Simply a masterpiece

Regardless of what you think of his interpretation of Barth or where you stand on the doctrine of the analogia entis, you have to admit that Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth is one of the greatest pieces of Catholic-Protestant ecumenical theology ever written. I realize that is kind of strong statement, but this book is just superb. I’m convinced that more of this type of careful and patient work needs to be done. Can anyone think of an ecumenical work that even compares to this masterpiece?

Balthasar on the Communist Manifesto

Sorry for all the quotes and lack of substantial posts as of late, but this stood out to me and so I thought I would share it.

The pathos that characterizes great anti-Christian movements can only be understood as a parody of Christianity itself. The pathos informing the Communist Manifesto would be impossible in the pre-Christian Greek, Indian or Chinese worlds: it comes from the words of Jesus: ‘I have compassion on the crowd . . . and I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way’ (Mt 15:32). Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the Manifesto serves to point out the Christians’ inability to implement their Master’s attitude and teaching on the stage of world history.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. III, The Dramatis Personae: The Person of Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press) 25-26.

Balthasar and the Death of God

Who is Jesus Christ for me? He is the only human being in the whole world of history who has dared to claim what God himself claimed in the Old Covenant and who was therefore seen as crazy and possessed (Mk. 3:21ff) and was thus crucified for raising this claim. For it is fitting for a sage to show humility and for a prophet to say “Thus says the Lord,” but not for someone to say: “But I say unto you.” God the Father has confirmed this claim by raising Jesus from the dead and this has launched the primitive Christian kernel of dogmatics, grounding all its statements: that God is love; that the immanent Trinity has been revealed in the economic Trinity; and indeed tha this revelation is God’s “orthopraxis” –the total surredering of his Son to the point of God-abandonment and descent into hell. This is the greatest possible conception of God: he is, with Hegel, identity of identity (God is everything, he is eternal life) and of non-idenity (God is dead insofar as he has identified himself with godlessness; he is so vital (so much love) that he can afford to be dead. No religion or world view has dared to think or proclaim anything like this about God, man and the world. That is why Christianity remains without analogy in the world; it rests not on an “idea” but on a fact–Jesus Christ. And this is a fact that remains as an unfissionable atom, fused into a unity of claim, Cross and Resurrection. On this fact depends whether we can dare to address Being as love and thus whether we can see everything that exists as worthy of love. This is a thought without the countenance of the world would be scarcely endurable to us.

Contribution to Wer ist Jesus von Nazareth für mich? 100 zeitgenössiche Zeugnisse, ed. by H. Spaemann (Munich, 1973) 17.

Rowan Williams on Balthasar and Postmodernity

In his wonderfully insightful essay, “Balthasar and Difference,” in Wrestling with Angels: Coversations in Modern Theology, edited by Mike Higton, Rowan Williams brings Hans Urs von Balthasar into dialogue with “postmodernist” thought. As Williams sees it “Difference preoccupies the postmodern consciousness” (77). In Williams’ view, postmodernity is in “systematic revolt against the dominance of identity and the erosion of the reality of what is not said in any act of saying” (77). In other words, the “postmodern consciousness” understands itself to be the rejection of all totalizing perspectives, emphasizing that all representations of the world are partial and particular. Postmodernists insist on us acknowledging the “locatedness” of our own perspective and therefore also the utter failure of all attempts at reducing reality through harmonization.

As Williams points out, in these discussions Hegel has been the target of postmodernism’s revolt against identity and totality. For Hegel is commonly understood as “canonizing the search for the end of language under the guise of what looks like a dialogical structure” (77). He goes on, “Hegel’s spiritual subject posits itself and then negates itself; the negation is conditioned by the first affirmation, it is always and necessarily and exclusively the other of the thesis” (77). That is to say, otherness in the Hegelian dialectic is always bound to and conditioned by “a prior sameness”–or identity. This “sameness” is unacceptable to the postmodern consciousness with its “rhetoric of unconditional difference” (78). Difference in this perspective is always and necessarily unspeakable–it is, in Williams’ words “the inevitable shadow of speech or thought” (78). It is not unspeakable because it is somehow “behind” the speech itself, but rather because speech itself is so utterly contingent (Derrida and Wittgenstein). In this perspective, then, there is “no relation between the same and the other, the said and the unsayable. The one is not even the ‘opposite of the other, as it cannot belong in one frame with it at any point” (78).

In Williams’ view it is precisely on this point, this refusal to see any relation between sameness and otherness, that we see “another kind of reduction to the same” (78). Ironically, “the absolutizing of the other…can work to reinforce a sameness more enclosed than Hegel’s” (78).

Williams argues that neither the postmodern model nor the Hegelian model “allows easily for a difference that is both simultaneous and interactive, a difference that allows temporal change, reciprocity of action, and thus avoids the two different but depressingly similar varieties of totalization…” (79). It is precisely here where Williams identifies the important contribution of Christian theology’s “reflections on otherness within the divine life and the peculiar otherness between the divine and the human in the identity of the Saviour” Indeed, such reflection can be rightly seen as attempts to “think through otherness so as to avoid totalization” (79).

Williams believes that von Balthasar’s concept of analogy is helpful here. Important for Williams is von Balthasar’s fundamental agreement with the Fourth Latern Council’s dictum that “whatever the likeness between God and creatures, it is outweighed by a greater unlikeness (maior dissimilitudo)” (80). The principle is classically linked to Nicholas of Cusa who argued that God is non aliud–not an other–not a thing alongside other things in the universe. According to Williams then, for von Balthasar following the Fourth Latern Council, “Analogy is thus emphatically not a correspondence between two or more things exhibiting in varying degrees the same features, as if God had a very great deal more of good and creatures steadily diminishing quantities of the same” (80). Far from subsuming God into creation, the concept of analogy works precisely in the opposite direction–it stresses the complete otherness of God. Analogy emphasizes that “there is no system of which God and creatures are both part.” So, where is the relation in the concept of the analogy of being? To quote Williams once again, “It is the active presence of the divine liberty, love and beauty precisely within the various and finite reality of material/temporal reality” (80). This “presence” is not some sort of mysterious transcendence hidden or latent within creation, but is in “creation being itself–which includes, paradigmatically, creation being itself in unfinishedness, time-taking, pain and death” (80). The ground and manifestation of what analogy means is nothing other than the crucified Jesus.

Williams sees two tensions at work in this conception of analogy. First, there is the non aliud principle, the insistence of the complete and utter difference between God and creation. There is no point of co-ordination between God and creation–”they cannot be moments in one story” (80). The difference is “inexhaustible” and “irreducible.” The dissimilarity expressed in the Fourth Latern Council is not even measurable precisely because of this ontological otherness between God and the world. On the other hand, the life of creation itself is not an “independent subject” alongside God’s life, rather creation is God’s life “itself freely ‘alienated’ from itself in a gift so absolute that it establishes the possibility of a free response, of an authentic love” (80). In and through something other than God, creation, God loves God. In this framework, “God is neither an identity into which otherness must be assumed, nor a nameless and abstract sacredness around the corners of speech” (80).

This is incredibly complex stuff and if you’re still following at this point, consider yourself tough.:) For Williams, analogy as described above only works within a distinctively Christian understanding of God in which God is not conceived as a subject or a plurality of subjects. In Williams’ words, “God is intrinsically that life which exists only and necessarily in the act of ‘bestowal’, in a self-alienation that makes possible the freedom and love of an other that is at the same time itself in otherness” (81). Again, this is manifested, especially for von Balthasar, in “the extremity of the relation between God and the God-forsaken Jesus”–and in this relation is “our way in to this claim for the life of God-as-such: the divine life is what sustains itself as unqualified unity across the greatest completeness of alienation that can be imagined” (81).

The great chasm between the Father and the crucified Son, Jesus, and the Father in heaven and the Son in hell, appears to us as “the immeasureable measure of the way divine love ‘leaves’ itself, travels infinitely from itself (from self-possession, self-presence)” (81).

As Williams rightly concludes, “Here there can be no identity prior to differentiation: the only identity in question is precisely the total and eternal self-bestowal that constitutes the other” (81).

Now Williams is not too sure that von Balthasar knew that his work on analogy carried all of these implications. However, I do think von Balthasar would be in large agreement with what Williams is trying to do in these pages and it seems to me that this is precisely the sort of engagement that needs to be pressed even further. As Williams’ account makes clear, contrary to popular opinion, von Balthasar’s work is a far stretch from some of the caricatures you’ll sometimes hear of his work (e.g. the stodgy conservative, sexist or what have you). He is not so easily dismissed.

The von Balthasar Thesis

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s seminal study The Theology of Karl Barth contains some rather harsh criticisms of the “early” Barth (The Epistle to the Romans, 1st and 2nd Editions) and some high praises for the “later” Barth (Church Dogmatics). Barth’s “conversion to analogy” becomes highly significant to von Balthasar’s overall account. In fact, it seems to me that any rapproachment between the two thinkers hinges on this thesis. He writes:

Just as Augustine underwent two conversions…so too in Barth we may find two decisive turning points. The first, his turn from liberalism to radical Christianity, occurred during the First World War and found expression in The Epistle to the Romans. The second was his final emancipation from the shackles of philosophy, enabling him finally to arrive at a genuine self-authenticating theology. This second conversion was a gradual process, indeed a struggle, that lasted nearly ten years, ending at about 1930 (93).

Von Balthasar quotes Barth’s own words about the significance of his 1931 Anselm book for his theology. He clearly states that the conversion process was a gradual one, and indeed, he never stops calling out traces of any residual dialectics in his theology. However, this thesis of Barth’s “conversion to analogy,” known now as the “von Balthasar thesis,” has recently come under fire, especially since the release of Bruce McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. In this work McCormack argues that “the great weakness of the von Balthasarian formula is that it conceals from view the extent to which Karl Barth remained–even in the Church Dogmatics!–a dialectical theologian” (18). Indeed, McCormack identifies many key developments in Barth’s thought, but the “von Balthasar thesis,” in his mind, is mistaken on a number of fronts, not least in von Balthasar’s insistence that a decisive shift to analogy took place in Barth’s book on Anselm.

Now it is important to note that Barth’s conversion to analogy is never radical enough for von Balthasar’s tastes, as it remains too constricted and never fully allows for an adequate human response to God’s offer of grace in Jesus. However, it remains hugely important to him. If McCormack’s thesis is correct I must say that I am afraid that it could deliver a serious blow to any efforts of rapproachment between the two thinkers.

On Secondary Literature

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time with two towering figures in modern theology, the Reformed theologian Karl Barth and Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Reading these guys is no easy task. The good news is that there is a whole host of secondary literature to guide you through it. Although reading secondary literature can never replace doing the hard work of reading the authors themselves, it is surely a wonderful gift to have learned teachers to help you through the process.

Of course, the bad news about reading secondary literature is discovering all the disagreements! Barthians know this all too well–hence we have anti-modern, modern, and even “post”-modern Barths among many other Barths. For Balthasarian studies the situation is not much better. This is the just the plain reality of study in general I suppose. Biblical scholars know this all too well–what does that damn book say, after all? And this is what academic theology is all about–reading through the primary texts and sorting out all the divergent interpretations of these texts and maybe, just maybe, paving the way for one more better interpretation. Ah, research…is it sleepy time yet?

Balthasar on the First Vatican Council and Natural Theology

In his famous work The Theology of Karl Barth Hans Urs von Balthasar defends Catholicism against Karl Barth’s accusations that “natural theology” is firmly embedded in the Catholic tradition. In order to do this von Balthasar has to acknowledge the decrees of the First Vatican Council that seem to explicitly and rather crudely assert precisely the sort of natural theology that Barth criticizes; namely that knowledge of God is attainable by natural reason independent of God’s revelation in Christ. The council decreed:

Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the origin and end of all things, can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from the things that he has made. . . Furthermore, the perpetual universal belief of the Catholic Church has held and now holds that there are two orders of knowledge distinct not only in origin but also in object. They are distinct in origin because in one, we know by means of natural reason; in the other, by faith. And they are distinct in object, because beyond what natural reason can attain we have proposed to us as objects to be believed mysteries that are hidden in God and that, unless divinely revealed, can never be known. (Denzinger 1785 and 1795).

In order to defend Catholicism against Barth’s allegation that this decree supports natural theology, von Balthasar develops a complex argument that analyzes the development of Catholic theology from Aquinas to the First Vatican Council and beyond. Now, I don’t want to lay out his whole argument, but I would like to highlight one element of his argument that specifically addresses this oft-cited decree of Vatican I.

Von Balthasar quotes Michael Schmaus’ Katholische Dogmatik to support his argument:

The Vatican Council asserts the possibility but not the factual actuality of a natural knowledge of God. Human reason possesses, without the additional infusion of grace by God to take it beyond its own powers, the ability of finding ways that lead to God. Human nature is thus capable . . . within salvation history – and thus even after the Fall – of finding valid reasons for the existence of God from contemplating creation in itself . . . (Theology of Karl Barth, 307).

For von Balthasar, Schmaus points out an important distinction in the decree between the possibility and actuality of natural knowledge of God. In this perspective, one can maintain, with the Council, that natural knowledge of God is possible outside of God’s self-revelation in Christ, but that it has never been actualized. Of course, von Balthasar’s argument does not stand or fall on whether or not this is a valid interpretation of Vatican I; his analysis of Aquinas and developing Catholic theology is much more complex than what I have only briefly noted here. But, I thought this was an interesting point to raise; I had never even considered that the wording of this decree only affirms the possibility of natural theology.

“Holistic” Theology and Receptivity

In a recent post Halden critiques what he calls the “holistic” tendency in some theological projects. If I read him correctly, his fundamental point is that all efforts toward theological closure are problematic. His post names two theologians who seem to fall prey to such efforts, Hans Urs von Balthasar and David Bentley Hart. Now, I think it wouldn’t be too difficult to list off many more theologians, both ancient and modern, who have written massive systematic tomes, which attempt at precisely the sort of theological closure to which Halden refers. In fact, I could say that much of the Christian theological tradition has attempted to do theology in this way. At the same time, there have always been voices against trends toward totalizing discourse. Obviously negative theology has been at the forefront of such efforts.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not mean to suggest that all systems of theology are wrongheaded, nor do I think Halden would go this far. Indeed, if theology is to be a rational discourse I think we need to think systematically. In fact, this is almost unavoidable, for all the various branches and themes that theology treats are ultimately interconnected. And so, most of us tend toward getting our theological ducks in a row, so to speak. For instance, we know that how we articulate the relationship between nature and grace has profound consequences for how we chart the relationship between the church and the world. Further, we know that all of this rides on Christology. Consequently, we find ourselves building a theological project as one builds a house. Just as in building the perfect house, not only do we want all the parts to stand together, we want it to be aesthetically beautiful. I don’t think I see anything inherently wrong about wanting both conceptual clarity and beauty in theological discourse. Indeed, this can be a form of doxological praise to God. I’m sure that both Balthasar and Hart would want there worked to be seen in such a way.

Yet, one of my concerns is that this approach to theology is perhaps too neat and even too easy. Despite its breadth and beauty such projects tend to close themselves off from the challenge of greater truth. Ironically, Balthasar’s notion of the subject’s receptivity as the unqualified perfection of being is quite instructive here. For Balthasar receptivity is the correlative to what we might call self-awareness. Receptivity is to be open to another’s being, to the truth that is the other. In Balthasar’s words, “receptivity signifies the power to welcome and, so to say, host another’s being in one’s own home” (Theo-Logic I, 45). For Balthasar, search for truth is opposed to closure. He says it so beautifully, “it would not be a sign of perfection if a subject were already so well-equipped, so stuffed with truths, that it no longer needed another to share anything with it. . .” (45). It is precisely in our capacity for openness to the other’s truth and to the truth of God that we find freedom and full richness of being. Thus, for Balthasar theological discourse as the search for truth is all about a stance of receptivity –and even poverty, for one must become poor to do be capable of receiving again.

Let me add another quote from Balthasar:

The subject that already contained the whole reservoir of its truth in itself would be struck with the curse of Midas: wherever it turned, it could find only itself and its own truth. Just as Midas could not eat anything without turning it to gold, the subject could not receive any truth that it did not already recognize as its own.

And so, here we have the towering figure Hans Urs von Balthasar who wrote on almost everything and covered all the bases speaking out against closure. Indeed, this point is in fact central to his entire theology. We must pose the question: is this consistent with his apparent attempt to create a massive theological system?

Swimming, Loving, and Knowing the Truth

Just as the swimmer, even when he has acquired increasing mastery of his art, must always swim in order to avoid drowning, the lover must live every day anew at the very origin of love and therein continue to probe and question it. In the same way, the knower must daily ask anew what truth is, although, to repeat, this question is not the same as fruitless and destructive doubt. As in swimming and loving, there is real progress in knowing the truth, but this progress never gets beyond, or puts behind itself, the vital beginning.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Truth of the World, Vol. I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 25.

Love Alone is Credible: Series Index

The following is an link index to my recent series on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Love Alone is Credible:

§ 1 Apologia and the credibility of love
§ 2 Theological aesthetic and perceiving truth
§ 3 The incarnation as the form of love
§ 4 Grace and perception
§ 5 Overcoming reductions and divisions