Despite the suggestion, I do not think I have any more wish to completely overturn the established than does Heaps. In fact, if I may be so bold, I think Heaps and I want the same things: balance and nuance, which means both tradition and challenge, both fluidity and stability, as he puts it. It is the way in which we envision the relationship between them, the way that we envision what balance means, that is different.

Heaps claims that chaos and order are no longer at one another’s throats in the same way as in antiquity. I wish this were true, but I struggle to see the source of his optimism. Theologically, it seems that those who defend chaos and those who oppose it are more at one another’s throats than ever. And one need only look at our current political situation to recognize ourselves as part of a people trying desperately to carve out a space of order by slashing at the throat of some real or perceived chaos.

Regardless, I think that both Heaps and I intuit that the opposition between the two in which each makes a caricature of the other is unsatisfactory, and that in some way Przywara does not fall prey to this stand-off and therefore perhaps offers a way through it. Thus, while I may privilege the dynamic against the static (and I do not see how it could be otherwise since these are opposites), this does not mean that I privilege the dynamic against the stable, or the already-so, or the established since for Przywara it is this dynamic (and be careful here not to conflate dynamism with Keller’s chaos) that is the most primordial already-so, the most established, the most stable or reliable.

So, Heaps is right – Przywara does chasten both totalizing systematizers and historicizing iconoclasts. But that last part is hardly remarkable. The doctrine of analogy has been used against historicizing iconoclasts quite frequently. The accusation, as far as I know, has never been that analogy insufficiently chastens historicizing iconoclasts. But what we see with Przywara that is very remarkable is that despite all of the postmodern (for lack of a better word) suspicions and accusations of analogy as a totalizing system, Przywara shows us how analogy itself, perhaps even inherently in his view, opposes attempts to totalize and thus it is capable of assuaging the important and legitimate fears of its critics.

In fact, it is not my account that describes Przywara in terms of exploding closed systems, but Przywara himself: “every closed system of mutual relatedness is exploded by an ‘above-and-beyond’” (287). Whether or not one likes the interpretation that I have offered of this dimension of Przywara, it is a dimension of his work nevertheless, yet I have not seen Heaps give an alternative account of it so much as avoid this dimension.

Indeed, even in Lacoste, whom Heaps proposes as an alternative interpretive lens to Marion for understanding what Przywara is getting at, there is the suggestion of an interruption to presence, to systems, with which we must reckon. While liturgy in one sense opens for the creature a kind of presence and knowledge, this is always on the condition of a greater separation from the parousia and the pain of our provisionality that the inexperience of God points to.[1] In this sense, it accords well with the particular point about Marion that I was attempting to make. The relevant point about Marion is not that he puts forward a negative theology, not absence for its own sake as an ontological category, but that he uses “radical apophasis” as a pragmatic tool for indicating the opening of the creature in its encounter with God onto knowledge of another type, which is also “not nothing.” Lacoste’s “inexperience” could arguably be thought of in similar terms: as a radical apophasis (for what is more radical than the suspension of the terms of experience itself) which enables a “knowledge of another type.” In other words, I do not take Lacoste to be suggesting something contrary, at least to the particular point by Marion to which I was referring (though it may be that Heaps has identified a different point at which they diverge).

And this is again compatible with the very quote by Przywara that Heaps cites. First, the attributive analogy is not a “mutual attribution of being (‘is’) to both God and creature” as Heaps suggests, but “the divine Is (Truth, etc.) appears as the primordial ground from the vantage of the creaturely ‘is (valid).” Przywara is not speaking here as if this is a metaphysical view from nowhere. The attributive analogy is an attribution to God that the creature makes from its vantage, extrapolating from its own situation as it were. This is the reason that it is “intrinsically overcome” (again, Przywara’s own words), as with Lacoste’s “inexperience.” No attribution takes place on the basis of experience.

The third movement likewise, is this gift of something, what Marion and Lacoste call “knowledge” and Przywara calls “a realm of service.” I do not necessarily want to suggest an absolute equivalence between these, but the interesting thing to me about this is that “service” is first (for the sake of keeping with the same language) a “pragmatic” or “dynamic” principle. What is given is a kind of movement, a kind of operation, a kind of performance. It is only then, secondarily and derivatively, an ontological principle.

And this is ultimately the difference between Heaps and I. It is not inconsequential that Heaps uses an eschatological image in concluding. His understanding of how Przywara moves between land and water is that the two simply lie next to each other. However, from the perspective of the creature (and I argue that Przywara always speaks from the perspective of the creature) the water and land do not lie down together yet, if by this we mean that we can see the whole coexisting in perfect harmony. This is a divine or eschatological perspective not one that the creature should claim prematurely. Przywara’s creature is one that is always oscillating. Land and water are both encountered, certainly, but only in and through time, as different moments along the way.

[1] Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 143-45.

The above reply does much to assuage my confessed hypersensitivity.

In fact, Eikelboom’s reply evinces its force in that it leaves me oscillating. On the one hand, she is so very right that Przywara’s work is remarkable for showing a way past many Protestant and post-modern critiques of the analogia entis as metaphysically occlusive. On the other, Analogia Entis does not move past these critiques by simply agreeing with them, but by calling them into question as well. It was this latter part that I sought to underline in my response. It is true also that the analogia entis has been used more to chastise those on the side of irruption and novelty than those aiming at fixity-by-system. But Eikelboom was also right that, anymore, those who adopt the analogia entis are viewed as an idiosyncratic, even anachronistic minority by the larger anglophone philosophical and theological conversations. But, to oscillate across to the other pole again, this plainly owes to so few remarking (as Eikelboom has) on Przywara’s remarkable clarification of the analogia entis’ double import. And to yet oscillate further, one wonders if, having taken in its full import, its present despisers would be able to accept it anyways.

Eikelboom is also correct to note that these days the relationship between chaos and order remains fraught, both in theology and in politics, not to mention our psyches. But I also acknowledged as much, indicating that the root cosmological imagination has changed only so very recently and in a handful of figures who, at least in English, are not very much read anymore. To say—in a dual voice, at once ontological and eschatological, as all talk of the analogia entis must be—that chaos and order lie down together is not necessarily to claim that their peace is the mere absence of violence. After all, not all who share a bed are sleeping. But this is neither optimism nor pessimism, only a hopeful exhortation to those who might bother to read Przywara or the others I listed. To that particular end, I can now see that I was manifestly too hard on Eikelboom’s initial comments. Perhaps those who avoided Analogia Entis because of its PR problems may well be convinced by Eikelboom’s comments that Przywara need not inflame their intellectual allergies.

But I am still left with a certain dissatisfaction by these many clarifying back-and-forths. There is in Przywara’s ontological vision something that calls the extant spectrum of contemporary philosophical, theological, and political mentalities into question. I am not at all sure it can be easily subsumed within the horizons of concern that dominate theological and philosophical discourse today. There is some new mentality to be embodied that at once looks forward by retrieving the 20th century’s emergentist moment in a “post-modern” way—in a way, especially, that avoids the myth of automatic progress that Przywara himself so thoroughly trounces (145–7) but still keeps in view the inescapable temporality of creaturely being and the promise of self-transcendence it holds. It may find its ontology in Przywara and those like him, but I sense it wants for its own rhetoric yet. Eikelboom’s language of “rhythm” and “oscillation” may prove better PR than what I have proposed with a technician’s fluency in my essay appearing later: Dialectical Traditionalism.

I’ve been ruminating on this conversation between Eikelboom and Heaps for a bit now, and my instinct tells me that I am failing to grasp something important that is at risk in the disagreement between the two. I am curious, then, if you could each articulate what is “at stake” when you part ways from one another, if you have time.

To assist any replies, I will try to be concrete. An example from each of you:

“What is given is a kind of movement, a kind of operation, a kind of performance. It is only then, secondarily and derivatively, an ontological principle. … And this is ultimately the difference between Heaps and I.” (Eikelboom, Reply #1)

“But I am still left with a certain dissatisfaction by these many clarifying back-and-forths. There is in Przywara’s ontological vision something that calls the extant spectrum of contemporary philosophical, theological, and political mentalities into question. I am not at all sure it can be easily subsumed within the horizons of concern that dominate theological and philosophical discourse today.” (Heaps, Reply #2)

Thank you for any response(s) you have the time to offer, and for the discussion so far.

Ah, great question! It seems to me that this question actually picks up what Heaps was saying at the end of his last response (that is, if I understand him correctly). The back and forth of clarification is helpful, but ultimately the important questions are ‘What’s at stake?’ ‘How is Przywara moving beyond current horizons?’ ‘What’s the vision?’

From my perspective here, what’s at stake is the creatureliness of the theologian. Theology has a responsibility to not only make statements about God, and theological philosophy has a responsibility to not only make statements about the nature of reality, but to do so always with one eye on what it means that it is a creature making those statements. It is important that we do not slip into making observations about the nature of God, ourselves, and reality either from nowhere or from a God’s-eye-perspective. The reasons that it is important that this not happen are, first, that forgetting what it means for a creature to identify principles about the nature of reality out of the nature of its particular sort of relationship to that reality leads to the sorts of problems associated with analogy that I mention above. As such, what is also at stake here is the degree to which analogy is understood as in fact a compelling vision. The critiques of it as either authoritarian or irrelevant seem to me to be the result precisely of the lack of creaturely perspective – the lack of acknowledgement that this is an articulation of reality in response to the creature’s relationship to that reality and for the good of the creature as creature.

Such creatureliness is indeed “at stake” because we do not always think very well about what it means for creatures to make theological statements. While linguistic analogy understands itself as a doctrine about how creatures make statements about God, my impression is that once this becomes a metaphysical principle the question of what it means for the creature to identify and interact with such a principle in the first place is not considered until the principle is already fully developed in the abstract and then applied to the creaturely realm as a mold to which it must then conform.

Przywara’s analogy is the best articulation that I have seen of the creaturely dimension as inherently part of analogy rather than as a realm to which it is simply applied. I think that this is in large part due to Przywara’s beginning from within the dynamism and temporality of the creature, namely the form of his own thought and being as creature, so that we can see the significance of analogy for a creature that moves in this particular way. While I do not necessary think that this is the whole of Przywara’s “calling the extant spectrum of….mentalities into question,” I do think it is part of what gives it this quality. Heaps helpfully points out that Przywara cannot be subsumed under the horizons of yesterday or today though he relates to them both, and it seems to me that this may be directly related to his creaturely perspective as one that moves through time. An important thing about this articulation of the doctrine at this particular moment in time is that it avoids the kind of premature eschatology in which reality as it ought to be is already known and so the only work left to do is to make everything conform to it. Instead, as something more like a form of moving through the world as a creature in relationship to something beyond itself, analogy becomes a form for meeting the as yet unknown and even the unexpected faithfully.

Eikelboom and I seem in agreement about the importance of the question of facing the new, the irruptive, or the ‘other’ without artificially and/or tyrannically closing off one’s horizon. And though we perhaps miscommunicated at first, I think we also agree that the analogia entis ought not be seen as a strategy or resource for doing so, and even should be among the philosophical starting points for cultivating what, in a Gadamerian idiom, we might call “conversational openness” in our creaturely theologizing. Moreover, I think it must be said that it is exceedingly strange the way in which the analogia entis has been deployed to any other purpose. The analogia entis is only an analogy at all if it harbors some dissimilarity, and if it is to be a theological analogy, this dissimilarity has to always be “still greater.” But I think where Eikelboom and I disagree is not so much in our construal of Przywara’s ontology of analogy, but as to which moments of analogical being should be accented looking forward.

My initial…let’s call it “discomfort” …with Eikelboom’s articulation arose because I feared appeal to Marion’s pragmatic apophasis suggested an account of creatureliness before God that, instead of qualifying our power to establish orders, condemned them. This was why I invoked Przywara’s description of the creaturely, “not nothing.” I was anxious that Eikelboom’s initial post suggested an account in which we return from the inexperience of God as skeptics because of our incapacity to take the God’s eye view. As I said before, Eikelboom’s follow up clarified for me that this was not the direction in which things were headed. We can, with any authenticity, no more bristle as skeptics in the rhythm of the creaturely than we can recline in stoic resignation, but we have to learn how to live in the distention of the in-and-beyond.

I think more than Eikelboom, however, I am concerned not just with the liminal oscillations of analogical finitude, but with the essential determination(s) of my existence within those limits-on-the-move. It is a kind of “deep question” for me how to become, from within the here-and-now of my creatureliness, not conversationally open in general to the new, irruptive, or other, but open in the particular and determinate way or ways that my historicity affords. But then I face an existential paradox (or, Balthasar might say, the “theo-dramatic tension”) in my effort to be authentically a creature. For insofar as I make myself determinately this kind of something/someone for the sake of meeting the new, irruptive, or other, I at once realize my potential as the new/irruptive/other’s interlocutor and close off (by making myself determinate) myriad other ways in which I might have been an interlocutor. I can only be concretely liberated to this encounter by imposing upon my own being some order. Moreover, because of my historicity, I am to some extent at the mercy of my circumstances in that task. Only God can welcome everything into reconciliation without restriction. I, at the very least, will eventually run out of time. In light of all of that, I suspect I am more intellectually and existentially mobilized by the moment of ordering determination in our creaturely being than Eikelboom, who has expressed more concern with (it appears to me at this point) the end to which this determination is a means: a creaturely mode of holding-open before the new/irruptive/other.

But my account of the tension above is not, on its own, entirely true. Philosophically I think it stands up, but theologically we confess that in God reconciling us to God’s self, we are also reconciled to one another and indeed to every other creature. On the one hand, as Eikelboom pointed out, this is an eschatological hope that cannot be imported into our present state without ideological violence or otherworldly utopianism. On the other, God’s grace has also begun this good work in us, such that the proportion of our essence has been dilated and the power to realize its existence in time has been augmented supernaturally. Consequently, even in the in-and-beyond of my creatureliness is itself in-and-beyond in the created communications of the divine nature by which we have faith, hope, and (God willing, in our lives as much as in our dialogues) charity.

I want to thank Prof. Ryan Hemmer for his extremely thoughtful response to my essay on Przywara and Aquinas.  I think he rightly locates what I take to be Przywara’s greatest inheritance from the Thomistic tradition to be his retrieval and extensive development of the analogy of being in its twin intersecting gnoseological and metaphysical registers. As Hemmer indicates, a misleading bifurcation of the ontic and the epistemic dimensions of esse can result in a false dichotomy, one that bases the mind’s grasp of being in the movement of the mind towards God as the ground of being, and thereby ultimately located in the mind’s act of judgment, and another that grounds that noetic grasp in a mind-independent concept of being beyond subjective human cognition, or as Hemmer puts it, an “opposition between the centrality of ‘being’ and the liminality of ‘meaning’” which betrays a “persistent confusion about the noematic contents of human knowing.”

As I attempted to delineate in my essay, this distinction is held in creative tension in Thomas’ own mind when he postulates that the analogicity of being is analogous in a dynamically two-fold manner. At the creaturely level, the very plurality of ways in which the perfective existence of things in the world may be analogically predicated points towards the proportional way in which entities participate in some one thing—that is, in a primary, non-analogical instance of esse, or common first cause. It is this crucial Thomistic insight—often misunderstood or simply ignored even by followers of the Angelic Doctor themselves—that Bernard Lonergan begins to expresses with admirable clarity even in his earliest work on Thomas, such as when he argues that the “concept of being cannot but be analogous; being is always conceived in the same way—as the expression of intelligibility or intelligence in act;” but, as Lonergan goes on to explain, “the content of one act of intelligibility or intelligence differs from the content of another; it is the identity of the process that necessitates the similarity of the proportion, and it is the diversity of the content that makes the terms of proportion different.” (Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, p. 58)

The corollary to this analogous relation results in a further insight: The ontic perfections in which creaturely entities participate, and attributed analogously in a supereminent manner to the Godhead, are possessed not merely notionally but indeed truly by God as the transcendent principle of being. Yet, even though such transcendental predicates as goodness or oneness authentically signify God’s existence, because as contingent beings we cannot fully grasp how these qualities exist in God, they remain a mystery—“hidden in the abyss of the ipsum esse subsistens,” as Reinhard Hütter memorably expresses it, not an exhaustive description of God, but rather an ineradicably incomplete “circumscription of the first principle in its pure, subsisting actuality.”

The plurivalence of being, then, is finally located in the sheer alterity of a God whose esse can only be obliquely yet faithfully indicated from creaturely being, who are nonetheless utterly dependent upon and thus radically open to the source of that being. In his response Prof. Hemmer asks what unique attributes Przywara brings to his retrieval and development of the medieval analogia and to how Przywara’s analogy of being can be related to other modern movements in Thomistic thought. I would point to this adumbration of an “apophatic” Thomism as good initial response to both queries. In their opening exchange on the Analogia Entis, Lexi Eikelboom and Jonathan Heaps already touched upon a kind of negative theology at the heart of Przywara’s project, with Eikelboom drawing a parallel to Jean-Luc Marion’s “pragmatic theology of absence.” In his response, Heaps I think rightly takes some exception to this comparison, but both ultimately agree, and I fully concur with their agreement, that Przywara posits a rhythmically dynamic analogy that harmonically encompasses the interrelations of contingent and divine, an ever greater dissimilarity-within-similarity that culminates in a creaturely ‘blinding rapture.’ I take this to be a true retrieval and novel development of Aquinas’ mystical theology.

Likewise, Przywara’s Thomism hovers uncomfortably yet creatively between and beyond any Thomistic schools or ideologies.  He has some obvious points of Contact with the Existential Thomism of Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, with its emphasis on the centrality of esse for Thomas, and it also touches upon some of Lonergan’s primary concerns, yet in the end of the day it transcends these movements as well. Certain key aspects of Przywara’s though were of course taken up by Hans Urs von Balthasar, but even here the fullness of Przywara’s creative retrieval of Aquinas is not fully articulated.  Perhaps we must await a kind of Balthasarian Thomism, such as we see promised in the work of Anne Carpenter, to bring Przywara’s—and Aquinas’—work to fruition.

If that isn’t an invitation to step in, I’m not sure what is.

First, I want to thank my fellow scholars, Hemmer and Montejo, for their fine contributions so far. It is interesting to look at Przywara from the perspective of Thomas, to see him as an inheritor of a developing idea. Thomas’s basic but marvelous insight into the distinction between esse and essentia enables not only a creative understanding of God, but also a renewed understanding of human being. I am wondering at this point if we can look at a couple of excerpts from Analogia Entis that emphasize Thomas, and that will – I hope – broaden out to include our other panel members (Eikelboom and Heaps).

There are a couple of points where Przywara focuses on Thomas’s achievements in particular. For Przywara, one of Thomas’s major contributions is an account of the creature that attributes to the creature its own, integral powers – even its own subjectivity (that is, agency and consciousness). He writes, “This is the crown that Thomas Aquinas places atop our entire discussion of potentiality: the doctrine of secondary causes (causae secundae): the doctrine that the creaturely “is (valid)” is so very much something produced from the divine Is (Truth, etc.) as to have its own power of operation (prima causa ex eminentia bonitatis suae rebus aliis confert non solum quod sint, sed etiam quod causae sint)” (229). I find it helpful to simplify Przywara’s delicately balanced sentences. So, to blunt his sword a bit: This is the crown that Thomas Aquinas places atop our entire discussion of potentiality: the doctrine of secondary causes: the doctrine that the creaturely “is” is so very much produced from the divine Is as to have its own power of operation.

Przywara’s discussion of potentiality is, at least in part, an attempt to work out large aspects of what is creaturely, since only what is created has potency at all. But to speak of potency is already to invoke the distinction between esse and essentia that Montejo and Hemmer have been working through, and it is already to aver to the openness and contingency that Eikelboom and Heaps discussed. If – as Montejo has said – really only the divine “is” at all, then all creaturely being, all creaturely existing and becoming, gestures toward that which enables it to be. In potency, Przywara says in a midrash on Thomas, “[t]he measure lies decidedly beyond the creature, in the incomprehensibility of the measure of divine giving” (222). Notice how, even in sharply distinguishing between Creator and creature, the relationship between the two is still profoundly intimate. That my measure lies outside of myself draws me near to God, who is my measure.

This sort of assessment at the same time makes God radically other, a “Thou” (to borrow Martin Buber’s preferred description) that is, even in any similarity to us, ever-greater in difference. It also highlights certain “Dionysian” tendencies in Przywara, which Przywara also sees in Thomas. He directly links Thomas’s system – so often derided as closed and rigid – with the “dazzling darkness” of God in Pseudo-Dionysius (see 283). Montejo seems to support such a reading of Thomas.

In bringing forward the dazzling darkness of God, I do not think Przywara loses sight of the creature. I wonder, however, if we might ask this question of him more incisively: how do we understand the profound contingency of the creature in Przywara, in light of his Thomist radicalization of God’s (immanent) transcendence? How might he – or might he not – succeed in such an endeavor? I have tried to sketch the beginnings of what I think Montejo and Hemmer are helping us to see. I hope that, here, we have a point of convergence between our panel members, that any of them might contribute. I do have some further thoughts on what Balthasar might do with this, but for now I want to follow the insights Hemmer and Montejo have so deligiently provoked.

I want to thank both Montejo and Carpenter for pushing this conversation forward. I’d like to respond briefly by reflecting on what I take to be the neuralgic points foregrounded in their respective responses.

I think they have identified a nexus of topics that shed a valuable light on the unitive themes in Thomas, Przywara, Balthasar, and Lonergan (not to mention Gilson, Rahner, and any number of others). It is striking to me that the real distinction between esse and essentia is a philosophical doctrine (first articulated, correct me if I’m wrong, in Ibn-Sina) that undergoes a series of theological intensifications (to borrow Przywara’s term). It is transformed in Aquinas owing to his rejection of the emanationist scheme as an adequate account of free creation (see David Burrell’s comparative philosophical theology). And—it seems to me—it undergoes further intensification in the context of a renewed focus on Chalcedonian Christology. Lonergan himself often remarked that it was a class on Christology (taught by Bernard Leeming) that convinced him of the necessity of the real distinction between essence and existence. For without it, Leeming argued, there could be no hypostatic union.

It is this same Christological context that Balthasar foregrounds in his explicit efforts to explain Christ as the “concrete analogia entis” (see Theology of History, 74n.5; Theo-Drama III, 220-229). And it is primarily in Christology that Robert Sokolowski disengages his notion of “the distinction,” a speculative articulation of the discovery of the relationship between God and the world embodied concretely in the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. A similar connection can be made with Gilson’s famous argument that the historic meeting of Greek philosophical method and Hebrew revelation allowed for the development of both new lines of philosophical inquiry owing to the content of revelation (namely, that the ultimate principle of unity might also be a person), and the methodical tools for speculative understandings of revelatory affirmations.

These various theses evince William Desmond’s notion of the “porosity” between theology and philosophy. Philosophical conceptuality is deployed in order to make intelligible the Christian belief about Jesus. Yet, in its specification to a revealed mystery, the particularity of that mystery occasions the emergence of new, formally philosophical questions, and allows the theological context of that emergence to serve as materials for the development of the philosophical doctrine.

This same mutual self-mediation is the context for Montejo’s citation of Lonergan’s Verbum. The analogicity of the concept of being owes to the invariant structure of the human act of understanding. Objectives of understanding differ from one another, but are known through the same operations, and so even as regards finite noema, their “thisness” and “thatness” are analogically related to each other through a shared noetic structure. But this very analogy obtaining between the various objectives of finite acts of understanding is itself analogically applied to the disproportion between a discursive act of human intellect and the actus purus that is the unrestricted act of understanding. The philosophical doctrine of cognition that Lonergan is retrieving from Thomas is itself the fruit of Thomas’s exploration of the Trinitarian processions, and the theological conviction that the imago Dei invites the development of formally analogical understandings of the Creator through apt features of the created.

When we pay attention, as Przywara does, to the way in which philosophy and theology interact in the context of a created order, I think we find much common cause between the explicit intentions of Przywara’s project and subsequent retrievals and expansions of Aquinas that define so much of Catholic theology over the last many decades, even if, as Montejo notes, we cannot neatly assign Przywara to a single Thomistic constituency. And if there is a Balthasarian Thomism (and I think there is), a Christological interpretation of the analogy of being is perhaps a good place to start.

There is this section in Bernard Lonergan’s Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ where he considers the controverted 20th century question of Jesus’ consciousness. Does Jesus have one consciousness, or two? Theologians have answered the question variously, and here Balthasar and Rahner notably (though perhaps not irreconcilably) parted ways. Lonergan answers that it depends on how we are asking the question. If we ask the question with respect to Christ’s natures, then he had two consciousnesses, human and divine. If we ask with respect to the union of the two natures, then Jesus had one, divine-human consciousness.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. One is that we can see in it a careful and precise application of “Chalcedonian” logic, with the assistance of Thomas’s habit of parsing meanings. The question is quite modern, but the thinking is patterned after a longer tradition. Another reason to look at this because, even without a direct connection to Przywara, Lonergan exhibits similar insights into the delicate distinctions and relations between what is created and what is eternal (in the Incarnation). We have a mutable nature united – without confusion, without separation – to an immutable nature, and Lonergan has thought through how this must in some way mean that Jesus did have a mutable consciousness (and, as God, did not). Thomas wrestled with similar problems when, early in his career, he sided with Peter Lombard and the tradition by saying that Jesus did not learn; and when, later in his career, he explained that it is a perfection of Jesus’ humanity to learn.

These interplays between what is mutable and what is not, what is finite and what is infinite, and determining how to speak of the two is at once a question of language and a question of ontology. In other words, we can see the dynamic previously outlined in our conversation playing out again in questions of the Incarnation. That means that the distinction between esse and essentia also play out in a Chalcedonic interpretation of the Incarnation, since we have a nature that becomes united to a nature that Is.

Earlier thinkers such as Maurice Blondel intuited how the consciousness of Christ would be an important question in modern theology (see History and Dogma). One of the primary reasons he makes this argument is because of another puzzle in theology: what to do with history. If Jesus is the “concrete analogia entis” (as Balthasar says), then we need to recognize how the one and only God taking on flesh also means that God has entered, has “taken on,” history. This is something different than a “pure” metaphysical problem, but they are not unrelated. Consciousness very much has to do with an awareness of human being in history, that is, consciousness is involved in an understanding of the creature as developmental and diachronic, yet united over time. Husserl and Augustine haunt us here: we are contiguous selves in time, and yet we also endure change, and arguing for some kind of consistent person requires at least a burgeoning awareness of a “self” and a consciousness. In other words, I am arguing, not without precedent, that questions of consciousness and questions of history are related to one another. Not as cause and effect, and not at some proportion, but as questions that emerge in a similar horizon.

This brings me to a question that has been asked in the “Discussion” section below this thread, and I want to bring it into the main conversation:

Dr. Carpenter, a question arises from your final paragraph here: given the current interest in creatureliness and finitude in contemporary theology, is there a something especially helpful about Przywara rooting analogy and theological anthropology in Thomas, while engaging (and conscripting?) Heidegger on questions of the particularity of human existence? Does Pryzwara’s use of phenomenology, similar to Balthasar, make him an especially helpful dialogue partner in questions of embodiment? If Przywara does not lose sight of the human, what does he add to the conversation that perhaps other don’t have?

The question itself leads us in some helpful directions, but I would like to take a moment to answer some implicit concerns. In a Balthasarian register, we might be worried that the turn to the subject obscures the centrality of God in the universe. We might, as Balthasar points out occurs in the transition between Medieval thinking and modern, be concerned at how the human being becomes the central organizing point of thinking about the universe instead of God (cf. Apokalypse, GL IV-V). In this sense, Thomas’s achievement might in fact be a problem, since he so firmly establishes the relative – emphasis on relative – autonomy of created operations. Umberto Eco makes this kind of argument in The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. So, we should indeed wonder what Przywara adds to a conversation that seems to have already established what he does.

I have argued, so far, that one of the elements that unites the 20th century Catholic thinkers we have studied is the “problem” of history (Blondel, Lonergan, Przywara, Rahner, Balthasar, etc., etc.). This means at least in part that all of these thinkers are acknowledging how things like context and subjectivity play fundamental roles in human understanding, and in theological reflection. Our “starting point” cannot but be with ourselves, and we exist in history – and indeed, God entered our history. Here we threaten to slide into a narrative whose broadness conceals something very, very important.

Przywara says, in a section quoted previously, that Thomas’ doctrine of secondary causes “crowns” potentiality. At the same time, for Przywara, the center of potentiality is not “in” the being that “has” potency (here, the human being). It has its center in the one who gives being, which is God. So, the relative independence of creatures in Thomas gives way to a radical theocentrism without surrendering the essential insight.

If we consider the matter more broadly, it means that in Przywara we have an account of the subject (even a “turn” to the subject) that is nevertheless theocentric. I would argue that this is an essential contribution on Przywara’s part, one echoed in theologies like Lonergan’s, Balthasar’s, Rahner’s. (Indeed Rahner’s!) It means that Balthasar, for example, begins with the “subjective evidence” of faith in Glory of the Lord, despite thinking that beauty is quite objective. Or perhaps because he thinks this.

As a final note, I would like to recall Pseudo-Dionysius, who has appeared yet not received much exploration quite yet. Balthasar will ever prefer Maximus’s Dionysius, and for Przywara Thomas is deeply aware of Dionysius. In both cases, though, the supra-rational excess of divine being receives expression and remains central to understanding not only God, but also the world. I would suggest that we have not quite done careful enough metaphysical work if we lose sight of this undercurrent, and that it helps to make sense of – yet relativize – the strong systematic leanings of metaphysical reflection.

Thank you for your patience, and I look forward to the rest of our conversation.

The manner in which Anne Carpenter and Ryan Hemmer have carried this discussion forward is quite exhilarating, they have opened up the initial topic in many fruitful ways.  I would like to narrow the focus of my response by going back again Thomas as a source form which not only Przywara, but we ourselves can continue to draw in our engagement with these issues.  My response will draw inspiration from a Przywara passage on the nature of the contingent creature brought to our attention by Jonathan Heaps:

“‘Sent forth’ is to say that the creature receives its essential groundedness from the supereminent divine Is (Truth, etc.). To say ‘performing’ is to underscore the active autonomy of the creature thus sent forth (causae secundae). To say ‘service’ is to make clear how this active positivity is simply another and more acute form of the above-and-beyond of God (in the maior dissimilitudo): the mysticism of rapture is humbled by the distance between Lord and servant. . . . ‘Longing’ (in the ascending analogia attributionis) becomes a ‘blinding rapture’ (in the analogia proportionis), in order to become ‘service’ (in the descending analogia attributionis).” (Przywara, Analogia Entis, 235)

Anne Carpenter perspicaciously calls our attention to the Dionysian element in this rhythmically ecstatic rapture, that “supra-rational excess of divine being receives expression and remains central to understanding not only God, but also the world,” and to which the creature that is constituted as radically open to the transcendent is continuously called.  and in his latest response, Ryan Hemmer foregrounds the crucial issue of Christology, and Balthasar’s view of Christ as the “concrete analogia entis” who grounds the “relationship between God and the world embodied concretely in the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth.”

I would like to begin to respond to these responses by giving an extended digression into Aquinas’ reading of Dionysius’ explication of the God/world relations, that ecstatic status of contingent humanity, and which concludes with an explicitly Christological telos. As Thomas explains, for Dionysius the goal of creation is union with a thoroughly transcendent God who is nonetheless the Supreme Good.  As the Areopagite explains in the Divine Names, the good by its very nature is not grasping or ungenerous; on the contrary, it possesses a magnanimous desire to share its goodness. So, if goodness is communicative then the Supreme Good, God, must be supremely self-communicative and self-giving. Dionysius explicates this self-communicative inclination in God in Divine Names 4 in terms of Eros or yearning. God’s goodness cannot be contained, it is effusive, because Eros prevents the lover from remaining within himself; it forces him out of himself to the beloved, yet without losing his transcendent deity. God, Dionysius explains, creates because He is ‘‘beguiled by goodness, by love, and by yearning and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things, and he does so by virtue of his supernatural and ecstatic capacity to remain, nevertheless, within himself.’’ (DN 4.13)  Another characteristic of Eros is its desire to be united with the object of its love.  So, the very love of the good that prompted God’s magnanimous creation is also the motive behind God’s plan of salvation whereby creation in all its manifold goodness is drawn back into union with God.  Dionysius’ protology is thus mirrored by his soteriological eschatology, whose goal is the ultimate reunion of the Divine Creator and fallen creation.

This is the self-same exitus/reditus model of procession and return that Thomas explicates in his Commentary on the Divine Name of Dionysius, but which also informs and indeed structures not only the Summa Theologica, but arguably almost the entirety of the Angelic Doctor’s theological project. As he writes in the Commentary, “God, who is the cause of all through the beautiful and good love by which God loves all things, according to the abundance of God’s goodness by which God loves things, is outside of Godself in so far as God provides for all existing things through God’s goodness and love or desire.”  (In de div. nom. IV, lect. 10) Therefore “God is in all things through the effects of God’s own goodness according to a certain ecstasy, which God makes it to be in all lesser things in such a way that God’s transcendent power does not go out from Godself; for God thus fills all things that God is in no way evacuated from God’s own power.” (Ibid)  Moreover, just as God goes out of himself, those who seek to be re-united to the divine must undergo a corresponding ecstatic abandonment of the self, one in which they become more truly themselves in becoming more Godlike. A process of re-imagining and transformation in which those who desire union with God must learn how to yearn to such an extent that they suffer ecstasy, that is, they become beside themselves for God just as God goes out of himself for the sake of the beloved.

For Dionysius in the Divine Names, and later for Thomas in his De divinis nominibus, but also in the Summa, the very model for this divinizing union is the Apostle Paul. As 2 Corinthians 12:2 relates, the Apostle was raptured and caught up to the third heaven. “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows— was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell.”   For Dionysius, everything that the Apostle preaches, endures, comes embodies the radical truth that he ‘‘was truly a lover and, as [Paul himself] says, was beside himself for God, possessing not his own life but the life of the one for whom he yearned.” In the words of 2 Corinthians 5:13, ‘‘If we are beside ourselves—that is, ‘‘if we are in ecstasy.’’ I would point out that here the Apostle Paul seems to embody for Thomas was Przywara would later characterize as that ecstatic longing which becomes a ‘blinding rapture.’” On this topic, Galatians 2:20 represents, in the minds of both Dionysius and Thomas, the single most important text in the entire Pauline corpus, for it is precisely in this verse that Paul identifies himself as the model of the ecstatic lover of the divine beloved when he writes “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  For Thomas, these words personify the Apostle’s Christophanic existence as an enraptured lover.  As the Angelic Doctor explains, Paul’s ecstatic “love does not permit the lover to be of himself, but rather of the beloved … and by going out of himself he projected himself entirely into God, as a true lover and as suffering ecstasy, living in God and not living by his own life, but by the life of Christ as the beloved, which life was to him intensely lovable.” (In de div. nom. IV, lect. 12)

Thomas then relates this loving transport to God’s own ecstatic self-giving in the economy of salvation, that is, to the kenotic enfleshment of the Son, that self-emptying of the incarnate Word as related in the ancient Christian Hymn preserved Philippians 2:5-11, which states that Christ “being in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be used for his own advantage; instead, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,” that is, “being born in human likeness.” It must be pointed out that Thomas is quite adamant on the radically apophatic nature of the divine condescension evinced by God’s Incarnation.  For Aquinas, the enfleshed Word is “supra-human but also fully human, beyond being yet also assuming a human mode of existence,” a hypostatic union which is “ineffable to every word and unknown to the mind,” so that every affirmation regarding Christ’s kenotic love for humanity in his assumed humanity is part of those theological mysteries which point towards the transcendent, unspeakable love of God precisely because they are located “above all things, above all mind and above all substance and above all cognition.” (In de div. nom. II, lect. 4) Regarding the Incarnation, then, Thomas will argue that even though it “seems most manifest, nevertheless the composition by which Jesus was divinely composed according to us, that is, in that he has our nature, cannot be sufficiently spoken by any word nor can it be known by any mind even of a supreme angel itself.” (ibid)

Needless, to say, Thomas finds ample warrant for this apophatic characterization of the kenotic self-abandonment of the Word in Dionysius. As the Areopagite explains in Divine Names II, 10: “Since that Supra-Divine Being has in loving kindness come down into the natural world and truly took substance and assumed the name of Man, we must speak with reverence of those things which we utter beyond human thought and language,” nonetheless, “even in this act” the enfleshed Son “possesses His Supernatural and Super-Essential Existence.” Not only, Dionysius goes on to explain, in that “He has without change or confusion of Attributes partaken in our human condition while remaining unaffected by that unutterable Self-Emptying”—note here the clear allusion to Philippians 2—“as regards the fullness of His Godhead, but also because He passed in His Supernatural and Super-Essential state through conditions of Nature and Being, and receiving from us all things that are ours, thereby exalted them far above us.” (DN 2.10.) More concisely put, Christ did not merely keep His Godhead parallel, as it were, with His humanity, but brought it into His humanity and so exalted the humanity.

When he comes to comment on this passage from the Divine Names, Aquinas similarly emphasizes that God through his own love condescended to comes down to our natural level and was truly made a substance, that is, a hypostasis of our nature, and while he remained the transcendent God, he was made a man, a human being—in other words, he is very much akin to the “concrete analogia entis” of Balthasar’s reading of Przywara. As a consequence, this assumption of a human nature by God “ought to be praised above mind and above reason.” (In de div. nom. II, lect. 5)  This exalted praise is necessitated for Thomas, much as it is in Dionysius, because in receiving the properties of our nature, nevertheless these human traits themselves have retained something divinely transcendent, something super-substantial. Thus, Aquinas goes on to say in his Commentary, “through an ineffable emptying, concerning of which the Apostle speaks in Philippians” 2, nothing was suffered in his transcendent fullness, nothing was diminished of the plenitude of his deity; for it is not called an emptying through the diminution of divinity, but rather through the assumption of a deficient nature. (ibid) And, Thomas concludes, what is “even more novel and wonderful,” God came to be “in our natural things supernaturally and in our substantial things super-substantially, having all human things, which he received from us, above us.” (ibid)

This analysis, with its direct allusion to Philippians 2, brings us finally to what I take to be the most significant manner in which Thomas develops what he found in Dionysius’s Christology as presented in the Divine Names, and which I believe is also pertinent to our Present discussion. In his exposition of the Philippians Hymn, Thomas takes special note of the personal unity of the kenotic human and divine natures, what Dionysius in his Fourth Epistle referred to, somewhat infamously, as the theandric interrelation of the natures in the divine person, writing that “[Christ] did not do what is divine as God, nor what is human as man, but instead [as] God having become man, He has administered for us a certain, new divine-human activity.” (PG 3.1072 B) Aquinas then expressly links this kenotic life of God in creation to the salvific process whereby we become progressively more Christ-like by our sanctifying conformity to that divine-human nature, that is, by our ecstatic imitation and participation in the actions of that humanity which the self-abandoning Christ united to himself. Thus, according to Thomas, through grace the believer come to participate in Christ’s divine nature through the mediation of the incarnation. It is by conforming ourselves to Christ’s exemplary ecstatic love by which he emptied himself by assuming our human emptiness, that we in turn will be made worthy to receive the fullness of the Son’s divinity within our own humanity. Transformed, re-imagined if you will, in such a manner that in the end we will come not only to see the divine glory hidden in that humanity, but indeed become more glorious, in the process. As Thomas points out in an early passage from In de div. nom. (I, lect. 1), Paul himself describes that very process in 2 Corinthians 3:18 when he writes, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.” The Son’s kenotic assumption of humanity establishes the means whereby our own bodies will eventually be glorified, as the Apostle promises in Philippians 3:21: “He will change our lowly body so it is like his glorious body.” And as always, in his elucidations of these various passages from the Pauline corpus, Thomas is once more deeply inspired by Dionysius emphasis on the Apostle’s ecstatic confession in Galatians 2:20 that ‘‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

Indeed, for Thomas this is the very crux of Dionysian Christology: the ecstatic Paul of Galatians in effect becomes the re-imagined apophatic form of Christ that the Apostle encourages his Philippian interlocutors to embody when he counsels them in the prologue to the Kenotic Hymn that they should put on the same ecstatic mindset of the God who humbly assumed human form.  The apophatic love of God’s embodiment is thus the ecstatic basis for our own sanctifying conformity to the kenotic divine-human unity of the enfleshed Word. Building upon the Areopagite’s reading of the Pauline corpus, Aquinas posits that we are united to God through a process of loving kenotic reciprocity. Our ecstatic imitation and participation of that human manner of living and acting which Christ united to Himself is the very means by which we are divinized.  Indeed, as Aquinas writes, with “regard to the full participation of the Divinity, which is the true bliss of man and end of human life, this is bestowed upon us by Christ’s humanity.” (ST III, q.1, a.2, c.) By ecstatic love we are re-imagined in the ineffable image of the transcendent God who makes himself knows precisely through his incomprehensibly loving self-emptying.

I hope that this much-too-long excursus away from Przywara has not taxed my reader’s attention beyond the breaking point; rather, I hope that is has gone some way in showing how many of the issues that we have touched upon in our discussions, a fair number of which hover about the perennial problems of the Creator/creation relationship and the paradoxical notion of the human creature as a Sosein in-über Dasein, an oscillating tension between two poles which remains perilously oriented to the transcendent, can be clarified by a ressourcement of Thomas and his reception by Przywara. Moreover. I will reiterate that the foundations for a renewed Thomistic mystical theology resides in a deeper and more sympathetic reading of the Analogia Entis and its ‘blinding rapture.’ And finally, and perhaps most importantly, in inaugurating the sort of Christological interpretation of the analogy of being that Prof. Hemmer calls for.

Before thanking Lexi Eikelboom for her immensely helpful response (and defending the term, ‘dialectic’ a little bit), I need to confess something a bit embarrassing: the appellation, “Dialectical Traditionalism,” did not begin as the high-minded vision of an incipient mentality portrayed above. It began, instead, as a bit of a goof, meant to relieve the persistent tension of trying to explain this mentality that I have found somewhat bereft of its own rhetoric. It tickled me that it shares some verbal resonance with “Dialectical Materialism,” a philosophy it could not resemble less (and, on another occasion I might argue, with which it is patently incompatible). It also put a smile on my face to think that the conjunction of these two terms, “dialectical” and “traditional,” is sufficiently improbable as to stymie those who might assume they always already knew what it meant. At worst, I thought, people might assume it was a kind of warmed-over Catholic Hegelianism. There are worse things to be suspected of by strangers than Hegelianism.

All of which is to say that Eikelboom is well within her rights to ask me just what I mean by it.

Initially I feared Eikelboom had mistaken me for, not a Hegelian, but something like a Heideggerian. To my relief, however, she recognized that such quasi-stoic resoluteness in the face of our creaturely ‘between’ was not at all what I had in mind. More than just relieved, I find myself gratified—bordering on elated—that, even in the mode of critique, she took up my suggested mentality and carried it into precisely the wider horizon that I believe Dialectical Traditionalism leads. Eikelboom is exactly right to insist that, in addition to the intra-traditional oscillation I spelled out, “an engagement with Przywara presents an opportunity to think about inter-traditional dialogue as well.” Though I did not highlight it above, I am in full and fervent agreement that not only do we have a diachronic dialectic within our traditions, but between traditions too. Eikelboom is right to point out that there is always also a synchronic “lateral” vector of oscillation. I am convinced that, to borrow Sartre’s syntax, Dialectical Traditionalism is a pluralism and Eikelboom’s response above deploys Przywara’s account of analogy in strong support of that conviction.

I found Eikelboom’s appeal to Przywara’s own philosophical and theological performance especially illuminating in this regard. I appreciate that she underlines how we can find in Przywara’s work evidence of continental philosophy and protestant theology raising questions unto new insights that occlusive fidelity—or, perhaps more accurately, “fidelity”—to the Catholic intellectual tradition at the time might not have otherwise occasioned. Even as I made his notion of “originary moments” integral to my account of tradition, I did not recognize Barth’s influence. Indeed, this dual-vector approach to interpreting a thinker’s place in the past has great promise for appreciating and appropriating the work of even great, originative geniuses. David Burrell’s studies of Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologies, for example, have advanced Bernard Lonergan’s studies of Thomas Aquinas’s place in the Christian speculative theological tradition in much this fashion. Looking into the future, I have to imagine that breakthroughs analogous to those made by Aquinas and by Przywara will be made by the continued combination of intra- and inter-traditional conversation. Indeed, global communications technologies and digital media (as evidenced by Syndicate itself) will only expand and compound this task, but also (we may hope) its promise.

By the ambient light of this affirmation, then, I want to very modestly defend my use of the term “dialectical.” First, I ought to offer a clarification: my invocation of Kierkegaard was meant to illustrate not my notion of dialectic, but rather Przywara’s insistence on distinguishing within ontology the meta-ontic and the meta-noetic. And even then, I did not mean to invoke the entirety of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, nor even the entirety of The Sickness unto Death, but (with willful and flagrant disregard for my reader) only that first page or two explaining the modalities of relation at work in human beings as selves. To be very brief about it, I meant only to illustrate that ontologies are made by persons.

That being said, Eikelboom is quite fair in turning my words against me to insist that I “sift the dialectics of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Barth, etc. for that to which [I] will say ‘yes’ and that to which [I] will say ‘no.’” Dialectic is, as she says, tradition-ed and so to “give an account” of the dialectical aspect of dialectical traditionalism will require getting dialectical (in the sense I mean) about its tradition. Me culpa; this I did not do. To be comically brief: Hegel’s are too narrowly logical, Kierkegaard’s are (for my purposes) too anti-metaphysical, doubly so for Heidegger, and Barth’s too dogmatic—which is to say, too theological.

But although I obviously did not say so, none of these were the notion of dialectic I’d intended. I had in mind instead some compound of Aristotle’s notion of dialectic and Bernard Lonergan’s. In my passing familiarity with Aristotle’s approach to dialectic, it seems the process itself (think especially of the first book of the De Anima) is proto-traditional. Received opinions are considered by calling them into question. More concretely, they are weighed by their ability to answer the philosopher’s questions. Those that can are allowed to be carried forward in the inquiry and those that cannot are discarded or, best case scenario, modified and augmented so that they can. Moreover, extant opinions are also allowed to call the positive contributions of the philosopher him or herself into question, and his or her positions are weighed on their ability to answer these or are modified when they cannot.

Lonergan’s notion of dialectic, however, is more fundamental. Lonergan identifies an open, but still normative directionality to this process of asking and answering questions. He calls it, “cognitional structure.” Opinions that close off this open-but-normative directionality are counter-productive and need to be reversed. They have to be wrong because they run against the grain of the intelligence that generated them. Conversely, any opinion that is consonant with this thrust of intelligence can, to the extent that it reflects the genuineness of that thrust, be affirmed at the very least as intelligent. Moreover, it can also be cooperated with to advance understanding in at least some small measure. Lonergan’s notion of dialectic, then, is a matter of identifying when you and/or your interlocutors are being intelligent, reasonable, and responsible or, on the contrary, being obtuse, irrational, and irresponsible in thought or deed. The former is to be affirmed, assisted, and advanced cooperatively, and the latter is to denied, resisted, repented of, and reversed, though no less cooperatively. The tricky part, of course, is that not only do these opposed tendencies usually exist together in a given person, but they often exist together even in particular philosophical positions. Hence the sifting required to say “yes” or say “no.” As I think about it, a better word than sifting might be “discernment.”

And so, while I think that “Analogical Traditionalism” is likely a better meta-ontic description of the mentality I have in mind (for the reasons grounded in Przywara’s work that Eikelboom cites), I want to yet hang on to my notion of tradition as “dialectical.” It captures, I think, the meta-noetic aspect of doing tradition—of ‘tradition-ing’ and especially of tradition-ing together. It maintains the implication of a mediated encounter with those who think differently-than, but also creaturely-with us. On this point I would reiterate my gratitude to my respondent for pushing my account from the intra- to the inter-traditional. There are many horizons, both within my own tradition and those of my others, that possess deep differences from my own but are still constituted intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly in their creaturely oscillations between thought and world, between history and truth, between self and God, and so with which I may come to not just converse, but also to cooperate.

As Heaps has so kindly made clear in his response to my questions, I am very happy with and interested in the horizons into which Heaps would like to take his dialectical traditionalism. I think that the sort of dialectic that Heaps envisions, which pertains primarily to method yet is appropriate to an analogical metaphysics, is clearer and I thank him for this. If I understand correctly, dialectic for Heaps names primarily a framework for advancing knowledge through, and perhaps even as dependent on, together-ness. Particularly if the two impulses towards both reason, intelligence, and responsibility and unreason, stupidity, and irresponsibility coexist in the same person and the same systems of thought, then such a cooperative approach would indeed be necessary since it is very unlikely that one would allow one’s self to see the less flattering impulses in one’s self and one’s systems.

So, if I continue to push a little it is only because I like Heaps’ impulse, the approach to thought and dialogue that he lays out, and want to see how far and in which directions we can push it.

My first set of questions is perhaps a little cheeky. I continue to be interested in this question of Heaps’ applying his dialectic form to his own dialectical traditionalism. First, with respect to Aristotle and Lonergan, if these are two voices in a particular tradition of dialectic, then how does Heaps see himself engaging them dialectically? Are there certain dimensions of Lonergan’s own dialectic that ought to be resisted such that Heaps’ understanding of dialectic oscillates both backward to Lonergan but then also forward beyond him? Second, I am interested in who Heaps sees as his own lateral interlocutors on this question of dialectic. Is this the role that Kierkegaard, Hegel, or Barth play, perhaps? Or are there more contemporary explorations of dialectic that serve this function? On what basis are thinkers identified as part of one tradition or as part of a parallel one to be engaged laterally?

As I say, I recognize these questions are a little mischievous, but I do also hope that they are stimulating in bringing out what I take to be some of the interesting potential of Heaps’ form for thinking through dialectic itself dialectically. But I will leave these cheeky questions here and move on to a second, more serious, set of questions that bring us back to Przywara.

A piece of the puzzle that is still missing to me, at least explicitly, is how Heaps understands his Aristotelain-Lonergan-dialectic-as-method to be ontologically grounded. What is the relation between the analogical meta-ontic and Heaps’ dialectical meta-noetic? In this case, however, I think there are indications of a possible answer to this question already latent in Heaps’ response. I will lay out what I am seeing in this regard as an invitation to correct or build on it, in part because I think that doing so may open up an interesting conversation with respect to Przywara. It seems to me that in wanting to maintain a dialectical traditionalism alongside analogy, Heaps is both grounding this method in Przywara’s analogical form and is correcting for something too-little emphasized in Przywara.

On the one hand, the differently-than/creaturely-with seems to resonate with Przywara’s own analogical form with respect to intimacy and alterity. Similar to the way in which God is the most interior to or intimate to the creature precisely at the moment that God is most other from the creature (231-32) (and here perhaps we have Pseudo-Dionysius again), Heaps suggests that the same logic holds between creatures in a way appropriate to them, namely that they are most properly with one another in their difference from one another. In engaging in the sort of cooperative endeavor that Heaps refers to in Lonergan, the creature would not only be advancing understanding but also simply being a creature well. Thus the dialectic meta-noetic would be an appropriate dimension of the analogical meta-ontic.

However, if this is the case, it might also reveal a deficiency in Przywara (which after all is possible if, as Lonergan suggests, opposed tendencies may exist in the same system), although one that I think could be rectified by his own logic. This is something that I have wondered about before with respect to Przywara so I’m grateful to Heaps for the opportunity to explore it. In the same way that I wondered above about there being an inter-traditionalism in addition to an intra-traditionalism, I have wondered that there is little to no mention of an inter-creaturely oscillation in addition to the intersection of the intra-creaturely and the theological oscillations that make up the analogia entis. I have wondered, when Przywara describes his intra-creaturely analogy in the Analogia Entis, whether he is describing a kind of relationship within a single creature, between creatures, or somehow both. While I sometimes choose to take him to mean one of the latter two, it nevertheless seems to me that when he describes the relationship between the various potentialities and actualities that make up the intra-creaturely analogy, for example (210-231), he appears to do so in the mode of referring to a single creature.

If this is the case, then this is perhaps a point at which Heaps’ dialectical traditionalism might be not only based on Przywara’s analogical form but also (dialectically?) pushes it forward to a new instantiation of that form, namely in its mediating between creatures as well as within the creature and between the creature and God.

Dialogical cooperation of the kind we’ve been both discussing and engaging in enacts a rhythmic ‘between’. It wiggles between critiques of occlusive sameness and fragmenting difference. By developing a mutuality, it gives rise to surprises. I was surprised, for instance, to find my by-the-way formulation, “think differently-than, but also creaturely-with,” transformed into something like a full-blown principle: differently-than/creaturely-with. In her effort to understand what I had put forward, Eikelboom helped me understand better what I’d said. It helped me understand that the differently-than/creaturely-with is one way to answer to her question about the ontological ground of what I have described in psychological, phenomenological, and hermeneutical terms.

When we turn to ask this metaphysical question about the being of dialogical cooperation, Eikelboom and I have already been invoking those classic metaphysical notions: similar and different. When diverse interlocutors meet, we may take stock of our meeting in ontological terms: You are different from me and I am different from you. In this way, we are the same; we are both different. The boundary of our difference is our finitude, that we are each an existing this, but furthermore we are “this” this. We are together in our being different-than and we are similar in our creaturely-with. The former grounds the dialogical character of our conversation, the latter its cooperative character.

The analysis unfolds the other way as well. If we can come to recognize that we are similarly different, we can also take stock of the concrete ways in which we are different differently. The reciprocity of being differently-than should not be conflated with symmetrical being differently-than. Differences in culture, forms of rationality, power, etc. can all create ways of being differently-than differently. Taking stock of these and giving an account of them together, however, transforms us and so transforms our ways of being differently-than, as my back and forth with Eikelboom has transformed me. One of the risks of such dialogical cooperation is that one can become differently-than/creaturely-with (or, in Przywara’s idiom, in-and-beyond) one’s self. Lonergan talks about this as the self transcending and the self transcended. When this mutual self-mediation proceeds authentically, however, we may hope to non-violently draw more closely together with others.

Authenticity, then, is not just a meta-noetic category, but can be seen down the line as a meta-ontic one as well. At the risk of sentimentality, we might say in the most profound metaphysical register that part of human becoming is becoming human together. But, as Eikelboom notes, not only do we face the limits of our finitude, but also the corrupting deficiencies of sin in ourselves and others. The dialectic with the other, if it will be authentic, needs to be open to dialectical transformations within myself. Dialectical traditionalism can scale in this way: while it can be a mentality for relating to millennia of cultural and inter-cultural history, it can also be a modality of discernment within the micro-history of one’s own biography.

(Indeed, this may be the beginning of an answer to Eikelboom’s gently-needling questions about my own lateral partners in dialectic: the ones I have I’ve accrued through some mix of osmotic laziness and intellectual commitment, both occasioned by accidents of biography. Many of the major partners in my own scholarly conversations (Milbank, Lonergan, Gadamer) I picked up in undergraduate classrooms, at the mercy of the syllabi my professors authored. Some I have since said “no” to, like Hauerwas, and others I have turned to subsequently, like James Cone.)

But the differently-than/creaturely-with of dialogical cooperation is, as Eikelboom also underlined, analogous with the differently-than/ontologically-with of the creature/Creator relation. The still-resounding consequence of 12th century advances in articulating divine transcendence is a more radical sense of divine immanence. God certainly acts as final cause, calling us into a new proportion of being differently-than/creaturely-with not just the Triune God, but all of creation in its reconciliation thereto. But God also acts efficiently, causing every cause and acting in every action. This includes the acts of meaning and commitment that constitute traditions and dialogical cooperation within and between them. Therefore, the authenticity of being-dialogical (differently-than/creaturely-with creatures) is also a participation in being-Godly (differently-than/creaturely-with the Creator).

I’m not entirely sure that Przywara has a sufficiently modern account of meaning and culture to fully bridge the ontological and the hermeneutical in the way I have tried to suggest above. I’m not entirely sure he doesn’t either, but it’s on that suspicion I’ve dragged Lonergan into the conversation because I think he (perhaps uniquely) does. But I don’t think Lonergan had time (there are those accidents of biography again) to make explicit or concrete that link between the ontological and the hermeneutical in a way that present anxieties and controversies demand. And so while this is not exactly a sifting “no” to Lonergan, it is perhaps a way of pushing out into new conversations differently-than/creaturely-with him.

I want to expand on my response to Hemmer in order to forward more dialogue between us, to round out some vague gestures I made, and to speculate about the implications of both expansions. To do so, I will turn to a paragraph from Balthasar that I often find myself puzzling over again and again:

The end of the question is the great cry. It is the word that is no longer a word, that therefore can no longer be understood and interpreted as a word. It is the monstrous thing that still remains after everything moderate, understandable, and attuned to the hearing of men has faded away. In truth, one should hear in every clothed word what breaks out naked in this cry. It is something literally unsayable, which comes from infinitely further than is comprised in the finite dialogic situation, and is directed infinitely further than can be expressed in the creaturely word in fully formed words. (A Theological Anthropology, 280)

Such a paragraph is on the one hand prototypically Balthasarian in the sense that it is in some way Logos-centered, and in the sense that its immediate meaning is difficult to surmise. It says something rather specific without saying, specifically, what it is saying. Such is Balthasar’s habit, though not all the time. Yet this paragraph is quite un-Balthasarian, since it goes beyond simple obscurity, and suggests a surging wellspring of meaning that is not understood, that seems to press apart the boundaries of logic and order. The Balthasar known among scholars, the Germanist of imperious logic that reaches too far, flickers in the mirror standing before us. Becomes someone else.

There is a structure here that is designed to allow for the sundering of structure. In musical terms, it would be a harmony that includes dissonance. It is difficult not to see Przywara underneath this structure, with his keen sense of the “in-and-beyond.” In that sense, Balthasar mimics the shape (or method) of Przywara’s thought, but he does so in a Christological key.

I do not think it is a mistake that Przywara seeks beauty when he does, that Balthasar’s form (Gestalt) operates the way it does, and that in the marriage of both we find ourselves with the beginnings of a Christological “method.” It is at first perceivable as a response to a problem. If Balthasar has learned one of the lessons Przywara is intent on teaching, then Christ as “concrete analogia entis” cannot be argued for simply because Christ is the center of all theological thought. Interpolating Christology and metaphysics is a necessary but dangerous game. We risk a sort of pan-Christ: an Incarnation that the world could have predicted or even brought about, a Jesus whose uniqueness as the one God sinks into the generality of created being. Avoiding this problem is no simple matter.

Enter beauty, which for both Przywara and Balthasar exists as a transcendental of being, and yet the one nearest to the flesh. The one that stresses human perception – that is, the human senses – the most, and so for each thinker this transcendental, beauty, is the one that appears in order to unify what is disparate without eliminating distinction. Neither man originated this collection of ideas. Here the long traditions of classical and Medieval philosophies arrive in order to influence both Przywara and Balthasar. It is perhaps for Thomas Aquinas, most of all, that beauty is a deeply sensational experience. Balthasar emerges with a kind of Bonaventurian-Thomist (Przywarian?) interest in the flesh not only as beautiful, but also as perceiver of the beautiful.

It is beauty’s status as an oddly “physical” transcendental – I speak highly analogously here – that allows for a logical move toward Christology that neither superimposes Jesus onto the structure of the world nor identifies him with it. The Logos is the Logos-sarx, the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us. This is why beauty is Balthasar’s first organizing principle in his theology: he is able to span the impossible distance between the created world and the God who takes creation upon himself without collapsing the two. Beauty calls upon our ordinary, created faculties, but at the same time begs the question of what Balthasar calls the “depths,” which is (at least in part) our implicit knowledge of the infinite God through finite truth. In aesthetic language, Balthasar calls this “splendor,” which is never apart from form.

If there is a Balthasarian Thomism, one that is fundamentally Christological, then it is founded first on what Balthasar learns from Thomas about what beauty is. It is founded as well on a “method” of a sort, one that – in an essential contribution from Przywara – refuses to see the subjective and objective apart from one another.

I want to thank Dr. Carpenter for her engagements with my essay. There is much in her analysis that provokes me, and in those provocations, I feel largely out of my depths. She is circling around a rather serious breakthrough, pivoting on Przywara’s philosophy (or at least my quirky depiction of it) to a novel reading of the theology that emerges in its wake. I want to let some of her proposals float aloft for a while, both because there is so much there to think about, and because I feel unequal to evaluating the really exciting insights she offers.

In a certain sense, her Christological intervention (through Balthasar’s “concrete analogia entis”) foregrounds a question (and, in some cases, an objection) long posed to Przywara’s analysis: cur Deus homo? If creation—the intending, emanating act by which all that is not God is from God (an emanation grounded in the Trinitarian processions)—is the theological correlate that grounds a philosophy of infinite/finite relation, why then, should the difference be traversed? If creation, why then Christ?

In his reflection on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, Balthasar highlights the noetic context of creaturely ambiguity, and does so in very Thomist terms. He notes that, for the child, the experience of any particular existent elicits universal wonder, as if any individual thing is perceived as the totality of being itself. But in leaving behind childish things, a person “emerges into the sphere of the comprehending intellect and of transcendence experiences for the first time enormous disappointment with the world” (The Christian and Anxiety, 129). When compared to the totality of being, this or that existent cannot help but be a let down. Even at their best, most things are . . . just okay. Balthasar argues that the operations of reason (abstraction and insight into phantasm) are both the very things that make conceptualization possible, and the provocation for the experience of anxiety (The Christian and Anxiety, 130). “The ontological difference gives to worldly being an abstract-ghostly outline,” Balthasar writes, “which the mind, insofar as it stands in the middle of the difference during the cognitive act, can register in no other way than as anxiety” (The Christian and Anxiety, 131).

The situation is only exacerbated when one moves from knowing to willing. As knowing depends upon abstraction from the concreteness of sensation in order to grasp in understanding the intelligible immanent in sense, so too must willing abstract from the concreteness of compulsion in order to grasp the goods to be desired. But the “yawning gap” between the existent and being opens up also between the infinite indeterminacy of freedom, and the anxious responsibility of determinate choice (The Christian and Anxiety, 132). But what is this anxiety? Creatureliness or sinfulness? Turns out, it’s a bit of both.

The yawning gap grasped in the noetics of knowing and willing is a consequence of creatureliness, but that the gap is empty is a consequence of sin. For Balthasar, Adam’s discursive knowledge and free will bear the same marks of creatureliness as our own, but while ours is anxious before the distance between existence and totality, the gap in Adam’s creatureliness is filled with God’s intimate presence. With sin, and the consequent withdrawal from the divine presence, the creaturely gap proper to our nature, now empty, invites anxiety. “But!” the theologian is quick to counter, “Jesus!” Balthasar, though, precisely because of his Christology, disabuses us of the notion that Christ is some easy antidote for this sort of existential absence. He writes, “Anxiety has arrived on the scene with the void, and Christ’s redemption does not eliminate this void. His redemption, to be sure, brings God’s fullness, but conveys it into the form of this void.” (142) Christ does not unmake history; he does not awake us from sleep to discover that sin was just a dream. He redeems in manner specified by the scale of emptiness that provokes noetic and volitional anxiety. He makes God present to us, but not as a co-ambulator in Eden’s twilight. Instead, “God is present as the unfelt fullness, as fullness in the void” (143).

It is striking to me that, in articulating how Christ makes God present as the unfelt fullness spanning the chasm of freedom, Balthasar articulates a meta-noetics with great precision. He is fully in possession of a cognition theory that highlights how intelligence abstracts from sensation, converts itself to images, issues forth concepts, judges conceptual validity, intends the consequent good, and ultimately decides for or against the good (148-149). But this articulation of noetic creatureliness is also that by which anxiety arises, and through which, Christ and faith in Christ detach us from such anxiety for the sake of mission.

What Balthasar makes plain is that the meta-ontic and meta-noetic features of analysis can disclose both the positive elements of finitude, and the negative elements of sin. Both features threaten philosophy’s final coherence; the anxiety at their base invites us to ask whether being, knowing, and desiring are anything but a punishment. Here, the freedom predicated on the analogy of being is clarified. We can reside with the anxiety that would keep us staring into the void, or, we can “leap.” We can risk the indeterminacy and indifference of uttering faith’s “yes.” And we can do this because the concrete analogy of being has already traversed the void from the other direction, and has forever entrusted himself to time (146).
Christ as concrete analogy of being forces philosophers and theologians working within Przywara’s thought to pay attention to the negativities disclosed through meta-noetic and meta-ontic investigation, to name them, to see them in ourselves, and to recognize that these negativities and the methods that brought them to light take us the brink of the void and force us to come to terms with our freedom. We can tremble at the nothingness, or we can leap. No pure method, no pure logic, no pure ethics can determine such willingness; it must will in the midst of the ambiguities of both creatureliness and sin. Yet, in Christ—the one in whom the analogy between God and the world inheres—grace elevates freedom to the faith that hopes and loves.

If I may, I would like to also offer some thoughts on Anne Michelle Carpenter’s very interesting responses. Hemmer’s concern to trace what is Catholic in Przywara in his initial post raises the question for me of what he also offers to Protestants, and Carpenter’s thoughts have been interesting to me in this respect (as well as others). If Przywara is eminently Catholic, his traversal of intra-Catholic ideological boundaries nevertheless enables him to continue to be an interesting interlocutor for Protestants as well since his thought perhaps does not fall prey to some of the standard Protestant critiques. This is part of the significance that I see in the links between several of Carpenter’s responses, which make explicit the links between method, metaphysics, and aesthetics, the latter a companion of metaphysics and method that often remains hidden. Nevertheless, I increasingly believe that if you want to know a given thinker’s metaphysics, his or her aesthetics will tell you a great deal. This is true of the Catholic-Protestant dialogue as well. Mapping it out in terms of aesthetics can sometimes unearth a more nuanced topography of agreement and disagreement.

For example, Carpenter’s previous reference to the shift in organizing principle from divine to human in the transition from Medieval to Modern, including Eco’s suggestion of Aquinas’ involvement, is very much bound up with an aesthetic change in which, if we do indeed believe Eco, involves the shift from an aesthetic of symbol to an aesthetic of form (although Eco suggests that aesthetics of the organism is a better fit for Aquinas himself). This is related to Carpenter’s claim that beauty for Aquinas is a sensational experience, that the flesh is perceiver of the beautiful. As the central organizing principle of the universe shifts from God to human with the advent of humanism, the organizing principle in visual art likewise shifts from a web of referential meanings to the eye of the human viewer with the advent of the Renaissance. The significance of form, an aesthetic category though not exclusively, therefore emerges as bound up with the shift to the significance of the creature.

This shift is the background against which the Reformation took place. Calvin’s objection to images, for example, seems to take for granted the idea that the image is primarily a form and therefore an attempt to contain the uncontainable glory and majesty of God. It then cannot but be a falsehood. Indeed, I suspect that this iconoclastic dimension of the Reformation, as well as perhaps other dimensions, would not have occurred if the prevailing aesthetics-metaphysics was more consistent with the Dionysian dimensions of Aquinas that had been the framework for understanding images earlier in the Middle Ages, in terms of a web of references that set the viewer in motion.

The twentieth century Protestant rejection of the analogia entis specifically and perhaps even metaphysics more broadly seems to me to be simply another instantiation of this rejection of the aesthetics of form, since they represent, in many Protestant minds, forms that metaphysically bind the transcendence of God in reference to the creature similar to the way in which the coherence of a Renaissance painting is bound to the eye of the human viewer.

This is precisely why I think Przywara’s analogia entis is capable of avoiding this impasse, though I do not know that I could have expressed it in this way without Carpenter’s parsing of Balthasar’s understanding of form. If Przywara’s turn to the subject is theocentric by virtue of his attending to the role of Pseudo-Dionysius within Aquinas and thereby maintaining “the supra-rational excess of divine being” for understanding world and God (form and that which is beyond form), then the way is opened for an alternative understanding of form to the direction in which the Renaissance took Aquinas. The aesthetic correlate to Carpenter’s metaphysical claim is that such a supra-rational excess of divine being is not only a feature of that which is beyond form but also necessary for understanding form itself. In other words, the aesthetic outcome of a turn to the subject that is nevertheless theocentric would be an attention to form that is nevertheless understood only in the context of a supra-rational excess of referential meaning that keeps the form open and in motion.

As I suggest above, the analogia entis is itself such a form in Przywara, form as motion and as such as a structure that “allow[s] for the sundering of structure” as Carpenter puts it. The analogia entis is a movement-form that we are inside. I perceive it through the flesh not as the viewer of a Renaissance painting, which holds together according to my perspective, but a moving flesh inside a moving form. Thus, while there may be other Protestant concerns that require addressing, Przywara, according to Carpenter’s reading of Balthasar’s form, seems to me to at least show that the Protestant fears regarding metaphysical form as something that necessarily confines the supra-rational excess of the divine or gives the creature a position from which the supra-rational excess of the divine is determined or mastered, should be dispelled. Hemmer’s last response makes clear, moreover, that in connecting Przywara’s analogy of being and Christ as concrete analogy of being, Balthasar reminds us that form cannot be simply dispensed with since Christ is found in human form but that such form is therefore also not understood apart from the supra-rational excess articulated by Przywara, such that the very idea of form itself may be different than what we often assume.