X. Imagination and the Analogia Entis

The idea of analogy grew up among the Greeks as they wrestled with the problem of the One and the Many. Parmenides believed everything is one, and all change is illusion.

Philosophical imagination makes metaphysics possible. In metaphysics, we reach toward reality—toward being in any sense and toward whatever grounds being, if that turns out to be a coherent idea. Questions of being are fundamental, even if our language devolves into silence when we try to articulate the nature of being and whatever lies beyond being. We come to know reality as a whole through acts of philosophical imagination. Our putative acts of knowing might distort reality, or they might reveal partial truth about it. But we have no other vantage point from which to assess the nature of the gap between what is and what we think we know, between reality and our own theories and images of reality, between the apriori and poesis.

Because our exploration of the universe always proceeds from within the active philosophical imagination, our philosophical investigations must include not only what is known but also the act of knowing. The act of philosophical imagination is expressed in the content of what we make, but because the act itself is our portal to reality, our insights cannot be separated from the nature of the act itself. The artifacts of this act must, in a sense, be performed for the artifacts to be illuminating: the contours of reality in a created universe require the participation of a mind to light up from within. The act of philosophical imagination is immersed in the fullness of lived experience, where the meaning of the smallest experience gains clarity. The act that allows us to see creation as a gift is not disembodied abstraction but the presence of the entire mind, embodied in the created universe.

In the history of philosophical thought, truth, goodness, and beauty have come to be known as transcendentals. Kant thought of transcendentals in relation to things as they are known—the true addressed in The Critique of Pure Reason, the good in The Critique of Practical Reason, and the beautiful in The Critique of Judgment. But the more ancient idea of transcendentals portrays them as relating to things as they are. The divide between antiquity’s concept of transcendentals and that of Kant centers on the question of whether our knowledge refers to reality or only to our minds without reference to reality beyond our minds. Thomas Aquinas framed the idea of transcendentals in light of his belief that the world was created. Thomas was interested in the relation of the soul to the things in the created world. He believed that truth is the domain of the soul. Truth and falsehood reside in the mind.³ Goodness and evil inhere in things.⁴ Thomas clarified a dialectic between truth and goodness, in which the two are brought together through the commerce between consciousness and being.

Beauty is related to truth and goodness, but it inheres both in the mind that contemplates the beautiful and in beautiful things themselves. This leads to an aesthetics of mind and an aesthetics of matter, both of which are necessary to move from consciousness to ontology (the relationship of transcendentals to things).

In our reach for the deepest harmony of this world, we always work from a metaphysics that allows the universe to be a universe, a cosmos with form and order. As humanity unfolds, this metaphysics expands, oscillating between the morphology we study in science and the ideas of things that are revealed through the shapes explored by science. Science is a placeholder for our best way of reaching toward the shapes in the universe, but these demand that we expand our metaphysics—our questions about what the universe is and our questions about why it is what it is. This is a unified act of the imagination that is necessary if we hope to tell a story about the whole. This is the method of the analogia entis, in which we are always attempting to comprehend the whole from within the whole that comprehends us. The analogia entis is formalized in a method through which we comprehend something, and by comprehending it, we become aware of the transcendent above-and-beyond its unity, above-and-beyond all unity to which we have access. In the same way, the truth that is beyond history reveals itself as being beyond history but does so through history.⁶ This is another way of stating the meaning of the poetic apriori—that which is beyond history, revealed through the history we make.

From within an apriori metaphysics, the telos of the universe illuminates the purpose of everything directed toward the end.

Parmenides’s metaphysics was an extreme version of absolute unity. The metaphysics of Heraclitus was an extreme version of absolute movement. In the case of Parmenides’ idea of the One, the experience of stability in created things is infinitely extrapolated into an eternal apriori, while Heraclitus’s flux is an infinite extrapolation of the experience of change among created things, leaving nothing but the pure aposteriori. The in-and-beyond binds unity and movement together, a unity of movement, and a unity of movement.⁸ The reality of our creaturely being is a dynamism of essence and existence. But a creaturely metaphysics that reaches imaginatively toward the unknown does so because of the hope that the unknown is knowable in the formula of God-beyond-the-creature. Philosophical imagination is always on its way, moving toward the fullness of wisdom rather than possessing it. It is always a knowing in unknowing, an act that moves under the poignant guidance of Augustine’s maxim, “If you understand it, it is not God.”⁹ Philosophical imagination participates in truth, without claiming to arrive at truth’s fullness, because our concepts are always overcome by mystery.

When we try to use language to express what is beyond language, even the best formulations of our ideas disrupt their own unity and completeness. They always fall short. But the search for better ways to express the ineffable is an important and enlivening act of philosophical imagination in a created universe. We continue in hope because of what our minds are at the deepest level—the image and likeness of the divine mind, overcoming the absoluteness of creaturely embeddedness in the pure flux of a world without unity but also overcoming the absolute distance of an apriori One that is beyond participation. At the center of an apriori–aposteriori and aposteriori–apriori metaphysics, the philosophical imagination’s fundamental principle is that of the in-and-beyond. This metaphysical principle is called analogy. This form of analogy only makes sense in a created universe: in such a universe, the connection between analogy (ana-logia) and being reveals an order that is intended through the act of creation. The resonance of Logos in the word analogy points toward the idea of being-as-meaningful in a way that is perceptible by the mind. In this profound form of Augustinian dialectic, the mind moves between critical distance from, and mystical fusion with, truth. Dialectic leads us to fundamental laws only by passing through the passion of this movement, alternating between identity and contradiction. Analogy does not leap into fantasies about dwelling among the gods, nor does it retreat into the miasmal fog of pure immanence. It finds a balance in the confusion that constitutes a kind of spiritual growth in which “defiant self-recusing yields to humble self-discrimination, and passionate desire for fusion to loving self-surrender.”¹³

The foundation of the order operative within analogy—a self-ordering within being-ordered— is the principle of non-contradiction.¹⁴ Aristotle first formulated the principle when he argued that something cannot simultaneously both be and not be in the same respect: we cannot, in the same respect, both affirm and deny something. This fundamental principle extends both to things as they are (or else as they eventually are, if there is a season of indeterminacy) and to our knowledge of things that exist. Even if everything is denied, this principle cannot be among the denied things, because the principle itself is the foundation for all thinking, including that mode of thought called doubt. Doubt was the starting point for Descartes’s method. But long before Descartes, Augustine argued that even the doubt that doubts everything cannot doubt its own doubting. When we doubt, we remember why we doubt, and we understanding that we are doubting. This means that in addition to doubt, we have life, memory, understanding, will, thought, knowledge, and judgment: “For if these things were not, one should be unable to doubt anything at all.”¹⁵

The principle of non-contradiction is preserved by analogy as the most fundamental activity of thought. In pure logic, which focuses on the form of judgment, rather than upon the theme of truth, the principle of non-contradiction is nothing more than an expression of the principle of identity. Hegel’s denial of this in his version of dialectic destabilizes the principle of non-contradiction. But even in Hegel, the principle of identity is still operative because apparent contradiction is worked out through higher identities within the immanent world. The principle is operative until Heidegger finally radicalizes Hegelian contradiction into the nothing that determines and produces all things.

The idea of analogy realizes the principle of non-contradiction without reducing it either to pure logic or to dialectic. The principle is the foundation of the struggle between the Heraclitian idea of a never-ending flux of oppositions and the Parmenidean idea of the One without change, the antithetical ideas that all is movement and all is rest. Dialectic must oscillate between the two ideas, but analogy is the middle, the equilibrium that is the principle of non-contradiction grounding all thought: reality comprises both actuality and possibility, and the relationship between the two appears in thought as the concept of analogy, in which an immanent dynamism is directed toward an end. The idea of telos prevents analogy from merely signifying a rhythmic oscillation. It carries the idea of analogy beyond immanence and reveals the transcendent meaning of the immanent, the peculiar orientation of creatures in a created universe where the apriori is revealed through the aposteriori, the eternal through that which has been made. This is the archetype that grounds the idea of the poetic apriori, expressed most completely in the idea of analogy as the immanence of transcendence—the poiein understood as eidos.¹⁶

The transcendent is ontologically prior to the immanent. When truth, goodness, and beauty appear in the immanent sphere, they are grounded not in the immanent but in the eternal. The relationship of participation between creature and creator, which is a gift imparted from above, is the crux of analogy. It illuminates the cause and the meaning of the being of all things, in which immanence is intimately related to transcendence. Being is inward to all things, and all being is from God: “Hence it must be that God is in all things, inwardly.”¹⁷ At this highest point, analogy expresses the dynamic movement between a transcending immanence and an indwelling transcendence.¹⁸

Plato conceived of an uncreated world of essences. But analogy points to the creative essence of God as the origin of potentiality in the world, giving limits—which is to say, form—to creatures. This is why creatures, though utterly dependent upon their relation to the creator, are not oriented toward nothingness. The directedness of creation, its telos, follows from this relation between the imminent and the transcendent. In Thomas’s formulation of analogy, creatures are willed for their own sakes as much as for the sake of God. They reveal God, expressing something positive, mysterious, and eternal, rather than descending back into the nothingness from which they came.¹⁹ The analogical relationship between creature and creator is why the supernatural perfects the natural, fulfilling our spiritual desire as creation proceeds toward its fitting end. The beatific vision is inextricably related to the fullness of creaturely flourishing.

The initiating mystery of God is this: we are created and sustained by God, and yet we are so far from identity with God that we can still say No to the divine will. Analogy requires and reveals this mystery. It allows us to attribute things to God, while also acknowledging God’s absolute otherness. When we perceive negation, we always do so in relationship to something we have affirmed, which is why the theological via negative cannot be the whole story. We can deny something about God only if we have some positive knowledge of God.²⁰ But this analogy of alterity, in which every similarity leads to awareness of an even greater dissimilarity, is the deepest knowledge of God we can have in this life. Analogy’s affirmation of the relationship between creator and creature is not a claim that we can come to full knowledge of God. Thomas has a clear formulation of this point: “We are said, at the pinnacle of our knowledge, to know God as unknown, because the mind is found to have entered most perfectly into the knowledge of God when it knows his essence to be beyond everything that it is able to comprehend in the conditions of this life.”²¹

Being—the entis of analogia entis—is the ultimate structure encompassing everything that is. In one direction, it spans the distance between everything that is and pure nothingness. In the other direction it spans the distance from everything that is to the threshold of the divine Is, in comparison to which creaturely being looks like nothing.²² Because creatures are created out of nothing, they find their authentic relation to the creator by appearing as nothing against the divine Is. Analogy resides between being and nothingness, between God and creature. The community of creator and creature is preserved by analogy, because within it the nothingness of the creature is called being analogously.²³

In the Symposium, Plato described the power of eros to break through to the transcendent. Eros is the hunter that traverses all things and makes the world fruitful.²⁴ The force of eros hunts its way through the particulars of the world, moving from individual beauties to beauty in itself, the form of beauty that instigates the hunter’s longing for home in the first place. But there is a paradox in the Platonic view of the divine. He made this explicit in the Euthyphro where the divine appears to be both primordially creative in relation to the archetypal forms and dependent upon the archetypal forms as antecedent to divine creativity. Plato asks, “Is that which is holy, holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy?”²⁵ Vacillation between the poles of this mystery is the heart of Plato’s version of analogy. As Thomas developed his own ideas about the relation between creator and creature, he borrowed Plato’s images of the artist (artifex), the artist’s idea (idea atificis), and the work of art (artificiatum). The images can only function as analogies for the mystery of what occurs between the creator and the creature, but they are nonetheless the only way we can understand the relationship between creator and creature.

We are creatures, and we can only see from the perspective of creation. But from that perspective, we can turn inward, focusing not on our minds and souls as such but instead looking through the functions of our minds and souls in their acts of artistic creation, virtue, contemplation, and so forth. In this act of the philosophical imagination, we look away from self and toward the eternal truth of God. We orient ourselves toward the ever above-and-beyond. This is the rhythm of the rational soul. We come to know God precisely through our faltering attempts to ascend toward comprehension. At the same time, this Augustinian view of the mystery of mind imagines the mind as a mirror that allows us to see but in such a way that we come to know the mirror, rather than God-as-God-is: “You may be able to learn what is proper to yourself: but can you ever learn what—whatever it may be—is proper to him who made you?”²⁶

Even in relation to the things of creation, the rhythm is a rhythm of coming to be, or else a rhythm of having been: “Before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they are fled they no longer are.”²⁷ The harmony of the whole emerges as contrasting things come together in the unity we call beauty, which is created from the opposition of contraries in the world.²⁸ This movement of coming to be and passing away within a created world manifests the mystery of the God who creates and sustains it. Creatures are fundamentally mutable, oscillating between antitheses. But in this oscillation, creation opens to the mystery of God who contains all things. Analogy best reveals God when the most creaturely aspect of the creature, its nothingness, is viewed in the light of its origin and source of sustenance, the God who Is.²⁹

Our knowledge of ourselves, of each other, and of all that comprises our experience of life is a lighted ambiguity, a form of illumination that reveals absurdity as much as it reveals ecstasy. We are suspended in God and utterly dependent. The mystery is that this suspension is only possible because the creaturely abyss of emptiness and the groundlessness of God are incomprehensibly one. Creatures reveal the mystery of God, the superluminous darkness of God, because they stand only by standing beyond themselves. Augustinian analogy focuses on the creature as suspended in relation to the creator. Thomist analogy moves from this suspendedness to the order of the universe as a holy order. Apart from this holy order, isolated things related to each other only in an accidental way can disintegrate into mere antithesis. But within the holy order, the potential for disintegration is overcome by the unity of the whole that comes from God.

The suspended realities of world and spirit reveal the holiness of order in the cosmos, the unity of the universe as a transcendent relation rather than merely the sum of isolated and countable things in the immanent world. From inside the universe, each particular thing has its own explanation. But the reality of the whole—and even the mere existence of the whole as a whole—cannot be explained from within. Suspendedness points beyond the immanent universe to a creator who is not merely one more link in a chain of explanations connecting all the relations within the universe but who is, rather, the ground of this unified order, the condition for the very existence of such order. In one sense, because God is transcendent, God is outside every order in the universe. But in another sense, God permeates it as its creator and sustainer, making the order itself sacred.

In a created universe, the idea of a holy order that orients the universe as a whole transforms the frame in which we understand sense experience. For Thomas, the natural knowledge available to creatures like us is limited by what we can access through sense experience.³⁰ Whether we are doing science, philosophy, or theology, imagination and language can only function in human terms, which means according to what we receive through our senses. God is beyond anything our intellects can represent on their own.³¹ This limit is so complete that even our mystical experiences of God are subject to it. Whatever light or dazzling darkness we mystically encounter is constrained by our nature, and the sense-conditioned knowledge of the mystic must, in the end, be an experience of the unknown God.³²

Our dependence on our senses for knowledge limits our minds, but it also profoundly transforms the significance of sense experience and the meaning of nature itself, from which our experience is derived. When we see that isolated things within the universe are related to a holy and transcendent order, we can understand the freedom of our own actions. Order is imposed in accord with the potential that is given to us in a material world. This potential is not determined by some accidental relation among immanent things. Rather, it derives from a freedom made possible by the nothingness of creation, in the sense of its complete dependence upon the creator: “Insofar as something comes from nothing, it follows that it is … labile.”³³ The analogia entis reveals the basis of this freedom, because a creature becomes what it is in the space between its own dependent nothingness and the transcendence of God beyond all things—the origin of all principal and of the totality of being. God is not a being among beings. Analogy expresses the lability of a creature on its way to becoming in a created universe where hope is grounded in a creator who is beyond all thing-ness, who is no-thing not because of a paucity of being but because of a superabundance.

A universe oriented toward God tends toward the balance characteristic of order. But this greater order, originating from that which is above-and-beyond, can disrupt smaller forms of order that exist within a closed system. We each exist as closed systems because of the limits constitutive of form and because our intellects are bound to sense experience. But from this vantage point we become conscious of something beyond ourselves: we see our relation to the transcendent, as creature related to creator. We begin by reaching toward ideas that are approximations of God, the origin of both the unity of the cosmos and the multiplicity of appearance in the world.³⁵ But we only recognize God as God when we go beyond Anselm’s formulation of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought and recognize God as that being who is beyond anything that can be thought: “This is the ultimate human knowledge of God: to know that one does not know God.”³⁶

But this is not the end of the story. Through intellect and imagination, we can reach beyond the immediate experience of sense toward a higher vision of God that is our greatest good, though our nature is not sufficient to attain it on its own.³⁷ To reach this vision, our nature must be elevated to place in which such an end is fitting for us.³⁸ In this life we are naturally inclined toward this supernatural vision, and our desires remain restless and unsatisfied until we reach this highest point.³⁹ This hope depends upon the created nature of the cosmos, which transforms our understanding of everything that shows up in the universe, including our minds, inclinations, and imaginations. Our restlessness is intensified by our awareness of the above-and-beyond that manifests within the things of creation. Though our vision of God reveals the incomprehensibility of God, nonetheless because creation is God’s self-communication, once we learn to see the universe as being from God, all experience is transformed, and we grow into a new way of contemplating even the smallest part of the cosmos.⁴⁰

This brings us back to the philosophical question of self-knowledge in light of analogy’s defining idea—the idea of the middle. Analogy illuminates reality for us because our own inwardness is an immanent middle linking creation to the transcendent. Our conscious life is situated between the placeholder frames of the material and spiritual, in a kind of suspendedness that is itself an image of a greater reality. The human soul becomes all things as it receives the cosmos through sense and intellect, and by having this knowledge, we “approach the likeness of God, in whom all things exist.”⁴¹ But this image of our souls as an immanent middle points beyond itself, because the true middle is God, the highest summit in whom all multiplicity and antitheses are one.

We come to understand this in the only way that we can—by ever more fully understanding ourselves as a creaturely form of a mediating middle. We are rational souls united to bodies, a perfection insofar as a human is made up of all things: “Man is said to be a little world, since all the creatures in the world are in a certain way found in him.”⁴² Thomas thought of us as little worlds because of our knowledge of reality, but we are learning about fascinating physical ways in which something similar can be said. Our carbon-based life is built upon a substance that is made only in stars, and we exist physically composed of stardust. The adventure of our life evolves out of this richness. It is an adventure that is always on the way but one filled with hope because of its telos. Thomas’s analogical thought culminates in the analogia entis, precisely because the entis signifies the unfathomable separation between God and creature but also provides the nexus from which radical unity is declared. His development of the idea of the analogia entis reveals humanity as a border where nature and spirit meet, and it illuminates the created world as a cosmos.⁴³

As an expression of the principle of non-contradiction, the analogia entis is a radical starting point. Within the analogia entis, thought is its own starting point. In the history of philosophy, thinkers have sought ever-more original starting points, but each one has interpreted the principle of non-contradiction, rather than taking the principal as its foundation. The natural philosophers began with the primordial elements, Anaxagoras with the mind, Plato with mind’s object (eidos), Aristotle with the subjective act of the mind (noesis), Descartes with the isolated act of the mind enclosed in the cogito, Kant with the transcendental form of the mind’s act as such, Hegel with the three-part dynamism of this form, and Husserl with the ultimate irreducibility of the objective and intentional forms of the mind’s acts. But in each of these cases, the so-called starting point ended up in a self-referential circle: either it must be assumed to establish itself or else it is merely asserted as true, a kind of clinamen about which the philosopher begs, “Give me only this and all else follows.” The analogia entis, as nothing more than the form of the principle of non-contradiction, is a condition for thought established in the mere act of thought. It is a thoroughly creaturely principle that expresses only the complete potentiality of the creature, an openness that allows the creature to experience the cosmos as pointing through itself, and beyond itself, to God.⁴⁴

There is a kind of cogito ergo sum in the analogia entis, in which thought returns into itself. But in the Cartesian formulation, the mind turns back merely to its own act as a mind without reference to the object with which the mind is engaged, or else it merely notes the object as it relates to the self-reflecting, active mind. The formulation of this return of thought to itself in the analogia entis illuminates intension toward all objects as the essential nature of the active mind. In knowing its own act, the mind knows the nature of its act, and by knowing the nature of its act, it knows its own essential nature—the fundamental capacity to conform to things.⁴⁵ In this radically non-Cartesian formulation of the cogito, intention within an act of the mind is not directed toward a mere object that is imminent to this act but rather toward a fully existing thing: the act of intension lights up the truth of things. This illuminated truth is not located within the isolated cogito. Its location is always the occasion of the existing thing, though which the transcendent in the immanent is disclosed. When creaturely consciousness correlates with the being of an existing thing in this way, the intending mind is able see the light of the in-and-beyond.⁴⁶ This act is the mind’s experience of the analogia entis. The imaginative expression of what is seen in this irreducible act constitutes the poetic apriori.

As a principle within the cogito, the analogia entis compels us to examine the objective facts of the created world and to see through-and-beyond everything with the faith available to minds in a created world, where the unity of the uni-verse is a coherent concept. This unity, fulfilled in the creator, motivates the idea that our insight into reality is grounded in the principle of non-contradiction, in which it is impossible to make contradictory true assertions regarding the same thing. Pythagoras discovered a cosmos that vibrates with a resonant rhythm. In this mysterious sense of the music of the universe, the rhythm of being is the rhythm of analogy, and the rhythm of analogy is the rhythm of thought. But just as musical rhythms require the notes, along with the silences that come before, between, and beyond the notes, the analogia entis as being and as thought passes into the silence that is the incomprehensibility of God: “The ‘resonant analogy’ is fulfilled in this ‘silent analogy’.”⁴⁷

As embodied minds move through the universe of concretely individual things, creation’s unity expresses itself to our minds. Unity underlies the individual things, but it also reveals itself through these things and within these things as an immanent transcendent. This is metaphysical experience. This is where thought begins. The rhythm of thought leads our minds from the experience of the immanent transcendent to awareness of ourselves as beings capable of thought. From there we become aware of the transcending immanence of our own consciousness of being. Our most profound questions about what underlies all being arise from this rhythm of metaphysical experience, because the rhythm always moves from the immanent to what lies beyond, oscillating between the transcending immanence described by Augustine and the indwelling transcendence described by Thomas. The structure of this oscillating rhythm is analogy, which appears in both metaphysics and religion—the consciousness of the interval between creator and creature, disclosing ever-greater dissimilarity within every similarity, whether that similarity manifests as a likeness, an image, or a word.⁴⁸

Augustine described the mystery of our inwardness that leads our intuitions beyond that inwardness toward the unfathomable mystery of God. Thomas described an indwelling transcendence, wherein the creator and creation are fused in such a way that we are rooted in God and in the tangible universe: we are creatures hanging in infinite space, for whom the heights and depths of God are beyond comprehension. In both cases religion is analogy, because God always ruptures the wineskins of our inwardness, sending us to the ever-greater but without destroying us. Our suspendedness in God uproots any fixity of our place in the palpable universe. There is no system that is not finally exceeded by the path along which analogy carries us. Augustine said that if we ever believe we have comprehended God, we can be sure it is not God whom we have comprehended. Analogical philosophy never arrives at completeness, because it always points toward a God who can only be encountered through analogy, which is always on the way.⁴⁹

Thomas’s philosophy resides between that of the pure image and that of the pure concept. In his philosophy, what is sensible in images, symbols, myths, and mysteries is both a necessary portal into the intelligible world and the only realm within which our knowledge of the intelligible world is possible. The sensible phenomenal world points toward the world of the Logos. This becomes transparent as our knowledge grows, moving analogically from a similarity, however great, toward the ever greater dissimilarity of the divine ground of this phenomenal world. Analogical philosophy overcomes the opposition between the philosophies of pure concept and pure image, ascending from images to the Logos using symbols, myths, and mysteries, and descending from the Logos to the image by way of the same. It avoids both the bathos of isolated images and the conceptually abstract purity of an isolated Logos.⁵⁰

In the progress from image to Logos and the regress from Logos to image, the turning point is constituted by myth and mystery, out of which we philosophize. Platonic philosophy shows this Logos developing consciously out of mythos and mysterium. Aristotle was critical of the Platonic myths, and instead embraced the approach of rational demonstration. But he retained the Platonic myth of Eros, and he portrayed the movement of the cosmos as a movement between lovers. Logos is being in-and-beyond image, myth, and mystery. Because of the in-and-beyond of creaturely essence and existence, all creaturely being is analogy of being. Likewise, because we can only conceive of Logos as the in-and-beyond of mythos and mysterium, we have no creaturely Logos other than analogy as Logos: philosophy in the Logos is a creaturely philosophy.⁵¹ For creatures like us, being and Logos can only be understood through analogy.

The movement from image to Logos and back is the analogical movement at the heart of the deepest work the philosophical imagination was created to do. It begins where it must begin, among the things in an inherently meaningful world, which is to say a created world. And beginning with the experience of created things as inherently meaningful, it must reach toward what lies beyond and ever beyond. We work out the fundamental structures of reality through what we make in our philosophical imaginations, and we revise as we grow in our consciousness of the apriori that lies beyond our current knowledge and experience. We reach with our imaginations. We reach again and again, always falling short but remaining hopeful. This is the adventure of the philosophical imagination that is always on the way in a meaningful universe. The philosophical imagination’s experience of the cosmos as meaningful and filled with things that point in-and-beyond themselves, explored through the imagination’s many forms of creative response to reality, is what I mean by the poetic apriori.

¹  George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, Forgotten Books, London (2012), 2.

²  Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure, and Univeral Rhythm, Eerdman’s (2014), 124. Throughout this chapter I have included references for authorities to whom Przywara turns for support, in case the original presentations of ideas illuminates Przywara’s use of the ideas in building his own argument.

³ Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q 82 a 3.

⁴  Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q1 a2.

⁵  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 136.

⁶  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 152.

⁷  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 158.

⁸  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 159.

⁹  Augustine, Sermons CVII iii 5.

¹⁰  Augustine, On the Trinity XV ii 2.

¹¹ Aquinas, Commentary on De Trinitate of Boethius q1 a2, corp et ad1.

¹²  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 182.

¹³ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 196.

¹⁴ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 197.

¹⁵  Augustine, On the Trinity X x 14.

¹⁶ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 210.

¹⁷  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q8 a1 corp.

¹⁸  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 216.

¹⁹  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 224. Thomas wrote: “It is the same to say that God made creatures for himself and that he will have made them for the sake of their own being” (Disputed Questions on the Power of God q5 a4 corp).

²⁰  Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Power of God q7 a5 corp.

²¹ Aquinas, Commentary on De Trinitate of Boethius q1 a2 ad1.

²²  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 236.

²³  Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q2 a11 ad5.

²⁴  Plato, Symposium 203b–d.

²⁵  Plato, Euthyphro 10a.

²⁶ Augustine, Sermons 52, 10, 23.

²⁷  Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio III vii 21.

²⁸ Augustine, City of God XI xviii.

²⁹class=00Text> Przywara, Analogia Entis, 266.

³⁰  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q12 a12.

³¹ Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q8 a1 ad8.

³²  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 383.

³³ Aquinas, De Malo q16 a6 ad5.

³⁴  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 286–287.

³⁵  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q13 a4 ad3.

³⁶ Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Power of God q7 a5 ad14.

³⁷  Aquinas, De Malo q5 a1.

³⁸  Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q27 a2.

³⁹  Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III 50.

⁴⁰ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 291.

⁴¹  Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q80 a1.

⁴² Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q91 a1.

⁴³  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 305.

⁴⁴  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 310.

⁴⁵  Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate q1 a9.

⁴⁶ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 312.

⁴⁷ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 314.

⁴⁸  lang=EN>Przywara, Analogia Entis, 424.

⁴⁹  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 429.

⁵⁰  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 434.

⁵¹  Przywara, Analogia Entis, 453.