Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision (Interventions)
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
In 1932 German theologian and philosopher Erich Przywara penned his Analogia Entis, a vision of the analogy of being and a metaphysical exploration of the dynamic between God and creation. A translation into English in 2014 made Przywara’s brilliant and influential work available to more people than ever before.
In this book Philip Gonzales calls English-speaking readers to embrace the Christian treasure of the Analogia Entis and to reimagine what it offers Christians today. Gonzales brings Przywara’s text into dialogue with debates in contemporary philosophy and theology, engaging in conversation with Edith Stein, Karl Barth, Martin Heidegger, the Nouvelle théologie, Vatican II, and leading figures in postmodern theology and the Continental turn to religion. The first book of its kind in English, Reimagining the “Analogia Entis” articulates a Christian vision of being for the postmodern era.
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- Reimagines an analogical style of metaphysics
- Reopens an exchange between philosophy and theology
- Articulates a Christian vision of being for the postmodern era
Part 1. Formal and Critical Dialogue
- A Crossroad Moment for Catholic Thought: The Modernist Crisis
- Philosophy and Theology: Modernity and Countermodernity
- Visions of Being: Foundation and Nonfoundation
- Differing Reimaginings of the Analogia Entis: Anthropocentrism and Theocentrism
Part 2. Constructive Reimagining
- Setting the Stage: Post-Conciliar Trajectories
- The Postmodern Scene of Thought: Breaking Heidegger’s Spell
- The Resurgence of Analogical Metaphysics: Desmond, Milbank, and Hart
- Enlisting Apocalyptic Theology: Cyril O’Regan’s Pleromatic Vision
- The Analogia Entis Reimagined: A Christian Analogical-Apocalyptic Metaphysics
Philip Gonzales here achieves a remarkable expansion and updating of the analogical metaphysics of Erich Przywara. Analogy comprises both being and revelation and a tensionality not just between God and creation but between essence and existence, past and future, potential and fulfillment. Therefore a metaphysics of analogy must be as much believed in as argued for, lived as much as believed, and hoped for through a welcoming of the fire of sanctity as much as lived. More radically than ever, Gonzales suggests that the biblical, Catholic horizon offers the only credible philosophy that is not a mere surrender to despair.
—John Milbank, University of Nottingham
Gonzales is that rare combination of exceptional scholar and visionary philosopher; he has shaken the dust off the analogia entis and, like Przywara, opened up worlds of conversation, communion, and nuance. Breathtaking, exhilarating, and grounded in the Christocentric substance which alone discloses truth, this book is indeed an analogia caritatis—an essential, graceful, and rewarding journey.
—Caitlin Smith Gilson, University of Holy Cross, New Orleans
Erich Przywara is at last gaining the attention he deserves in Anglophone theological circles. For too long, he has enjoyed the status of little more than a repressed memory among us; and yet no figure is more crucial for an understanding of the immense revolutions in systematics and philosophical theology in the twentieth century, and the work of very few remain as perennially pertinent and fruitful as his. Gonzales is to be praised not simply for providing a survey of this remarkable thinker’s contributions, but for bringing them into deep conversation with so much of contemporary theological scholarship and speculation.
—David Bentley Hart
Philip John Paul Gonzales is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas. He is the editor of Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O'Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity and the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews.