The World in the Shadow of God. Ephraim Radner

like Julian Huxley declared that all such analogizing was entirely perverted: “Innumerable comparisons have been made between human society and the social organisation of ant, bee, or termite . . . [and] almost without exception the moral has been false.”18 So the geologist and poet Jonathan Wonham has argued as well: what exactly we find analogous seems to reflect less the First Cause than the simple cultural prejudices of the observer. In Caryl Haskins’s 1939 Of Ants and Men,19 Wonham argues by example, Haskins

      compares the evolution of three major ant groups: the Ponerines, the Myrmicines and the Formicines to “evolution” of human society from primitives, to empire-builders and, finally, to pioneers. Of Ponerines he says: “The young are, for ants, extremely athletic, competent, and able to care for themselves, exactly as the children of primitive peoples display an early competence which belies their later deficiency.” Or: “the ease with which the entire economy of the colony may be overturned by a very slight alteration of the environment all bespeak primitiveness.” So much for Ponerines who are, eventually, dismissed as carnivorous, barbaric and always on the move looking for new prey on which to feast. The Myrmicines, with their “Queen found[ing] colonies among inhospitable regions’ sound like agents of the British Empire. And the Formicine resemble, more than anything, the doughty American homesteaders of the frontier, ‘pushing’ hard upon the edges of the (American continent’s) melting glaciers . . . an aggressive, sensitive band of pioneer Formicines” whose “simplicity in social life is evident” and who rely on their own resourcefulness.20

      Who is to say, in retrospect, if Haskins’s ants did not indeed unlock, through analogy, the meaning of humankind in 1939?

      Still, 1939’s organic resemblances are a far cry from God’s own hand tilting the world. Those who speak of the ants at best describe themselves, and perhaps that only uniquely and mischievously. If we “go to the ant” (Prov 6:6) and “ask the beasts” (Job 12:7), shall we hear “wisdom” or more likely, the corruption of wisdom? So what shall we say of imitative analogy, other than at best that it is a hope whose gift is rendered vain by the reality of the malleable human heart and perhaps even (as Burnet wondered) the figural vacuity of all living things, such that the “beast” is left only to point out sin, a usage the Desert Fathers eagerly employed?

      But in fact, among those most wedded to the scholastic doctrine of analogy are those most aware of its moral limitations. God is “transcendent” to all “transcendents” as we might imagine them, Henri Bouillard writes. Even “being,” as in the proposition that “God is,” cannot be understood as a predicate, so as to introduce into God’s reality a category that is simply common to all things, including ourselves. And so the early twentieth-century Thomist Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges turns to Aquinas’s citation from Gregory the Great: balbutiendo ut possumus excelsa Dei resonamus (“Even in our stammering, we are able to sound out the marvelous things of God”).21 This is a matter of grace, to be sure, but a grace, grasped negatively if looked at squarely, embedded in the forms of our creaturely existence. Even the term “perfection” is not adequate for the Uncreated who alone creates. To use such defining words as “cause,” writes Sertillanges, therefore “implies no more than the postulate of universal poverty.”22

      By speaking of “poverty” Sertillanges turns to the general category of creaturely limitation, as though there are outlines that bind the creature’s sense and experience, and beyond which its pressing cannot move even though that press itself is somehow driven towards God. Impossibilities hound the very being of the creature. Even Barth saw mortality as a king of natural “historical witness” to God, although hardly of the same kind as Revelation.23 And hence Sertillanges is talking about more than an experiential limit upon knowledge. He is alluding as well to the moral failure involved in a “poverty” whose reach is exhaustive, so that the “outlines” of a creature and its experience represent also the shape of one’s interior perceptions and reactions. Thus, all creatures come into confrontation with their “outlines.” But these outlines are also “inlines,” in the sense that they define every aspect of creatureliness as also a kind of inevitable withering: for who are we, if we cannot know even who we “really” are? Are we not destined simply to drift away? Do we not “pass as a shadow,” therefore, neither knowing our coming nor our going (Eccl 6:12)?

      Perhaps this kind of judgment is already too interpretively shaped within a Christian mode of thinking. But that is the nature of Christian natural metaphysics. Indeed, the claim here regarding the analogical character of human experience and apprehension—of the “world” as it is bound to human life somehow—is that it speaks of God, even when and especially and fundamentally only (because this only is what can happen) when somehow one has failed to speak rightly of God at all. This too marks the outline, not of God but of what God has made. Yet having made it, it is His, and will ever be such. We might speak of analogy here in terms of a “shadow” with its ambivalent character of outline from without but also darkness and threat as it somehow obscures some limited and perhaps even false hope from within. Indeed, the scriptural language of “shadow” as pertaining to God is itself somewhat ambiguous: protective (Ps 17:8; 91:1), overcoming and even deathly (Isa 25:5; Jer 6:4; 13:16), creatively instrumental at a distance (Acts 5:15), looming out in awesome and revelatory glory (Matt 17:5), incomplete (Jonah 4:5-8), even somehow inappropriate (Jas 1:17). But for all that, “heavenly” shadows form the connective tissue of natural history and divine reality (Col 2:17; Heb 8:5; 10:1), and the world exists just in this form, marked by the overcast of goodness and heaven. Much as the Law is “holy, just and good,” is in fact “spiritual,” yet it drives us to our knees in a recognition of “wretchedness” before God who alone can turn this—yet just this!—into “thanksgiving” (Rom 7:12, 14, 24, 25), so our “natural” lives drive us to God as they drive us against our own perplexed inner and outer walls.

      Obviously, the sense that God casts a shadow upon the world, indeed, that the world is filled with or even somehow stands towards God as a set of shadows derived from some further and ungrasped substantial form, scriptural though the metaphor is, was prone to a range of more strictly philosophical and Platonic elaborations. But the metaphor remains implanted all the same, and works on at least two levels: precisely by grasping the material aspect of creation and claiming this analogically to its Creator and Cause; yet also by insisting that its character as a “natural” life be imbued with a fundamental ambivalence and ambiguity, so that its turn toward God even proves to be the source of diverse and perhaps distorted claims. In our imitation of God, that is, we are knotted, at least in ourselves, to the moral ambiguities and even abject failures of the shadow’s passing.