Analogia Entis and Nietzschean Mysticism: The Work of Erich Przywara

Erich Pryzwara was a highly influential figure in twentieth-century Catholic theology, whose evaluation of Nietzsche lies at the heart of his thought. In 1936, Przywara published an article in the Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik whose title consisted of the names of Thomas Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola, and Friedrich Nietzsche—and whose content pursued the threefold relation of those three figures. In his major monograph of 1932, translated as Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, Przywara defended the Scholastic doctrine of analogia entis (or “analogy of being”). At the same time, however, Przywara noted that his interest in Nietzsche had led him to the sociology of Max Scheler and to his material value-ethics, and that Scheler’s work, through its notion of the “immediacy of the religious,” propelled him towards the problematic of the analogia entis. Using a formula that he derived from Augustine, “God in us and God beyond us,” Pryzwara sought to “understand the ‘ultimate’ relation between God and creature,” propelling “creatureliness” to one of his philosophy’s central concepts. This understanding, it turns out, pivots on the notion of a Deus incomprehensibilis “in us” as well as “beyond us,” and on the problem of what Pryzwara called “the oscillating ‘in-and-beyond’ [schwingendes in-über].”