An Introduction to
Balthasar
Aidan Nichols OP
Hans Urs von Balthasar was born on 12 August
1905 at Lucerne, the most Catholic city of a pre-secular Switzerland.
His was a long-established patrician family, though on his mother's
side, his roots were Hungarian.[1] Indeed, the Austro-Hungarian
imperial family, in decorous flight from Vienna, put up at the
Pension Felsberg, run by his grandmother, baroness Margit Apor,
in the summer of 1918.
His immediate family were linked to the Catholic
Church in a variety of ways: his father, Oskar, an architect
of church buildings among others; his mother, Gabrielle, an office-bearer
in the Swiss League of Catholic Women, whose
foundations and early history she chronicled; his sister, Renée,
for many years superior-general of a Franciscan order of nuns.
One of his Hungarian relations was a bishop who would die of
injuries inflicted by the invading Red Army in 1944. [2]
Balthasar's childhood and youth were dominated
by an obsession with music. His first book, published in Germany
in 1925, when he was twenty, would be called - with characteristic
ambitiousness - The Development of the Musical Idea Attempt
at a Synthesis of Music.[3]
The influence of Benedictine monks whose abbey
school at Engelberg offered a fine musical education, was paramount
here.
Before finishing his secondary education, however, Balthasar
was moved by his parents for reasons which have never been trade
clear - to a Jesuit college in the Austrian Vorarlberg, which
adjoins the eastern border of Switzerland.
The decision was all the stranger in that
the peace negotiations of St Germain had not yet taken place:
the Danubian monarchy, Austria-Hungary, was still in the death
throes of its final dissolution. This experience of parental
Diktat was evidently unwelcome, because, without
his parents' consent and before the equivalent of the British
'sixth form' years were over, he removed himself from school
and matriculated in the faculty of Germanistik,
German studies, a mixture of literature and philosophy, in the
University of Zurich.
From one point of view Balthasar never abandoned
that faculty. As was not unusual in the universities of German-speaking
Europe, he was peripatetic already as a student. He took courses
in Berlin (where he studied as a sideline both Indian thought
and, through the priest-philosopher Romano Guardini, Kierkegaard)
and at Vienna (where he discovered Plotinus).
His own mature theology would attempt to identify
the elements of truth in both Existentialism, represented here
by Kierkegaard, and Neo-Platonism, summed up in Plotinus, while
at the same time identifying over against these the specifying
features of a distinctively Christian metaphysics. Also worth
noting, is the influence upon him of Rudolf Allers,
erstwhile pupil of Freud, a convert to Catholicism whose journey
from Freudian reductionism, where the self is not much more than
a bundle of instinctual drives, to a Christian psychotherapy
where primacy is given to interpersonal love as the proper medium
of human existence, was assisted by his studies of mediaeval
philosophy and theology.
To return, then, to my statement that in one
sense Balthasar never left the German faculty at Zurich. This
is in an extended sense true, for he continued to regard the
marriage of philosophy and literature as the best possible preparation
for theological existence. Or, to put the same point in another
way, the offspring of that marriage provides theology with its
most serviceable handmaiden.
That Balthasar was already, even as a young
layman engaged in purely academic work, thinking in religious
and theological terms, is clear both from his life?story and
from the massive and (it has to be said) not entirely digestible
text which his studies produced.[4]
In the year when he submitted his thesis,
1929, he entered the Bavarian Province of the Society of Jesus;
ironically, his university was situated in the most radical Protestant
of all Swiss cities, where opposition to any relaxing of the
'articles of exception', forbidding the activity of the Jesuits,
was at its most vociferous.[5]
And furthermore, the thesis he handed in was
itself a form of tacit theology. Its subject was modern German
literature, examined from the viewpoint of its attitude, explicit
or implicit, to the 'Last Things' - the final destiny of the
human soul. Much of the material of this thesis would find its
way into the first of his major works, The Apocalypse of
the German Soul, a massive tripartite study of the eschatological
bearings of the work of numerous major German philosophers, dramatists
and poets of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.[6]
Despite wandering from his brief in chapters
on the vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson, an important figure,
in more - than - Germanic perspective, in the overcoming of the
rationalist element in nineteenth-century thought, and on Dostoevsky,
whom he treats as a Christian counterpart to Nietzsche, Balthasar
more or less succeeds here in his self-appointed task.
Taking German philosophers from Lessing to
Heidegger and German poets from Goethe to Rilke to be the most
penetrating intelligences at work in the unfolding of European
culture in their periods, he tries to show that they divide ultimately
into two principal attempted solutions of the riddle that is
existence, what he calls the 'Promethean' and the 'Dionysian' solutions, after respectively, the Greek hero, Prometheus,
and the Greek god, Dionysus.
Prometheus
for Balthasar is the symbol of man's attempt to raise himself
by his own bootstraps to the level of the gods. The human 'I'
exalts itself in self-affirmation, seizing fire from heaven -
not only emancipating itself from inherited constraints, whether
biological or historical, but aiming at the total mastery of
existence. The Promethean outlook is manifested in the writers
of the Enlightenment, and in such Idealist philosophers as Hegel
with his project of reaching absolute knowledge, where the human
mind coincides with the divine mind in realising that everything
is, and has happened, just as it ought to have if infinite spirit
is to become self-aware in man.
Dionysus
for Balthasar is a symbol of a more tragic attempt to resolve
the puzzle of existence. Dionysian man resembles Promethean man
in the unboundedness of his aspirations but his interest lies
more in escaping the limitations of existence, rather than in
dominating them: Faced with transience and mortality, he leaves
reason behind in a flight towards the unnameable heights of whatever
lies behind everyday existence.
But characteristically this movement of mystical
exaltation is followed by a falling back, disenchanted, into
a sense of the absurdity of everything. The Dionysian temper
is reflected in such artistic and philosophical movements as
Expressionism and Existentialism.
The upshot is that only fitfully and in fragments
do this vast range of writers and thinkers, spanning two centuries
of enormous conceptual creativity, come close to the truth. The
truth being that humans find their destiny only in selftranscendence,
in transcending themselves towards the reality that is always
greater than everything they can be, think or imagine, namely,
God.
We could in fact describe the Apocalypse
of German Soul as a testing of the dogmatic affirmation
of the First Vatican Council that human beings, through the light
of human reason, can develop a sense of God as not only the author
but the goal of nature and history. It was Balthasar's conviction,
evidently, that attaining a just doctrine of transcendence -
seeing humans as called to transcend themselves towards an absolutely
or unconditionally transcendent reality - is, without Christian
revelation, no easy matter. Significantly, Balthasar ends this
work with a study of his older Swiss contemporary, Karl Barth.
Apocalypse of the German Soul is the expanded, published form of Balthasar's History
of the Eschatological Problem in German Literature and
as such it gives us an insight into the making of his thought
at a crucial and formative, if immature, stage. But by the time
Apocalypse was given to the public in the years
1937 to 1939, Balthasar had completed his Jesuit training in
the Jesuit studentates of Pullach, near Munich and Fourvières,
near Lyons. He was ordained priest in November 1936, by of the
aristocratic German prelate, already celebrated for his resistance
to the ethos of the Third Reich, Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,
primate of Bavaria.
Balthasar did not have very much that was
favourable to say about the NeoScholastic manuals in use in the
Jesuit study houses of France and Germany in the 1930s. While
of course not dismissing all their themes as misplaced, or treating
all of their theological judgments as wrong or shallow, he spoke
harshly of the arid, desert-like quality of the theological landscape
in which he was made to wander. He wrote later:
My entire period of study
in the Society was a grim struggle with the dreariness of theology,
with what men had made out of the glory of revelation.[7]
To understand the acerbity of this remark, I must look ahead
briefly to Balthasar's mature work, the great trilogy which consists
in, first, a theological aesthetics, secondly, a theological
dramatics and thirdly, a theological logic. Balthasar's strictures
on Jesuit theology in the 1930s were fundamentally stylistic
in character. Rejection of a theological culture simply on the
ground that its textbooks were poorly written may seem dilettantish
or frankly bizarre.
But not to one whose theological logic would
not be finished until he had completed a theological aesthetics
and dramatics. The revelation which Christian theology set itself
to study was the disclosure of a beauty beyond all worldly beauty
in the supreme artwork of Jesus Christ; in it the transcendent
beauty - in biblical language, the glory - of the ever-greater
God came to expression.
How could a theology genuinely attuned to
its own subject-matter be ugly? Similarly, the salvation history
which Christian theology set out to represent, and into whose
ambit, as players in an ongoing déroulement
of the plot, it invited its readers to enter, was a drama in
which God set forth his own philanthropy, his own goodness to
men, in the midst of a conflictual and agonistic world.
How could a theology really faithful to its
own subject-matter be lacking in dramatic power and tension?
And because the truth which theological logic sets out is the
truth of the gloriously beautiful God in his incarnate Word,
the truth of the dramatically philanthropic God in that play
whose director is the Holy Spirit, could a theology which was
unprepossessing and dull be adequately true, even given the qualifications
we have to enter when faced with the notion of the adequate conceptualisation
of a revelation of the living God who exceeds all our categories?
It would not be difficult to show that these
most basic intuitions about divine beauty, goodness, and truth,
and the mark these qualities should leave on theology itself,
were already in his possession from the earliest years of his
priesthood. They show themselves above all in the choice of topic
and manner of treatment which typify the series of short books
on patristics and Christian literature which he wrote in the
wake of Apocalypse of the German Soul, and the
manner in which he praised his earliest theological hero, Karl
Barth.
A qualification has to be set against any
notion that Balthasar could find nothing good to say about his
Jesuit mentors. There were in fact two that he lionised. The
first was the Polono-German fundamental theologian Erich Przywara
whose chief influence on Balthasar was to show him the amazing
theological possibilities present in that key doctrine of Christian
Scholasticism, the analogia entis or 'analogy of
being'.[8]
Przywara and Balthasar share an attitude towards
the analogia enris doctrine which makes that teaching
not (as is often the case) a commonplace of metaphysics, but
a specifically religious doctrine of enormous spiritual power.
Essentially they turn the analogy of being idea into a doctrine
of participation, of a sharing in the divine life which, intimately
present in the constitution of the human creature, presses that
creature to go beyond itself in the direction of God.
That there is an analogy between our being
and God's should not make us seek to domesticate God but, on
the contrary, lead us to recognise an invitation - inscribed
in the very nature of our being - to enter his mystery. The more
man is permitted to live his life from out of this divinely impelled
movement, the more he will realise that God is the ever-greater
Lord.
The more intimately he shares the divine life,
the firmer his grasp of the divine transcendence as infinitely
above him. Przywara's highly theological commentary on the 'Spiritual
Exercises' made Balthasar appreciate their true depth.
Indeed, it might not be
too misleading to say that what Przywara, and Balthasar after
him, hoped to do was combine the mind of St Thomas with the heart
of St Augustine, all in the spirit of St Ignatius Loyola, that
burning obedience - at once interior and missionary - to the
Word of God.
Balthasar's other hero was Henri de Lubac
- later, after various vicissitudes, to be like himself, a cardinal
of the Roman church. De Lubac, on whom Balthasar, in the last
decade of the latter's life, would write an entire, if concise,
book, [9] inspired him not only by his encyclopaedic grasp
of the Catholic tradition of commenting on Scripture, his love
of the Fathers, and his willingness to grapple with alien metaphysics,
from Buddhism to the French socialist Proudhon, in the service
of faith but also by the sheer range of his enterprise. Both
men, in a sense, were capable of creating, and did create, at
least in bookish form, a Christian culture of a comprehensive
kind all on their own.
During his student days a number of Balthasar's
books on the Fathers and on the literary art of twentieth-century
Catholicism were happily gestating: his substantial essays on
St Maximus the Confessor, and predecessor St Gregory of Nyssa,
both of which appeared during the Second World War, as well as
his slighter study of Origen - which, published in Austria in
1938, only achieved its definitive form in a French version in
1957.[10]
At the same time, stimulated both by de Lubac
and Pryzwara, no mean students of Augustine, he was compiling
two anthologies of texts from the North African doctor, for which
purpose he read through the entire corpus of Augustine in class,
with earplugs to block out the sound of lectures. [11]
Balthasar was lucky enough to be living in
France at the time of a major Catholic literary renaissance there,
and this bore fruit in his books on the novelist George Bemanos,
Le chrétien Bemanos, as well as his translations
of the poet and dramatist Paul Claudel. [12]
The Maximus book presented Christ as the key
to the cosmos, tying together in his own person all the pathways
of creation and redemption. The Nyssa book set forth for the
first time the related themes of desire, eros, and charity, agape,
presenting the stream of eros, which is never exhausted by any
object in this world, as the concrete form of man's openness
to transcendence, on which divine grace, then, can set to work,
turning desire into self?giving. The Origen book is a modern
restatement of the idea of the spiritual sense of Scripture,
a sense more important than the literal in being not more foundational
- for the literal is always that - but higher, more open to the
full dimensions of God's self-revelation.
The study of Bemanos presents major themes
of sin and forgiveness, confession and judgment. Claudel was
sought out for his ideas on the nature of poetic knowledge and
the need for sympathy - connaturality - between the knower and
the object known. Connaissance, 'knowledge', in
its highest reaches, is co-naissance, 'co birth',
familial intimacy.
But more widely, these
books represent an appeal to broaden, deepen and above all humanise
the Scholastic tradition, going back behind it to the Fathers
with their mystical warmth and rhetorical power, and
going ahead of it (or to the side of it) by appeal to literary
artists who could put Christian experience, the wider sense of
the faith, into compelling, unforgettable form.
At the time when this stream of what we could
call his ancillary works - for the great trilogy of the aesthetics,
dramatics and logic, is surely his master-work - began flowing,
Balthasar was living neither in France, however, nor in Bavaria
but in his native Switzerland, at Basel. In canton Zurich Jesuits
were not allowed at all; throughout the Swiss Confederation they
were inhibited by the constitution from running schools or parishes.
The Swiss Jesuits, who until 1947 had no separate
organisation of their own were, if not simple, unlettered men,
then certainly forced by circumstance to restrict themselves
to pastoral work of a low profile, and even marginal, kind. There
was, however, one type of institution which the anti-clerical
laws of the 1840s had not envisaged because it did not then exist,
and that was the student chaplaincy.
Given that Balthasar had already written more
books than all the other Swiss Jesuits put together, his superiors
decided that - unless he wished to go to Rome, to teach at the
Gregorian University - this was the place for him. Balthasar
threw himself into the work with his customary energy, founding
a system of parallel lectures for Catholic students so comprehensive
that it was almost a parallel university, giving Ignatian retreats
and editing throughout the War a collection of anthologies, called
the 'European Series', intended to help save Europe's
cultural heritage in the face of National Socialism and capitalistic
philistinism.
Basel was the home of the two people - the
theologian Karl Barth and the mystic Adrienne von Speyr - who
more than any others were to determine the direction of his work.
Balthasar's admiration for Barth, which was reciprocated, is
expressed in his book The Theology of Karl Barth,
[13] which began life as a series of lectures on Barth
given in his presence.
Balthasar waxes lyrical in his praise of Barth's
manner of practising theology. He calls Barth's work 'beautiful'
on the grounds that it combines 'passion' with 'objectivity'.
Barth's theology is objective in the sense of being thoroughly
immersed in its object, God as revealed to the world in Christ.
But the effect of this objectivity is that the theologian himself
becomes involved in, and fascinated by, what he studies, and
that at the deepest level: hence passion. The combination, Balthasar
remarks drily, is not that common in contemporary Catholic theology.
To Balthasar's eyes, Barth shows us a true
understanding of what theology should be. The 'principle' of
theology is nothing other than the content of revelation itself.
But this revealed content cannot be separated from revelation
perceived as the action of God. It is not primarily the communication
of truths, but God himself, very Truth, revealing himself in
all his sovereign freedom. Consequently, theology must be a contemplative
exploration of God's self-gift.
In theology's case, we cannot dispose of the
principles of our discipline, in the way that we can with profane
studies. Furthermore, it is not just that, in Barth, revelation's
content provides theology with its foundational principles. The
style of Barth's theology expresses the immensity
of this revealed content, the extraordinary greatness of the
dramatic event of revelation.
Balthasar made no secret of the fact that,
while he wished Barth's manner of theologising to inspire Catholic
theology, he also wanted to convert Barth to Catholicism. He
had more success with Adrienne von Speyr, a medical doctor, though
herself a woman in chronically poor health, who through her two
marriages was intimately connected to the academic echelons of
the upper bourgeoisie of the city: a perfect Jesuit catch.
Balthasar himself considered that
von Speyr's role in his life had exceeded anyone else's, and
in case posterity was in any doubt wrote in later life a study
of their common work, Unser Auftrag, explicitly
intended to prevent any prising apart of his theology from her
mystically generated contemplative reading of the Scriptures.[14]
Certainly von Speyr provided several of the
main themes of Balthasar's theology of the atonement, as well
as of his mariology, ecclesiology and eschatology, not to mention
his understanding of the specific mission in the Church of such
(canonised or uncanonised) women mystics as Thérèse
of Lisieux and Elizabeth of Dijon, on whom he wrote substantial
studies.[15]
Though one might suspect a degree of chivalrous
overstatement in Balthasar's references to von Speyr (he was
deeply angered by what be regarded as the dismissive way her
mystical experience was being treated, despite the full satisfaction
she had given Jesuit professors, both German and
French, deputed to examine her credentials and 'mission'), he
described the task of spiritual director to a mystic as essentially
an auxiliary one.
Speyrian insights received at Balthasar's
hands fuller articulation and suitable positioning within the
corpus of Christian doctrine, gaining enhanced power to illuminate
the biblical
revelation in the process. And so, by a seeming paradox, a content
drawn insignificant part from Adrienne's experience could be
placed within a theological structure inspired by that relentless
critic of the Christian mystics, Karl Barth.
As the doyen of 'post-critical' theology in
the United State, the Lutheran George Lindbeck, has written,
a discernible 'family resemblance' links the theologies of Balthasar
and Barth. Both are wary of transposing biblical revelation into
categories alien to itself, seeking rather to describe the world
in terms that are scripturally rooted; the appeal of both to
the Bible is, nonetheless, not lacking in intellectual power
for they find there a sophisticated coherence, treating Scripture
as a narrationally (Barth) or dramatically (Balthasar) as well
as typologically unified whole.[16]
In 1945 after a retreat in the second order
Dominican monastery of Estavayer, in canton Neuchatel, Balthasar
founded with von Speyr a secular institute - or society of consecrated
life, celibacy, for lay people living in the world. The Community
of St John, with both a male and a female branch, became more
widely known three years later when Balthasar produced a theology
for secular institutes, the first book to be published by the
Johannes Verlag, a publishing house established with the help
of a friend at Einsiedeln, and named after the Gospel writer,
St John, who predominates in both von Speyr's work and his own.[17]
Neither the local bishop nor the Jesuit superiors
supported the venture, and the Society made it clear, after an
interview with its Dutch Father General J. B. Janssens, that
Balthasar must choose between the Jesuits on the one hand and
his collaborator and spiritual children on the other. Balthasar
made known his decision in a short printed statement sent to
friends:
I took this step, for both
sides a very grave one, after a long testing of the certainty
I had reached through prayer that 1 was being called by God to
certain definite tasks in the Church. The Society felt it could
not release me to give these tasks my undivided commitment ....
So, for me, the step taken means an application of Christian
obedience to God, who at any tithe has the right to call a man
not only out of his physical home or his marriage, but also from
his chosen spiritual home in a religious order, so that he can
use him for his purposes within the Church. Any resulting advantages
or disadvantages in the secular sphere were not under discussion
and not taken into account. [18]
And for his Jesuit confrères he explained, with references
to St Thomas and the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian
John de Lugo that, in cases where obedience to the Order and
a subjective evaluation of the demands of obedience to God's
will conflict, a resolution is not to be found 'absolutely and
in every case in obedience to the Order'.
Shortly before his death, Balthasar asked
the present Jesuit General, Fr Peter Kolvenbach, to receive him
back into the Society, but this negotiation foundered over, once
more, the question of the Community of St John. Kolvenbach attempted
to sweeten the pill by obtaining for Balthasar as Cardinal the
Roman titular church of Sant' Ignazio, one of the glories of
the Jesuit Baroque, but this proposal also met with canonical
difficulties.
At first Balthasar's secularisation laid a
heavy burden on him. He had to give lectures here, there and
everywhere to earn his keep. The Roman Congregation for Seminaries
and Universities (as it then was) inhibited him from accepting
at least one offer of a chair from a Catholic theology faculty,
that of Tabingen. In any case this was not what he wanted, and
the time which might have been given to seminars and academic
organisation was bestowed instead on spiritual direction and
- above all for our purposes - his remaining books.
The key to his great trilogy is found in the
Scholastic notion of transcendental determinations of being,
qualities so pervasive throughout reality that they crop up in
all the categories of particular being, and so may be said to
'transcend' such categorial distinctions as those differentiating
substance and accident, quality and mode.
It is the existence of these transcendental
determinations - of which the most relevant to Balthasar are
verum, the true, pulchrum, the beautiful,
and bonum, the good, which allows the analogy of
being, the various intensities of reality as manifested in the
varying activity of beings at all levels, from amoeba to angel,
to be pressed into service by patristic and mediaeval theology
for speaking about God. For that which can be ascribed to being
itself must surely have some validity in discourse about the
ultimate Source of being, God.
There is a correspondence, an analogy, as
well as a staggering disproportion - we remember how for Przywara
both comparability and incomparability increase as we move closer
to God - between worldly beauty and divine glory. There is a
correspondence, an analogy, as well as a staggering disproportion
between finite freedom and the infinite freedom of God. There
is a correspondence, an analogy, as well as a staggering disproportion
between the structure of created truth and the structure of divine
truth.
If the God of glory wished to show his beauty
tothe world in his incarnate Image he must at once take up forms
within the world and shatter them so as to express the Glory
beyond beauty. If the philanthropic God wished to show his goodness
to the world in the protagonist of the saving drama that is the
Lamb slain and victorious he must at once take up the dynamic
pattern of human freedom and burst it from within so as to express
the sovereign Love beyond all goodness.
If the God of truth wished to make known his
primordial truth to the world - himself as the prima veritas,
the 'First Truth' as St Thomas and St Catherine call him - then
he must use, and in using take beyond their limits, laws of human
thought and language so as to convey a revelation of truth beyond
the heart of man in the incarnation of the Logos and the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit.
The ending of the Council, and the ensuing
post-conciliar crisis, coincided with the decline and death of
Adrienne von Speyr in 1967. It was surely no coincidence that
Balthasar's honouring and exploitation by Church authority began
almost immediately afterwards. Separated from Adrienne, with
whom Catholic officialdom has only in the last few years begun
to come to terms, and his intellectual stature increasingly self-evident,
he was exactly the kind of antiliberal but reforming theologian,
neo-patristic in his sympathies, with whom the Roman see in the
later years of Paul VI's pontificate and that of John Paul II,
liked to do business. It did no harm that his book on The
Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church is theologically
the profoundest book on the papacy ever written.[19]
Not that Balthasar angled for church office
or honours. On the contrary he shunned the proferred cardinalate,
and only accepted, in view of a later conclave, and at the pope's
urgent request, in an ignatian spirit of obedience to the Roman
pontiff, as well as with a subsidiary hope that the honour might
vindicate Adrienne. He died at Basel, with the Johannesgemeinschaft
on 26 June 1988, three days before his investiture as cardinal.
A fellow German-speaking Cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, said in
his panegyric:
In a sense, his intuition
was confirmed by the call to the next life which reached him
on the eve of receiving that honour. He was able to stay entirely
himself. But what the pope wanted to express by this gesture
of recognition and even of respect remains justified: not in
some isolated and private fashion but in virtue of her ministerial
responsibility the Church tells us that he is an exact master
of the faith, a guide towards the sources of living waters -a
witness of the Word from whom we learn Christ, from whom we can
learn life. 'For me, to live is Christ': this phrase. from the
Letter to the philippians sums up in a final way his whole journey.
[20]
1 P. Henrici, S.J., 'Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His
Life', in D. L. Schindler (ed.), Hans Urs von Balthasar.
His Life and Work (San Francisco 1991), pp. 7-44.
2 For Vilnos Apor of Gyor, see 1. Kozi Horvath,
Leben and Sterben von DischofAstor (Munich 1952).
3 Die Entwicklung der musikalischen
Idee. Versuch einer Synthese der Musik(Braunschweig 1925).
4 Geschichte des eschatologischen Problems
in der modernen deutscher Literatur (Zurich 1930).
5 Such laws, in the context of a less dispersed
system of authority in the postRevolutionary Swiss Confederation,
had been framed in the aftermath of the midnineteenth-century
religious war, lost by the principal Catholic cantons (which
included Lucerne). Thus C. Gilliard, Histoire de la Suisse
(Paris 1987), pp. 120-121 .
6 Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien
zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen 1. Der deutsche Idealismus
(Salzburg 1937); 11 Im Zeichen Nietzsches (Salzburg
1939); 111 Die Verg6ttlichung des Todes (Salzburg
1939).
7 H. U. von Balthasar, 'Einleitung', in A.
von Speyr, Erde and Himmel, Ein Tagebuch. Zweiter Teil,
11: Die Zeit der grossen Diktate (Einsiedeln 1975),
p. 195.
8 'Einleitung', in L. Zimmy (ed.), Erich
Przywara. Sein Schrifttum (Einsiedeln 1963), pp.5?18.
9 H. U. von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac. Sein
organisches Lebenswerk (Einsiedeln 1976).
10 Kosmische Liturgie. Hohe and Krise
des griechischen Weltbilds bei Maximus Confessor (Freiburg
1941); his Nyssa essay is: Presence et pensee. Essai sur
la philosophie religieuse de Gregoire de Nysse (Paris
1942); on Origen, there is:
Origenes, Geist and Feuer. Ein Aufbau aus seinen Werken
(Salzburg 1938), and Parole et mystère ehez
Origene (Paris 1957).
11 Aurelius Augustinus, Ueber die Psalmen
(Leipzig 1936); Aurelius Augustinus. Das Antlitz der Kirche
(Einsiedeln?Cologne 1942).
12 Bernanos (Cologne?Olten 1954).
1 cite the title of the French version, Le chretien Bernanos
(Paris 1956). The Claudel translations are: Paul Claudel.
Fiinf grosse Oden (Freiburg 1939); Paul Claudel.
Der seidene Schuh (Salzburg 1939); Paul Claudel.
Maria Verkiindigung (Lucerne 1946); and others taken
up into: Paul Claudel, Gesammelte Werke 1. Gedichte
(Einsiedeln 1963), and Paul Claudel. Corona BenignitatisAnni
Dei (Einsiedeln 1964).
13 Karl Barth. Darstellung and Deutung
seiner Theologie (Olten-Cologne '1951); ET The
Theology of Karl Barth (New York 1971; San Francisco
1992).
14 Unser Auftrag. Bericht and Entwurf
(Einsiedeln 1984).
15 Schwestern im Geist. Therese von
Lisieux and Elisabeth von Dijon (Einsiedeln 1970)
16 Lindbeck, 'Scripture, Consensus and Community',
in R. J. Neuhaus (ed.), Biblical Interpretation in Crisis:
The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (Grand Rapids,
Mich. 1989), pp. 74?101.
17 Der Laie and der Ordenstand (Einsiedeln
1948; Freiburg 1949).
18 Cited in, Henrici, 'Hans Urs von
Balthasar', in Schindler (ed.), Hans Urs von Balthasar,
p. 21.
19 Der anti-romische Affekt. Wie lasst
sieh das Papsttum in der Gesamtkirche integrieren? (Freiburg
1974); ET The Office of Peter and the Structure of the
Church (San Francisco 1989).
20 J. Ratzinger, 'Ein Mann der Kirche fur
die Welt', in K. Lehrmann and W. Kasper (eds), Hans Urs
von Balthasar. Gestalt and Werk (Cologne 1989), pp. 353?354.
Reproduced with permission
from New Blackfriars
Vol 79 No. 923 January 1998
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