Thoughts on Analogy and Relation

The present paper engages the relation between two teachings: the doctrine that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the doctrine of the divine simplicity—and the doctrine of analogy.1 It is principally owing to my exchanges with Fr. W. Norris Clarke and David Schindler Sr.,2 and with Kenneth Schmitz (and, again, Fr. Clarke)3 that I have become increasingly aware that certain judgments superordinating relation to being occur in one principal early form in Thomistic writers of the nineteen sixties and seventies, only subsequently to be developed in the thought of the theologians and philosophers whom one might refer to as forming, in North America, the Communio School, or if one likes, “Communio Thomists.” Those early discussions regarding receptivity and relation in creatures and God pivoted around the understanding of the nature and limitation of the analogy from creatures to God.