Conversations with Augustine: Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain
Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. Following this logic Augustine states that, like Eve from Adam, the Church proceeds from the side of Christ toward a marital commitment to Christ that includes contractual and liturgical elements indicative to a marriage.
Moorman’s transition to Balthasar recognizes that Balthasar, like Augustine, sees the nuptial model as a helpful launching point for exploring the Church’s relationship to Christ. However, he goes further than Augustine in introducing the language of obedience as essential to the marriage between Christ and Church. “Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose.”
Like de Lubac, Balthasar sees the Church as the vessel through which the whole world will be redeemed. “There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.” The Church’s public faith and obedience to Christ is not only a witness of Christ, but is primarily that for which the world was created. “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.” Moorman suggests that here in the public nature of marriage, especially in the bride’s naked assent to the groom, we see the most explicit link between Augustine and Balthasar.
Moorman concludes with a reflection on Mary, the mother of Christ. She says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent…The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.”
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, not only for the interaction with Balthasar and de Lubac, but also for the opportunity to read more about Augustine’s ecclesiology. However, as my expertise lies more in former, I beg Cynthia’s and Mary’s forgiveness in limiting my comments to reflections on issues surrounding Balthasar’s use of the nuptial model. I’d like to offer just three critical reflections in conclusion, all of which stem from prelimenary concerns about what to me seems to be Balthasar’s deficient idea of marriage and, more generically, his use of typology.
First, it is dubious whether marriage includes all of the aspects that Balthasar imports into his nuptial ecclesiology under the concept of marriage. Most disconcerting to me is that his model of marriage presupposes mortifying obedience on the part of the wife. The Church as the Bride is called to total obedience, EVEN to the point of death: “Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.” I am not sure how the marriage metaphor leads to this kind of mortifying obedience. Likewise, the nuptial relationship shared by Christ and the Church leads to the Church’s adherence to her husband’s totalizing agenda, and thus to the virtual disappearance of her identity, to be replaced by her husband’s: “Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say ‘Church’ will be to say ‘obedience’.” Moreover, in losing her identify, the wife becomes the visible identity of the husband’s invisible kingdom: “My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.” While I don’t dispute that the Church is to have this kind of obedience, I have serious misgivings about whether the marriage relationship is an appropriate or beneficial metaphor for getting at this obedience. Roman marriage, as Moorman rightly acknowledges, is the reference point for Balthasar and Augustine. But is this Christian marriage?
Secondly, in borrowing from marriage to talk about ecclesiology, Balthasar risks a reciprocal interpretation or re-presentation of Christian marriage. Moorman points to the influence on Balthasar of De Lubac’s incorporation of the Augustinian cosmology – union with God as the fulfillment of the cosmos’ identity. But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working, although he is therein attempting to expand de Lubac’s (and Augustine’s) idea of cosmological fulfillment precisely through employing the marriage model: “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.” Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something superior about the concept of “husband.” Balthasar exposes Christian marriage to a reciprocal reinterpretation by employing the marriage model to explain the relationship of the Church to Christ, indeed the world’s fulfillment in and through the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church. Christian marriage, in light of nuptial ecclesiology, begins to look not like two people engaging in a life long commitment to one another of mutual love and submission, but rather of wives submitting to husbands in order to be fulfilled by their husbands (analogously?) as the Church submits to Christ and is thereby fulfilled. As the Church relinquishes her identity, wives too ought to lose their identity in order to manifest the their husbands’ identity, they ought to mortify themselves in obedience to their husbands. These conclusions are ramifications of what appear to be an unsystematic or unrestricted use of typology. How should one judge the direction and the extent to which the typology is to be employed?
Finally, bringing Marian doctrine to bear upon nuptial ecclesiology, Moorman says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent.” De Lubac and Balthasar are both fond of calling Mary the mother of the Church (see especially de Lubac’s commentary of Lumen Gentium in The Church: Paradox and Mystery). Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child – although it is clear that Balthasar would like to go further by equating constituency in the Church as participation in Mary’s yes. Moreover, I have concerns with how much being part of the church is repeating Mary’s yes versus imitating Christ. Nonetheless, the metaphors of Bride and Mother become distorted when Mary is both the Mother of the Church and the archetype of the Bride. How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride? I confess bewilderment as to what it means to embrace both metaphors simultaneously when each refers to something antithetical to the other. De Lubac doesn’t engage the two quite as systematically as Balthasar does. Neither offers a satisfactory solution. As long as the two function typologically the way that Balthasar employs them, it seems unlikely that there’s a middle ground to be had by balancing between the two as the two can neither be equivocal nor dialectically opposed. They are, rather, metaphors that seem to be best when left unmixed.
15 Responses so far
6:30 pm
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11:24 pm
Dan,
Very nice criticisms. Here are a couple of points.
1) With regards to your last criticism, Balthasar tries to go over that in Theo-drama vol. 3. I’m actually not sure if he succeeds though. You asked, “How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride?” Certainly that’s a valid criticism. However, I don’t see if that’s big of a problem. Christ himself is considered our brother and our groom.
2) I don’t see the criticism about mortifying obedience a valid one especially when we look at it from the overall framework of Balthasar’s theology. The God-forsaken state of Christ is God’s faithfulness to His bride. In fact, the Incarnation itself can be seen as the Son leaving the Father so that He can cling to His wife (cf. John Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians). It is in Christ’s mortifying obedience to his Father and Israel that he drew all people to himself.
I also think it is important to note that Christ does not exist apart from the Church. Christ needs the Church to complete his work. Also, the obedience of the Church is not possibile once Christ’s faithfulness to his covenant ceases.
Also, with regards to mortifying obedience, I think everyone who is married experiences that. Not every day is a honeymoon. Plus, there may be a situation where a husband finds himself very attracted to a woman at work. Yet, he must mortify, he must “tear” himself apart not because he denies himself, but because his true fulfillment is in his wife, the woman God gave him. I think Balthasar’s The Moment of Christian Witness, with his emphasis on the Ernstfall, is key on this point as well.
9:35 am
Let’s grant for the sake of argument that there is some kind of authority (from the Christian perspective) involved in a husband’s role in marriage (while bracketing exactly what that authority is and how it works itself out in individual cases—the latter being in my opinion a prudential issue that varies from couple to couple). For me, a great deal of tension enters with regard to the differences or dis-analogous aspects of the various analogies employed in these conversations, particularly when the analogies are strained and taken too literally. E.g., in marriages, Christian or otherwise, there is the real problem of sin (for both spouses) which is not a factor among the Persons of the Trinity. You never have a case in which the Father misuses his power or authority to harm the Son (where the Son is an un-willing participant).
Bringing this back to Augustine, while I certainly do not think that he is a misogynist, as a good deal of contemporary secondary literature suggests, I do find his views on marriage and women as presented in the Confessions to be contestable. (I haven’t read his treatise on marriage, but have heard that he presents a very positive view of marriage in that work). E.g., in IX.9.19 (Boulding translation), Augustine the narrator provides some background information on his father, Patricius. Here we read that Patricius had numerous adulterous affairs and had anger issues. Augustine praises Monica for her gentleness and patience in putting up with Patricius’s actions and notes that it was common for women in that day to be beaten by their husbands, suggesting that Monica’s gentle response had kept her from being beaten. Perhaps it did, but this is not the case in every situation. (While working overseas in Russia, I worked with women who were regularly beaten by their alcoholic husbands, and it didn’t matter whether the women were gentle or not, they were still beaten). Augustine goes on to say that Monica would remind the women of her day (who had been beaten by their husbands and were complaining about their situation) that “they had heard their marriage contracts read” and that “they had been in duty bound to consider these as legal documents which made slaves of them. In consequence they ought to keep their subservient status in mind and not defy their masters” (p. 225). Though I am glad that in Monica’s situation Patricius was eventually converted and that her response (in her situation) played a positive; however, I don’t think that Monica’s actions and response should be universalized to apply to all marriages and held up as the only “godly” and “spiritual” response of a Christian wife. I wonder how Augustine would have written this chapter if his father had in fact regularly beaten his mother or sexually abused him or his siblings. Would he have applauded Monica in that situation? That women today have the means and ability to protect themselves or their children through the help of family members, churches, government agencies or other social services is in my opinion a good thing. Moreover, I would not advise a woman who is being physically beaten or who has children who are being abused by her husband to simply be patient and respond in gentleness. Rather, the husband needs to be confronted with his sin, and perhaps a separation for the purpose of confronting and dealing with his sin would make him come to his senses. Simply staying “quiet” under the guise of “gentleness” and “obedience” can be a very un-courageous and un-godly thing to do. Monica’s cultural situation is different from ours and perhaps she made the best choice given her options and her particular situation. However, holding her particular situation up as the model Christian wifely response strikes me as misguided and unwise.
11:13 am
Thanks for the comments.
RE: 1. you say, “Christ himself is considered our brother and our groom.” As you see from my response, my concern is not with nuptial imagery as such, but with making nuptial the only or dominant image. As such, I’m willing to grant that we need to hold the two – brother and groom – in tension with one another. Indeed, I’m happy to grant that such a metaxological approach is actually quite fecund. However, as I state above, it’s when we begin to read that nuptial imagery back onto human marriage that things get messy.
2. Mortifying obedience. Following the same train of criticism – reading nuptial ecclesiology back onto human marriage – I think my worry here is founded and quite obvious. Who wants to preach that wives should be obedient to their husbands even to the point of death? Instructing that kind of obedience to the church is one thing, to wives quite another, and rather misogynistic. Christ’s obedience to death is a model for Christians re: obedience to God, not for wives.
3. “it is important to note that Christ does not exist apart from the Church”. This is not an obvious point, and I suggest it’s possibly heretical. TO suggest that Christ or God stand in any “need” toward humanity is not the same as saying that Christ invites the Church to participate in his task. Necessity… You need to explain this more.
4. Husbands mortifying their “flesh” because of sinful desires is not the same as saying that mortifying obedience is an essential aspect of marriage. In your example, the husband has represses a lustful desire which is a result of the fall. Balthasar however is using the nuptial imagery as a type without respect to sinful desires. I don’t agree that the husband’s choice has something to do with obedience. Rather, true love (Paul in Corinthians) represses pride, lust and selfishness for the sake of the other, for both wife and woman at the office.
Again, I’m not against Balthasar’s model as such, but rather some of the leaps he takes with the typology. He’s very happy to rest quite a lot on this model, but I”m not so sure it can bear the weight that he places upon it.
9:27 pm
Dan,
Thanks for the reply!
1) Okay, I think I understand you better here.
2) I understand wives’ obedience to their husbands not as doing whatever the husbands say, but obedience to the vow of giving themselves to their husbands. In other words, I see it as faithfulness to the marriage.
3) As for Christ not existing apart from the Church, I meant the Logos-made-flesh. I also don’t see how this is not evident. How can the Logos who has decisively assumed a human nature exist apart from it? How can he who was made sin, exist apart from the people he has shared his life with? To say that Christ needs the Church to complete his work simply means that he has chosen to give his Spirit to the People of God to finish his work. Without the Church, how else will his work will be completed? In other words, as Augustine said, God created us without our help but He cannot save us without our cooperation. Here’s an analogy: in order for God to save the world, the human nature of the Logos needed to conform his human will to the divine will: synergism.
4) I do think that the husband’s choice has to do something with obedience. Obedience is not a mechanical following, but an affection, that is, a true attitude towards the person. It is the orientation of the person towards another according to his/her value. Finally, I don’t understand love apart from obedience (Phil. 2).
9:26 am
Re: 2. You’re not using the more recent understanding of the word obedience in marriage, especially regarding the submission that wives are supposed to have in certain readings of Paul. I like what you’re saying; it’s just not what most mean when using those terms.
re: 3-4. Again, we’re talking past each other. You’re using “necessary” to describe the way in which God has chosen to redeem humanity, not in the philosophical or prolegomena sense which I was. I was merely cautioning you in your use of loaded terms. I think you can accomplish as much to say that God has chosen or made a covenant to work with humanity in a certain way via the incarnation. Or as Maximus says, God did not make the world perfect because he wanted to invite humanity to freely participate in perfecting the world with him.
Let me remind you that the context of the paper I was writing about skews the marital relationship to make the husband Christ and the wife the church. One is without sin, one is sinful. One stands as the redeemer, the other the redeemed. My concerns, again, or not with the model as such but with what I see as obvious ways in which this model has been distorted in order to force a certain kind of submission on wives because they need to by redeemed by their husbands through his authority. I’m certainly open to nuanced and generous readings of love and obedience in which both spouses stand in lovingly obedient relation to eachother. My worry is for an unbalanced relationship where the husband has an apriori preference.
12:56 pm
Last thing I’ll add to this: Apolonio, you say, “in order for God to save the world, the human nature of the Logos needed to conform his human will to the divine will: synergism.”
By “in order for” I take it you don’t mean that God was logically required to do so but rather God freely chose to do so. Lastly, the will of the Logos as human is still Christ’s will and one that we shouldn’t talk about as distinct in any way but formally from the divine element. Incarnation, not synergism. You might think I’m being picky here, but this is a pretty fundamental issue you’re raising. Do we understand the Incarnation in light of philosophical tenets, or is there something going on in the Incarnation that even philosophy can’t grasp, namely that the Son of God can exist AS a human?
1:41 pm
Dan,
Thanks again for the exchange.
2) The way I understand obedience is the way Balthasar understood it. Remember, for him, “every true love has the inner form of a vow: it binds itself to the beloved and does so out of motives and in the spirit of love” (The Christian State of Love, 39). As for St. Paul, Balthasar sees Paul’s message of “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” and “For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman” as key passages for his view that marriage is that of mutual submission and not one-sided. The difference between Christ and the Church is not that they are both obedient to each other, but their obedience, their love takes on a different form: Christ to make the Church holy and without blemish, and the Church as respect and reverent awe (cf. Mary for Today, 53-56, TD vol. 3). In fact, that man needs a “helper” makes Balthasar believe that Mary’s fiat on the cross is important to God’s economy of salvation (cf. The Moment of Christian Witness,38-49). The best way to understand the husband-wife relationship Balthasar presents is actually to see it from the standpoint of the New Adam and New Eve in Calvary where the fertility of their sorrows brings forth the Church. Here, we see “mortifying obedience” in its concreteness. And what biinds the New Adam and Eve is their faithfulness to God’s plan.
3) I did know that you were talking in the philosophical sense, but I’m not to sure if using necessity in the philosophical sense would be heretical or wrong with the way I used it. Of course with regards to logical necessity we have to say “no” to the notion that Christ does not exist apart from the Church. However, with regards to metaphysical necessity, I am not too sure. For, according to Kripkean semantics, we have to say that in every possible world that Christ (the man) exists, he is the son of Mary. I think we also have to say that in every possible world where Christ exists, he exists insofar as he has a human nature. Hence, there is synergy in Christ in all possible worlds he exists.
But I do get your worry and I did have to think hard before I did make that statement. If anything, it could refer to epistemic necessity rather than metaphysical necessity.
I do get your worry though and the fact that you raised it made me reflect on what Balthasar was really saying and ways we have to be careful in what we say.
2:12 pm
Friends,
Good discussion. Thanks. What an excellent essay. Forgive me for the format of these thoughts, but I’m just going to quote some things from Dan’s commentary, and share my thoughts. I suppose it’s the sloppiness that this medium (a blog comment) allows.
“But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working…”
Well, let’s not forget that “Christ became obedient unto death”. The submission is truly mutual. Christ submits himself to humiliation, torture, total abasement, and death for his bride – in order to give her life, joy, peace, fulfillment, which she appropriates in her submission of herself, body and soul, to him.
“Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something superior about the concept of “husband.””
There is something superior, not about “the concept of ‘husband’” – but about the husband himself. There’s a danger of getting the typology backward. Human bridegrooms and brides are the type (the symbol), Christ and his Church are the antitype (the reality). As Paul put it: “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family [patria] in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3.14-15).
And let’s not forget that we all stand before God, even the Lord himself in his humanity, gendered female. So the Body of Christ lies prone; so he is pierced. We all (men and women) become little “sponsae” by baptism, incorporation into the mystical Body, the one Bride.
Let’s also not forget that the subjugation and the abasement of Christ’s nuptial bed, the cross (“consummatum est”) is “…for our transgression… our iniquities” (Isaiah 53.5). That is to say, mutual submission looks like this within the domain of telluric corruption and sin. Put another way: “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Mark 12.24-25). Or again: submission means abnegation, and obedience servility, only within the context of the world’s brokenness.
As feminist critique, the nuptial ecclesiology drawn out by Moorman is imminently useful insofar as it betrays not the naïve submissiveness of Christian Brides, but the abusiveness of Bridegrooms. Rather than scrapping the whole system of sacramental type and antitype because of the abuse of women by men, why not hold Christian men to the standard of abasement-for-the-sake-of-their-wives implied by Augustine / von Balthasar / de Lubac / Moorman / the Gospel? Indeed this standard was made explicit by the announcement of the man to the woman (it ran only in that direction) in the Solemnization of Matrimony from the old Book of Common Prayer: “…with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
In other words: a coherent, Christian, feminist critique of matrimony, as it is too often manifest, would be that men do not worship (i.e. announce the worth / dignity of their brides) their brides with their lives, and do not endow them with all their worldly goods (all that they have and are). Christians might usefully bind men to the terms of the marital covenant, rather than absolving women from them. An abusive husband fails to live by the terms of the covenant in which he solemnly announces that his life is no longer his own, but that he now lives and dies for his wife. The Church has a vocation to remind husbands of this, and when they fail to listen, to insure the safety and integrity of their victim wives / children. In such a cases, the Church may helpfully remind wives and children that their husbands / fathers are not God, but mere typologies, and failed typologies insofar as they are abusers.
“Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child…” and “How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride?”
It might be helpful to remind ourselves that in the Church’s dogmatic economy, Mary is not the spouse of Christ, but the “Spouse of the Holy Spirit” (cf. Leo XIII in “Divinum illud”, May 9, 1897). As Gabriel put it: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called… the Son of God” (Luke 1.35). Mary can be the mother of the Son of God by being the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, by saying yes to the love of God in virtue of which the Father eternally begets the Son – that love being itself the Holy Spirit (cf. Thomas in “Compendium Theologiae” Part 1, Treatise 2, Chapter 219).
Holding Mary’s titles in tension is indeed difficult for unaided reason. Insofar as her role is a sublimation of herself to the divine economy (insofar, in other words, as the Holy Spirit comes upon her and the power of the Most High overshadows her), she becomes herself an object of faith, precisely by being an exemplar of faith (“be it unto me according to thy word”). It is really no less mysterious how it is that Christ is our Mother (we are reborn from the water flowing from his pierced side), our Brother, and the perfect image of our Father. The key is that Mary PROLEPTICALLY figures the Church in as much as what happens to her at the Annunciation (the Holy Spirit comes upon her), happens to the Church at Pentecost. The Church then becomes Mother, like Mary, by giving birth to us, as well as by “bearing” Christ to the Gentiles as Mary bore him to Israel.
Thanks again.
3:51 pm
Dear Dan,
Re: “Lastly, the will of the Logos as human is still Christ’s will and one that we shouldn’t talk about as distinct in any way but formally from the divine element.”
Well, the human nature of Christ, we say in Theology, is accidental to his person.
It’s not essential for Christ to be human in order to be a person.
He’s a divine person for all eternity.
So, the human nature of Christ, while hypostatically joined in the person, is still accidental to His person so that we don’t say that He is a “human person”; no, he’s a divine person but he also has a human nature which puts him in a unique category.
Now, because he has two natures, he would then have two wills because the intellect and will reside in the nature.
So, the divine nature has an intellect and will that is divine. The human nature has an intellect and will that is human. Therefore, Christ (now, a regular human being doesn’t have this – he doesn’t have 2 intellects; he has one intellect and one will) is unique in that He has two natures in his person, he has two intellects and two wills.
5:21 pm
Dear Fr. Brown,
Thanks for contributing to the conversation. I really enjoyed your thoughts on Mary as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, and what happens to Mary at her Annunciation proleptically figuring what happens to the Church at Pentecost.
Dear Dan and Mary,
Thanks to both of you for your essay (Mary) and your commentary (Dan)—you’ve given us all much food for thought and have had the courage to address an issue that many would rather avoid than engage.
Dear Apolonio,
Thanks for your participation in the discussion as well!
Best wishes,
Cynthia
5:48 pm
Dear Ms. Nielsen:
RE: “Dear Fr. Brown: Thanks for contributing to the conversation. I really enjoyed your thoughts on Mary as the spouse of the Holy Spirit, and what happens to Mary at her Annunciation proleptically figuring what happens to the Church at Pentecost.”
Where are Fr. Brown’s comments? I would like to read them. Thanks.
7:34 pm
Dan,
Sorry for the confusion. I was speaking in the context of Christ. By “Christ”, I mean the Word-made-flesh. So in order for God to save the world, that is, in the context of the Incarnation, the human will of Christ must conform to the divine will. The Incarnation entails synergism or else we will fall into monothelitism. I hope that clears up some things.
4:56 am
Dear All,
thanks for the great feedback on my commentary. lot’s to think sbout for future work in this great topic.
Hope everyone has a great school year. I hope that during the year some of us may get to meet in the flesh.
Best,
Dan McClain
8:11 pm
I will love to read more. Do u know mary c moorman. if so let her know that I will like to see her I have been a friend of her for years….
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