Brian Hamilton-Vise

Analogia Entis: Hunsinger, Spencer, Hart

The much anticipated session has come and gone, and was quite as enjoyable as I could have hoped. The presentations were thick and quick-moving, so my notes are incomplete and my memory is fading fast. I kept up with Hunsinger for the most part; Spencer spoke quickly enough and glossed enough that I missed much of what he said; Hart’s language was usually too mesmerizing for me to have taken the time to make copious notes. Still, I think I can get the major points down. Hopefully others who were there heard better what I missed.

George Hunsinger started, as Joshua Ralston notes, with a crowd-pleasing set of criticisms. “I do not believe in the analogia entis,” he announced. “And even if I did, I think we would be obligated to ignore it.” The analogia entis is a dangerous idea, and Hart’s work falls victim to just the dangers that Hunsinger fears. Hart’s work, I say, and Hunsinger was careful to specify: his criticisms were of the implied author of this book, The Beauty of the Infinite, and he expected that David Bentley Hart the person would have other ways to avoid or allow his criticisms. He entitled his presentation “David Bentley Hart: An Attempt to Understand Him.”

Hunsinger made sure to begin with affirmations. He quite liked the book, thought it had many good things to say. He liked, for example, Hart’s way of speaking about the filioque, which gained much ecumenical ground, and he liked Hart’s criticisms of Jenson on the Trinity, and he liked Hart’s unusual (for the Eastern Orthodox) affirmation of Anselm.

It’s Hart’s metaphysics that make Hunsinger so uncomfortable, the metaphysical strand that runs through Hart’s Christology and doctrine of creation, which impels Hart towards a focus on ontology (he says) rather than a straightforward Christology. “Why does the implied author of this book talk so much about the form of Christ and the pattern of Christ as opposed to Jesus Christ himself?” But again, Hunsinger stressed, he’s really not sure if he’s understanding Hart’s argument correctly.

With the analogia entis, are we talking about an analogical interval or an analogical divide? Hart acknowledges that there’s a difference in kind between God and the created order, but there’s also an element of proportionality or continuity. The analogia entis, in other words, comes to function as a principle of mediation–but Christ is the sole mediator between God and humanity. For Barth, Hunsinger says, the connection between God and creation is mediated entirely by the sovereign will of God.

The thrust of Hunsinger’s concern seemed to be the eclipse of Jesus Christ as the one mediator, and he went on to ask in several different contexts whether Hart was finding ways for the human ascent to God to be accomplished in other ways. Does the incarnation suggest for Hart that our souls can take on their own ascent to God? (This question came with a warning about neo-Platonism.) Is Hart replacing koinonia as the name of our relation with methexis? Does Hart suggest that church or its members can somehow reproduce the hypostatic union of God and humanity in Christ, which is unique in kind? Does conceiving salvation as a practice call into the question the completed work of Christ? Hunsinger didn’t frame all of these as questions, but all as challenges on a theme: these were the illustrations of the dangers of allowing the analogia entis into our theology, that we end up circumventing Christ or proving him irrelevant for our journey to God if we allow some other continuity of being.

Archie Spencer had to abbreviate his paper quite a bit and speak quickly besides, both conditions which made him hard for me to follow. He also had some pointed things to say to Hart, though he thought the book highly worth reading. Mainly, I think, he was frustrated with Hart’s lack of attentiveness to Aquinas paradigmatically and to the whole history that followed him. “Hart,” Spencer said, “thinks that he can read off [the early Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa] as though their reinterpretations through the history of theology matters little.” In what sounded to me like an over-identification of Hart with Milbank, Spencer accused Hart of “colonizing history” by “scouring history to find what modernity has lost.” This is what Hart does when he believes it possible to recede before Aquinas to recover the tradition of Christian ontology, as if the way that Thomas or anyone after him read that tradition was irrelevant.

Spencer didn’t leave these claims unsubstantiated; most of what I failed to follow was his attempt to demonstrate exactly what Hart missed in Aquinas and how that mattered. Still, I think this captures the core of his critique. His summary quoted Balthasar at length on careful ecumenism and listening, and demanding that we not read too quickly past Thomas or Kant or Barth in order to get back to the patristics.

Somewhere or other, Spencer also charged Hart with thinking that he could avoid the dangerous aspects of neo-Platonism while still embracing the neo-Platonic theurgic tendencies as compatible with Christian truth. (This made it seem even more like Spencer was parroting certain criticisms of Radical Orthodoxy where they completely miss Hart’s work. It’s Milbank who invokes the theurgical dimensions of neo-Platonism over and over, not Hart.)

David Bentley Hart wandered up with a tissue box and let us know that he was ill, and proceeded to keep us laughing for the first several minutes of his presentation. He had only scribbled notes and nothing formal prepared, so his lecture was somewhat disconnected though quite coherent in its individual responses. And as I said, I was too taken by his language to take many notes. So I understood him well, I think, but I can’t reproduce his comments.

His main theme, it seems to me, was to clarify the nature and purpose of the analogia entis: it does not aim to find a new mediator between God and humanity; rather, it is shorthand for “what sort of ontology would follow from the assertion that God is truly transcendent, that all being comes from him, and from the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.” “There is no mediator between us and God but God,” he agrees, but it is insufficient to say (as Hunsinger did) that all that mediates between God and creation is God’s sovereign will, for it is vacuous not to extend that into the category of being–God’s will is what willed us into being, with a certain stamp of the divine nature. Will we simply gloss over all those parts of our Scriptures that speak of the divine image imprinted on humanity? These do say something about ontology, manifestly. “We are fortuity and grace; our nature is a gift and only a gift.” But our nature is a gift of God and bears an image of him, and this is what we mean when we say that our nature is related analogously to God’s: that there is a certain continuity, not of essence but of creation, so analogy expresses both the continuity and discontinuity that is already clear in our central doctrines.

(I’m piecing together from my memory phrases and arguments from different stages of his presentation. Correct me if I’m getting something wrong.)

In response to the charges of neo-Platonism, Hart admitted their truth unashamed. “I am not afraid of the term neo-Platonism–I am a Platonist in some sense–because I believe that Platonism has always been part of Christianity by the providential will of God.” Indeed, it has been one of the “disastrous foibles” of Protestantism to deny that heritage altogether, to deny that it is present already in the New Testament.

Finally, I should make mention of Hart’s regular insistence that his treatment of the analogia entis is an eight page section in a book over four hundred pages long. Christology was a constant theme throughout his sections on creation and salvation, where the analogia entis was a brief transition between the doctrines of Trinity and creation. There is no way that the analogia entis threatened to overcome Christ as mediator. This was no concession, since Hart truly believes in the analogia entis–and as he said at the beginning of his presentation, so does George Hunsinger–but he did want to set it in the same role of importance that he had in the book: which, next to Christology, is infinitesimal.

Hunsinger, in the end, suggested a final exchange to clarify the nature of the disagreement. For Barth, Hunsinger said, the answer to the question ‘What ontological conclusions flow from the doctrine of creation?’ is none at all. He expanded on this a bit, but I didn’t write it down and I can’t remember what he said. Hart’s basic response was, ‘of course there are ontological conclusions, whether you want to call them that or not.’

20 November 2006 | Comments (29)
Tags: David Bentley Hart