Harmony and Interruption

Abstract

Building on Erich Przywara’s reception of Augustine in the previous chapter, this chapter explicates Przywara’s own use of rhythm in arguing for the doctrine of the analogy of being. Przywara uses rhythm to describe a doctrine of analogy that is not observed at a remove but glimpsed through movements in which the human creature is always already embedded. After parsing out the intersections between these various movements, the chapter argues that Przywara’s use of rhythm includes both synchronic and diachronic perspectives and, therefore, also includes movements of both harmonization and interruption. While both are operative, Przywara methodologically privileges the diachronic, intra-creaturely perspective, thereby proposing a doctrine of analogy that does not succumb to the critiques typically made of other articulations of the doctrine, as well as imagining a new approach to the practice of theology more generally.