SOME
CONTRIBUTIONS
OF
BALTHASAR
AND
FARRER
ON
THE
SUBJECT
OF
ANALOGY
OF
BEING
by
THE
REVD
KEVIN
TORTORELLI,
O.F.M.
ANALOGY
works by moving a word over from one context to
another with a control
of
meaning. Thus,
'John
is a snake' or
'Tom
is a lion' are meaningful analogies and their meaning is sufficiently
straightforward to start a pub row in the one case or to
honour
a
pensioner in the other. Analogy is the
stuff
of
memorable verse as
in Seamus Heaney's 'between my finger
and
thumb the squat pen
rests. I'll dig with
it.'
It
is the
stuff
too
of
Holy Scripture where we
may read 'all flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the
field' .
But does analogy also work by moving a word,
not
over
but
up,
with a similar control
of
meaning? There is biblical warrant for it:
'as a father cares for his children so does the Lord care for those
who fear
him'.
But is there warrant for the
'up
relationship' apart
from Scripture? Is the philosophical procedure which ascribes pure
perfections to God admissible? Are its results, as, for example,
that
God is absolute being, absolute understanding, absolute truth,
absolute love, in fact true?
In these pages I should like to set
out
some
of
the contributions
which Hans Urs von Balthasar and Austin Farrer have made to the
discussion
of
analogy in service
of
the up relationship
or,
more
commonly expressed, the analogy
of
being. And I should like to begin
with Balthasar's discussion with Karl Barth on analogy of being as
a prelude to a presentation of the development
of
Balthasar's own
view.
Karl Barth
had
objected to the view
that
any word, indeed any
notion
of
being, could ever express what is decisive in the up
relationship which is only illumined in the act
of
faith. He
contended
that
any notion
of
being offends the divine majesty by
subsuming God under the merely finite and relative. More sharply,
in the hands
of
sinners, any notion
of
being subverts the order
of
grace by demanding
that
God conform to
our
idolatry,I
Balthasar
took
issue with him
and
argued
that,
in denying the
analogy
of
being by positing an infinite, qualitative distance
between God and creation Barth is left with a concept
of
nature
that
is either a total identity with the
cr~ator
or else a separation
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