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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2025
E. L. Mascall devoted much of his early scholarly career to developing accounts of analogy and natural theology grounded in the study both of Thomas Aquinas and in his Thomist successors. This essay examines Mascall’s account of analogy in relation to other views on analogy in his day, finding that in the 1950s, ‘image’ becomes at least as important a category for Mascall as ‘analogy’. Even while beginning from Thomist metaphysical standpoints and motivated by Thomist considerations, Mascall develops an account of thinking and speaking about God that diverges from his Thomist contemporaries, resembling more the thought of his ‘para-Thomist’ friend and colleague, Austin Farrer.
1 John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900–1970 (London: SCM Press, 1963), p. 289; John Macquarrie, ‘Mascall and Transcendental Thomism’, in John Macquarrie, Stubborn Theological Questions (London: SCM Press, 2003): p. 49–63.
2 E. L. Mascall, The Openness of Being: Natural Theology Today (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971), p. 6: ‘I should still wish, apart from comparatively minor points of emphasis, to defend the position which I set forth in my books He Who Is (1943), Existence and Analogy (1949), and Words and Images (1957)’.
3 E. L. Mascall, He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism [HWI] (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1943), p. ix.
4 See Domenic D’Ettore, Analogy after Aquinas: Logical Problems, Thomistic Answers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2020).
5 See Metaphysics 4.2, 1003a33–35.
6 See Richard Cross, Great Medieval Thinkers: Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 34; Richard Cross, ‘Duns Scotus and Analogy: A Brief Note’, The Modern Schoolman 89 (2012), p. 147–154; Richard Cross, ‘Are Names Said of God and Creatures Univocally?’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92, no. 2 (2018), p. 319; Garrett Smith, ‘‘The Analogy of Being in the Scotist Tradition’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 93, no. 4 (2019), p. 644–651.
7 For more on the Scotist tradition, see Stephen Dumont, ‘Transcendental Being: Scotus and Scotists’ Topoi 11 (1992), p. 133–148; Smith, ‘The Analogy of Being in the Scotist Tradition’.
8 EA, 100. More recent readers of Suárez agree with Mascall’s conceptualist characterization: see Victor Salas, ‘Between Thomism and Scotism: Francisco Suárez on the Analogy of Being’, in Victor M Salas and Robert L Fastiggi, eds. A Companion to Francisco Suárez (Leiden: Brill, 2015), p. 340.
9 Indeed, some scholars argue that Suárez’s view nearly resembles Scotus’; see Lukáŝ Novák, ‘Suarez’s Notion of Analogy: Scotus’s Essential Order in Disguise?’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 95, no. 2 (2021), p. 195–233. Étienne Gilson draws the line between Thomism and Scotism on analogy precisely between the ‘judgmentalism’ of the former and the ‘conceptualism’ of the latter: see Étienne Gilson, Jean Duns Scot: introduction a ses positions fondamentales (Paris: J. Vrin, 1952), p. 101.
10 Basil Mitchell, ‘Staking a Claim for Metaphysics’, in Harriet A. Harris and Christopher J. Insole, eds. Faith and Philosophical Analysis: The Impact of Analytical Philosophy on the Philosophy of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 21–32; see also David Brown, ‘Basil George Mitchell: 1917–2011’, Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the British Academy, XII, 308.
11 FI, 16.
12 FI, 62.
13 Austin Farrer, Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay [FI] (Westminster: Dacre, 1943), p. 7.
14 FI, 7.
15 FI, 22.
16 FI, 263.
17 Farrer, for his part, attributes this argument to William of Ockham at Austin Farrer, ‘Analogy’, in Lefferts A. Loetscher, et al, eds. Twentieth-Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge: An Extension of the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Baker Book House, 1955), p. 39.
18 E. L. Mascall, ‘Austin Marsden Farrer: 1904–1968’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LIV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968–1970), p. 436, citing a phrase from Gregory Dix.
19 HWI, viii.
20 E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy: A Sequel to “He Who Is” [EA] (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949), p. xviii.
21 EA, 95; see also p. 124: ‘[i]f the doctrine of analogy can explain how this is possible, so much the better; if it cannot, it is the doctrine of analogy that is discredited, not our knowledge of God’.
22 HWI, 13; see Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediæval Philosophy: Gifford Lectures 1931–1932, trans. A. H. C. Downes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), cc. 3–4, especially p. 51.
23 Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 61.
24 Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1956), p. 33.
25 EA, 19.
26 EA, 51.
27 For discussion of Mascall on natural theology, see William Haggerty, ‘On Not Taking the World for Granted: E. L. Mascall on The Five Ways’, Studia Gilsoniana 8, no. 2 (2019): p. 277–303.
28 EA, 67.
29 HWI, 72–73.
30 HWI, 73.
31 EA, 171.
32 Mascall’s undergraduate degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge, was in Mathematics, and immediately after university, he was Senior Maths Master at Bablake School.
33 HWI, 79.
34 HWI, 80.
35 EA, 93–94.
36 EA, 96.
37 EA, 96.
38 See A M Farrer, ‘The Extension of St. Thomas’s Doctrine of Knowledge by Analogy to Modern Philosophical Problems’, Downside Review 65, no. 1 (1947), p. 23–24: ‘Now I am about to suggest that for a modern the balance of this contrast has considerably altered, and that what we take to be our apprehension of finite substances approximates far more towards the traditional account of our apprehension of God than strict traditionalism would have said’.
39 See Robert MacSwain, ed. Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 59–63. Farrer acknowledges his debt to Gabriel Marcel on ‘problems’ and ‘mysteries’, though he does not exactly follow Marcel’s usage.
40 MacSwain, Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, 66.
41 EA, 111n3.
42 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange God, His Existence and His Nature: A Thomistic Solution of Certain Agnostic Antinomies, vol. 2, trans. Dom B. Rose, OSB (St Louis & London: B. Herder, 1934), p. 218.
43 Garrigou-Lagrange God v. 2, p. 219–220.
44 Garrigou-Lagrange, God v. 2, 220.
45 Garrigou-Lagrange, God v. 2, 220.
46 M. T-L. Penido, Le Rôle de L’Analogie en Théologie Dogmatique (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1931), p. 138.
47 EA, 111n3.
48 See EA, 96: ‘The doctrine, as we find it in the Thomist tradition, appears in at least three distinct departments of philosophy, namely the metaphysical or ontological, the epistemological or psychological, and the logical or linguistic’.
49 EA, 97.
50 EA, 120.
51 EA, 123.
52 EA, 124.
53 EA, 123.
54 EA, 119–120.
55 EA, 123.
56 Victor Salas, ‘The Judgmental Character of Thomas Aquinas’s Analogy of Being’, The Modern Schoolman 85 (2008), p. 129.
57 Salas, ‘The Judgmental Character’, 130.
58 Salas, ‘The Judgmental Character’, 134.
59 EA, 120.
60 EA, 120.
61 EA, 120.
62 Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, eds. New Directions in Philosophical Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955).
63 MacSwain, Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, 15.
64 MacSwain, Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, 55.
65 MacSwain, Scripture, Metaphysics, and Poetry, 65–66.
66 E. L. Mascall, Words and Images: A Study in Theological Discourse [WI] (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1957), 121.
67 WI, viii.
68 WI, 39.
69 Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 1998), 32.
70 WI, 63.
71 WI, 38.
72 WI, 34.
73 WI, 33.
74 WI, 114.
75 WI, 114.
76 WI, 114–115.
77 E. L. Mascall, ‘Sensation and Perception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 64 (1964), p. 272.
78 WI, 85.
79 For Farrer, see Austin Farrer, ‘Poetic Truth’, in Charles C. Conti, ed. Reflective Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SPCK, 1972), 37–38: ‘the chief impediment to religion in this age, I often think, is that no one ever looks at anything at all: not so as to contemplate it, to apprehend what it is to be that thing, and plumb, if he can, the deep fact of its individual existence’.
80 Farrer discusses this in many places; for an exemplary statement, see Austin Farrer, ‘Faith and Reason’, in Reflective Faith, 51: ‘apprehension is both the beginning and the end of our subjective coming-to-know, and also its sole objective control throughout. Reasoning is not a source of knowledge but an instrument to clarify apprehension: and what we apprehend we accept in the last resort in the evidence of its self-presentation’.
81 See WI, 101–108.
82 See his claim at EA, 174 that ‘Farrer’s discussion would be even more impressive than it is if he had given rather greater weight to the doctrine of analogy in its classical form; his discussion of proportionality, for example, seems to me somewhat cavalier’.
83 See, for example, Peter Geach’s statement regarding intellectual apprehension and the Five Ways that ‘I cannot make any sense of this metaphysical vision; neither, I suspect, could Aquinas’ (Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 77). While Geach does not mention Mascall by name here, he would have been a (if not the) premier proponent of the view Geach criticizes.
84 For a Scotist to insist on this is not to beg the question, since Scotus defines univocal uses of a term, in part, as preserving validity in demonstration; see Ord. I.3.1.1–2, n. 26. The Scotist will be very happy for what the Thomist calls analogy to be what the Scotist calls univocity; it is the Thomist who insists on avoiding univocity.
85 FI, 263, on analogical arguments being guilty of quaternio terminorum.
86 EA, 171, though Mascall would ‘not [himself] have used just those words’.
87 See Joshua Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
88 For a strong defence of this argument, see Thomas Williams, ‘The Doctrine of Univocity is True and Salutary’, Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (2005): p. 575–585.
89 See John Milbank, Beyond Secular Order: The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 29–37, 50–66. Paul DeHart sees Milbank as standing within Mascall’s tradition on analogy and intuition: see Paul DeHart, ‘On Being Heard but Not Seen: Milbank and Lash on Aquinas, Analogy, and Agnosticism’, Modern Theology 26, no. 2 (2010): p. 272–273.
90 See Catherine Pickstock, ‘Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance’, Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (2005): p. 543–574.
91 EA, 124. See also Mascall, The Openness of Being, 111.
92 See Thomas Pfau, Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).
93 See Stirne Casey, Mark McInroy, and Alexis Torrance (eds.), Image as Theology: The Power of Art in Shaping Christian Thought, Devotion, and Imagination (Brepols, 2022).
94 For criticism of Mascall’s account of contuition, see W. E. Kennick, ‘A New Way with The Five Ways’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 38, no. 3 (1960): 225–233; Haggarty, ‘On Not Taking the World for Granted’, 299ff.
95 HWI, 80. See also WI, 108: ‘in the ordo cognoscendi of unsecularized man, of man who sees finite beings as they really are in their dependence on their Creator and in their participation of his perfection, both the finite and the infinite analogue are given together in the concept or image in their mutual relation’.
96 EA, 171.
97 David B. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); David B. Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
98 Nicholas Lash, ‘Ideology, Metaphor, and Theology’ in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986): p. 95–119; Nicholas Lash, ‘Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy? Questions on Milbank’s Aquinas’, Modern Theology 15, no. 4 (1999): p. 433–444.
99 Lash, ‘Ideology, Metaphor, and Theology’, 114.
100 See DeHart, ‘On Being Heard but Not Seen’.
101 Donald MacKinnon, ‘Some Notes on Kierkegaard’, in G. W. Roberts and D. E. Smucker, eds. Borderlands of Theology: And Other Essays (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968), p. 126; DeHart, ‘On Being Heard but Not Seen’, p. 273.
102 See ST I.1.7.c.