43. Analogy, Proportion, and the Beatific Vision

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Lecture Notes

Main Topics #

• Equivocation by Reason (ἀναλογία): Words are carried over from their primary meaning to secondary meanings by dropping part of the original meaning while maintaining an ordered relationship
• Proportion (λόγος/ratio): The relation between one thing and another; can be exact (mathematical: 3:6 = 1:2) or broader (likeness of ratios, like first matter to shapes)
• Creature-God Relation: Creatures have a proportion to God as effect to cause, but this is not mathematical proportion
• Can God Be Seen Through Created Likeness?: Thomas argues NO—God’s essence must be the intelligible form itself
• The Light of Glory (lux gloriae): A supernatural disposition that raises the intellect to receive God as intelligible form, not a created likeness

Key Arguments #

Equivocation by Reason (Examples from Lecture) #

• ‘Undergoing’ (πάσχειν/pati):

  • Primary: to be acted upon destructively and contrary to oneself (‘I’m under the weather’)
  • Secondary: what senses do when perceiving (perfects rather than destroys)
  • Tertiary: what intellect does when understanding
  • The word is generalized by dropping the destructive aspect while keeping the core idea of receptivity

• Fear:

  • Emotional fear: involves bodily disturbance (pounding heart)
  • Philosophical fear (of error): act of will without bodily transformation
  • Same formal aspect (recognizing difficulty to overcome) but drops the bodily element

• Love:

  • Emotional love (of candy, of woman): involves bodily passion
  • Intellectual love (of wisdom, of syllogism): act of will without emotion
  • Same formal structure maintained, bodily aspect dropped

• Hope (as theological virtue):

  • Emotional hope: passion with bodily components
  • Theological virtue of hope: act of will pursuing difficult good toward God
  • Drops bodily aspect but keeps structure of rising to overcome difficulty

• Perfect/Perfection:

  • Primary: what has been completely made (πεπερασμένον/finitum)
  • Secondary: God as having infinite actuality
  • Drops the ‘completed through composition’ aspect but keeps ‘actualized potency’

The Road in Knowledge #

• In material reality: one part of a road precedes another (asphalt/physical material)
• In knowledge: maintain the ‘before-and-after’ relationship (προηγούμενα)
• Drop: the material (asphalt), Keep: the ordering (sequence, progression)
• This is why philosophy is called ‘knowledge proceeding along a road’ (μέθοδος)
• Example: From sensible/material things we proceed to knowledge of the divine

Proportion and Mathematical Example #

• Exact proportion: 6:4 = 3:2 (can be transposed: 6:3 = 4:2)
• Likeness of proportions (ὁμοιότης λόγων): 5,000:10,000 = 1:2; 5,000,000:10,000,000 = 1:2
• Can take things increasingly far apart and maintain same ratio
• Application to God: First matter is known ‘by proportion’ as clay:sphere/cube (not exact mathematical ratio, but likeness of ratios)
• More appropriate for God: use likeness of ratios rather than exact proportion, since creature and God are infinitely distant

Thomas on Seeing God’s Essence (Article 2) #

The Problem: Objections claim no created likeness can represent God because:

• Lower orders cannot reveal higher things (Dionysius)
• God’s essence is His being (esse); no created form possesses this
• God is infinite; no limited created species can represent infinity

Thomas’s Solution:

1. On the knower’s side: Light of glory required as a disposition
2. On the known’s side: No created likeness; God’s essence itself must become the intelligible form

Why no created likeness works:

• Every created form is determined to some notion (genus/species)
• God is uncircumscribed (ἀπερίγραπτος/incircumscriptus), infinite
• Created likeness would be inferior to what it represents
• God’s essence IS His existence; created forms have existence distinct from essence

The Light of Glory vs. Other Lights #

• Natural light of reason: Makes potentially intelligible things actually intelligible
• Light of faith: Makes truths above reason intelligible to us
• Light of glory: Does NOT make God intelligible (He already is pure act, maximally intelligible)
  • Rather, it DISPOSES our intellect to receive God as intelligible form
  • Raises our power above its natural capacity
  • Different meaning of ’light’ (dispositional, not illuminative)

Divine Substance as Intelligible Form #

• In natural knowing: external form is received in intellect; substance remains outside
• In beatific vision: divine substance itself must be the form by which we know
• Our intellect must be raised to receive what is naturally God’s form (His self-understanding)
• This requires something supernatural (the light of glory)
• We participate in the way God understands Himself through Himself

Important Definitions #

• ἀναλογία/analogia: Analogy; equivocation by reason where part of the original meaning is dropped
• λόγος/ratio: Relation, proportion; can be exact mathematical ratio or broader relation
• ὁμοιότης λόγων/similitudo rationum: Likeness of proportions; relations between things far apart that maintain the same structural ordering
• lux gloriae: Light of glory; supernatural dispositional perfection raising intellect above nature
• intelligibilis forma: Intelligible form; that by which something is understood; in beatific vision = God Himself
• esse/being: Existence; in God, essence and existence are identical (ipsum esse subsistens)
• ἀπερίγραπτος/incircumscriptus: Uncircumscribed, infinite, not bounded by genus or species
• via: Road, way; the journey of knowledge; from Greek ὁδός (ὁδός = road, more sensible than English ‘way’)
• beatific vision: Direct vision of God’s essence as He is in Himself

Examples & Illustrations #

The Shape Known Through the Eye #

• When I see a picture, the shape has been received in my eye (not the physical picture, but its likeness)
• The eye becomes shaped in a way (is informed by the similitude)
• But the eye doesn’t contain the substance of what it sees
• Similarly, external forms are received in intellect as likenesses, not as the thing itself
• Exception: In beatific vision, the form is not a created likeness but the divine substance itself

Empedocles and the Problem of Material Presence #

• Empedocles: “By earth we know earth; by water, water; by air, air”
• We agree the thing known must be in the knower, but NOT materially
• Counterexample: David’s stone hitting Goliath’s servant—having a stone embedded in you doesn’t make you know what stone is
• A picture with water in it doesn’t know what water is
• A chair made of wood doesn’t know what wood is
• Therefore: what is known must be in us not materially but as intelligible form

Shakespeare’s Argument on Human Dignity (Hamlet) #

• “What is a man if his chief good in the market of his time he but to sleep and feed a beast, no more?”
• Structure: chief good of man : man :: chief good of beast : beast
• Transposed mathematically: chief good of man : chief good of beast :: man : beast
• If chief good of man = chief good of beast, then man = beast (false)
• In numbers: “What is the three if it be half of four? A two, no more”
• If 3 is half of 4, then 3 is only a 2 (reductio)

Euclidean Geometry Example (Book 2, Theorem 14) #

• Finding the side of a square equal to a given rectangle
• Builds on earlier theorems, particularly Book 2, Theorem 5
• Theorem 5: For same perimeter, square has more area than rectangle (oblong)
• Formal statement: If a line is cut into equal and unequal segments, the square on the half exceeds the rectangles contained by the equal ones by the square between the points of section
• Illustrates how knowledge proceeds step-by-step (paulatim, bit by bit)
• Natural mind limitation: must consider things one by one, not all at once
• Contrast: In beatific vision, we see all at once; we see everything in seeing God

The Child and the Road #

• Berquist asks his young son Paul: “What is the basic road in human knowledge?”
• Paul (stuck in sensible meaning): “There are cars and trucks on it!”
• Illustrates how primary meaning (material road) captures attention first
• Analogous to how sensible things are most knowable to us but least knowable in themselves

Natural Light and Phantasm #

• Potentially intelligible things (in phantasm/imagination) are made actually intelligible by natural light of reason
• This is like how external light makes colors visible
• But light of glory is NOT like this—it’s not making something intelligible
• Rather, it’s raising the power to receive what is already maximally intelligible

The Bat and Bright Light (Aristotle Reference) #

• Bat cannot see the sun not because sun is invisible but because light is too bright
• Similarly: God is most visible in Himself but exceeds our natural capacity to see
• We need light of glory not to make God visible but to raise our power

Notable Quotes #

“The relation of one thing to another can be called a ratio. And thus there can be a ratio of the creature to God insofar as it has itself to him as an effect to a cause and as ability to act.”

“There is a proportion there… not as exact as four is to six is two is to three, but there is a likeness of the way one is to the other.”

“That’s the kind of equivocation where a word is carried over by having part of its meaning dropped.”

“The word fear is not purely equivocal there… as I carry the word love over from the emotion to the act of the will, I’m dropping the bodily aspect out.”

“When the word road is carried over from the road we walk upon to the road in our knowledge, do you keep something of the idea of that road? Because when I take the road from here to Boston, one part of the road is before another part. And so that before and after, I keep that idea, but I drop out the asphalt.”

“Thomas is trying to make the point that you can have a likeness of ratio between things that are very far apart.”

“Through no created likeness is the nature and substance of God able to be seen. Because what he’s going to say is that no created likeness would be adequate to expressing God as he really is.”

“The divine substance itself is united to our mind, or maybe better to say, our mind is united to the divine substance.”

“The light of glory is not to make God understandable—God is completely understandable as pure act—but to raise up our power of understanding to dispose it to receive the divine substance as a form.”

“In your light we shall see light.” (Psalm 35:10)

“We’re being raised up to be able to receive God as the form by which we see God as he is. That’s the form in which God sees himself.”

“Our mind has to be raised up by this disposition called the light of glory, which is something necessary, therefore supernatural.”

“We see everything in seeing God. See? We’ll see at least the divine mind, the divine substance clearly enough to see everything you naturally want to know.”

Questions Addressed #

Primary Question: Can God’s Essence Be Seen Through a Created Likeness? #

Answer: No. God must be seen through His own essence as the intelligible form, not through any created likeness.

Three Reasons Why Created Likeness Fails:

1. Dionysius’s argument: Lower orders of things cannot make known higher things; a created form cannot reveal bodiless divine nature
2. Identity of essence and existence: God’s essence is His being (esse); no created form possesses this identity—in creatures, existence and essence are always distinct
3. Infinity problem: God is infinite and uncircumscribed; every created form is determined to some genus or species; infinite cannot be represented by the finite and determined

Secondary Question: What is Required on the Knower’s Side? #

Answer: The light of glory is required to dispose the intellect to receive the divine substance as intelligible form.

How it works:

• Not a created likeness of God
• A supernatural elevation of natural intellect
• Analogous to how natural light makes potentially intelligible things actually intelligible
• Analogous to how light of faith makes revealed truths intelligible
• But unlike those: not making something intelligible, but raising the power to be subject capable of receiving God Himself as form

Tertiary Question: How Can Augustine Say “Likeness of God Comes to Be in Us”? #

Answer: Augustine speaks of knowledge “in via” (on the road/in this life), not the beatific vision. The likeness is not a created likeness of God’s essence but refers to the elevation of our mind by grace (light of glory) making it capable of receiving divine form.

Methodological Notes #

• Order of naming vs. order of things: Material things are named/known first (more sensible to us) but are later in being; we must go from sensible to intelligible
• Distinction between knowable by nature and knowable to us: God is maximally knowable in Himself but least knowable to us in our natural state
• Handling equivocation: Key to understanding how we can speak truly of God by carrying over words from created things—the formal aspect is maintained while dropping limitations tied to materiality
• The role of proportion: Even though creature-God relation is not mathematical proportion, it is a proportion in the broader sense of ordered relation; this allows meaningful analogical speech about God