Analogy without remainder : resisting univocity in British theology

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century British theologians, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, strove to reclaim ‘analogy’ as a useful category for exploring God’s likeness-in-dissimilarity to creatures in new philosophical and cultural contexts. ‘Analogy’ as a theological term of art arose in thirteenth-century Latin scholasticism: any word used in common of God and creatures must mean something different in each case, given the absolute difference of God from creatures, but there must be some commonality to explain why one word (e.g., ‘good’) is chosen over another (e.g., ‘evil’). A dispute between followers of Thomas Aquinas and partisans of John Duns Scotus arose, spanning the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, about whether analogical terms require a ‘univocal’ core: a sense shared between divine and creaturely predicates that serves as an unmodified, unchanged heart of what that predicate means in any context. The import of this disagreement was in maintaining valid arguments in theology: while Scotists argued that a univocal core was necessary to avoid equivocation, Thomists insisted that analogical terms could perform this role without univocity. 1943 saw a revival of ‘analogy’ in British theology with books from Anglican priest-scholars Austin Farrer and Eric Mascall. Since then, prominent figures and movements in British theology—the ‘grammatical Thomists’ Herbert McCabe, David Burrell (an American, but influential in Britain), Nicholas Lash, and Stephen Mulhall; the Archbishop of Wales and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams; and the ‘Radical Orthodox’ theologians John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock—have maintained ‘analogy’ to be a significant touchpoint in their theology. Despite significant disagreements, they share common features in their interpretations of analogy, since they reject the element that all scholastic thinkers agreed was indispensable: the need for analogical language to secure valid arguments; thus, they adopt an even more radical resistance to univocity than their Thomist forebears. Since they reject the possibility of logical proofs via analogy while insisting that theological language remains analogical, these modern theologians find new rationalities for theology in perception, artistic creation, communal practice, and political action. The upshot of this tradition is that theology and the related field of metaphysics undergo a transformation from being argumentative sciences to becoming aesthetic and active ones.