Analogy of being

David Hart ( In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments ) explains the analogy of being by pointing to the difference between God (whose essence is existence) and us (whose essence in no way implies existence, and who do not even possess our essence, since we become “by losing what we have been”). He notes the “delightful consequence”: “If it is the wholly fortuitous synthesis of essence and existence within us, in becoming, that constitutes our analogy to the perfect identity of essence and existence in God, in its eternal changelessness, then the more we become the particular beings that we are, the more we show forth (precisely through our ‘infinite difference’ from God) the being of God. It is our very particularity – in all the richness and poverty of its limited existence – that is also our universality.”