Per Caritatem

W.T. Dickens in his essay, “Balthasar’s Biblical Hermeneutics,” notes that according to Balthasar the vast majority of modern theologians and biblical scholars (both Roman Catholic and Protestant) had thrown theological aesthetics to the wayside and as a result a distorted view of Scripture prevailed (e.g., seeing the Bible as a principally a set of propositional truths). This is not to say that Balthasar believed that modern biblical scholarship as a whole was a completely unfruitful project. Rather, for Balthasar, a recovery of certain premodern hermeneutical conventions was needed to reintroduce a lost theologico-aesthetic sensibility to the biblical hermeneutical project and such conventions were not incompatible with the positive discoveries of modern biblical scholarship. These premodern hermeneutical practices include “viewing the Bible as a self-glossing, christologically focused story, the proper interpretation of which is enabled by the Holy Spirit and nourished by regular liturgical worship” (p. 175).

As mentioned above, one of the problems arising when theological aesthetics is discarded is a tendency to view the Bible as primarily a set a propositional truths. Such a view presupposes a kind of dualism between sign and referent in which the sign becomes disposable once that which is signified is affirmed; hence, the mediation of revelation is rendered somewhat superfluous (p. 175). By reintroducing the medieval view of the transcendentals in which beauty, goodness, and oneness are understood as mutually dependent aspects of created being, not only can the sign/referent dualism be overcome, but one also gains a more integrated view of the relation between nature and grace. As Dickens explains,

“in redeeming creation, God does not destroy it in order to create it anew, but surpassingly fulfils it. From this perspective, creation’s unity, truth, goodness, and beauty are seen to be perfected in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Created being’s determinations are not identified with God; they are believed to participate in the divine beauty, truth, goodness, and unity.

When beauty is conceived as a transcendental attribute of being that participates in the glory of God, then the natural and historic forms it takes are regarded in significantly different ways from those followed by most modern theologians. Rather than merely pointing to or dissolving in a transcendent ground or depth, Balthasar claimed that beautiful forms embody and reveal this transcendence, while simultaneously veiling it (GL 1, 151). This is because they are indissolubly united with the transcendence they mediate. Although a form’s content transcends its mediation, it is available only in and through the form. It does not lie behind, above, or in front of it—regardless of whether those spatial metaphors are construed historically, morally, spiritually, or otherwise. Form and content, therefore, can be distinguished only provisionally. Breaking the bonds that unite a beautiful radiant form with its transcendent content destroys the one and renders the other inaccessible” (pp. 176-177).

Notes
Dickens’ essay is found in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Eds by Edward T. Oakes, SJ and David Moss. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 175-186.

In chapter 2 of his book Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, Balthasar discusses two forms of becoming. In the previous chapter he had set forth that idea that time constitutes the foundation of material being. He then adds that if this is the case, then “physical movement is itself founded on a primordial movement, a metaphysical movement, so to speak, which is common to all creatures: namely, the passage from nothingness to existence” (p. 37). Only God as uncreated is not subject to change, whereas created beings are essentially becoming beings. As Gregory states, “[s]ince it possesses the beginning (ἀρχη) of its being by way of change, it is impossible that it should not be entirely variable (τρεπτός)” [Catech. 21; II, 57 D]. Speaking to the different varieties of created being, viz., material and spiritual, Balthasar notes that if we consider time as category of created being, the continuance in change for material being is precisely time. Alternatively, for the spiritual being, continual becoming “is a participation in the cause of being not only insofar as it is source but also insofar as it is end” (p. 37). This participation in God is described by Gregory as follows: “Creation stands within the realm of the beautiful only through a participation in that which is the best. It has not begun merely at one point or another to exist, but at every moment it is perceived to be in its beginning stages on account of its perpetual growth toward that which is the best” [C. Eunom. 8; II, 797 A]. Both material and spiritual (created) being displays a kind of infinity—the former, in the horizontal realm of the quantitative and of number, and the latter, in an unending vertical ascent given the infinity of the source to which it seeks to be united, viz., God. As Gregory explains, “[n]ever will the soul reach its final perfection, for it will never encounter a limit, … it will always be transformed into a better thing.” […] “Since the First Good is infinite in its nature, communion with it on the part of the one whose thirst is quenched by it will have to be infinite as well, capable of being enlarged forever” [C. Eunom. I; II, 340 D]. All of this leads Balthasar to the following conclusion:

“there are two forms of becoming, the two of them together yielding the total formula for the analogy of being. One of these two is the horizontal movement of created being, which is to say, its foundation of nothingness, which separates it eternally from God, inasmuch as pure potentiality (time) is in itself κένωμα καὶ οὐδέν [emptiness and nothingness]. The other expresses the ascending movement of becoming, which is the innate idea and desire for God in the creature” (p. 38)[1]

Notes
[1] In footnote 9, Balthasar adds, “we are not dealing here with innate ideas in the sense of modern philosophy […] but rather in the sense of the Stoics (Cicero: De nat. deor. II, 12)” [p. 38].

As Balthasar explains, the “matter” or res to which Christian dogmatic formulations refer is Christ—His Incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. In Christ, the Son of the Father, we are given a revelation of the innermost nature of the Christian God, viz., the Trinity as love. The Christian of course in his/her act of faith embraces not merely the formula or theological expressions of the “matter”, but the res. As St. Thomas says, “actus credentis non terminator ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem”, “the act of belief is not limited/confined to the proposition/expression, but to the thing” (ST, II-II q 1, a 1 ad 1). However, if expression is required in order to encounter the res, then in which expressions is encounter impeded and in which is it made possible? (Truth is Symphonic, p. 65). Balthasar answers this question as follows:

“For the encounter to take place, the expression must cause the act of God’s love for us to appear more divine, more radical, more complete and at the same time more unimaginable and improbable. The criterion is that of maximality, which succeeds (in a way that is beyond our grasp) in incorporating aspects that human reason would like to regard as incompatible with the res. In fact, we can say this: wherever, in our elucidation of the mystery, some aspect appears really lucidly clear from a rational point of view, causing the mystery quality (which announces the ‘greater dissimilarity’ of God, his distinctive divinity) to retreat at that point and opening up a wider spiritual landscape—there heresy is to be found, or at least the boundary of permissible theological pluralism has been overstepped. For when this happens, the intellectus fidei has been eclipsed, and only human reason is operating; instead of man’s total act, responding in faith to the ever-greater, incomprehensible love of God, we have an act that has rationally domesticated this love, at least in part. This almost always involves taking one of two or more apparently contradictory statements of the word of God and making it absolute, and then this isolated proposition (which is an enuntiabile and not the res) is used as the basis for further logical deduction.

A classical example of this is the doctrine of double predestination [e.g., as hyper-Calvinism teaches] […] According to this, God’s sublime foreknowledge has from the outset appointed a number of men to eternal bliss and a number to eternal damnation. People can adduce God’s absolute sovereignty in support of this, but also man’s freedom. They can quote passages such as Matthew 25. They can do all this without noticing that they have clearly moved away from the central message of revelation and, having reduced the mystery of God’s dealings with us to a logic, they have robbed him of his divinity. Does this mean that we are forced to adopt the converse teaching of the ‘restoration of all things’ and the abolition of hell? By no means. For that too would be to rationalize the love that is only encountered where it actually takes place, a love that demands our participation. We cannot man on observation post over and against this love. The Christian hope for the world is something quite different from rational reportage.

Our theme is the maximality of God’s love, but as it encounters us in Jesus Christ, that is, in a divinely willed poverty and humiliation” (pp. 65-66).

“God’s presence in and absence from the world are a mystery that is impenetrable to thought and even more so to man’s senses and experience. It would seem that we can only think and speak of it in propositions that are dialectical, that is, which cancel each other out. For if we construct the idea of God as its content demands, God is both everything (to pan estin autos: Sir 43:27)—for nothing can be outside God, nor can anything be added to him—and ‘exalted above all his works’ (para panta to erga autou: Sir 43:28). For none of these works is God: indeed, each of them is separated from him by the infinite distance and opposition of absolute and relative. The more God has to be in all things if they are to ‘be’ at all, the more his presence in them reveals him to be utterly different from them: the more he is immanent, the more he is transcendent. This dialectic is correct in its own particular way, but it sounds empty; religious experience finds it hard to follow, with the result that the images of God in the religions manifest a pluralist diversity.

No one has ever seen the Father, but the Son has ‘interpreted’ him (Jn 1:18) in human form. As the Word-made-flesh, he has clothed the ineffable in human categories, but in such a way that the essentially incomprehensible God can be discerned shining through and beyond all these categories of comprehensibility. […] God, ever incomprehensible, approaches us as a ‘God at hand’, yet he would not be God if he were not also a ‘God afar off’ (Jer 23:23)” [Truth is Symphonic; pp. 122-123].

Before jumping into this essay, I have a special request for my readers. I have been ill for the past week, running a pretty high fever. For whatever reason, I did not respond to the first round of antibiotics, and have had to return to the doctor for additional tests and new antibiotics. I still feel pretty lousy and am more or less confined to the bed. Your prayers would be greatly appreciated for my full recovery. The summary below was written before I became ill, but I haven’t had the strength to post it. Please feel free to leave comments as to the essay, but it is likely that my responses will be delayed.
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Fergus Kerr’s essay, “Balthasar and Metaphysics,” begins with a quote from Balthasar stating the Christian must not ignore metaphysics but rather is called to be its guardian. Yet, Balthasar no doubt believes that there are right and wrong ways of doing metaphysics, and points to St. Thomas as setting forth a metaphysic worth following. In contrast with other interpreters of Thomism, Balthasar takes Thomas’ distinction between essence and existence in creatures to be real and not merely conceptual. Consequently, Balthasar rejects the idea that Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy was simply a semantic theory. Rather, the analogia entis “refers to the creature’s real participation in the divine life, anticipated in the here and now by faith” (p. 226). Though the relationship between Creator and creature must be understood as analogical, Balthasar affirmed that with every similarity between God and his creation there exists simultaneously a greater dissimilarity. As Kerr observes, there is a strong apophatic thrust to Balthasar’s interpretation of Aquinas, as well as a desire to uphold God as Wholly Other. Yet, according to Balthasar, Thomas’ analogy of being saves negative theology from certain undesirable consequences, as were played out historically in, e.g., John Scotus Eriugena (p. 233). Balthasar’s read of Thomas also gives us insight into how he viewed the relationship between philosophy and theology. Although the Greeks were attuned to the mystery of being, according to Balthasar, they were unable to properly distinguish being from God. Aquinas, on the other hand, by reflecting on divine revelation—particularly, the doctrine of creation—was able to rethink the mystery of being as inherited from his ancient and medieval predecessors with a new appreciation for it immanence and transcendence. In sum, for Balthasar, Aquinas’ crucial move was his “conception of the real distinction, the ontological difference, in every and all created being, between existence and essence; this is what allows us to see the radical difference between creatures and God, and thus to respect each, letting creatures have their own reality and letting God be God, collapsing neither into the other” (p. 234).

The concluding section of Kerr’s essay is devoted to a discussion of Balthasar’s revamping of Heidegger’s conception of the fourfold. Though Kerr thinks that the first of Balthasar’s fourfold difference, viz., “the intersubjective difference of the awakening child’s ‘I’ from its mother,” warrants further reflection, he seems to question whether the claims of Balthasar’s fourfold are sufficiently supported (p. 235).

Notes
Kerr’s essay is found in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Eds by Edward T. Oakes, SJ and David Moss. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 224-238.

John Webster, in his essay, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” discusses Balthasar’s friendship with Karl Barth and the various ways that Barth influenced Balthasar’s theology. As is well-known, Balthasar, was an avid reader of Barth, lectured on Barth’s works, and even devoted an entire book to Barth’s theology, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation . As Webster points out, Balthasar’s book on Barth was by far the best of the Roman Catholic responses to Barth, as it “did much to lay to rest a conventional and ill-informed Catholic presentation of Barth which, on the basis of a very partial knowledge of his Romans commentary and a few other early writings, dismissed him as an ‘occasionalist’” (p. 243). Balthasar’s acquaintance with Barth was by no means superficial, as he meticulously engaged Barth’s mature writings, viz., the Church Dogmatics, and took very seriously the need for and mutual benefit to be gained from a charitable dialogue with his Protestant brother in Christ. In his presentation of Barth for Catholic consideration, Balthasar argued that Barth had abandoned the conceptuality that characterized his early work and had moved over the course of the 1930’s and 1940’s to an analogical understanding of the relation between God and creation. According to Balthasar, this shift allowed Barth to affirm a significantly more positive view of the “twofoldness” of Creator and creation. Thus, creation as that which is not God was understood vis-à-vis God as good in itself. “And the shift from dialectic to analogy is christologically driven: ‘Word of God’ (abstract, interruptive, atemporal) is replaced by ‘Jesus Christ, God and man’ such that Barth affirms an incarnationally grounded ‘compatibility between God and creatures’” [KB, 114] (p. 243). Webster, however, disagrees with Balthasar’s schematization of Barth’s development and argues that Barth never completely discarded his dialectical thinking and that even in his early work, Barth was concerned “with the fellowship between God and humankind which Balthasar” thought only came about with Barth’s later discovery of analogy. Regarding the latter, Webster believes that Balthasar tended to blur the distinctions between the Lutheran and Reformed influences on Barth, and, in particularly, Balthasar overlooked the impact of Calvin and the Reformed tradition on Barth’s theology during the period of his professorship at Göttingen in 1921-25. During that period, Barth devoted himself to the study of Calvin and the Reformed confessional writings. “As he lectured on these topics […], Barth very early came to an account of the magisterial Reformation according to which Luther emphasizes the ‘vertical’, soteriological axis in God’s relation to the world, whereas Calvin complements this by stronger humane, moral concerns, a concern with the ‘horizontal’. […] The center of gravity of Barth’s early years as a theological professor was thus not—as Balthasar believed—Luther and Kierkegaard, but the tradition which stemmed from Calvin” (p. 247). Though Webster is wholly unconvinced by Balthasar’s account of Barth’s development, he nonetheless praises Balthasar’s engagement with Barth and lists the following as the most important issues to have emeged from that engagement: “the analogical relation between God and creatures; Barth’s actualism; and his Christological constriction” (p. 248).

I close with the following question. Given the clear connection that Webster traces out between Barth and Calvin, coupled with the suggestion that I made in a previous post regarding the possible link between Balthasar’s view of the self-authenticating nature of divine revelation and Barth’s view of the same via Calvin, perhaps the Balthasar/Calvin connection via Barth is a fertile and hitherto unexplored area of study?

Notes
Webster’s essay is published in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar. Eds by Edward T. Oakes, SJ and David Moss. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 241-255.