This is the translation of an important book in metaphysics by Erich Przywara that joins philosophy and theology together in a systematic outlook on the whole of created being as it relates to the Creator. The original German appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, at a time when phenomenology was challenging the validity of metaphysics regarding questions of theology of any kind, whether rational or faith-based. It defends not only the validity of a systematic metaphysics of being as being for transcending phenomenology, but also the necessity of it for attaining a truly theological discourse regarding God as both Creator and Redeemer of humankind and of the universe.
The book focuses on a properly metaphysical analogia entis, and not any other loose analogy one might think of, as the only way of introducing an authentically theological turn in philosophy that is comprehensive of what can only remain incomprehensible to any rational inquiry, even as God intervenes in what the author refers to as the “original structure and universal rhythm” of created being. The analogy of being has long been the centerpiece for the philosophy of being where it joins with theology, rational or faith-based, and conversely where theology, again both rational or faith-based, joins with philosophy in its exploration, not only of what is comprehensible to us in our rational inquiry about God as Creator, or as First Most Universal Cause, but also of what remains strictly incomprehensible to rational inquiry about God's supernatural intervention in the historical order in redeeming the world.
This centrality of the analogy of being for both philosophy and theology in their relation to one another was lost to what passed as metaphysics in modern philosophy and to the abstract rational theology derived from that very questionable metaphysics, as critical philosophy was quick to show. Heidegger barely mentions analogy in his historical assessment of metaphysics, thus leaving out an essential component of the philosophy he was intent on deconstructing. Barth speaks of analogy as an invention of the devil to replace God by a man-made idol. But Przywara goes back to the long tradition of analogy in metaphysics, not only to restore metaphysics to its rightful and necessary place at the junction of theology and philosophy, but also to show how one can move from one realm of rational discourse to the other without confusing them and without reducing either one of them to the other, but also without isolating them from one another.
Analogy is often represented as an abandonment of rigorousness in rational discourse. But that is not how it is conceived by Przywara, or in the long tradition of analogical metaphysics of being he invokes, going back not just to Aquinas and Augustine, but even to Aristotle and Plato. Przywara does not set phenomenology aside in his metaphysical endeavor, nor does he use it to dismiss metaphysics, as Heidegger did. He integrates it as part of his meta-noesis, to transcend particular sciences of nature or of historical cultures, opening the way to a concrete order of being in a meta-ontics of the universe and a morphology of the concrete world. In this integration of phenomenology as a preamble to metaphysics, Przywara does not lose sight of the presence of being to intelligence as well as to the senses, and of what Max Scheler spoke of as a certain “resistance” of reality in all its diversity to all consciousness.
There are two parts to what has been translated in this volume. The first part, “Original Structure,” is the original presentation that appeared under the title Analogia Entis. This part is subdivided into two sections, one on metaphysics as such, transcending all particular sciences, including phenomenology, and relevant to both philosophy and theology; the other on how analogy functions as principle for comprehending the incomprehensible in both philosophy and theology.
The second part of the book, entitled “Universal Rhythm,” contains fifteen essays dealing with different aspects of how analogy and metaphysics play themselves out with regard to philosophy and religion, including an essay on how phenomenology gives way to “realogy” (or ontology), which in turn gives way to “relationology” (or analogy); another splendid essay on the religious gnoseology of Saint Augustine; and several more on contemporary figures like Edith Stein and Simone Weil as well as Husserl and Heidegger. The choice of essays is excellent in the range of subjects it covers and in the erudition of the author it displays with regard to contemporary thought in philosophy and theology as well as to the whole of Western tradition in these two metaphysically interrelated fields.
The translation is all that it should be for such a systematic work, including frequent interpolations to keep the English as close as possible to a German that is terse as well as complicated. It is preceded by a bibliographic introduction of 115 pages by one of the translators, and followed by an index consisting of both proper names and some of the central topics that run throughout the book, although not all of them, as one would wish for a systematic book such as this, to facilitate the more systematic study that the book deserves. The translators are to be congratulated for having resurrected this treasure of a book so well and for giving it a new life in English at the junction of philosophy and theology we have come to. One can only hope that it will be read and studied as widely as it deserves.
