Everyone who has ever tried to proclaim the Faith knows this situation: You are having a conversation with someone about religion, and you come to some kind of sticking point. This can be the result of anything from defending a teaching of the Church, to giving evidence for the reasonableness of religious belief, to sharing one’s own position on the truth of the Catholic Faith.
You and the other person go back and forth for a time until one of you tires of the debate or runs out of things to say, and then the proverbial “trump card” is pulled: “Well, that is your belief, and this is my belief. We should agree to disagree and leave it at that.” Then the discussion ends or takes a turn in a different direction, and you are left feeling—rightly—that you haven’t accomplished much.
Determining the intelligibility of our own faith and worldview, as well as evangelizing and interacting others, is an ever-present challengefor twenty-first-century Catholics. As Catholics, this is our duty; but how do we do it justice?
Fundamental differences of reality
Religion in the modern world is usually viewed only in the sense of some set of doctrines that provides comfort to the belief holder. So long as it edifies the person (and it doesn’t bother anyone else), it doesn’t much matter the content of the belief, or even whether or not it makes sense or is in conformity with reality. So long as it works for you, it is valid. As the old Latin saying goes, “De gustibus non est disputandum”—“Concerning matters of taste, there cannot be dispute.”
This is the prevailing view of what religion is in the modern, secular West, but it misses the point. Religion is not simply a matter of taste, as one would prefer salty foods to sweet ones or football to basketball. Religious people hold their religious beliefs because they believe them to be true. That is to say, they are fully intelligible (they make sense) and they are significant and relevant to the lives of human beings.
This is especially true for Catholic Christians, since we believe that following Jesus Christ and the dictates of his Church bring nothing less than the promise of eternal life, something of a fundamentally different kind than one’s tastes in food or sports entertainment.
However, the question still remains: “Why do sane, reasonable, and in many cases well-educated people disagree so fundamentally on matters of philosophy and religion? Why can’t they come to a consensus?”
The answer is simple: they disagree because they hold radically different presuppositions about what reality is. Because of this, dialogues become monologues; people talk at each other instead of with each other, and no real progress is made. The same concepts have completely different meaning to holders of different worldviews, and so two people speaking the same language are unintelligible to one another.
The only way to recognize that different worldviews spring from different philosophical presuppositions is to isolate those presuppositions and to develop a way to actually meet in a common understanding. The key to doing this is a concept that has been known up to this point only by high-level philosophers but should be known to the entire world. In Latin it is called analogia entis, or the analogy of being.
In its best translation, analogia entis means “relatedness of being.” Simply put, the analogy of being is one of the three general concepts of being that have been classified by philosophers:
- Theunivocal holds that the spiritual and the physical are one and the same
- The equivocal holds that the spiritual and the physical are totally separate and cannot interact
- The analogical holds that the spiritual and the material are distinct yet they interact
Understanding that these worldviews exist and, moreover, discovering which groups hold which one is the key to dialogue on a meaningful rather than a superficial level. This can work for both religious systems (such as Protestantism or Hinduism) and for purely philosophical systems (such as existentialism). It is worth talking about these concepts briefly.
The univocal concept of being
The univocal framework of being holds to the unity and sameness of all being, where everything is understood as one: one in essence and one in being, and where essence and existence themselves are one and the same in all things. This outlook is called the univocal concept of being, or monism.
Here, physical and spiritual are thought to be essentially identical, either because spiritual is reduced to the level of the physical or because the physical is elevated to the stature of the spiritual (specifically, God). An example of a univocal system of thought is any of the various strands of Hinduism (which are usually pantheistic) as well as thoroughly secularized idea systems like materialistic atheism.
Everywhere within the reign of the univocal concept of being there is the fusion of physical and spiritual, regardless of the different sorts of phenomena (observable events) and the different sorts of noumena (objects or events that are known—if at all—without use of the senses). Everything is squeezed into one kind of being—an indivisible continuum, as it were—with only a virtual or mental distinction to separate them. Monism holds that everything is interrelated, interdependent, and interpenetrating in one single whole. Since matter is essentially divinized, evil does not exist.
To give an extreme example of this, journalist Arthur Koestler tells of a fascinating interview he had with a Japanese Zen (Buddhist) scholar who, when asked for Zen’s response to the atrocities of Hitler and Nazism, replied that what Hitler had done to the Jews was “very silly.” Although repeatedly pressed by Koestler, the Zen scholar refused to call Hitler evil, saying that distinctions between good and evil are alien to Zen. A problematic position to be sure.
The equivocal concept of being
On the other side of the spectrum there exists the equivocal concept of being. This is the idea that the physical and spiritual are totally alien to each other and do not ever, cannot ever, interact with one another.
When applied to a worldview, “equivocal” points to the belief that, although we use the same word when we speak of the being of God and the being of man, the two beings are so radically different that there is not the least any similarity. In the equivocal system, phenomena and noumena become radically separated by an unbridgeable abyss.
This dualism will insist either that God is so completely transcendent that we can come to affirm his existence by blind faith alone or else that we can never come to know the noumenal realm by any means whatsoever. Strict Protestantism, most schools of Islam, and as philosophies such as fideism and empiricism all fall into this broad category, as do Jehovah’s Witnesses and rabbinical Judaism.
The equivocal concept of being maintains that although the spiritual realm exists, we can know only that which we can experience through our senses (i.e., the physical). We can discover and explore the riches of the physical world, but we can never rationally pass beyond them. The spiritual and the material never meet, like railroad tracks that run parallel and never merge.
All of reality is bisected into two isolated divisions that have nothing in common—no connection, no continuity. This results in the conclusion that since we can sensually experience only the physical, then the spiritual—if it exists—is totally unknowable. Thus, we can never reason to the existence of a God.
With regard to free will, the equivocal tends to be deterministic as well, but stemming from a different source. For the equivocal theist, matter and all things not relating to the spiritual world are infinitely depraved. Thus, any “good” that occurs is an expression of God’s grace and never of human agency.
Taken even further, if one holds that all things happen because of God’s will—including bad things—it still does not reflect poorly on God, since God’s ways are infinitely above our ways. Both the univocal and equivocal positions, in their own ways, are contrary to our experiences of freedom as well as the reality of evil, and so both positions constitute a kind of intellectual suicide. There must be a better way.
The analogical concept of being
The analogy of being (cf. Wisdom 13:5, Romans 1:20), is the overall transcendental concept that points unequivocally to the full truth of the Roman Catholic Faith and demonstrates why the Catholic Church is “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” ( I Tim. 3:15 ). The analogy of being is the idea best suited to prove that fullness of truth to the rest of the world and thus to bring the whole world to know, love, and worship the one triune God.
The analogical concept of being has a long history in Roman Catholic theological understanding. It is implicit in the thinking of many Church Fathers, and in its formal expression even predates Thomas Aquinas, having first been established as a basis for the Catholic worldview by the Fourth Lateran Council in A.D. 1215. It has been extensively used by Thomists and other schools of Catholic theology down to the present day.
The analogical concept of being is a position that espouses both philosophical realism and Judeo-Christian theism:
- Philosophical realism professes confidence that, by means of the senses and the intellect, man can reach truth about a real (extra-mental) world outside himself, however incompletely.
- Theism holds to the existence of God—the paradigmatic instance of being—whose existence we can know only analogically, in relation to our experience of finite being.
This position also holds that God’s immanence in creation is made possible by his utter transcendence. Only God is omnipotent. No other being imaginable could share this attribute with him. Yet precisely because he is all-powerful, transcending all else that is and being infinitely greater than the sum total of all existing things, he is able to be omnipresent by his causality, present in all creation, “upholding the universe by his word of power” (Heb. 1:3).
Regarding the question of free will and the problem of evil, the analogical way of looking at things is in accord with reality and with divinely revealed truth. On free will and choosing the good, the analogical mind holds that actual freedom of choice is possible, since nature has the possibility to be graced or not graced, depending on whether or not it is aligned with the divine being of God.
Regarding the problem of evil, through the analogical concept of being we can know through reason that there is a God and know that we are not God; similarly, we can come to understand that, although we are fallen from the initial perfection of Adam, our natures are not fundamentally altered from God’s design. We are damaged but not broken beyond repair in our capacity to do good. The analogy of being provides an accurate and concise navigation through the complexities of the world’s beliefs about God from a Catholic viewpoint.
To know the analogy of being is truly a mind-transforming experience in the Roman Catholic tradition. The analogy of being’s greatest strength is that it has the possibility to form one’s worldview in a way that it is both truly intelligible and truly orthodox. When we speak of the analogy of being, we mean that the being of God and the being of creatures are neither univocal (monism ) nor equivocal (radical dualism ).
In viewing the world via the analogical concept of being, we are better able to make sense and make arguments concerning those things we already know from reason and revelation. It can also make us aware of the deficiencies of both the univocal and equivocal. Once you have this knowledge, the next time you are at a dinner party and this subject comes up, provided you know the concepts of being of the person or group to whom you are speaking, you may just get somewhere with your discussion.