Introduction to Hans Urs
von Balthasar
Stratford Caldecott
(Plater College, Oxford)
It is increasingly clear that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von
Balthasar (d. 1988) is among the most lastingly significant theologians
of the twentieth century, and certainly in the pontificate of
Pope John Paul II (he has been called "the Pope's favourite
theologian").
Though not invited to be present at the Second
Vatican Council, Balthasar was later awarded the prestigious
Paul VI Prize for theology, and at the time of his death in 1988
was about to be made a Cardinal by John Paul II.
Through the influence of his ideas not only
on the Pope but also on Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, with whom
he founded the journal Communio, and on the Catechism of the
Catholic Church which later consolidated the teaching of the
Council and the postconciliar popes, Balthasar - building on
the almost equally monumental work of his teacher, Cardinal Henri
de Lubac SJ (d. 1991) - has without doubt helped to shape the
form of Catholicism and the direction of its development well
into the new century.
It is the purpose of this brief article to
introduce some of the themes of Balthasar's work, and perhaps
to help some of those who find his writings voluminous and obscure
to understand better why Balthasar is nevertheless so important
for modern theology and for the Church.
The Healing of Theology
In the mid 1930s, as a Jesuit novice, the
young Hans Urs was studying Scholastic theology at Fourvière,
just north of Lyons. He found St Thomas Aquinas interesting enough,
but what his professors seemed to have done to St Thomas was
so boring that he eventually resorted to stuffing his ears during
lectures in order to read something much more thrilling: the
writings of St Augustine and the early Church Fathers. What had
gone wrong with theology to make it so boring? Unlike many another
who has found it a tedious waste of time, before and since, this
particular Jesuit novice set out to discover why. In the course
of answering that one simple question, he had practically to
reinvent the whole subject.
Theology, Balthasar believed, is supposed
to be the study of the fire and light that burn at the centre
of the world. Theologians had reduced it to the turning of pages
in a dessicated catalogue of ideas - a kind of butterfly collection
for the mind. The philosopher Maurice Blondel had warned as far
back as 1870 (in his groundbreaking thesis L'Action) of the danger
in treating God in this way: "As soon as we regard him from
without as a mere object of knowledge, or a mere occasion for
speculative study, without freshness of heart and the unrest
of love, then all is over, and we have in our hands nothing but
a phantom and an idol."
For Blondel and Balthasar the living God,
if he is anything, must be supremely concrete; not something
abstract, and certainly not a ghostly, forbidding presence with
a long white beard. The true God is to be found wherever the
"parallel lines" of this world meet, at the converging-point
of the common or "transcendental" properties of being
that we call Truth, Goodness and Beauty.
It is only in Beauty that Truth is good, and
that Goodness is true. By losing the sense of Beauty, by closing
the spiritual senses that grasp the colours and the contours,
the taste and the fragrance of Truth in its radiant body, the
theologians had betrayed even the very Master they claimed to
serve.
Of course, the word "beauty" in
some circles today evokes nothing but a sneer. But there is nothing
self-indulgent, luxurious or sentimental about what Balthasar
had in mind. The problem is our distorted concept of beauty.
Balthasar was not advocating an "aesthetic theology"
but a theological aesthetics opening on to a theological dramatics.
In the first volume of his series The Glory of the Lord [T&T
Clark and Ignatius Press] he made it clear that beauty is not
a matter of appearances alone.
"We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it
a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it.
Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least
as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she
will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two
sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious
vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as
if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past - whether he admits
it or not - can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able
to love" (p. 18).
Outside the shrinking islands of religious
belief maintained by tradition, a culture of self-indulgence
and violence has gained an unprecedented hold. Modern man has
lost his grip on morality partly because the deepest reasons
for being good have been systematically denied him.
What Balthasar saw more clearly than anyone
else was that the unity of Truth and Goodness in Beauty is evident
above all in the very thing that ought to be the subject of theology,
but which has been almost completely forgotten by the theologians:
the Glory of God, which is incarnate in Jesus Christ.
His major achievement was fifteen massive
volumes (in the English translation), in which he gathered together
the scattered achievements of the European theological, philosophical
and literary tradition around this fundamental insight. By the
end of this series theological truth had become once again living,
dynamic and glorious.
In his little "introductory" book Love Alone [Sheed
& Ward], Balthasar showed how his major works were a way
of placing at the centre of theology the simple fact that "God
is love" (1 John 4:8). Love, correctly understood in its
full cosmic and personal meaning, is itself the Glory of God;
it is the essence of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
The whole history of civilization can therefore
be read as a history of what we have done and failed to do in
relation to the call of divine love within our being and the
being of the world. Throughout his writings, Balthasar very clearly
describes exactly what is wrong with the world, the culture,
that we have grown up with. But at the same time he states the
possibility of an alternative.
This alternative culture is based on the awakening
of what he calls in the very first volume of the great series
(with St Paul and, later, Clement of Alexandria) a "gnosis"
or knowledge belonging to faith; the opening of an interior vision
that "reads" the world in the light of love. (It was
part of the intention of the international review Communio, of
which Balthasar was the leading founder, to encourage this re-reading
of the culture and the cosmos within the Church.)
Later in the series, in the five-volume Theo-Drama,
he employs the eyes of faith to reveal the underlying dynamic
of cosmic salvation history, culminating in the inevitable "Battle
of the Logos" which drives evil into the open and onto the
world stage. It is this vision of the spiritual issues underlying
the modern crisis of Christianity and culture that enables him
to go beyond the shallow optimism of some of the Vatican II documents
to a more profound critique of post-Enlightenment modernity.
The Implications of Love
It has been alleged that Balthasar had no
interest in the question of social or political justice. I would
argue that Balthasar is in fact more socially radical than Karl
Rahner, and no less so than a "liberation theologian"
such as Gustavo Gutierrez.
This is brought out most powerfully in an
important book called Heart of the World, Center of the Church
[T&T Clark and Eerdmans] by Balthasar's foremost American
interpreter, the editor of the review Communio, David L. Schindler.
But Balthasar's "social theology"
can easily be missed if you are looking for something conventionally
left-wing. Just as he in a sense reinvented theology, so he reinvented
social theology by refusing to separate social issues and ethics
from spirituality. His social theology is of a piece with his
mystical theology, and it has at least one very practical expression,
namely the Community of St John that he co-founded with Adrienne
von Speyr.
Balthasar and Speyr believed that the time
of the great religious orders and their style of withdrawal from
the world was giving way to a time of new communities within
the Church that engage more directly with the world in order
to transform it.
These new types of world community, half way
between the religious state and the lay state, became known in
Canon Law as "secular institutes". It was a good thing,
Balthasar believed, that the Church no longer wielded the temporal
power that had once been claimed by the Popes, and that she had
renounced forever the use of force and fear to achieve her ends.
Christendom was at times a noble experiment,
but it had failed to give clear expression to many of the priorities
of the Gospel. The disaster of the Crusades had shown how easily
even the greatest of Christians (such as St Bernard of Clairvaux)
could be deceived into confusing earthly with spiritual warfare.
What was needed now was a new non-violent
chivalry, a new kind of consecration in the midst of secular
life. That is what his Community of St John was intended to be,
and the same thing is of course happening in many other places
and forms, as the Holy Spirit moves the Church towards new ways
of being Christian and raises up fresh saints and communities
as exemplars and agents of change.
Such communities grow out of the Church's communio or "communion"
in the one Holy Spirit. Trinitarian love, Balthasar believed,
is the only foundation not just for an authentic Christian community,
but for the very existence of the cosmos. The world we see around
us is the loving gift of the Creator to ourselves, and of the
Father to the Son and the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.
This love is both the source of a true liberation
for the human person, and of the respect we need to have for
the world of nature in us and around us - a respect which is
a necessary condition of being able to study the creation in
such a way that it will genuinely become intelligible to us.
St Thomas, adapting Aristotle, had defined
God's nature as pure act. This seemingly technical abstraction
is totally transformed once we realize that the "act"
in question is an act of love. It is therefore an act of seeing,
of beholding, of giving (revealing) and receiving (adoring).
It is a Trinitarian act; an act involving
three Persons in the relationship of Giver, Recipient and Gift.
Love is at the heart of being, and its dynamism is at the heart
of knowing: it is the "code" that enables us to read
the meaning of things.
One more particular application of this insight
might be mentioned: an application of relevance to contemporary
feminism. There is always a close integration in Balthasar's
thinking between seemingly abstract theological conclusions,
cultural critique (thus social science) and spirituality.
The tradition that God, being "pure act",
could contain no trace of passivity had become associated with
the tendency in Christian thought to assign a lower place to
woman and to the so-called "feminine" virtues.
In modern society, which increasingly values
the hard, driving mechanisms of technological progress and economic
competition, theology inevitably becomes entangled with the same
attitude. According to Balthasar, on the other hand, to receive
something from another is not at all a weakness or imperfection,
but intrinsic to the nature of what it is to love.
If gentleness and openness to others, or "Receptivity",
is a feminine virtue, it is also an essential dimension of God.
This means that theology is free to revalue the feminine - and
the spirit of childhood. Love Alone contains the following famous
passage:
"But whenever the relationship between nature and grace
is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed
as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the
dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent
in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science,
technology and cybernetics.
The result is a world without women, without
children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation
- a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria,
where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised,
persecuted and in the end exterminated - a world in which art
itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique"
(pp. 114-15).
This article is based
on 'The Social Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar', which is to
appear in Volume V of THE CATHOLIC SOCIAL SCIENCE REVIEW, extracts
from which are reproduced with permission. Contact Dr Ryan J.
Barilleaux, Dept of Political Science, Miami University, Oxford,
Ohio 45056.
Link to the website of the
Society of Catholic Social Scientists http://gabriel.franuniv.edu/scss/index2.htm
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