Karen Kilby on von B. on beauty

Here is a ten minute presentation by Dr. Karen Kilby (Nottingham) on von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics:

Click here for a list of all seven volumes of The Glory of the Lord and the rest of the trilogy (beauty, ethics, reason).

von Balthasar resource

Here is a helpful collection of pretty much everything on the web ever written on/by Hans Urs von Balthasar:

http://hansursvonbalthasar.blogspot.com/

[HT: Phil]

The Ontology of Grace

Many theologians are inclined to view the primary function of grace as one of contradiction or disruption of present creaturely existence. The “new creation” (Paul) is an eschatological reality. It does have current manifestations but mainly by way of revealing (a noetic category) our present abidance in sin, little by way of transforming (an ontic category) our lives into a genuine holiness. John Webster is hard to pin down on this issue, but in the following passage he expresses this (typically Protestant) view:

…the Church’s holiness is visible as it confesses its sin in penitence and faith. The Church is consecrated by the Father’s resolve, holy in Christ and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. Such holiness is not achieved perfection, but an alien holiness which is the contradiction of its very real sinfulness. The Church is holy, not because it has already attained the eschatological state of being ‘without spot or wrinkle’, but because the promise and command of the gospel have already broken into its life and disturbed it, shaking it to the core. The Church is holy only as it is exposed to judgment.

This means that, far from being a matter of confident purity, holiness is visible as humble acknowledgment of sin and as prayer for forgiveness. ‘There is no greater sinner than the Christian Church,” said Luther in his Easter Day sermon in 1531. It is in repentance, rather than in the assumption of moral pre-eminence, that holiness is visible. …Realized moral excellence does not necessarily constitute holiness and may contradict it.

Holiness, pp. 73-74

Penitence is, thus, the primary function of grace, and as a penitent people, the Church witnesses to the one alone who is holy, Jesus Christ. Not I, but Christ. “Witness,” like “reveal,” is a noetic category, at least insofar as it is signifying not one’s own reality, but another reality. Other theologians, however, are more inclined to view the primary function of grace as both condemnation and constitution. Holiness can really be predicated of the Church. Of course, the Protestant fear of this typically Catholic approach is that the Church, the objects of grace, become the focus (“look how holy we are!”, “we are justified in our acts!”), instead of the giver of grace, God, from whom all holiness exists. Hans Urs von Balthasar understands the issue well (far better than I do!), as seen in such careful distinctions as “grace is a de facto property of nature, not a de jure property.” We do not merit the grace given, much less are we entitled to it, but in the grace given we in fact do partake in the life of God — His existence as love. Here is a passage where von Balthasar expresses this understanding, against the Protestant eschatologists:

According to Catholic doctrine, grace is that self-disclosure and self-communication of God in which God no longer possesses his own divine inner life for himself but now bestows it upon the world and thereby gives the creature a share in it. Now because God is both absolute spirit and absolute Being, this sharing in God’s life must also be both something conscious and ontically real: or what amounts to the same thing, it can only be understood as simultaneously involving both an event aspect as well as an ontological aspect.

If it were merely something conscious and cognitive — that is, if God were known in his self-revelation only as a truth about himself that the creature would have to accept and to believe — then even though we might think we had been enriched by this knowledge, the gain would prove to be entirely illusory. For really all we would have gained is a view of a world to which we were otherwise forbidden entry. But this kind of merely cognitive revelation of a divine world is inherently contradictory and impossible, because God’s truth is one with his Being (this is expressed in the statement that God is love). In other words, God cannot communicate his truth without at the same time giving us access to his Being.

…God’s revelation can only be an event if something actually takes place. …In fact, if nothing actual occurs between God and man that can be expressed ontologically, then in fact what happens is…nothing at all.

The Theology of Karl Barth, pp. 364-5

Of course, the problem remains, as von B notes elsewhere, that the Christian is indeed, in some sense, both sinner and saint. In our pre-resurrection existence, sin is real — but holiness is also real. The former does not require an absolute Nein over against a holy life, my life, in Christ. Both penitence and charity can and do constitute the visible holiness of the Church, as indeed even John Webster notes the Church’s “constitutive character of its holiness” (p. 76) in its prayer for God’s enactment of his holiness in the Church.

Theology’s Use of Philosophy

From The Theology of Karl Barth by Hans Urs von Balthasar, pp. 218-219:

Critics of Thomas Aquinas have often accused him of being at heart an Aristotelian philosopher who would recast revelation in this mold, thereby constricting it. Nor have critics been slow to accuse Barth of the same thing: taking a fully formed picture of the world — this time, that of German Idealism — and making it the standard for shaping and containing the biblical message.

But this comparison with Thomas Aquinas should give us pause, especially at this most critical juncture of our investigation. Barth himself after all accused Thomas of philosophism, clearly, then, something he wanted to avoid. For at least one fact about Barth is indisputable: Barth has always wanted to be a theologian and nothing else. He has always been aware, increasingly so, of this objection raised against him. He has taken it into account, confronted it: in this respect he is anything but naive.

He knows, and he has repeated it often, that every theologian has no choice but to work with human concepts and thought forms. And if he uses those concepts in which he first learned to think theologically, then he does so in clear awareness of the consequences and because he can find no better. He has made use of them, not as a philosophy per se, but as a helpmate for theological work, transposing them and submitting them to a necessary critique, sterilizing the instruments before using them in his theological operations.

He has made use of them the way Thomas did the Aristotelian categories, which to philosophy would seem illegitimate or at lest “supererogatory.” Fundamentally, we cannot object to such a transposition of categories. Revelation has never revealed that it has been predestined to be expressed in one, single human thought form (this is not to say anything against the content of a “perennial philosophy”). The Old Testament itself thinks and expresses itself in Babylonian and Iranian thought forms. Paul and John use Hellenistic, Platonic and perhaps even Philonic schemata and concepts. Was Platonism not a form of Idealism and is Schleiermacher not a Platonist? And has not Joseph Maréchal proven that certain basic intuitions of modern speculative philosophy are in complete agreement with those of Scholasticism, that the ontological and the transcendental modes do not finally contradict but complement each other?

When Dialectics is Disobedience

I’m currently reading von Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth. Highly interesting, to say the least. I’ve read the last part of the book before — his constructive, Catholic response — but not the actual study of Barth. The bulk of the critique so far is similar to that found in Louis Bouyer’s The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism and is bringing to the fore of my mind a lot of what Bouyer was criticizing in Protestant thought but I didn’t quite comprehend the significance of before. Bouyer was using a realist-vs-nominalist critique that was not quite as compelling (to me) as von B’s realist-vs-existentialist (or analogy-vs-dialectic) critique. Barth’s Der Römerbrief, according to von B, starts and ends with an existential negation which serves as the paradigm for critiquing the human (incl. scripture, church, theology, spirituality, philosophy, etc.) instead of beginning with the Incarnation and making Christ the paradigm for critiquing the human (with the possibility of divine affirmation of human projects). Once the latter shift is made in Barth’s thinking, we have room for a minimal but real correspondence between finite and divine categories. Here is the core of von B’s criticism of Barth before his Christological concentration:

The experiment of the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans was to try to push dialectics to absurd limits, until dialectics rendered itself void for dialectical reasons. But this only resulted in the great irony that dialectics — which took itself to be the proven method — was not only not better than dogmatics and criticism but decidedly inferior to them. In its radical infallibility (as radical fallibility!), it actually betrayed its own self-imposed mission: to speak only of God and not to call attention to itself. It’s loud avowal, “I cannot,” is actually disobedience. As if it were making its relativity an absolute, as if it really were not relative!

The Epistle to the Romans is the very thing against which it itself raged and thundered: a pinnacle of human religiosity. Its insistent cry of “Not I! Rather God!” actually directs all eyes on itself instead of on God. Its cry for distance gives no room for distance. Perhaps, shuddering at the dreadful pain of its flagellations, we could admit that it is right — a hundred times right! But the very blow tells us of its guilt. The real scandal is the mystery of God, which cannot be evaluated in language, even indirectly. There is no suitable method for describing the “infinite qualitative difference between God and man,” even if only negatively. Dialectics cannot replace theology. It must be content to serve merely as a corrective. As the moment of indirection, it can itself be only indirect.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth (Ignatius Press 1992), p. 84.

The “disobedience” line is particularly striking. It’s the same attack von B uses against Luther and Kierkegaard in The Christian and Anxiety, and, in a way, is a sum of the Catholic critique of the Protestant use of simul iustus et peccator.

von Balthasar on anxiety

Only he who has left the anxiety of sin behind attains the fullness of faith and thus true indifference, and the entry into the realm of complete truth is unconditional joy, consolation, overwhelming light. When God bestows Christian suffering, including Christian anxiety, it is, viewed from his perspective, fundamentally an intensification of light and of joy, a “darkness bright as day,” because it is suffering out of joy, anxiety out of exultation: it is a sign of God’s ever-greater confidence in the one who believes. And what experientially seems constricting and frightening to the believer is in truth enlarging, a fruitful dilatatio of the birth canal, an interior trembling that expands faith, hope, and love. Even if subjectively it were mortal terror, objectively it is greater blessedness, a participation in the everlasting trinitarian ecstasy.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Christian and Anxiety, pp. 147-148.

The Absolute in the Finite, pt. 2

In Part 1, I concluded: But, if we follow von B, the experience of love here and now, as between mother and child, can be apprehended as “the highest good” and “absolutely sufficient,” wherein all of existence is “lit up from this lightning flash of the origin with a ray so brilliant and whole that it also includes a disclosure of God.” Still, this existence also reveals a feeble contingency wherein death, non-existence, seems to be the only true and trustworthy absolute, the consummation of our being. So, how can we know from existence as it is given to us, apart from the explicit promise of the Word made flesh, that Being as life, as love, as creative, is the final word? Must not we say with Heidegger that Being and death (not love) are coextensive, such that Being is “Being-toward-death”?

This deficiency experienced in our natural contingencies is put in dialogue with our spiritual contingency. This spiritual Being is brought to us in our experience of Being as given, as given in love: “…the fact that one must exist in keeping with the laws of the world is a subtraction from the beatitude of the original permission to exist; all the necessities of human life and of the subhuman nature are deficiencies vis-à-vis the original experience that Being means fullness, joy and freedom and that in this sense, as the genuine reversal of necessity, it demands and receives man’s unlimited assent” (Explorations in Theology, III, p. 33). This is one of the many ways in which von Balthasar wonderfully expresses the tension I believe fundamental to all of our divinity, philosophy, art, and relationships. I think we could further describe it as a sort of hesitant revolt from the depths of our existence toward existence as we know it. Existence qua existence is good, perceived as an unfathomable gift and inscrutable as object of our “unlimited assent.” Existence, however, as we live it, suffer it, and die to it, receives our firmest disapprobation. Thus, Being is a mystery which we are hesitant to accept, in the full range of that term. Many persons are paralyzed by this recognition (of Being’s own internal threat) and will subsequently spend their lives in a mediocrity of hesitation. Others will attempt to transcend the tension, especially in a Stoicism popular to every generation. Others will affirm the deficiencies and relativize Being accordingly (as less than Good/Love), in a Cynicism popular to every generation. But these answers do not satisfy, as the experience of Being as Love, as Gift, as Grace haunts us. So, where should the “natural” man stand, since the Christ who gives the definitive answer to the question is yet unknown? Or, actually, is Christ known, as promise if not (yet) as fulfillment? Von Balthasar seems to come to the latter conclusion, with important qualifications:

Thus, behind what is apparently the alien element in nature — the element on which he himself is built and which governs him as far as his highest capacities — stands ultimately an eternal Spirit that is related to this own spirit; as spirit, he can only have an unmediated relationship to this Spirit, from which the process and the mediation of the world’s nature do not distance him in any serious way. He would not be able to see God as a natural being in the infinite cosmos unless he had already found him beforehand as a spiritual being: as his own origin in the love whose remembrance can never be wholly buried and which remains the secret or open horizon against which he must measure everything that is in the world. In this process, two things will happen: he will be able to arrange what is in the world into a certain ascending scale of approximation to the absolute measurement…, but he will also know at the same time that nothing in the world can, as such, bring him to the point of absolute love; rather, absolute love can only turn to him on its own initiative, in freedom. But although it is true that this cannot be compelled on the part of the world nature (“grace” cannot be postulated by “nature”), it is equally true that subspiritual nature can have its foundation only in the absolute Spirit (and thus in love), and this means that there is a promise inscribed on nature itself that this free fulfillment of all the world’s searching and all searching (“eros”) of existence for the definitive encounter with love — in short, salvation — will one day become a real event. (Ibid., p. 21)

Our distinctions will have to follow those above, to wit, grace (and salvation) cannot be “compelled” or “postulated” from nature, but it is “inscribed” therein. What does this mean, and is it sufficient? Is it a distinction without difference and thus deserving a firm Nein?

The Absolute in the Finite

The purpose of this post, and some subsequent posts, is to explore Hans Urs von Balthasar’s understanding of Being (=Love) disclosed through created reality. In short, nature intimates a covenant. Von Balthasar’s favorite illustration of this disclosure is the child’s apprehension of his own existence through the loving address of his mother:

The little child awakens to self-consciousness through being addressed by the love of his mother. This descent of the intellect to conscious self-possession is an act of simple fullness that can only in abstracto be analyzed into various aspects and phases. It is not in the least possible to make it comprehensible on the basis of the formal “structure” of the intellect: sensuous “impressions” that bring into play a categorical ordering constitution that in its turn would be a function of a dynamic capacity to affirm “Being in absolute terms” and to objectify the determinate and finite existing object that is present here. The interpretation of the mother’s smiling and of her whole gift of self is the answer, awakened by her, of love to love, when the “I” is addressed by the “Thou”; and precisely because it is understood in the very origin that the “Thou” of the mother is not the “I” of the child, but both centers move in the same ellipse of love, and because it is understood likewise in the very origin that this love is the highest good and is absolutely sufficient and that, a priori, nothing higher can be awaited beyond this, so that the fullness of reality is in principle enclosed in this “I”-”Thou” (as in paradise) and that everything that may be experienced later as disappointment, deficiency and yearning longing is only descended from this: for this reason, everything — “I” and “Thou” and the world — is lit up from this lightning flash of the origin with a ray so brilliant and whole that it also includes a disclosure of God. (Explorations in Theology, III: Creator Spirit, Ignatius Press, p. 15)

[After some poetic profundity, von B continues later:] A subsequent process is necessary — and it is the parents’ task to begin this — in order to differentiate the initially indivisible love of the child into love for fellow human beings and love for the absolute, in order to introduce the direction for the child’s love to God. This happens most painlessly when the parents declare that they are themselves “children of God” and behave accordingly, turning to God together with their children, for then the unconditional love that flows between parents and children does not need to be tied down and “demythologized” to the limited worldly measure; rather, this can be the love that is the foundation and bears the love of parents and children and is now related explicitly to the absolute “Thou.” …This highest realization is, however, an extreme achievement that is made wholly possible only within Christianity. But even here, at the outset, it remains important that we see that Christianity will be the only fully satisfactory unfolding of what has been implied in the first experience of Being on the part of the awakening human spirit: Being and love are coextensive. (p. 17)

So, we move from Being to God to Christ in an unveiling of love. The possibility of identifying the love apprehended in our (natural) relations with the love apprehended in God’s reconciliation in Christ is challenged by the deficiencies experienced in our relations, in our created existence. Many theologians of a more existential mold (and often Protestant) will allow this deficiency to be the norm which cuts against all such identity (and so we have the classic debate between the “theologies of glory” and the “theologies of the cross,” between an analogia entis and, at best, an analogia fidei). But, if we follow von B, the experience of love here and now, as between mother and child, can be apprehended as “the highest good” and “absolutely sufficient,” wherein all of existence is “lit up from this lightning flash of the origin with a ray so brilliant and whole that it also includes a disclosure of God.” Still, this existence also reveals a feeble contingency wherein death, non-existence, seems to be the only true and trustworthy absolute, the consummation of our being. So, how can we know from existence as it is given to us, apart from the explicit promise of the Word made flesh, that Being as life, as love, as creative, is the final word? Must not we say with Heidegger that Being and death (not love) are coextensive, such that Being is “Being-toward-death”?

To be continued.

‘A Beautiful Mind’ and Creative-Redemptive Knowing

There’s a deep philosophical (and theological) principle in this line from Alicia Nash in the film, A Beautiful Mind: 

“Often what I feel is obligation, or guilt over wanting to leave, or rage against John, against God. — But then I look at him and I force myself to see the man I married. And he becomes that man. He’s transformed into someone I love. And then I’m transformed into someone who loves him.”

And now, Hans Urs von Balthasar, from Theo-Logic I: Truth of the World:

“The lover simply lets the real, imperfect image of the beloved sink into nonbeing. In the lover’s eyes, this image has no validity, no weight, no right to exist. It is, so to say, crossed out, banished from the cosmos of existing things. It is not honored with knowledge. It is not accorded the same measure of significance as if it were meant to unveil itself, as if it possessed, in other words, a truth of its own that was pronounced enough to take seriously. …God’s knowledge of things is absolutely archetypal and exemplary. He has in himself the ideas of things. This image is the correct one, not because God sees things more objectively than we do, but because the image he projects is as such the one true image that is both subjective and objective at once. Because God sees things thus, they should be as he sees them. It is to this idea of things held in God’s safekeeping that all of man’s creative knowledge has to look. Only in God can one man see another as he is supposed to be.” (Ignatius Press, pp. 117, 119-120)

And, hence, the importance of an Atonement that is universal.

Theology and Personal Holiness: Simone Weil and Hans Urs von Balthasar

 

           “It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying and we do not want to die. We know that sin preserves us very effectively from seeing him face to face: pleasure and pain merely provide us with the slight indispensable impetus towards sin, and above all the pretext or alibi which is still more indispensable. …It is not the flesh which keeps us away from God; the flesh is the veil we place before us to shield us from him.”

             Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

 

            This quote from Simone Weil came to mind upon reading von Balthasar’s “Theology and Sanctity” (from Word and Redemption) as perhaps a way to consider his account of the cleavage between theology, namely dogmatics as the explication of revealed truth, and sanctity – a mark of Christian thought in the wake of the advances made by the medieval scholastics. In short, the mystics and spiritual writers do one thing – detail the work of God at individual, mental states of their personal journey – while the theologians do another thing – discern the truth and coherence of God’s work in scripture and the Church. Contrasted to this are those, from the prophets to the scholastics, for whom truth is the “unity of knowledge and action” (p. 59), which is to say that truth is not concerned with man as isolated, cerebral, analytic but as governed by reason, yes, but also by the will and the heart. The latter, especially as it deals with the “affections” of love, happiness, sorrow, et cetera (von Hildebrand, The Heart), is particularly associated with spiritual writers, yet von Balthasar sees, in the premodern era, this intimate work of God as serving the deliverance and explication of revelation. It is not that the reason is blinded and prejudiced by these other movements of our mental faculties, but that it is illuminated thereby and, indeed, preserved from the vanities and prejudices of the isolated reason.

            What is this vanity? If Simone Weil is to be our teacher, it is the desire to be independent, self-constituting creatures – in other words, to be God; and the more consistent among such persons will deny God in order that one’s illusions of self-sufficiency can take course (and it matters not that this self-sufficiency is so often translated into a humanity-sufficiency, a materialist collectivism working on the same principles). This is why we fear God; it is the fear of seeing ourselves truly, as creatures and what that entails, not least what it means for the service of others who are just as “entitled” to the goods which we use to sustain the illusion: “All of a man’s treasure is simply the whole universe seen with himself as its centre. Men only love riches, power and social consideration because they reinforce the faculty of thought in the first person” (Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks).

            In turning back to von Balthasar’s concerns, we can understand how the reason likewise “preserves us very effectively” (Weil). An anthropology, as in the one which developed after the medievals, which defines man as primarily a reasoning creature who properly acts only upon a strictly defined reason, for its seemingly greater security at right conclusions, will thereby privilege the man who desires his own self-constitution, since here it is the reason alone which is to be cultivated and not the will or heart. In the theological world, this takes form in the prejudice that we can deal with God in our theological systems without dealing with him in our lives. In von Balthasar’s discussion, it is the error of thinking we – dogmatic theologians – can concern ourselves with the verum without the bonum and leave the bonum for others to deal with. What is the solution? Von Balthasar does not work out, at least not in this essay, a developed anthropology along the lines of, e.g., Catholic theorists of “personalism,” which would develop my above points on the place of the will and heart; instead, he finds the needed unity between theology and sanctity in the center of all properly Christian thinking – Jesus Christ. Here, all of our thought is to serve Christ because our thought, our very selves, is constituted by Christ for those who have faith.

            Christ, as true God and true man, is the revealing of humanity redeemed and, as such, united in service, devotion to God and the revealing of this God. Moreover, the task of the theologian is not simply to point to this man, Jesus Christ, and expound; rather, the theologian is to live this incarnating of the Truth that is fully given in Christ: “From the standpoint of revelation, there is simply no real truth which does not have to be incarnated in an act or in some action, so that the incarnation of Christ is the criterion of all real truth….” (p. 50). The important point here being, as he develops later in the essay, that while Christ is the fullness of this revelation and the criterion for judgment, it does not end with him but extends to the whole Church in “the constant repetition of the theological existence of the Lord in the life of his faithful and saints” (80). In other words, and to tie it in with my previous points, any real appropriation of the truth of man vis-à-vis God affects the entirety of his person – the reason and the will; it is not otherwise because Christ has revealed what it is to be a man taken entirely by truth in his perfect obedience to the Father, revealing man’s true relation to God (i.e., no illusions), and for those who are to receive this truth is to likewise subject oneself to the Father.

Kevin D.