Unless we already know what God is and what his qualities are, in which case the analogy would tell us something interesting about whatever is compared to God, not about God, about Whom we already know all there is to know.
It could be argued that the cases in which God is truly spoken of metaphorically are exempt from this criticism. The poetic metaphors of the Bible that speak of a God raging like a lion or as persistent as a woodworm tell us something about his wrath or his obstinacy. Granted. But these metaphors are not designed to reveal to us God’s nature, which is unknown, but the effects of his operations, which we already know. They do not posit an unknowable God but a God already anthropomorphized, like the pagan gods. Proceeding from the known to the known, these metaphors place something before our eyes, but in the mode of a simile. We are on this side of, or in any event outside of, an analogical discourse in divinis.
This is the fundamental weakness with any discussion of the analogia entis, and in fact all it permits the philosopher to discover is what the philosopher already knew on faith. It is no accident that discussions of the analogia entis engender prodigies of subtlety, but end up dissipating with the Scholasticism of the Post-Reformation. In fact, whenever we have to speak of the divine attributes, if we assume a Platonic-Augustinian position, then we already know everything about God for innate reasons, and only because we have this knowledge of the divine can we say that something shares (pallidly) in His Goodness or another of the transcendental properties of being. These appear to be the terms in which authors like Alexander of Hales, who speaks of the soul as “imago Dei,” or Bonaventure, for whom the soul possesses “principia per se nota,” handle analogy. And analogy is not so much a pathway to knowledge as a proportion known by illumination (see Lyttkens 1952: 123–153).
Otherwise we must take experience as our starting point, in which case the analogia entis is reduced to the rational demonstration of God’s existence, or to the formula that basically reiterates Thomas’s five ways: given a chain of cause and effect in the world, ergo there must exist a causeless first cause. Apart from the fatal weakness of the argument (the ergo that leads up to the final conclusion is exactly what was supposed to be proved—that is, just as the things of the world suppose a chain of causes and effects, so the chain of causes and effects of the world supposes an otherworldly cause—an argument that fails to withstand Kant’s criticism), we should note that what the five ways tell us at the most is that God must exist, not what God is like.
In point of fact, any discussion of analogy only serves to remind us that all we can predicate of God is Goodness, Truth, Fullness of Being, Unity, Beauty, but nothing further. And it can only come up in a culture that already assumes that God is Goodness, Unity, Truth, and Beauty.
Precisely on account of this dramatic impasse, which will lead to its collapse, the analogia entis has less cognitive value than a good metaphor.
3.8. Conclusion
The poetry and prose of the Middle Ages abound in metaphors, while contemporary theory, be it philosophical or poetic and rhetorical, is inadequate to account for this richness. This should not surprise us, as it is a commonplace that the culture of the time frequently shows a dichotomy between theory and practice. The typical example is music, a field in which the doctrinal discussion is extremely abstract, based on Pythagorean models, relicto aurium iudicio (“setting aside the judgment of the ears”), as Boethius remarked, and as a result deaf to the evolution of musical practice (see Eco 1987 and Dahan 1980: 172). But at least in the case of music there is an explanation, which is, as we mentioned, the weight of the Pythagorean tradition as transmitted by Boethius. Can we find a similar reason in the case of the theory of metaphor?
We can, and it lies in the weight that the commentary on Aristotle’s Categories had throughout medieval doctrinal culture thanks to the mediation of Porphyry.
Let us take another look at what we said in Chapter 1 (section 1.2.1) apropos of the Arbor Porphyriana: that it makes it possible, in other words, to classify, but not to define. In order to define, the tree would have to introduce many more differences than it actually does, or it would have to resolve itself into a network of differences. Every time Aristotle is faced with explaining a metaphor he has recourse to local “ontologies” that are far more flexible than a tree of genera and species.
Now, the doctrinal thought of the Middle Ages is unable to wean itself away from the model provided by the Arbor, and as a consequence, while it can easily understand and justify substitutions from genus to species and vice versa, it finds itself in difficulties when it comes to talking about the multiplicity of properties that enter into play in metaphorical substitutions. It is worth noting that Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who was not a philosopher, was not the only one to point out the need to take into consideration all of the possible properties of an object: philosophers and theologians too, when it came to analyzing a metaphor, were perfectly well aware of what, often peripheral, characteristics formed the basis of the amalgam of the two sememes. But when it came to constructing a theory of metaphorical invention (considering the subtleties they were capable of when discussing problems of logic), they found themselves without a sufficiently flexible semantic model, and they were loath to call into question the canonical model of the Porphyrian tree that had been such an integral part of their intellectual formation.
Why this instinctive reluctance to challenge the world order established by the Arbor Porphyriana? If what we said at the conclusion of Chapter 1 is true, resorting to flexible, even unexplored, “ontologies” to explain metaphorical expressions meant admitting that ontologies, like the Porphyrian tree itself, were practical, provisional tools, and not definitive images of the structure of the world and the Great Chain of Being. And not even the most faithful devotees of Aristotle in those centuries could escape the influence of Neo-Platonism (Thomas Aquinas himself commented not only on Aristotle but also on Dionysius).
To construct or suggest the possibility of an unexpectedly adequate ontology, we do not have to start with the supposition that the universe must always be seen according to a single organizational model according to preordained genera and species. But it was precisely this idea of an “ontological revolution” that could not even cross the mind of a medieval thinker, because their very image of the world was conceived along the model of a stable Arbor Porphyriana.
This helps us understand, I believe, why a historical period so rich in extraordinary metaphors (audaciously proposed by its poets) found itself unable to elaborate a theory of metaphor as an instrument of fresh knowledge.
This is a shorter, edited version of a paper delivered at a seminar at the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici of the University of Bologna in March 2001 in the context of a series of talks on the fortunes of Aristotle’s theory of metaphor. It appeared in Lorusso (2005).
- “Tropus est dictio translata a propria significatione ad non propriam similitudinem ornatus necessitatisue causa.… Metaphora est rerum uerborumque translatio. Haec fit modis quattuor, ab animali ad animale, ab inanimali ad inanimale, ab animale ad inanimale, ab inanimali ad animale: ab animali ad animale, ut Tiphyn aurigam celeris fecere carinae; nam et auriga et gubernator animam habent: ab inanimali ad inanimale, ut ut pelagus tenuere rates; nam et naues et rates animam non habent: ab animali ad inanimale, ut Atlantis cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris piniferum caput et cetera: nam ut haec animalis sunt, ita mons animam non habet, cui membra hominis ascribuntur: ab inanimali ad animale, ut si tantum pectore robur concipis; nam ut robur animam non habet, sic utique Turnus, cui haec dicuntur, animam habet” (Ars maior III, 6, ed. Holtz, pp. 668–669). “A trope is an expression taken out of its proper meaning to a similar improper one for the purpose of embellishment or necessity.… Metaphor is the transformation of things or words. This takes place in four ways, from the animate to the animate, from the inanimate to the inanimate, from the animate to the inanimate, from the inanimate to the animate—from the animate to the animate, as Tiphyn aurigam celeris fecere carinae [P. Terentius Varro Atacinus, Argonautae]; for both auriga ‘driver’ [or ‘charioteer’: Lewis and Short] and gubernator ‘guider’ [steersman,’ ‘pilot’: Lewis and Short] have souls—from inanimate to inanimate, as ut pelagus tenuere rates (Aeneid 5.8) ‘when the ships gained the deep’; for neither naves ‘ships’ nor rates ‘rafts, ships’ are alive—from animate to inanimate, as Atlantis cinctum assidue cui nubibus atris piniferum caput; (Aeneid 4.248)
