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Medieval Theories of Analogy

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Stanford Encyclopedia Medieval theories of analogy were a response to problems in three areas:
logic, theology, and metaphysics. Logicians were concerned with the use
of Philosophy of words having more than one sense, whether completely different, or
related in some way. Theologians were concerned with language about
God. How can we speak about a transcendent, totally simple spiritual
being without altering the sense of the words we use? Metaphysicians
were concerned with talk about reality. How can we say that both
Edward N. Zalta Uri Nodelman Colin Allen R. Lanier Anderson substances (e.g., Socrates) and accidents (e.g., the beardedness of
Principal Editor Senior Editor Associate Editor Faculty Sponsor Socrates) exist when one is dependent on the other; how can we say that
Editorial Board both God and creatures exist, when one is created by the other? Medieval
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thinkers reacted to these three problems by developing a theory which
Library of Congress Catalog Data divided words into three sorts, independently of context. Some were
ISSN: 1095-5054
univocal (always used with the same sense), some were purely equivocal
Notice: This PDF version was distributed by request to mem- (used with quite different senses), and some were analogical (used with
bers of the Friends of the SEP Society and by courtesy to SEP related senses). Analogical terms were thought to be particularly useful in
content contributors. It is solely for their fair use. Unauthorized metaphysics and theology, but they were routinely discussed in
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SEP Society and obtain authorized PDF versions of SEP entries, to the discussion was given by what is often called the analogy of being or
please visit https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/ . metaphysical analogy, the doctrine that reality is divided both horizontally
into the very different realities of substances and accidents and vertically
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Copyright c 2017 by the publisher into the very different realities of God and creatures, and that these
The Metaphysics Research Lab realities are analogically related. Nonetheless, the phrase “medieval
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Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 theories of analogy” as used here will refer to semantic analogy, a set of
Medieval Theories of Analogy
linguistic and logical doctrines supplemented, at least from the fourteenth
c 2017 by the author
Copyright century on, by doctrines about the nature of human concepts.
E. Jennifer Ashworth
All rights reserved. There were three main types of semantic analogy, each based on a type of
Copyright policy: https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/info/copyright/ metaphysical analogy. In the original Greek sense, analogy involved a

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 Medieval Theories of Analogy
comparison of two proportions or relations. Thus ‘principle’ was said to be
an analogical term when said of a point and a spring of water because a
point is related to a line as a spring is related to a river. This type of
analogy came to be called the analogy of proportionality. In the second
sense, analogy involved a relation between two things, of which one is
primary and the other secondary. Thus ‘healthy’ was said to be an
analogical term when said of a dog and its food because while the dog has
health in the primary sense, its food is healthy only secondarily as
contributing to or causing the health of the dog. This second type of
analogy became known as the analogy of attribution, and its special mark
was being said in a prior and a posterior sense (per prius et posterius). A
third type of analogy, sometimes used by theologians, appealed to a
relation of likeness between God and creatures. Creatures are called good
or just because their goodness or justice imitates or reflects the goodness
or justice of God. This type of analogy was called the analogy of imitation
or participation. Of the three types, it is the analogy of attribution that is
central to medieval discussions.
From the fourteenth century on discussions of analogy focused not so
much on linguistic usages as on the nature of the concepts that
corresponded to the words used. Is there just one concept that corresponds
to an analogical term, or is there a sequence of concepts? If the latter, how
are the members of the sequence ordered and related to each other?
Moreover, how far should we distinguish between so-called formal
concepts (or acts of mind) and objective concepts (whatever it is that is the
object of the act of understanding)? These discussions were still influential
at the time of Descartes.
1. Medieval Theories of Language
2. Problems in Logic, Theology, and Metaphysics
3. History of the Word ‘Analogy’
4. Divisions of Equivocation
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5. Divisions of Analogy
6. Thomas Aquinas
7. John Duns Scotus and the Role of Concepts
8. Cardinal Cajetan: A New Approach
Bibliography
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Related Entries
1. Medieval Theories of Language
Medieval logicians and philosophers of language were principally
concerned with the relationship between utterances, concepts, and things.
Written language was only of secondary importance. They agreed that
spoken language was conventional, having its origin in imposition, or the
decision to correlate certain sounds with certain objects. Concepts,
however, were natural, in the sense that all human beings with similar
experiences had the same concepts, without any decision being involved.
The key semantic notion was signification, rather than meaning, though
translated sources tend to obscure this by translating ‘significatio’ as
‘meaning’. For a term to signify is for it to function as a sign, to represent
or make known something beyond itself. A typical spoken term, such as
‘horse’ or ‘dog’, signifies in two ways. It signifies or makes known the
concept with which it has to be correlated in order to function
significatively at all, and it also signifies or makes known something
external to and independent of the mind. Modifications were made to this
simple scheme to cover the cases of special terms, including
syncategorematic terms, such as ‘every’ and ‘not’, fictional terms such as
‘chimera’, and privative terms such as ‘blindness’; and modifications were
also made to cover the case of special predicates, such as “is a genus”, or
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“is thought about”, but we need not concern ourselves with these
modifications here.
Theories of signification were complicated by the metaphysical problem
of common natures. If we say that words signify not only concepts but
things external to and independent of the mind do we mean that ‘human
being’ and ‘tall’ signify special common objects such as humanity or
tallness, or do we mean that they signify Socrates and his quality of being
tall? For Aquinas, who did not want to give common natures any kind of
intermediary existence independent of both concepts and actual things, the
significate (significatum) of a term was the intellect’s conception (whether
simple or definitional) of the thing signified; the thing signified (res
significata) was usually the property or the nature characterizing
individual external objects; and the referent (suppositum) was the
individual external object itself, viewed as the bearer of the property or
nature. However,‘human being’ cannot be said to signify Socrates, since
the mind cannot conceive physical individuals as such. In the fourteenth
century, further developments took place. There was a new focus on the
notion of a mental language superior to spoken language, and concepts, as
parts of this mental language, were themselves regarded as having
signification. Moreover, Scotists and nominalists agreed that, at least in
principle, physical individuals could be conceived as such. William of
Ockham and his followers not only denied the existence of common
natures but insisted that spoken words did not signify concepts. As a
result, both spoken words and the concepts to which spoken words are
subordinated have the same significates, namely individual things and
their individual properties, such as the tallness of Socrates). Other
nominalists, notably Buridan, insisted that spoken words did signify
concepts as well as individuals, for concepts are required to mediate
between spoken words and individual things.
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In addition to having signification, terms were also said to have modes of
signifying (modi significandi). These modes of signifying were related to
the term’s logical and grammatical functions, and include such essential
features as being a noun, verb, or adjective, and such accidental features as
time (which includes tense without being limited to it), gender, and case.
More generally, they included being abstract (e.g., justice) and concrete
(e.g., just). They also include modes of predication, related to Aristotle’s
ten categories, such as substantial (e.g., horse), qualitative (e.g., brown),
quantitative (e.g., square), relative and so on. The notion of modes of
signifying was developed from the early twelfth century on, though it was
specially emphasized by the speculative grammarians of the late thirteenth
century.
It is important to recognize that medieval thinkers had a compositionalist
view of language signification, and so words were thought to be endowed
as units both with their signification and with nearly all their modes of
signifying in advance of the role they would subsequently play in
propositions. Moreover, the doctrine of common natures suggested that
terms, at least those terms which seem to fall within Aristotle’s ten
categories (substance, quality, quantity and so on), each correspond to a
common nature and so have a signification which is fixed and precise.
This meant that questions of use and context, though explored by medieval
logicians especially through supposition theory, were not thought to be
crucial to the determination of a term as equivocal, analogical or univocal.
It also meant that terms which did not fit into Aristotle’s categorial
framework needed a special account. This problem relates especially to
theology, because God was thought to transcend the categories in the sense
that none of them apply to him, and also to metaphysics, because of the
so-called transcendental terms, ‘being’, ‘one’, ‘good’. These transcend the
categories in the sense that they belong no more to one category than to
another, and they do not correspond to common natures.
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2. Problems in Logic, Theology, and Metaphysics
In order to understand how the theory of analogy arose we have to bear in
mind the history of education in the Latin-speaking western part of
Europe. During the so-called dark ages, learning was largely confined to
monasteries, and people had access to very few texts from the ancient
world. This situation had changed dramatically by the beginning of the
thirteenth century. The first universities (Bologna, Paris, Oxford) had been
established, and the recovery of the writings of Aristotle supplemented by
the works of Islamic philosophers was well under way.
One source for the theory of analogy is the doctrine of equivocal terms
found in logic texts. Until the early twelfth century, the only parts of
Aristotle’s logic to be available in Latin were the Categories and On
Interpretation, supplemented by a few other works including the
monographs and commentaries of Boethius. The Categories opens with a
brief characterization of terms used equivocally, such as ‘animal’ used of
real human beings and pictured human beings, and terms used univocally,
such as ‘animal’ used of human beings and oxen. In the first case, the
spoken term is the same but there are two distinct significates or
intellectual conceptions; in the second case, both the spoken term and the
significate are the same. We should note that equivocal terms include
homonyms (two words with the same form but different senses, e.g.,
‘pen’), polysemous words (one word with two or more senses), and, for
medieval thinkers, proper names shared by different people. By the mid-
twelfth century the rest of Aristotle’s logic had been recovered, including
the Sophistical Refutations in which Aristotle discusses three types of
equivocation and how these contribute to fallacies in logic. For writers
throughout the later middle ages, the discussion of analogical terms was
fitted into the framework of univocal and equivocal terms provided by
Aristotle and his commentators. We will return to this below.
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Twelfth-century theology is another important source for the doctrine of
analogy, for twelfth-century theologians such as Gilbert of Poitiers and
Alan of Lille explored the problem of divine language in depth. Their
work initially sprang from works on the Trinity by Augustine and
Boethius. These authors insisted that God is absolutely simple, so that no
distinctions can be made between God’s essence and his existence, or
between one perfection, such as goodness, and another, such as wisdom,
or, more generally, between God and his properties. New attention was
also paid to Greek theologians, especially Pseudo-Dionysius. These
theologians insisted on God’s absolute transcendence, and on what came
to be called negative theology. We cannot affirm anything positive about
God, because no affirmation can be appropriate to a transcendent being. It
is better to deny properties of God, saying for instance that he is not good
(i.e., in the human sense), and still better to say that God is not existent but
super-existent, not substance but super-substantial, not good but super-
good. These theological doctrines raised the general problem of how we
can speak meaningfully of God at all, but they also raised a number of
particular problems. Must we say that “God is justice” means the same as
“God is just”? Must we say that “God is just” means the same as “God is
good”? Can we say that God is just and that Peter is just as well? For our
purposes, this last question is the most important, for it raises the question
of one word used of two different realities.
The third source for doctrines of analogy is metaphysics. The first part of
Aristotle’s Metaphysics had been translated by the mid-twelfth century,
though the full text was recovered only gradually. One crucial text is
found in Metaphysics 4.2 (1003a33–35): “There are many senses (multis
modis) in which being (ens) can be said, but they are related to one central
point (ad unum), one definite kind of thing, and are not equivocal.
Everything which is healthy is related to health…. and everything which is
medical to medicine….” In this text, Aristotle raises the general problem
of the word ‘being’ and its different senses, and he also introduces what is
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known as pros hen equivocation or focal meaning, the idea that different
senses may be unified through a relationship to one central sense. Another
foundational text is from Avicenna’s Metaphysics, also translated into
Latin during the twelfth century, where he writes that being (ens) is neither
a genus nor a predicate predicated equally of all its subordinates, but
rather a notion (intentio) in which they agree according to the prior and the
posterior. As we shall see below, this reference to the prior and the
posterior is particularly important.
Some further background for the development of doctrines of analogy is
provided by Aristotle’s discussion of scientific reasoning in his Posterior
Analytics, first commented on in the 1220s by Robert Grosseteste. One
important issue was how analogical relations might be used to find a way
of referring to things which did not belong to one genus and lacked a
common name. A popular example throughout the middle ages involved
Aristotle’s account of the relation between the ‘bone’ of a cuttlefish, a
spine, and a normal bone (Posterior Analytics, 14.2, 98a20–23), though
there was some disagreement about the type of analogy involved. Even
more important was Aristotle’s view that scientific reasoning requires
demonstrative syllogisms, which, in order to be logically valid, must have
a middle term that avoids the fallacy of equivocation. How far analogical
terms could fill that role was a frequent topic of discussion and
controversy. In the thirteenth century, in his questions on Aristotle’s
Physics, Geoffrey of Aspall remarked that analogy did not rule out
univocity or prevent a subject from being one, while in the early
fourteenth century, Scotus preferred to preserve unity by abandoning the
use of analogical terms. In the late fifteenth century Cajetan strongly
supported the claim that analogical terms could function as middle terms.
None of these authors suggested that natural science and theology could
appeal to analogical relationships to produce probabilistic rather than
demonstrative arguments.
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3. History of the Word ‘Analogy’
The Latin term ‘analogia’ had various senses. In scriptural exegesis,
according to Aquinas, analogy was the method of showing that one part of
scripture did not conflict with another. In rhetoric and grammar, analogy
was the method of settling a doubt about a word’s form by appeal to a
similar and more certain case. Several twelfth-century theologians use the
word in this sense. In translations of Pseudo-Dionysius, the term had a
strictly ontological sense, for it refers to a being’s capacity for
participation in divine perfections as this relates to lower or higher beings.
In logic, authors were aware that the Greek word ‘αναλογια’, sometimes
called ‘analogia’ in Latin, but often translated as ‘proportio’ or
‘proportionalitas’, referred to the comparison between two proportions.
However, by the 1220s the word came to be linked with the phrase “in a
prior and a posterior sense” and by the 1250s terms said according to a
comparison of proportions were normally separated from terms said
according to a prior and a posterior sense.
The phrase “in a prior and a posterior sense” seems to have been derived
from Arabic philosophy. H.A. Wolfson has presented evidence for
Aristotle’s recognition of a type of term intermediate between equivocal
and univocal terms, some instances of which were characterized by their
use according to priority and posteriority. He showed that Alexander of
Aphrodisias called this type of term ‘ambiguous’ and that the Arabic
philosophers, starting with Alfarabi, made being said in a prior and a
posterior sense the main characteristic of all ambiguous terms. So far as
the medieval Latin west is concerned, the main sources for the notion of
an ambiguous term said in a prior and a posterior sense are Algazel and
Avicenna, both of whom became known in the second half of the twelfth
century, and both of whom used the notion to explain uses of the word
‘being’.
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The word ‘analogical’ soon became linked with the word ‘ambiguous’ in
Latin authors. Speaking of the cuttlefish example in his commentary on
Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Grosseteste says that Aristotle’s use of
analogy to find a common term produces ambiguous names said according
to a prior and a posterior sense, and he uses the phrase “ambiguum
analogum”. In the same decade, the Glossa of the theologian Alexander of
Hales links being said in a prior and a posterior sense with ambiguity and
(in one possibly unreliable manuscript) with analogy, and the writings of
Philip the Chancellor also link being said in a prior and a posterior sense
with analogy. In logic textbooks, the word ‘analogy’ in the new sense
appears in the Summe metenses, once dated around 1220, but now thought
to be by Nicholas of Paris, writing between 1240 and 1260. The new use
of ‘analogy’ rapidly became standard in both logicians and theologians.
4. Divisions of Equivocation
In order to understand the way in which theories of analogy developed, we
need to consider the divisions of equivocation found in medieval authors.
In his commentary on the Categories, Boethius presented a series of
divisions which he took from Greek authors. The first division was into
chance equivocals and deliberate equivocals. In the first case, the
occurrences of the equivocal term were totally unconnected, as when a
barking animal, a marine animal, and a constellation were all called ‘canis’
(dog). Chance equivocation was also called pure equivocation, and it was
carefully distinguished from analogy by later writers. In the second case,
that of deliberate equivocation, some intention on the part of the speakers
was involved, and the occurrences of the equivocal term could be related
in various ways. Boethius himself gave four subdivisions. These are found
in various later sources, including Ockham’s commentary on the
Categories, but as we shall see, other subdivisions became more popular.
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The first of Boethius’s four subdivisions was similitude, used of the case
of the noun ‘animal’ said of both real human beings and pictured human
beings. Medieval logicians seem to have been totally unaware of the fact
that the Greek word used by Aristotle was genuinely polysemous,
meaning both animal and image, and they explained the extended use of
‘animal’ in terms of a likeness between the two referents — a likeness
which had nothing to do with the significate of the term ‘animal’, which
picks out a certain kind of nature, but which was nonetheless more than
metaphorical in that the external shape of the pictured object does
correspond to that of the living object. Those medieval authors whose
discussion of equivocation was very brief tended to use this example, and
they often claimed that Aristotle introduced it in order to accommodate
analogy as a kind of equivocation. On the other hand, authors whose
discussion was more extensive tended to drop both the example and the
subdivision of similitude.
Boethius’s second type of equivocation is ‘analogia’ in the Greek sense,
and the standard example was the word ‘principium’ (principle or origin),
which was said to apply to unity with respect to number and to point with
respect to a line, or to both the source of a river and the heart of an animal.
‘Principium’ is a noun and, as such, might be expected to pick out a
common nature, but although a unity, a point, a source and a heart can all
be called ‘principium’ with equal propriety, there is no common nature
involved. Mathematical objects, rivers, and hearts, represent not merely
different natural kinds, but different categories, in that mathematical
objects fall under the category of quantity, and hearts at least under the
category of substance. What allows these disparate things to be grouped
together is a similarity of relations: a source is to a river as a heart is to an
animal — or so it was claimed. While theologians, including Aquinas
himself in De veritate, and the fourteenth-century Dominican Thomas
Sutton, occasionally make use of this type of analogy, most logicians do
not even mention it.
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The last two subdivisions found in Boethius are ‘of one origin’ (ab uno),
with the example of the word ‘medical’, and ‘in relation to one’ (ad
unum), with the example of the word ‘healthy’. These subdivisions
correspond to Aristotle’s pros hen equivocation. The example ‘healthy’
(sanum) as said of animals, their diet, and their urine is particularly
important here. ‘Sanum’, like other adjectives, was classified as a concrete
accidental term. As such, it did not fall within an Aristotelian category,
since its primary signification had two elements whose combination was
variously explained. On the one hand, some kind of reference is made to
the abstract entity health, which belongs to the category of quality; on the
other hand, some kind of reference is made to an external object which
belongs to the category of substance. This dual reference precludes the
term from picking out a natural kind, though in the case of other
adjectives, such as ‘brown’, no problem is caused thereby. Brown things
may not form a natural kind, but at least they are all physical objects, and
‘brown’ is used in the same sense of each one. ‘Healthy’, however, is more
complicated. To say that Rover is healthy is to say that Rover is a thing
having health, and obviously this analysis can’t be applied to diet, which is
called healthy only because it causes health in an animal, or to urine,
which is called healthy only when it is the sign of health in an animal.
Whatever the properties which characterize urine and food, they are
different from those characterizing the animal.
We should also note that in the same passage of his commentary on the
Categories, Boethius linked deliberate equivocation with metaphor, in
which the sense of one word with an established signification was
extended to apply improperly to something else. A favourite medieval
example was ‘smiling’ said of flowering meadows. Later logicians
supported this link between equivocation and metaphor by an appeal to
Aristotle’s divisions of equivocation in his Sophistical Refutations, where
he remarked that the second type was based on common usage. As we
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shall see, the question of metaphor’s relation to analogy became
particularly important in post-thirteenth-century discussions.
5. Divisions of Analogy
Boethius’s subdivisions had one major failure: they did not seem to
accommodate the different uses of the word ‘being’ (ens). As a result,
many authors used a new threefold division which included Boethius’s last
two subdivisions and one more. They presented the division as a division
of deliberate equivocals, and they identified deliberate equivocals with
analogical terms. This threefold division of analogy was established in the
thirteenth-century, in response to a remark by Averroes in his commentary
on the Metaphysics to the effect that Aristotle had classified ‘healthy’ as a
case of relationship to one thing as an end, ‘medical’ as a case of
relationship to one thing as an agent, and ‘being’ (ens) as a case of
relationship to one subject. It is found in Thomas Aquinas’s own
commentary on the Metaphysics, as well as in his fifteenth-century
follower Capreolus. An analogical term is now seen as one which is said
of two things in a prior and a posterior sense, and it is grounded in various
kinds of attribution or relationship to the primary object: food is healthy as
a cause of a healthy animal, a procedure is medical when applied by a
medical agent, a quality has being by virtue of the existent substance that
it characterizes.
A second threefold division of analogy arose from reflection on the
relationship between equivocal and analogical terms. Analogical terms
were said to be intermediaries between equivocal and univocal terms, and
the standard view was that analogical terms were intermediary between
chance equivocals and univocals, and hence that they were to be identified
with deliberate equivocals. The notion of an intermediary term, however,
is open to more than one interpretation, and some authors went further in
suggesting that at least some analogical terms were intermediary between
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univocals and deliberate equivocals, so that they were not equivocal in any
of the normal senses at all. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, an
anonymous commentator on the Sophistical Refutations gives the
following classification. First, there are analogical terms which are
univocal in a broad sense of ‘univocal’. Here reference was made to genus
terms such as ‘animal’. Human beings and donkeys participate equally in
the common nature animal, but are not themselves equal, since human
beings are more perfect than donkeys. This type of analogy was routinely
discussed in response to a remark Aristotle had made in Physics VII
(249a22–25) which, in Latin translation, asserted that many equivocations
are hidden in a genus. Medieval logicians felt obliged to fit this claim into
the framework of equivocation and analogy, even if the consensus was that
in the end the use of genus terms was univocal. Second, there are those
analogical terms such as ‘being’ (ens) which are not equivocal, because
only one concept or nature (ratio) seems to be involved, and which are not
univocal either, because things participate this one ratio unequally, in a
prior and a posterior way. It is these terms which are the genuine
intermediaries. Third, there are those analogical terms which are deliberate
equivocals, because there are two concepts or natures (rationes) which are
participated in a prior and a posterior way. The example here was
‘healthy’. This second threefold division was much discussed. Duns
Scotus bitterly criticized it in his earlier logical writings. Walter Burley
claimed that both the first and the second kinds of analogical term could
properly be regarded as univocal in a wide sense. The division was
popular in the fifteenth century with such Thomists as Capreolus, who
realized its closeness to the account given by Aquinas in his Sentences
commentary.
6. Thomas Aquinas
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Despite the vast modern literature devoted to Aquinas’s theory of analogy,
he has very little to say about analogy as such. He uses a general division
into equivocal, univocal, and analogical uses of terms, and he presents
both of the threefold divisions of analogy mentioned in the previous
section, but he offers no prolonged discussion, and he writes as if he is
simply using the divisions, definitions, and examples with which everyone
is familiar. His importance lies in the way he used this standard material to
present an account of the divine names, or how it is we can meaningfully
use such words as ‘good’ and ‘wise’ of God.
The background to this account has to be understood in terms of Aquinas’s
theology and metaphysics. Three doctrines are particularly important.
First, there is the distinction between being existent, good, wise, and so
on, essentially, and being existent, good, wise, and so on, by participation.
God is whatever he is essentially, and as a result he is existence itself,
goodness itself, wisdom itself. Creatures are existent, good, wise, only by
sharing in God’s existence, goodness, and wisdom, and this sharing has
three features. It involves a separation between the creature and what the
creature has; it involves a deficient similarity to God; and it is based on a
causal relation. What is essentially existent or good is the cause of what
has existence or goodness by participation. Second, there is the general
doctrine of causality according to which every agent produces something
like itself. Agent causality and similarity cannot be separated. Third, there
is Aquinas’s belief that we are indeed entitled to claim that God is existent,
good, wise, and so on, even though we cannot know his essence.
Against this background, Aquinas asks how we are to interpret the divine
names. He argues that they cannot be purely equivocal, for we could not
then make intelligible claims about God. Nor can they be purely univocal,
for God’s manner of existence and his relationship to his properties are
sufficiently different from ours that the words must be used in somewhat
different senses. Hence, the words we use of God must be analogical, used
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in different but related senses. To be more precise, it seems that such
words as ‘good’ and ‘wise’ must involve a relationship to one prior reality,
and they must be predicated in a prior and a posterior sense, for these are
the marks of analogical terms.
Nonetheless, the divine names do not function exactly like ordinary
analogical terms such as ‘healthy’. We need to begin by making use of the
distinction between the thing signified (a nature or property) and the mode
of signifying. All the words we use have a creaturely mode of signifying
in that they imply time and composition, neither of which can pertain to
God. When speaking of God, we must recognize this fact, and attempt to
discount it. To say “God is good” is not to imply that God has a separable
property, goodness, and that he has it in a temporally limited way. God is
eternally identical to goodness itself. But even when we have discounted
the creaturely mode of signifying, we are left with the fact that God’s
goodness is not like our goodness. This is where the analogy of attribution
enters the picture.
In his early writings, Aquinas questioned whether the standard account of
the analogy of attribution was sufficient for his purposes. In his
commentary on the Sentences, he suggests that there is one kind of
analogy in which the analogical term is used in a prior and a posterior
sense, and another kind of analogy, the analogy of imitation, which applies
to God and creatures. In his De veritate, he argues that the analogy of
attribution involves a determinate relation, which cannot hold between
God and creatures, and that the analogy of proportionality must be used
for the divine names. We must compare the relation between God and his
properties to the relation between creatures and their properties. This
solution was deeply flawed, given that the problem of divine names arises
precisely because the relationship of God to his properties is so radically
different from our relation to our properties. Accordingly, in his later
discussions of the divine names, notably in the Summa contra gentiles and
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the Summa theologiae, Aquinas returns to the analogy of attribution, but
links it much more closely with his doctrines of causal similitude. As
Montagnes has pointed out, he came to place much greater emphasis on
agent causation, the active transmission of properties from God to
creatures, than on exemplar causality, the creature’s passive reflection or
imitation of God’s properties. In this context, Aquinas makes considerable
use of his ontological distinction between univocal causes, whose effects
are fully like them, and non-univocal causes, whose effects are not fully
like them. God is an analogical cause, and this is the reality that underlies
our use of analogical language.
Aquinas’s views about agent causality explain his insistence on
definitional inclusion. He says explicitly that the term said in a prior way
must be included in the definition of the posterior, just as the definition of
healthy food includes a reference to the health of the animal. In the divine
case, the reference is not direct or explicit, but is a function of our
recognition that when humans are said to be good, this means that they
have a participated goodness which must be caused by that which is
goodness itself. The nature of this causal relation between God and
creature also helps to explain the sense in which terms are said in a prior
way of God. So far as imposition is concerned, terms are given their
signification on the basis of creaturely effects, and, before we learn about
God, we may think that their prior use is to refer to creaturely perfections.
However, when we come to know God as the first cause and fully perfect
being, we recognize that their prior application is to God. Finally,
Aquinas’s causal doctrines help us to explain his insistence on the
distinction between the analogy of many-to-one and the analogy of one-to-
another. In the first case, both food and medicine are said to be healthy
because each is related to something else, the health of an animal. In the
second case, food is said to be healthy because of its relation to the health
of an animal. Only the second kind of analogy applies to the divine names,
for no non-metaphorical name we apply to God can ever be explained in
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 Medieval Theories of Analogy
terms of something other than God. Our use of divine names has to reflect
God’s absolute priority.
7. John Duns Scotus and the Role of Concepts
One of the issues that Aquinas touched on but did not settle was that of the
number of rationes an analogical term was associated with. This issue
stemmed from Aristotle’s Categories. As translated by Boethius, Aristotle
introduced the distinction between univocal and equivocal terms by
claiming that whereas univocal terms were subordinated to one
substantiae ratio, equivocal terms were subordinated to more than one
substantiae ratio. The word ‘ratio’ here is capable of various
interpretations, including ‘definition or description’, ‘analysis’, or
‘concept’, but by the early fourteenth century logicians and theologians
came to agree that the appropriate interpretation was ‘concept’. The
second threefold division of analogy given above suggests the importance
of a focus on concepts; and the question of how many concepts an
analogical term was subordinated to came to be central. The nominalists
held that so-called analogical terms were either metaphorical or were
straightforwardly equivocal terms subordinated to two distinct concepts,
but the Thomists were split. Analogical terms could be viewed as
subordinated to an ordered cluster of concepts (possibly but not
necessarily described as a disjunction of concepts); or they could be
subordinated to a single concept which represents in a prior and a posterior
manner (per prius et posterius).
The issue was considerably complicated by the influence of John Duns
Scotus. In his early logical commentaries, Scotus had argued that it was
impossible to have two concepts that were related in a prior and posterior
way, just as it was impossible to have a single concept that captured such a
relationship. As a result, ‘being’ was a chance equivocal, and metaphor,
which was a matter of linguistic usage, replaced semantic analogy.
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However, Scotus did believe in metaphysical analogy, whereby God and
creatures, substances and accidents were related in a prior and posterior
way, and in his later theological works he argued that without a unified
concept of being neither metaphysics nor theology would be possible.
Accordingly, he replaced the claim that ‘being’ was a chance equivocal
with the claim that it was univocal. In order to support this claim, he
rejected the common doctrine that for a term to be univocal it had to be a
strictly categorial term, picking out some natural kind or other. He argued
that it was sufficient for univocity that contradiction would arise when the
term was affirmed and denied of the same thing. He then argued that
‘being’ (ens) was a univocal term subordinated to a single univocal
concept.
Even for those within the Thomistic tradition, Scotus’ arguments about the
univocity of ‘being’ had to be taken seriously. On the one hand, the word
does not seem to be straightforwardly equivocal, in the sense of being
subordinated to more than one concept, for we at least have the illusion of
being able to grasp ‘being’ as a general term. As Scotus pointed out, in an
argument reproduced by all who considered the issue, we can grasp that
something is a being while doubting whether it is a substance or an
accident, and this surely involves having a relatively simple concept of
being at our disposal. On the other hand, there does not seem to be any
common nature involved, and in the absence of a common nature,
Thomists thought that to call the term ‘univocal’ was inappropriate. What
was needed was a way of allowing the concept to enjoy some kind of
unity, while allowing the word to have a significate that was not a simple
common nature. For many thinkers from the early fourteenth century
onward, the distinction between formal and objective concepts provided
the answer.
The formal concept was the act of mind or conception that represented an
object, and the objective concept was the object represented. If the spoken
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word ‘being’ corresponds to just one formal concept (a point on which
there were some differences of opinion), the focus of discussion shifts to
the status of the objective concept. Is it the actual thing in the world which
is thought about; is it a common nature or some other kind of intermediary
entity which is distinct from the external object without being mind-
dependent; or is it a special kind of mind-dependent object which has only
objective being, the being of being thought (esse objective, esse
cognitum)? In the case of ‘being’, since we are clearly not talking about
either an individual thing or a common nature, we get back to the original
set of questions about analogical concepts, now posed at a different level.
That is, are we talking about a special ordering intrinsic to a single
objective concept, or are we talking about an ordered sequence of
objective concepts which corresponds to the one formal concept?
8. Cardinal Cajetan: A New Approach
In 1498 Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, wrote a little book called On
the Analogy of Names which he intended to supplement his commentary
on Aristotle’s Categories. The work was not published until 1506, when it
was included in a collection of short texts that was reprinted at least six
times during the century. Perhaps because of his important contribution to
the sixteenth-century revival of Thomism, Cajetan’s contribution to
discussions of analogy has been misrepresented in modern times. It has
been assumed that he was commenting directly on Aquinas, rather than on
his immediate predecessors, and that his views were central to sixteenth-
century discussions. In fact, his influence was slight at first, and when he
became more widely read, such important late scholastic authors as
Francisco Suárez argued against his doctrines.
Part of Cajetan’s book is devoted to formal and objective concepts and
ways in which the latter can be ordered, but he also offered a new
threefold division of types of analogy. He called the first type, the case of
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E. Jennifer Ashworth
genus terms, the analogy of inequality, and dismissed it as unimportant,
indeed, not properly analogy at all. He called the second type the analogy
of attribution, and here he made two changes. First, he gave a new account
of its subdivisions by adding Boethius’s subdivision, similitude, to the first
threefold division involving attribution to one efficient cause, one end, and
one subject. He described the resulting four subdivisions in terms of
Aristotle’s four causes. Second, he claimed that attribution involved only
extrinsic denomination. That is, in each case of attribution, only the prior
object is intrinsically characterized by the property in question, e.g.,
health.
Cajetan called the third type of analogy the analogy of proportionality, and
he subdivided it into metaphor and proper proportionality. His account of
metaphor was commonplace, and goes back to Aquinas’s remark that
meadows are said to smile because flowering is related to meadows in the
way that smiling is related to human beings. He claimed that proper
proportionality was analogy in the Greek sense of the word, and that it was
the only true kind of analogy. Moreover, it involves only intrinsic
denomination, that is, both the primary and the secondary object referred
to are characterized by the property in question. He did allow for the word
‘being’ to be used in accordance with attribution when we think of
creatures as beings only because they reflect the nature of the God who
created them, but in general he held that ‘being’ and all other
metaphysically and theologically important analogical terms principally
belonged to this third division. Both in his insistence on the priority of
proper proportionality and in his use of a sharp distinction between
intrinsic and extrinsic denomination, Cajetan departed from earlier
medieval discussions of analogy. It was also on these points that his late
scholastic successors were to disagree with him. For instance, Suárez held
that the main use of proportionality was to account for metaphor, and that
the analogy of attribution embraced both intrinsic and extrinsic
denomination.
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 Medieval Theories of Analogy
It is unfortunate that many later commentators have been misled into
taking Cajetan’s account of analogy as a typical one, and, even more
unfortunately, as a useful summary of the doctrines of Aquinas. However,
more recent scholarship involving a number of authors is beginning to
change this situation.
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Related Entries
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Aquinas, Saint Thomas | Aristotle, General Topics: categories | Aristotle,
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General Topics: logic | Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus | Duns
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Spätantike und Mittelalter, Sten Ebbesen (ed.), Tübingen: Gunter
Narr Verlag, pp. 135–68. Copyright © 2017 by the author
Valente, Luisa, 2008, Logique et théologie. Les écoles parisiennes entre E. Jennifer Ashworth
1150 et 1220, Paris: Vrin.
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