1038. It's entirely clear that what Hartshorne . . .

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It's entirely clear that what Hartshorne typically speaks of as his two "analogies" for God are, in both cases, not proper "analogies" at all, but, rather, "symbols"—in the precise senses in which he himself defines these terms when he explicitly distinguishes them.

Thus his "interpersonal analogy" compares God with one specific kind of thing—a person interacting with other persons; and his "soul-body analogy" compares God, again, with one specific kind of thing—a soul or mind, as the integrating, animating principle of an animal body (cf., e.g., PCH: 571, 642, 693, 707; cf. also 597). But just this is what, according to Hartshorne, makes a symbol a symbol—that it draws a comparison between God and one concrete species of entity in contrast to all other such species (whether person in contrast to nonpersons or mind in contrast to nonminds or bodies).

Allowing for this, I have little trouble agreeing with Hartshorne that "we must ... find analogies between the divine, which we do not obviously experience as such, and things that we do obviously so experience, for instance persons or other higher animals. Without these analogies the idea of God remains an utterly empty abstraction and its existence would lack religious or ethical import and mean no more than that we conceive it" (PCH: 598). But I must insist that what he thus speaks of as "analogies" are really what, in terms of his own explicit terminology, are "symbols," as distinct from "analogies, and I must protest the confusion he perpetuates—and persists in perpetuating—by not using the proper terms in which to express himself. I also regard it as an unfortunate overstatement to speak of "two basic analogies required to give content to the idea of God" (PCH: 707). The Idea of God can be and is given content even when it is defined purely literally or transcendentally. So whether it has content does not in the least depend upon defining it analogically or symbolically; at stake in so defining it is only what content it has—merely metaphysical or religious and ethical as well as metaphysical.

It is worth noting, perhaps, that Hartshorne now speaks of his kind of neoclassical theism as "theism as defined by dual transcendence and the interpersonal and mind-body analogies" (PCH: 587, n. 4).