (on the part of
the Son and the Father, who freely gives his Son); and, as such, the Cross simultaneously
effects a revolution in cosmology. Cf. Col. 2:15. See in this regard, David Hart's debate
with Ren Girard in The Beauty of the. Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Gran
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), pp. 346ff.
3 Literally, "one thing to another". See Metaphysics IV 6,1016b.
4 See Ps. 8:3-4; 104; 131:1; 139:17.
5 As the well-known Barth scholar, Eberhard Jngel, who happens to be a great admirer of
Przywara, has put it, "Through the work of Erich Przywarawhich cannot be admired
enoughthe term 'analogia entis' developed in our century into a formula of theological
controversy, which has undoubtedly been invoked more often thaneven approxi-
matelyunderstood." See Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, sixth edn. (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1992), p. 357. For the best brief account of the terms of the debate and of Barth's own
doctrine of analogy, see Jngel, "Die Mglichkeit theologischer Anthropologie auf dem
Grunde der Analogie" in Barth-Studien (Gtersloh: Benzinger Verlag, 1982), pp. 210-232.
For the two most helpful and admirable book-length treatments of Barth, Przywara, and
the debate concerning analogy, which aim at some degree of conciliation (much as Otto
Hermann Pesch has tried to conciliate between Luther and Aquinas), see Bernhard Gertz,
Glaubenswelt als Analogie: Die theologische Analogielehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in
Auseinandersetzung um die analogiafidei(Dsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1969); Eberhard
Mechis, Analogie bei Erich Przywara und Karl Barth: Das Verhltnis von Offenbarungsth
gie und Metaphysik (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1974). I wish to express my
gratitude here to professor Jngel for occasional discussions about Przywara, and to Hans
Anton Drewes, whose seminar on Przywara, Barth, and von Balthasar in 1997 initially
alerted me to Przywara's importance.
6 KD 1/1, p. viii.
7 KD /2, p. 262.
8 See KD 1/2, p. 41: " . . . Not on the basis of an analogia entis that would be evident to us in
advance, not on the basis of a recognizable affinity and capacity for God's revelation that
is proper to the world as we know it from creation in spite of the fall, as though, with
regard to it, God would in some sense now be bound to this particular path!" In short, as
Barth goes on to say (and as he also stated against Brunner), there is no Anknpfungspunkt
in the realm of nature, nor is there any prior understanding of, or natural preparedness
for, the Word of God.
9 Von Balthasar, Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (Einsiedeln: Johanne
Verlag, 1976), pp. 46-47 (my translation); The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and
2006 The Author

Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1992),
p. 37.
10 Ibid. Cf. KD /1, 31, pp. 656-657.
11 For a view of Barth's theology as "nachdenkende Dogmatik", see Eberhard Jngel, Gottes
Sein ist im Werden, fourth edn. (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986). For a vivid account of
the incapacity of fallen reason to know anything about God apart from revelation, see
Luther's commentary on Jonah (1526), WA 19, pp. 206ff.
12 See KD, 11/1, 26, p . 89f. Perhaps the most important theologian to develop Barth's
insights in this regard is Robert Jenson. See his The Triune Identity (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1982), esp. pp. 136-139; idem., Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
13 The most common of these is undoubtedly the notion that the analogia entis subordinates
God to some "being" that is shared, however differently, with creatures. See, for example,
Henri Bouillard, S.J., The Knowledge of God, trans. Samuel D. Femiano (New York, NY:
Herder and Herder, 1968), p. 101 f., who follows Barth in identifying Przywara with
Quenstedt, claiming that (allegedly for both of them) "there exists between the creature
and the Creator a relationship which resides in a being which is common to both of them,
a relationship which can be known independently of revelation in Jesus Christ. The con-
sequence is inevitable. The criterion of every truth in this relationship is not God, but
the being in which God and man participate, one in an absolute, the other in a relative
fashion. Grace and sin, revelation and faith, can no longer be understood except as
modifications of this participation in b e i n g . . . . This leads one to a prudence whose
absence among the earlier theologians was excusable, says Barth. But it would no longer
be so today. Christology must be the living center of every theology, including teaching
on the knowledge of God. We must take account of it. The conception of analogy
defended by Quenstedt 'is identical to the cardinal dogma of Roman Catholicism, the
doctrine of the analogia entis.' " Bouillard then goes on to exculpate Aquinas from similar
charges, unfortunately without realizing that what Przywara means by the analogia entis
is simply an explication of Thomas' own teaching in this regard and in no sense a new-
fangled doctrine that subordinates God to some being (ens commune) shared by God and
creatures; so that if one is to condemn Przywara, one must also condemn Aquinas
himself.
14 Admittedly, Barth could not have read the actual text of the Analogia Entis until after he
had published the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, since it appeared the following
year in 1932; thus his understanding of Przywara's doctrine, and his condemnation of
it in 1931, was based upon earlier texts wherein the doctrine is stated, most notably,
Przywara's Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1927).
15 Erich Przywara, In und Gegen: Stellungnahmen zur Zeit (Nrnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955),
p. 278.
16 Przywara is explicit on this point (see Analogia Entis, p. 136). As for Aquinas, see Summa
Theologiae I, q. 13 a. 5 corp.; cf. Summa Contra Gentiles I, 34, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975): "In another way, the analogy can obtain
according as the order or reference of two things is not to something else but to one of
them. Thus, being is said of substance and accident according as an accident has reference
to a substance, and not according as substance and accident are referred to a third thing.
Now, the names said of God and things are not said analogically according to the first
mode of analogy, since we should then have to posit something prior to God, but accord-
ing to the second mode." Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1061 a; 1003 b.
17 Of course, to speak of God's self-interpretation through the creature is not immediately
false; for, as Paul says in 1 Cor. 2:11, it is only through the Spirit that we can know the
depths of God. Nor, indeed, is the beatific vision anything other than "the knowledge of
God through God" (Hilary of Poitiers). For Przywara, however, this does not negate the
natural knowledge of God; rather, it shows the natural knowledge of God to be an "anal-
ogous 'knowledge of God through God' ", inasmuch as God has clearly revealed himself
through creatures and so enabled the active response of the creature. See Erich Przywara,
"Weg zu Gott" in Schriften, Vol. 2 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), p . 24. Cf. with regard
to Barth's "theopanism", Humanitas: Der Mensch gestern und morgen (Nrnberg: Glock und
Lutz, 1952), p. 238: "But, of course, in their dialectical relation to one another, 'contra-
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42 John R. Betz
diction (between God and creature)' in the status viae and 'identity (between God and
creature)' before creation and in the status termini constitute the basic form of Hegel's
[philosophy]: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. [...] When, in the first volume of his dogmat-
ics, Karl Barth reduces all of salvation history [Heilsgeschehen] to the tri-personal life of
God, such that the Holy Spirit is understood as the 'subjective appropriation' of salvation,
one is but a step away from the way in which, for Hegel, the history of creation is [suc-
cessively] the 'kingdom of the Father, the kingdom of the Son, and the kingdom of the
Spirit'. For Hegel too, just like Karl Barth, opposes the sole agency \Alleinwirksamkeit\ of
this trinitarian objectivity to the pietism of subjective experiences." And thus, from Barth's
doctrine of the Trinity it is but a small step to "trinitarian Gnosticism ...".
18 Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1959), p. 328f.
19 This should be said in spite of Barth's response to Przywara's criticisms. See KD 1/1, 5,
p. 178f.
20 KD 1/1, p. 255.
21 Ibid., pp. 255-256; Humanitas, p. 174. For Barth's rebuttal, which denies Przywara's
charges, but takes his critique as an advisory not to proceed further in the direction of
Gogarten, see KD 1/1, p. 178f.
22 Humanitas, p. 174.
23 Ibid., p. 175; for Barth's rebuttal, discussion of trinitarian Gnosticism, see KD 1/1, p. 505.
24 Erich Przywara, "Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie" in Schriften, Vol. 2
(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), p. 442; translated as Polarity: A German Catholic's
Interpretation of Religion by A. C. Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).
25 Ibid., p. 443 (emphasis mine).
26 KD 1/2, p. 158f.
27 For Przywara does say (and here one can sense Barth's temperature rising) that "religion,
in the ultimate sense of the analogia entis, means the active consciousness of the divine
origin of the creature, the consciousness that in its ultimate essence it is a self-revelation
and self-condescension of God; which makes the creature, already in this 'natural' form
of religion, an objective preparedness for the actual incarnation, in which, as Hilary
of Poitiers puts it, God is worshiped by God, in which God... becomes the priest of
creation" ("Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie", p. 442f.). In other words, the
minimum of natural theology is the consciousness that creation is a self-revelation of God,
which is not to say (if one reads the text carefully) that a purely natural knowledge com-
prises an anticipation of the incarnation. Indeed, for Przywara, the fundamental recep-
tivity of creation, specifically, for the mystery of the incarnation and the mystical body of
Christ, is in no way visible from the vantage of the creature (apart from faith in what has
been revealed). As he puts it, "The final mystery of Catholic religion is not visible from
the perspective of the creature by way of calculation from below to above, but from God
alone, in reverent looking to him who is beyond all creation" (ibid). Thus, even if there
is some analogy between the orders of creation and redemptionwhich must obtain if
God is the author of boththey are in no way confused; and herein lies, one might add,
Przywara's basic contribution to the theology of nature and grace: that he always thinks
in terms of analogy, and not in terms of identity or contradiction.
28 KD 1/1, p. 33.
29 For that matter, should it not be supposed that for Przywaraeven if metaphysics can lay
bare the dynamic nature of creaturely being, which is to say, and how minimally, that crea-
turely being is not what it is, but is infieri,and thus points to a divine Is as its source
metaphysics can in no way envision the incarnation in advance, much less the heights of
participation in the divine nature that follow from it?
30 See Analogia Entis, p. 139f.
31 Of course, Przywara also did Barth a favor, which Barth in a way acknowledges: he pro-
vided a justification, which every Protestant theologian needs, especially one wishing to
write a multi-volume dogmatics, for not being Catholic.
32 As Otto Hermann Pesch puts it, "The Catholic Christian affirms salvation as a being in this
world and in his humanity, the Protestant Christian affirms it as a relation in spite of this
world and in spite of his (sinful) humanity." See Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin
Luther und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald Verlag, 1967), p. 716.
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33 See KD 1/1, pp. 251ff. For Barth, then, one is "similar" to God not on the basis of one's
being, but on the basis of one's faith, whereby one is first "conformed" to God.
34 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Akt und Sein: Transzendentalphilosophie und Ontologie in der sys-
tematischen Theologie (Mnchen: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1956), p. 52f. This text, originally
Bonhoeffer's Habilitationsschrift from 1931, provides a brilliant survey of this period in
German theology, including an insightful and altogether lucid account of Przywara's
doctrine. See, however, Bonhoeffer's study, Creation and Fall (New York, NY: Simon and
Schuster, 1959), p. 41, where Bonhoeffer clearly sides with Barth.
35 See, for example, Balthasar's original contribution to this topic, which was later incorpo-
rated into his book on Barth, "Analogie und Dialektik" in Divus Thomas Vol. 2 (1944);
Gottlieb Shngen, "Analogia Fidei" Catholica Vol. 3 (1934), pp. 176-208; J. Fehr, "Offen-
barung und Analogie" Divus Thomas Vol. 3 (1937).
36 See in this regard, from the Protestant side, Emil Brunner's discerning assessment in the
second volume of his Dogmatik: Die Christliche Lehre von Schpfung und Erlsung (Zrich:
Theologischer Verlag, 1950), pp. 54-56. While Brunner agrees with Barth's rejection of the
analogia entis (inasmuch as it derives from Neoplatonism), he issues the reminder that
some form of analogy is obviously implied in the doctrine of creation, which Barth cannot
possibly wish to deny and, in point of fact, goes on to recover in his own exposition of
the imago Dei in KD /1, pp. 206ff. For Brunner, who was always a more discerning voice,
one must simply be careful to distinguish between the analogia entis as the extra-biblical
principle of a natural theology and the properly biblical doctrine of the imago Dei and the
analogy that this implies.
37 Gottlieb Shngen, "Wesen und Akt in der scholastischen Lehre von der participation und
analogia entis", StGen Vol. 8 (1955), p. 650.
38 Ibid., "Analogia Fidei", p. 176.
39 Erich Przywara, "Natur und Uebernatur" in Ringen der Gegenwart: Gesammelte Aufstze
1922-1927, Vol. 1 (Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1929), p. 429 (my emphasis).
40 With regard to the notion that faith is solely the work of God, which is in many ways the
ensign of Reformed theology, one cannot fail to note one of the more compelling peri-
copes of the Reformed position, namely, John 6:44: "No one can come to me unless drawn
by the Father who sent m e . . . " Of course, as with Luther's reading of Rom. 3:28, Eph. 2:8,
etc., which adds to Scripture the word "alone", one must point out that what Christ says
in no way excludes the notion of a necessary human response to and co-operation with
grace; it simply indicates that no one can come to faith in Christ apart from grace. How
otherwise is one to explain Christ's countless exhortations to faith, his occasional surprise
at faith (Matt. 8:5ff.), and his frequent displeasure at the lack of it, all of which would be,
respectively, pointless, unsurprising, and wholly beyond culpability if faith were, as the
Reformed position would have it, the work of God alone. One must take care, therefore,
not to read illegitimately into the text more than the text allows; one must also note that
the language of John 6:44 is explicitly one of a "drawing", of God making the first move,
as it were, as the sine qua non of any faith, but most certainly not of "God working every-
thing alone", which is another unwarranted addition. To be sure, for all its apparent bib-
lical force (to which Barth lends his stentorian voice), the notion of God's sole agency, his
so-called Alleinwirksamkeit, is ultimately an unbiblical doctrine. At the same time, one must
be clear: This is not to deny what has always been Catholic doctrine, namely, God's All-
wirksamkeit, i.e., that he lovingly works all in all in a way that suavely (Wisdom 8:1) takes
into account the positive human admixture of faith and prayer, and the negative admix-
ture of sin; or, as Paul puts it, that he "causes all things to work together for the good of
those who love God and are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28), which is to say,
on a generous reading, that God works all things on behalf of everyone, inasmuch as all
are called, even though not all, due to their own ultimate refusal, are "chosen" (Matt.
22:14).
41 Reprinted in Analogia Entis, pp. 247-301.
42 Erich Przywara, In und Gegen, p. 278.
43 Ibid.
44 Von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 48.
45 Ibid., p. 279.
46 Ibid.
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44 John R. Betz
47 Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 94.

48 Ibid.
49 Von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, p. 257; p. 50.
50 That this is more than a piece of inter-confessional repartee is evident in view of Jngel's
admiration for "the great Przywara" and his corresponding judgment (issued from a
Protestant promontory, as it were) that Barth's understanding of the analogia entis is unfor-
tunate, if not to say confused. As he expresses it, the Protestant critique of the analogia
entis (including Barth's own) was "generally directed at precisely that against which this
very doctrine was itself directed". See Jngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, p. 384. He goes
on to point out (with some embarrassment) that not only have Protestant theologians com-
pletely misunderstood Przywara's doctrine, but the absolute otherness of God they
wished to affirm (against the analogia entis) could find no better expression than in the
very doctrine they despised (ibid., p. 388).
51 See Przywara, "Weg zu Gott" in Schriften, Vol. 2 (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), p. 88.
52 The closest Barth comes to this is in KD 11/1, p. 90 in light of Shngen's interpretation of
the relationship between the analogia entis and the analogia fidei.
53 Leo Zimny, ed., Erich Przywara: Sein Schrifttum (1912-1962), with an introduction by
Hans Urs von Balthasar (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1963), p. 5. As von Balthasar puts
it, "What is more unfortunate, however, is that Barth railed to see that Przywara's thought
as a whole, including the entire structure of the analogia entis, is fundamentally christo-
logical." In this regard, see especially Przywara, Summula (Glock und Lutz, 1946). For a
defense of Przywara in this regard, see von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, pp.
337-338.
54 Ibid.
55 See Jngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, p. 385.
56 See Karl Barth, Der Rmerbrief (1922) (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1989), preface to the
second edition, p. xx.
57 See Analogia Entis, pp. 7-10. Of course, this raises the question of whether Barth ever read
the Analogia Entis, since it appeared a year after his condemnation of the analogia entis (as
he came to understand it on the basis of Przywara's earlier work).
58 As Przywara explains in Gottgeheimnis der Welt: "To be sure, such is the fundamental dis-
position of the one who knows God: God nearer to me than all the world. God nearer to
me than I am to myself; God more real than all the world, God more real than myself:
God all in all, Deus meus et omnial But precisely out of the givenness of this knowledge of
God, out of this, shall we say, psychological immediacy to God, grows that disposition of
awe-inspired longing, that inextinguishable Inquietum, that infinite restlessness towards
God, which is never satisfied but blessed in its very restlessness: quaeritur inveniendus
et invenitur quaerendus ..." See Schriften, Vol. 2, p. 230. So, too, in the Confessions (III, 6)
Augustine speaks of the ineffable excellence of God (Deus superior) only after an experi-
ence of God's shocking intimacy (Deus interior), which is preceded by an intuition of God
in creation (Deus exterior).
59 See Przywara's text of the same title in Ringen der Gegenwart, Vol. 2 (Augsburg: Benno
Filser Verlag, 1929), p. 543f.
60 As Aquinas puts it, De veritate, Q. 2, a. 11 corp.: "No matter how much a creature imitates
God . . . a point cannot be reached where something would belong to it for the same reason
it belongs to God. For... whatever is in God is His own act of being; and just as His
essence is the same as His act of being, so is His knowledge the same as His act of being
a knower. Hence, since the act of existence proper to one thing cannot be communicated
to another it is impossible that the creature ever attain to the possession of something in
the manner in which God has it, just as it is impossible for it to attain the same act of being
as that which God has."
61 See S. T. I, q. 88, a. 2 ad 4 as well as S. T. I, q. 3, a. 4 corp.; See Analogia Entis, p. 200.
62 Inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit diss
itudo notanda. See Heinrich Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Defer-
rari (St. Louis and London: Herder, 1957), p. 171 (432). N.B.: Some manuscripts seem to
include the "tanta" in tanta similitudo, while others do not. In any case, Przywara gener-
ally reads it as tanta similitudo; he also tends to read the Ignatian "ever greater" (semper
maior) into the Lateran maior dissimilitudo.
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63 John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York,
NY: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 3ff.
64 Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Frank-
furt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1971), p. 233.
65 Denzinger, p. 443 (1782).
66 See in this regard especially Przywara's "Die Reichweite der Analogie als katholischer
Grundform" in Analogia Entis, pp. 247-301.
67 Augustine, Confessions III, 6.
68 See Augustine, In Ps. 121,12; Confessions, XII, 6; cf. Augustine's account of his vision at
Ostia, and, in particular, his account of the collective witness of creation in Book IX.
69 Przywara, In und Gegen, p. 173.
70 Ibid., p. 58; cf. Analogia Entis, p. 362-363, where Przywara shows that Heidegger's so-called
"philosophy" of the "Logos" is essentially a new mythology, which plays out between a
manifest mythos and a concealed mysterium.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., p. 60.
73 Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1994), pp. 282-283.
74 See John Milbank, "The Second Difference: For a Trinitarianism without Reserve", Modern
Theology Vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), pp. 213-234.
75 See Analogia Entis, p. 137. This not only demands a consideration of analogy in terms of
similarity and dissimilarity, as if that were sufficient to distinguish between the diversas pro-
portiones (because the aliquid unum would in this case still be prior to God), but suspends
the analogy itself before a difference so insuperable that the final term is an ever greater dis-
similarity. For this reason, Przywara says that the "resonance" of thefirstanalogy gives way
to the "silence" of the second (Analogia Entis, p. 210). Of course, the terms of this distinc-
tion go back to Aquinas, if not before, and there have been no lack of commentators who
have attempted to assess Thomas' final judgment on the priority of analogical models.
Cajetan, for one, was an exponent of the proportional analogy; Suarez, on the other hand,
of the analogy of attribution. In De ventate, q. 2, a. 11 corp., however, Aquinas clearly opts
for an analogy of proportionality as the most proper way to express the relation between
God and creatures, as distinguished from a more direct analogy of proportion.
76 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names (708 A), trans. Colm Luibheid (New York, NY: Paulist
Press, 1987), p. 79.
77 As Aquinas puts it (S. T, I, q. 8, a. 1 corp.): "Esse autem est illud quod est magis intimum
cuilibet, et quod profundius omnibus inest: cum sit formale respectu omnium quae in re sunt
linde oportet quod Deus sit in omnibus rebus, et intime."
78 Ps. 42:7. See Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru (Grand Rapids,
MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), pp. 5-13.
79 Considered from the standpoint of ethics, because the image of God is an abyss unto itself,
it defies mastery of all kinds, whether at its own hands (i.e., absolute self-knowledge) or
at the hands of another human being; and on this point at least, Lvinas and Christian
theology can be agreed.
80 Jo. ev. tr. 63,1.
81 Confessions, III, 6.
82 Sermon 117, 3; cf. Sermon 52,16. Cf. Analogia Entis, p. 170; cf. p. 435f.
83 In this regard it is notable that Jean-Luc Marion, at the climax of an essay devoted to dis-
mantling Derrida's objections to negative theology, invokes Przywara's favorite formula
for the analogia entis:1 inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notori, quin inter
eos major sit dissimilitudo notanda (Denz. 806). See "In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking
of 'Negative Theology' " in John Caputo and Michael Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift, and Post-
modernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 39.
84 As Bernard puts it, "I have climbed up to the highest that is in me, and see! The Word is
far, far above. A curious explorer, I have plumbed my own depths, and he was far deeper
than that. If I looked outward, I saw him far beyond. If I looked inward, he was further
in still. And I knew that what I had read was true, that 'in him we live and move and
have our being.' " See Bernard of Clairvaux: Selected Works, trans. G.R. Evans (New York,
NY: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 255.
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46 John R. Betz
85 Theology's uncanny resistance to rhetorical classification has not been lost on all post-
modern authors, however; as Derrida himself admits, theology (in the form of negative
theology) "exceeds even the order and the structure of predicative discourse", and for this
reason is not easily reduced to a "metaphysics of presence". See Derrida, "How to Avoid
Speaking: Denials," in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and
Literary Theory (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 5. For Marion,
however, Derrida's attempt to deconstruct negative theology is not so much an attack as
it is a maneuver of self-defense. See "In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of 'Negative
Theology' ", pp. 20-42. But if we live in a day when postmodern rhetoric against analogy
(and theology) is commonplace, it is perhaps worth noting that postmodernity is not
without analogy after all; for it too has a sacrament of binding and loosing that is carried
out by its priests. The difference is that it is forever binding with rhetorical stratagems the
dangerous supplement of theologydangerous, because it knocks at every secular phi-
losophy as a possibility that is denied (cf. Rev. 3:20).
86 Accordingly, we saw how fixed essences, along with the beautiful generally (as a species
of representation), are continually overturned in tragic, Hegelian fashion by the sublime
irruption of existence; and how this metaphysical prejudice is furthered in the "sublime
practice" of deconstructionwhereby fixed essences are continually deconstructed either
as fictions of reason (Kant) or as the artistry of power (Nietzsche). Of course, once such
an ontology (such a metaphysics) is adopted, once the specter of the Hegelian sublime
reappears (which was kept at bay only by the theological dialectic of Kierkegaard), it is
no wonder that postmodernity should evince a taste for violence, the triumph of the will,
and the "theater of cruelty".
87 Przywara, "Die Problematik der Neuscholastik" in Kant-Studien Bd. 33 (1928), p . 81.
88 See Niels C. Nielsen, "Przywara's Philosophy of the Analogia Entis," The Review of
Metaphysics Vol. 5 no. 4 (1952), p. 606f.
89 This is not to say that Aquinas conceives of creaturely being as fallen from an order of
essences; nor, certainly, is it to say that Augustine failed to conceive of creaturely being as
becoming. Rather, it is to say that Przywara's dynamic formulation of the real distinction
allows him to affirm the existential dignity of the creature to a greater degree than Augus-
tine (or even Thomas), for whom becoming does not have the same positive valuation
that one finds, say, in Gregory of Nyssa.
90 Analogia Entis, p . 28. In other words, the tension that constitutes the mutability of the crea-
ture is not between essence and existence in themselves, as if they were independently
given, but between "essence in existence" and "essence beyond existence", or more
precisely, between essence as transcending existence (and thus in some sense deferred or
absent) and essence as immanent to existence (and thus in some sense present or already
there).
91 Analogia Entis, p. 121.
92 See Nicomachean Ethics 1131 B; cf. Analogia Entis, p. 149f.
93 Cf. William Desmond's "metaxalogical" metaphysics as developed chiefly in Being and the
Between (Stonybrook, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), which is compara-
ble to Przywara's own in scope and depth.
94 Cf. Analogia Entis, p. 26: "Even Kant's pure categories of judgment bear the form of onto-
logical categories: quality, quantity, modality, etc. Even Hegel's retreat to the inner and
most formal species of judgment runs up against an expression proper to ontology: iden-
tity and opposition. Even the most formal comportment of consciousness as such
relation (that between act and object)has an ontological shape. And even what is most
proper to 'pure consciousness' (in the sense given this phrase by objective Idealism) suc-
cumbs to this reality: in the permanence of 'validity' there rings out the 'there'the 'Da'
of a Dasein (existence); in the ideality of 'validity,' the 'thus'the 'So'of Sosein (essence)."
95 See Przywara, "Drei Richtungen der Phnomenologie", Stimmen der Zeit Bd. 115 (1928),
pp. 252-264.
97 See Metaphysics III, 3 1005b; , 5 1061b-1062a; Analogia Entis, p. 104f.
98 Ibid., p. 26. For example, neither a "material idealism" of the transcendentals (as an
instance of "essence beyond existence"), which reduces subjectivity to a manifestation (or
self-mediation) of the object, nor a "functional idealism" (as an instance of "essence in
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Beyond the Sublime: Part Two 4t7
existence"), which reduces the true, good, and the beautiful to epiphenomena of the
subject qua intellect, desire, and feeling can stand on its own in alleged purity; rather each
is analogically related to the other. See Przywara, Mensch: Typologische Anthropologie
(Nrnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1959), p. 22f.
99 See Mensch, pp. lOff.; see also "Agape, Commercium, Analogie" in Christentum gem
Johannes (Nrnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1954), pp. 229-249.
100 See in this regard, Przywara's essay, "Philosophie als Problem" in Analogia Entis, pp.
303-312.
101 See John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001),
p.7.
102 For this reason, it is plausible to relate the truth of Christ (as perfect correspondence to
God the Father) to truth as an immanent linguistic event, inasmuch as the event of truth,
as a correspondence between the act of consciousness and the intuited object in a word
(as "logos", as a "gathering together" into one), is ultimately a reflection of the hyposta-
tic union of the Word, who "gathers together" in himself both God and human beings in
love (cf. Matt. 23:37). Indeed, following Franz von Baader, one might view the event of
cognition, of consciousness, as a loving exchange, commercium, between the act and object
of knowledge: when the object gives itself to be seen and the act of consciousness gives
itself in attendance. See along these lines, Przywara, Mensch, pp. lOff. Cf. Bruce Marshall,
" 'We Shall Bear the Image of the Man of Heaven': Theology and the Concept of Truth"
Modern Theology Vol. 11 no. 1 (1995), pp. 93-117.
103 See Mensch, p. 22f.
104 For Edith Stein's discussion of the Analogia Entis, and how Przywara's work influenced
her own, see Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: an attempt at an ascent of the meaning of
being, trans. Kurt F. Reinhardt (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies Publica-
tions, 2002), p. xxixf.
105 Ibid., pp. 142-143; cf. p. 102f. Przywara reads in the sense of an "ordered sequence",
and in the sense of "upwards".
106 Ibid., pp. 29-36. Of course, within the various types one must make a further distinction,
given the difference between Plato's eidos and Aristotle's morphe.
107 Ibid., pp. 36-97.
108 See "Phnomenologie, Realogie, Relationologie" in Analogia Entis, pp. 373-392.
109 What may be lost amid this terminology (and understandably so) is that while Przywara
was a penetrating scholastic, he was also a musician, and while his scholasticism may win
out (at least as far as first impressions go), his scrupulously worked-out ontology is meant
to convey but one thing: that being is music; that the beauty of being lies in the rhythms
of its various proportions (analogies); and that one truly understands the analogy of being
when one "hears" in the structures of finite being the rhythmic echo of a triune life. As
such, the analogy of being refers not to an ontic hinge of the universe (a God "before
whom no one can dance"), but to a perichoresis of love. Indeed, it is not that being has
analogy, but that Being is analogy, which is to say, a triune relation of mutual otherness.
See Analogia Entis, p. 325.
110 In other words, in its constant re-tracing of the "distance" between consciousness and
being, transcendental philosophy (whether in Kant or Husserl) simply repeats on the
noetic level the ontic "back and forth" between essence and existence. As Przywara puts
it, "The methodological problem between phenomenology and realogy is rooted in this
metaphysical problem between 'essentia' and 'existentia'and, conversely, it is first by
rooting the methodological problem in the metaphysical problem that the metaphysical
problem achieves its complete centrality in anything properly called philosophy" (Analo-
gia Entis, p. 388).
111 By this I do not mean, of course, that every scholastic theologian upheld the "real dis-
tinction" in the sense commonly attributed to Aquinas. (Indeed, while the term clearly
follows from Aquinas' doctrine, he himself does not seem to have authored it; rather, it
emerged in the course of the subsequent Thomist tradition and, in particular, its debate
with Scotism.) I simply mean that the problematic signified by this term is, for any honest
philosophy, inescapable.
112 Following Aristotle, this corresponds to the fact that the actuality () of the crea
ture is never pure, but always "suspended" between its potency () and its final
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48 John R. Betz
end (). Admittedly, these terms may have lost much of their descriptive power
for us today, but for Przywara, as well as for any Thomistic metaphysics, they maintain
their validity insofar as they describe a fundamental mutability, a cor inquietum of crea
turely being. In this regard, following Augustine, Przywara goes so far as to identify crea
turely being with mutability itself. See Analoga Entis, p. 167: "Creaturely being is a
'cascading torrent' (torrens ... colligitur, redundat, perstrepit, currit et currendo decurritin
Ps. 109,20); indeed, one could even say that it only 'was' and 'will be', but never 'is' (ante-
quam sint non sunt, et cum sunt fugiunt, et cum fugerint non eruntDe liber, arb. Ill 7, 21).
This is why Augustine distinguishes between the "Est" of God and the "est non est" of the
creature. See In Ps. 121,12; Confessions, XII, 6.
113 Of course, one must add (again to allay Barth's fears) that whether or not creaturely being
becomes what it "is" is strictly a function of whether or not one is "in Christ", and not a
function of any creaturely potentiality toward this end, since it is not automatically
ordered to God and cannot attain its essence apart from the actuality of grace (and the
creature's free response to it).
114 Cf. Eccles. 3:11, in one translation: "He has also set eternity in the hearts of m e n . . . " Or
as Augustine puts it, the creature does not have its being "in itself", but rather "in Him"
noetically, because God is our light, and ontically, because he is our life: si... accedendo
illuminamini et recedendo tenebramini: non erat in vobis lumen vestrum, sed in Deo vestro
Si accedendo vivitis, recedendo morimini, non erat in vobis vita vestra (Jo. ev. tr. 19,12; quoted
in Analogia Entis, p. 119). Cf. Aquinas: dicuntur omnia esse in Deo, in quantum continentur ab
ipso (S.T. I, q. 8, a. 1 ad 3); cf. Plato, Theaetetus 1601x.
116 See Erich Przywara, Was ist Gott?: Summula (Nrnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1953).
117 This is true, not least of all, inasmuch as every act, every movement from to
already participates (to however impoverished a degree) in the divine movement
of creation, in the self-transcendence of love.
118 As Aquinas puts it, "Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent
in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing Hence it must
be that God is in all things, and innermostly" (S.T I, q. 8, a 1 corp.).
120 See Mensch, p. 73; Heraclitus (Diels 70 60), in G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and Norman
Schofield, eds. The Presocratic Philosophers, second edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer
sity Press, 1983), p. 188.
122 S. T. I, q. 8, a. 1 corp. (my emphasis). The rhythm of creation hereby assumes a deeper,
infinite resonance, as its own rhythmic correlations begin to echo the gift and return of
transcendencea gift and return that points ultimately to the triune, analogical (
) economy of God's own life.
123 Or, following Augustine, one might simply express the distinction as that between Est and
est non est. Cf. Analogia Entis, p. 106.
124 See Analogia Entis, p. 260; De ventate q. 2, a. 11 corp.
125 Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, trans, by Boris Jakim (Princeton, NI:
Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 351-354. Cf. Przywara's discussion of divine infin
ity as the basis of creaturely becoming in Gott (Kln: Oratoriums Verlag, 1926), pp. 18-19.
126 Analogia Entis, pp. 137-141.
127 See Pryzwara, Schriften, Vol. 2, p. 403f.
128 The question of a theological sublime has been posed most recently by Frederick Bauer-
schmidt in his essay, "The Theological Sublime" in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology
(London: Routledge, 1999), and by Clayton Crockett, A Theology of the Sublime (London:
Routledge, 2001), which Bauerschmidt reviewed in Modern Theology Vol. 19 no. 3 (July,
2003), pp. 438-441.
129 See Przywara, Schriften, Vol. 2, pp. 382-384.
130 Jo. ev. tr. 63,1; cf. in Ps. 99, 6 (100, 6): "Before you sensed God, you thought that you could
express him; once you begin to sense him, you sense that you cannot express what you
sense." Quoted in Przywara, "Weg zu Gott" in Schriften, Vol. 2, p. 30.
131 That being said, it is the saints who best understand the analogy of being, who know it
to be true, since for them it is not so much a theory as it is an experience; and since God's
2006 The Author

transcendence of the creature (Deus superior) is never so genuinely understood as from

within, and in spite of, an experience of God's radical immanence to the creature (Deus
interior).
132 Of course, when speaking of this dynamic between God's immanence and transcendence,
his beauty and sublimity, one must be careful to observe the analogy between the orders
of nature and grace; for even if it is possible naturally to intuit a certain immanence of
"the divine", and even if it is rational to affirm a transcendent "first cause" of the world,
it is the believer alone who can properly appreciate the depths of God's immanence and
the heights of his transcendence, not to mention their intersection in Christ. Indeed, it is
in Christ alone that one can properly express what is meant by the "in-and-beyond" of
the analogy of being, and for this reasonwhich Barth seems never to have appreciated
Przywara's analogia entis is, one must repeat, a fundamentally Christological doctrine.
133 I owe thanks to the physicist Vladimir Gladyshev of the University of Virginia for a fruit
ful conversation about this. For that matter, even the movement of music is analogous (in
the sense of ), inasmuch as it is marked by an interplay (of varying degrees
of richness) of the beautiful and the sublime: on the one hand, by a familiar, pleasing
accord and, on the other hand, by an unexpected, hitherto unimaginable, and perhaps
overwhelming interruption, which does not negate what has gone before it, but brings
with it the expectation of an even greater beauty. All of which may be taken as a metaphor
for the music of time itself (as a single analogical economy between nature and grace):
between the beauty of the ordered sequence of chronos and the sublime reconfiguration
brought about by the interruption of kairos.
134 See Przywara, Ringen der Gegenwart, Vol. 2, p. 543. By implication, this simple formula not
only provides a guideline for genuine piety, but also a rule for proper celebration of the
liturgy.
135 Nowhere is this so evident as in view of their respective conclusions: whereas a theolog
ical ontology leads, upon sufficient reflection, to the childlike disposition of the saint, as
in St. Thrse of the Child Jesus, postmodern ontology leads to the "ethics" (or rather lack
thereof) of Heidegger. To be sure, the latter could be said to resemble the former, inas-
much as postmodernism, following Nietzsche, longs for a certain child-like innocence;
after all, the child is the final stage of Zarathustra's three "transformations". But because
it is an "innocence" born of a stubborn refusal of the possibility of any transcendent
authoritynever mind whether this authority be that of a loving Father (Lukel5:llff.)
it is modeled ultimately not on the childunless one means by this an enfant terriblebut
on the figure of the rebellious adolescent. In short, it is modeled not on the figure of Mary,
who said "yes", but on the figure of the adolescent, who says "no".
136 As Nietzsche strikingly puts it in 40 of Beyond Good and Evil, "Everything profound loves
the mask; the most profound things of all even have a hatred for image and likeness"
(Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 5, p. 57). As such a statement shows, the language of
Antichrist (Nietzsche's own self-designation) is always the language of the most profound
anti-humanism. Indeed, it reveals an ultimate self-hatred at the heart of postmodern phi-
losophy: the hatred of the self as the image of God.
137 See Przywara, "Weg zu Gott" in Schriften, Vol. 2, p. 272f.
138 That is to say, the sublime consists not simply in God's qualitative distance from creation,
but in his kenotic presence to it, so that his infinity is not limited by immanencethis
would be what Hegel calls the "bad infinite"but pervades it (Matt. 13:33), and does so,
moreover, in such a way that immanence is continually disrupted by the unexpected offer-
ing of transcendence (subjective and objective genitive).
139 See "The Theological Sublime", p. 208. From this conclusion Bauerschmidt rightly extends
his discussion of the sublime to the real, bodily presence of God in Christ, the Church,
and the Eucharist. See pp. 209-216.
140 Thus, as soon as a postmodern critic would cry "onto-theology", it turns out that the
"object" of such a critique is already gone forthwith how much more (semper maior)
alacrity and abandon than its noble image ("On a dark night, w h e n . . . " ) . Indeed, fol-
lowing John Milbank, one could claim that the celerity of supplementation, of diffrance,
is always analogous to and never catching up with the "offering" and original difference
within God, which has always already occurred. See Milbank, "The Second Difference:
For a Trinitarianism without Reserve", Modern Theology Vol. 2, no. 3 (1986), pp. 213-234;
2006 The Author

50 JohnKBetz
cf. idem, "Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic," Modern
Theology Vol. 11, no. 1 (1995), pp. 119-161.
141 See Hieromonk Damascene, Christ the Eternal Tao (Platina, CA: Valaam Books, 2004).
142 Denzinger 3001 (1782): "... super omnia, quae praeter ipsum sunt et concipi possunt, ineffa
biliter excelsus". Analogia Entis, p. 402.
143 For a discussion of the peace of the ecclesial community as the beauty of Zion, see Stephen
E. Fowl, "God's Beautiful City: Christian Mission after Christendom", The Ekklesia Project
No. 4 (2001).
2006 The Author

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Beyond The Sublime (Part 2)

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Modem Theology 22:1 January 2006

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

BEYOND THE SUBLIME: THE

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thetic theory explodes all teleology in the name of a fundamentally violent

Anselm of Canterbury, "than whom nothing greater can be thought" (quo

Karl Barth and the "Invention of Antichrist"

theology), so that the revelation of God in Jesus Christ appears ultimately

of revelation. And in this respect one can speak, albeit guardedly, of a

"image of [divine] aseity", if it is a "pure relation", then it is ultimately

Analogia entis is an abbreviated way of stating what the IV Lateran

genuinely Christian. Nor does it signify a "theological-philosophical

It is curious that Przywara should have felt misunderstood even by von

except by a Promethean force of delusion, attain to any pure starting point.

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Martin Heidegger and "Onto-Theology"

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But if it is acknowledged that the analogia entis is a form of negative the-

theater of representation and the panoptic oppression that this inevitably

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Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being

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torical oscillation between an (idealist) philosophy of essence and a (realist)

Thus, at the heart of the "immanent analogy", which we defined above as

Przywara's analogy of being, which at face value appears to be a purely

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beyond" creation, i.e., at once immanent to creation, yet excessively, abun-

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The Theological Sublime

an elevation of possibility over actuality, which translates into a priori-

cations (which, taken by itself, would privilege a Reformed aesthetics of

According to Przywara's analogical metaphysics, the sublime appears ini

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(in the sense of ). To underscore the aspect of relation one

ually betrayed by a more profound violence (which is perhaps the meta-

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offered to the incomprehensible (1 Cor. 1-2). To be sure, the kenosis of God,

tity of beauty and sublimity) is "in-and-beyond" the immanent beauty of the

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47 Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 94.

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transcendence of the creature (Deus superior) is never so genuinely understood as from

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2006 The Author

Copyright and Use:

The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously

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