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.

Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the tabulae matrimoniales of ancient Roman jurisprudence.[1] Thus, although various scholars have held that Augustine’s concept of the Church must always be regarded rather tentatively, since his ecclesiology is constituted by a complex and dynamic nexus of interconnected distinctions, historian Peter Brown proposes that Augustine portrays the Church in the commonplace legal imagery of a legitimately contracted bride when it became most necessary to delineate a clear ecclesiology for his parishioners against the separatist movements of his day.  Brown urges that “the atmosphere of a courtroom will follow Augustine into Church when he preached against the Donatists… with the same unnerving confidence as Monica (when displaying) her own marriage contract, Augustine would now produce the marriage contract of Christ and His Church.”[2]

Augustine’s “nuptial” ecclesiology may be summarized in three key elements. In the first place, Augustine teaches that the bridal Church was born from Christ’s suffering body:

(Just as) God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side…in Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side.  With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church.[3]

From various Ennarationes such as in Psalmos 30, Augustine continues that Christ speaks for the members of the ecclesial bridal body to which He has joined Himself, as its Head, because “by a great sacrament (the Incarnation) these two were united in one flesh…out of two people, one single person comes to be, the single person that is Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.”[4]

Secondly, Augustine also holds that the bride of Christ is not merely born from Christ; she is also contracted to Christ in a mutual exchange of marital vows.  In this regard, Augustine describes the bridegroom at the wedding feast of John 2 as a metaphor for Christ the bridegroom in Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John:

For (even virgins) together with the whole Church, attain to a marriage, a marriage in which Christ is the Bridegroom…For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, “You have kept the good wine until now,” represented the person of the Lord.

Finally, the content of the nuptial vows exchanged between Christ and the Church stipulate their binding relationship to one another, as Augustine describes in an Easter octave sermon of AD 400:

The sacred reading of the Gospel, year after year, points out to us the true Christ and the true Church, to make sure that we are not mistaken in either of them, (as) by introducing the wrong bride to the holy bridegroom, or by presenting the holy bride with someone other than her true husband.  So, to be sure we make no mistake about either of them, let us listen, as it were, to their marriage contract in the Gospel.[5]

On closer inspection, the content of Augustine’s metaphors relate in imaginative ways to key excerpts of modern ecclesiology. We note in particular that the procedural family law of the classical Julian age required extensive negotiations between the father of the bride and the prospective groom, which ultimately culminated in the body of the bride. While the social context on which Augustine drew for his metaphor excluded the bride from the negotiations in anticipation of her wedding, Roman law did require the expectant bride to signify her public and free consent to the contract arranged between her betrothed husband and her father. She showed her legal consent in multiple and recurring ways. She would have worn her betrothed’s bronze rings, symbolizing the durability and frugality of the empire that would be constituted in part by her future household. She would have clasped her betrothed’s hand publicly, face- to- face, in symbolic declaration of fidelity. Finally, following the ratification of the detailed deed of purchase by which she was bestowed upon her husband at his wedding, she had to pause one last time on the threshold of her husband’s home for her final and free public act of consent to his nuptial invitation, without which no legal marriage could take place. She said “Quando Tu, Ego”: “whenever and wherever you are, I am then and I am there; wherever you are, I am.”[6]

Against this context, the nuptial images from several of Augustine’s ecclesiological sermons might indicate that a key assumption in the grammar of Augustine’s ecclesiology is that the true bride and true groom, as true Church and true Christ, are identifiable from the content of their legal vows, with the groom being the one who offers, and the bride being the one who assents. In other words, against those who would supplant her, the true bride may be identified as the one who is already familiar with the terms of her betrothed’s marital contract, by which she had been purchased as a bride, and to which she has manifested her free and binding consent.

If we transition imaginatively from this paradigm for Augustine’s ecclesiology, we find that Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s chapter entitled “The Conquest of the Bride” in his Heart of the World of 1979 highlights an ecclesiological theme which strikingly resounds with Augustine’s implicit theme of the nuptial Quando Tu.[7] Here, as elsewhere, Von Balthasar unequivocally appropriates the Augustinian notion of the Church as sponsa Christi:

Our covenant – our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb – is already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love… You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you…Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.[8]

From this understanding of a nuptial union between Christ and the Church that is characterized by obedience, Von Balthasar depicts Christ commissioning the Church in a sense which imitates the ancient nuptial formula: “Where I am, there you too are to be. What I do, that are you to do in me.”[9] Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose:

You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death… 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”; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross…So it is that I wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me.

Von Balthasar continues that this nuptial union is thus properly one that is publicly enacted and publicly ratified by acts of consenting faith:

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.”…I want to raise you up like the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is dashed to pieces… So there you stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen…. in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations.

At this point we note that Augustine’s notion of the nuptial Church, as the corporation which performs public signs of faith to ratify her nuptial covenant, might also contextualize DeLubac’s contemporary description of the entire universe as a nuptial creature formed for the enjoyment of union with its creator. Citing Gregory of Nyssa’s references to o anthropos bios, DeLubac explains that “(the Fathers) seemed to witness (human nature’s) birth to see it live, grow, and develop, as a single being” both with regard to its origin, salvation, and eschatological end:

With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption.  And when Christ at last appeared, coming as ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the whole human race.[10]

In brief, DeLubac’s sense of a nuptial consummation which recapitulates the entire creation is affirmed by Von Balthasar’s description of the Church as the one who can “gather up all humanity in order to present it to (Christ) as the one fruit in the libation-cup of (her) prayer.”[11] For Von Balthasar, the Church can unify and embody the world for Christ in as much as she is joined to Christ, who is Himself “the whole…the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.”[12] Von Balthasar elaborates further on the purpose of the Church’s nuptial union- as the consummation of the entire creation- in a manner which accords with DeLubac:

I have died once, and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me, each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change, in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world…There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church…Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises… To you, my Church, have I entrusted this fountainhead…You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh – you, my Bride and my Body – will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.[13]

Von Balthasar’s contemporary references to the nuptial bond of love between Christ and the creation, through the Church’s responsive obedience qua nuptial assent, returns us to the implications of Augustine’s ecclesiological imagination, wherein the Church responds, with faith and public signs of assent, to Christ’s offer to all of creation. On Augustine’s metaphor, the Church does so in the same way as a Roman bride would have complied with the rituals of nuptial law by signifying her assent through public acts of compliance with her bridegroom’s offer. In this way, the Church signifies on behalf of the world the nuptial assent and faithful obedience that is required for its consummation.

What might we make of Augustine’s nuptial ecclesiology and the modern appropriations which emphasize the Church as the assenting creature who seals her nuptial contract on behalf of the entire world by her obedience to Christ? I would suggest that the strain examined here might turn modern ecclesiology towards a renewed consideration of Mary of Nazareth and the tradition in which she, as mater ecclesiae, is honored as the definitive nuptial agent who utters the consenting, responsive Quando Tu, Ego for the redemption of the world. In the mind of the tradition, long before the Holy Spirit hovered over the Pentecost community to inaugurate the life of the Church, the same Holy Spirit had once hovered over the first fruit of the Father’s promises to the Son, when a timid teenage girl in Nazareth paused at the threshold of her spouse’s household, and, to conclude the long series of free acts of assent made by the symbolic gestures of her ancestors, gave consent to the terms established: may it be to me according to your word. Thus, 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. Thus, with her own definitive “let it be to me according to your word, wherever you go, I will go,” we simply join in: “Amen.” It is in this way that Von Balthasar’s modern ecclesiology rejoices that in Mary, the archetype of the Church, the door to the Father’s household has already been opened, the nuptial covenant has been ratified, the word has been made flesh in the body of the bride, their marriage has been consummated on the cross, and its procreative purpose is already unfolding in the weary world as humanity is gathered, more and more, into Christ’s nuptial embrace of His Church. 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.

Notes

[2] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[3] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 56.11.

[4] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 3, 4.

[5] Augustine, Sermon 238.  The Works of St. Augustine.  Sermons, Vol III.7 “On the Liturgical Seasons,” trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1980). See also Augutine, Sermons 37 and 293,  Ennarationes in Psalmos 45 and 72, Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John, and On Marriage and Desire I.11.

[6] Susan Treggiari,  Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism:  Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (Ignatius Press, 1988) p. 27.

[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

As Crammer points out, Balthasar wants a two-sex/two gender model (in the terminology of Laqueur) in which we have genuine difference yet equality;[1] however, despite his good intentions, according to Crammer, he ends up with a one-sex/two gender model in which Woman is defined by the Male and provides what the Male lacks-she serves as a kind of boundary for the man “and never truly exists as a subject and actor.”[2] According to Balthasar, the feminine is essentially characterized by receptivity and obedience; whereas the masculine is essentially characterized by action, initiative, and leadership-all highly problematic claims in my opinion, which do not correspond with my own experience as a woman or with what I have observed in other women.[3] For Balthasar, Man is question, and Woman is Answer (Antwort; hence, Woman is not an actor but a reactor, not an initiator but a responder. Balthasar bases his argument in part on the fact that the German word Antwort is feminine and not neuter, which violates the typical rule for German nouns made up of two words, viz., the new word reflects the gender of the of the second morpheme.[4] I find this aspect of his argument rather odd and arbitrary. For example, in Russian, the word for answer is ответ (otvyet), which consists of two morphemes mirroring the German in meaning and function, the latter of which is вет (vyet) meaning “say” or “speech,” and yet, the word is masculine. So why privilege the German? Balthasar also uses the metaphor of Woman as reflecting gaze (Antlitz) or mirror in which her gaze is fixed on Man; whereas, in contrast, Man’s gaze is able to look around and is not fixed solely on Woman. Both metaphors seem to make Balthasar’s Woman both overdetermined and underdetermined. Crammer then employs Marilyn Frye’s Venn diagrams to help further illustrate her point.

Rather than constructing a model of human sexual difference as a truly dualistic schema [here meaning a true dyad, wherein genuine difference exists] of A/B [and hence allowing for genuine difference], I believe that Balthasar constructs a fundamentally monistic A/not A model [...]. As Frye points out, to be an A (or B) is to be something or someone, whereas not A is not something anyone can be. Using the image of Venn circles, she describes A/not A as a single circle: everything inside that circle is A, everything outside the circle is not A-a category or space she describes as ‘the infinitation of the negative’. A/not A splits the world, but not into two, since not A is an infinite undifferentiated plenum, unstructured and formless, a chaos without internal boundaries. A/not A is therefore a dualism and cannot construct two things-there are no ‘somethings’ outside the circle drawn around A. Using this diagram, Woman provides the line that creates the circle defining Man. In this ‘positive-negative mirror-logic’, everything that man is, Woman is not; everything that Woman must be, man cannot have been.’[5]

In the end, Crammer sees Balthasar’s theology of the sexes, in spite of his affirmation of the equality of women and desire to present a two-sex/two gender model as incoherent and unintentionally “reproducing the one-sex model in which the normative human being is implicitly male and Woman’s definition is based around Man, particularly around what Man is seen to need Woman to be. The result of this methodology is that Woman in Balthasar’s theology lacks substance, subjectivity, and a voice of her own.”[6]

Notes

[3] E.g., Balthasar writes, “[i]t is the natural role of a man to command, but in profound dependence on the planning, careful woman. He symbolizes freedom, but now, how would round he is by clinging ivy, which often threatens to choke him-by wife and children, home and profession, a knot of cares” (Theological Anthropology, p. 309).

 [4] Balthasar also, of course, turns to Scripture for his argument, particularly Gen 2:23 and I Cor 11:7. Here I would to want ask how Gen 1:26-28 and Gal 3:28 are to be understood within Balthasar’s theology of the sexes? For example, in Gen 1:26-28, God gives dominion over the earth to both the man and the woman.

[5] “Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes,” pp. 101-103.

[6] Ibid., p. 102.

The Cross is thick bestrewn with roses: who has joined roses to the Cross?
[Goethe, 'Die Geheimnisse']

in place of Jerome’s ‘naked, to follow the Naked One’. Either philosophy misconceives man, failing, in Gnostic or Platonic guise, to take with full seriousness his earthly existence, settling him elsewhere, in heaven, in the pure realm of spirit, or sacrificing his unique personality to nature or revelation. Or, alternatively, philosophy forms man so exactly in God’s image and likeness, since man in his suffering and overcoming of suffering shows himself God’s superior. Here God only fulfills himself and manages to satisfy his own desires by divesting himself of his essence and becoming man, in order, as man, ‘divinely’ to suffer and die. If philosophy is not willing to content itself with, either, speaking abstractly of being, or with thinking concretely of the earthly and worldly (and no further), then it must at once empty itself in order to ‘know nothing…except Jesus Christ and him crucified’ (I Corinthians 2, 2). Then it may, starting out from this source, go on to impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification (ibid., 2, 7). This proclamation, however, rises up over a deeper silence and darker abyss than pure philosophy can know” (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, pp. 65-66).

In Aristotle’s Ethics, as he unfolds his account of the vicious or dissipated person, that is, the person who was deprived of a virtuous upbringing in which good beliefs were fashioned, and consequently, whose corrupt desires and opinions form a perfect harmony in which no resistance is present, it seems that such a person is in an utterly hopeless situation. In other words, a person in this condition is, as Aristotle says in book VII, paragraph 8, incurable.[1] The vicious person is doomed to his fate with no possibility of breaking free from destructive cycles which may have been part of his family line for generations. Having grown up in an injurious environment, a person in such circumstances has experienced and in turn acts out perverse versions of love and friendship. From this perspective, Aristotle’s view that the dissipated person acts with a kind of necessity rings true. Yet, when we bring the Christian tradition into the conversation, whether appealing to St. Augustine or Balthasar, we find that there is hope for the vicious person, as well as any person who has experienced being bound and fragmented by his or her own will. Turning briefly to St. Augustine, in book VIII of his Confessions, Augustine provides a kind of phenomenology of the will in which he vividly describes his own inability to choose the good, which was the result of many years of debauched living.[2] However, for Augustine, as is the case with Balthasar, the Trinitarian God via the Christ event can and does overcome the power of destructive habits and heals not only the will but the whole person. In his taking on of flesh and giving of His Spirit, Christ, so to speak, works from the inside, and thus, is able to effect a transformation that far exceeds any extrinsic solution or mere modification of one’s behavior.

This transformative healing of course comes at a great cost, and the cost was the life of the Son by way of the Cross in which His experience of utter abandonment has never been surpassed. The giving over of Himself to death and willingness to be forsaken by the Father, brings us to a second point of departure with Aristotle’s philosophy. Would, for example, Aristotle’s magnanimous man or his contemplative philosopher voluntarily relinquish a state of perfect bliss and give his life for his enemies? Would such an act be perceived as virtuous or foolish? Yet, this radical self-donation and self-surrender to the Father’s will are constitutive of the Christ event. Not only did He die for those who hated Him, but He offered (and still offers) His adversaries an unfathomable inheritance—i.e., He is willing to bestow upon them all that His Father has imparted to Him. As St. Paul says, perhaps one would die for a good person; however, Christ’s love exceedingly surpasses the possibility of dying for an upright person, which when said and done leaves us with little cognitive dissonance. Christ’s act, on the other hand, as far as the Greeks are concerned, is difficult understand as anything but the apex of foolishness.

Speaking more directly to the implications of Christ’s radical self-giving in relation to friendship, in John 15:12-16, Christ instructs his disciples to keep his commandments, and specifically highlights that they are to love one another as He self-sacrificially loved them. Furthermore, He says that his disciples are now called friends because they have been brought into the circle of intertrinitarian love (see John 15:5ff). Then in verse 16, in the exhortation to live fruitful lives, there is an implicit invitation to participate in Christ’s ongoing mission, a mission that is characterized by loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Here we see that in Christocentric friendship the vertical and the horizontal are inseparable with the latter flowing out of the former, and by implication, serve as a necessary conduit for the full actualization of the self. This Godward/manward nexus highlights the essentially communal and social nature of Christian philia—a philia that has been and continues to be transformed by divine agape. In other words, in Christocentric friendship, the “I” and the “thou” are seen neither as a threat to one another nor is the other instrumentalized (as is the case with some forms of modern and contemporary philosophy, e.g., Sartre). Rather, the relationship between the “I” and the “thou” is a dynamic, reciprocal encounter of love in which both are brought closer to the realization of the particular person that God desires them to be. Since both share a love for Christ and a common mission, they are aware of the fact that human love is a reflection of a more originary, perfect love shared among the members of the Trinity. This divine love, manifested to us in the Person of Jesus Christ, is itself not static, but dynamic because it is the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[3] Or to use Balthasar’s words, “the archetypal identity which we discover in creatures within a clear separation of persons who are held together by love, is a creaturely imago trinitatis, veiled and yet not wholly visible.”[4] As Balthasar gathers together the stones of his mosaic of friendship, the final form takes on a distinctively Chirstocentric and hence Trinitarian shape in which the love held out to us in the Christ event is a gift—a gift that involves no less than an invitation to participate in the love of the Trinity, and in so partaking, one naturally engages in a vertical expression of love that is friendship.

Notes
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 133 [Sachs translation].
[2] Augustine, Confessions, p. 200 [Boulding translation].
[3] Bonnici, Person to Person, p. 36.
[4] Balthasar, Unless You Become Like this Child, pp. 17-18.

Moreover, for Balthasar, the Bible is neither “a script, which the faithful must slavishly follow in order to secure their heavenly reward. Nor does it contain a fixed set of propositions or ‘fundamentals’ to be believed. And it is not the historical record of events now long past whose impact gradually attenuates with the passage of time. From Balthasar’s perspective, the Christological or spiritual sense of the Bible is neither static, nor time-bound. It mediates the resurrected Christ, who did not ascend into a timeless eternity, but is present in every time as a living event that is ‘always taking place in an ever-new “now”’ [TD2, 102; Balthasar’s emphasis] (p. 183). As one would expect, Balthasar rejected the idea presented by a number of modern biblical scholars and theologians that the goal of biblical hermeneutics is to find a “fixed, original meaning, which then is contrasted to a contemporary perspective [TD2,103]. It is not the transposition of one horizon to another that bothered him about this standard approach, for […] he believed such transpositions are necessary, but rather the presumption that the Bible is an inert object whose meaning can be laid hold of once for all” (p. 183). By this, Balthasar is in no way dismissing the importance of seeking to understand the original authorial intention. It is, however, to insist that the meaning of a text cannot be exhausted by human authorial intention. “Balthasar believed that at the time of a given biblical text’s composition and first reception, the Spirit was already at work opening up the text’s superabundant range of meanings” (p. 183). Relatedly, Balthasar was extremely critical of the idea that a text’s meaning can be summarized in brief formulas in which the summary is presented as articulating the text’s meaning more perspicuously than the text itself. “Once we step into that boat, […], we inevitably cut the mooring lines to the text and are sure to drift wherever our own culture’s winds happen to blow us. The standard approach, therefore, fails to appreciate the Bible’s surplus of meaning as it participates in the theodrama” (p. 183).

In light of the fact that Balthasar accepts multiple meanings in Scripture, does his position necessarily result in a kind of hermeneutical relativism? According to Dickens, (and I tend to agree), absolutely not. There are two constraints that limit the range of acceptable meanings: (1) authorial intent and (2) the regula fidei. Regarding the first, though Balthasar did not limit the meaning of a text to human authorial intent, he did view the human author’s (or redactor’s) intent as being a necessary but not sufficient condition for proper interpretation. “For Balthasar, trying to discern the human author’s intention is, in part, a straightforwardly historical-critical undertaking, involving the identification of the various conditions attending the creation and reception of the original text. Such investigations do not yield meanings, however, since […] tracing the genesis of a text [i.e., relying solely on the diachronic approach] is not the same as understanding it. But this research does limit the number of plausible authorial intentions” (p. 184). Secondly, part of understanding the human author’s intention involves what Balthasar calls seeking a “fellow-feeling” with the author. [I hear echoes of Gadamer here]. Because the goal of “sharing a fellow-feeling with the author is to apprehend more accurately the text’s subject matter, interpreters trying to cultivate this feeling must take their cues from the texts themselves. Putting the point differently, a reader must not allow his or her pre-understanding of love to control the way he or she interprets, say, John’s claims about God’s love for the world. Rather, the interpreter must let the evangelist’s (and redactor’s) uses of this term and its philological relatives guide the inquiry” (p. 184).

The second constraint that restricts the range of acceptable meanings is the regula fidei, which Balthasar understood as a “sense for the radiant integrity of the whole form of revelation as that is mediated by the Scriptures. This is a theological aesthetic sensibility, a capacity to hear when a proposed interpretation distorts the harmonies that Balthasar believed resonate throughout the Bible” (p. 184). Examples of such harmonies include the (consonant, yet in some instances paradoxical) relation between mercy and judgment, Christ’s humiliation and exaltation, the distance of the Father and the nearness of the Son, the dual nature of the one Person Jesus Christ and so on. “For Balthasar, the theological aesthetic fittingness of these relationships, and the beauty of the whole to which they belong, is objectively demonstrable to the eyes of faith. These demonstrations, however, are not based on a comprehensive overview of revelation in its finished totality, for such a vision would undermine the theodramatic quality of God’s dealings with creation. Rather, the rule of faith is a graced capacity to detect when one aspect of revelation’s dynamic relationships has been thrown out of balance by exaggerating or unduly minimizing its significance, or by omitting it altogether” (pp. 184-85).

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.

As Dickens points out, Balthasar was somewhat critical of diachronic readings of the Bible, though at times his own readings seem to depend on diachronic analyses. Balthasar’s burden it seems was not to establish the intelligibility of the Bible on the basis of certain similarities to non-biblical forms of life, but rather to emphasize the ways in which the biblical authors transformed what they had taken from non-biblical worldviews to communicate God’s purposes (p. 178). Moreover, Balthasar rejected the idea that the interpreter should “assume that all biblical concepts and images are so time-and culture-bound as to be unintelligible to the modern reader. He recognized that interpretation requires transposing horizons, but refused to countenance any comprehensive, programmatic summary thereof” (p. 178). For Balthasar, events like the Virgin birth are particular, historical events “that God has invested with universal theological significance. Each is a ‘supertemporal expression of the living revelation’ [TD2, 98]. In such cases, it is not the biblical author’s view of creation, or of God’s identity and will, that must be transformed, but the interpreter’s” (p. 178). In other words, Balthasar took seriously the Bible’s claim on one’s life and its ability via the Spirit to radically change a person. Scripture, in other words, is not simply another fascinating subject to study, but is a medium through which we hear a call to follow Christ and die to self. “The Holy Spirit enables such dying and rising in Christ by shattering the interpreter’s anthropological and cosmological horizons of interpretation [TD2, 91]. Hence another implication of Balthasar’s claim that the Bible is self-interpreting is that the Spirit leads the faithful to understand the Bible as God would have them do. The hermeneutics that constitutes theology’s task is therefore sustained by God’s own hermeneutics. Wanting to be known and loved by creation, God provides the conditions that make this possible. The most important of these are the incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This proves to the eyes of faith both that God is freely self-emptying trinitarian love, and that, as such, God communicates through creaturely forms without destroying them. Part of the Son’s self-emptying involves handing over to the Spirit the responsibility of interpreting the mutual love of Father and Son, which, according to Balthasar, the Spirit both is and exhibits [GL7, 255] (p. 178). In addition, according to Balthasar, the two most important ways in which the Spirit interprets the Son are “enabling the biblical authors to fashion a salvifically adequate image of the Spirit’s own vision of the event of Jesus Christ—and through him of the Father—and initiating the faithful into the triune love of God [GL1, 3; TD2, 106]. These two actions of the Holy Spirit imply each other. On Balthasar’s view, interpreting the Bible as God intends requires an in-spiration in the interpreter that analogously corresponds to the inspiration of the biblical authors” (pp. 178-79). In sum, Scripture is not merely an academic affair but lays a claim on the life of the interpreter. Thus, to interpret Scripture properly involves a noetic and existential transformation of the self that is accomplished by an active cooperation with and submission to Holy Spirit.[1]

Another dimension of Balthasar’s understanding of Scripture as self-interpreting is what we today speak of as intratextuality. The medievals used the term self-glossing to describe this same idea, viz. that the various parts of Scripture are interrelated and can be read as commenting and illumining each other in a polyphonic manner. For example, “Balthasar frequently used verses from the Gospel or epistles of John to solve interpretative riddles that he believed were evident in other texts. Sometimes the intratextual melodies that Balthasar heard were more complex, involving several different texts, from both Testaments. For instance, when discussing the identity of the Church, he used the Deutero-Pauline imagery of Christ being the Head of his Body, the Church, to interpret the ecclesiology of the Letter to the Hebrews, which itself, he maintained, provided a theological corrective to the Old Testament image of Israel as the people of God [GL7, 92]. By listening for such melodies, Balthasar did not mean necessarily to imply that a given biblical author or editor had read the texts with which Balthasar put him in conversation. Rather than making a historical claim about the likely reading list of various biblical authors, Balthasar was contending that contemporary interpreters are more likely to avoid interpretative pitfalls and dead ends if they are alert to the theological interaction among texts that the canon brings together. Otherwise, a certain note will be allowed to sound too loudly, distorting the symphony that he believed the Spirit performs by means of the whole Bible” (p. 181). Clearly, viewing the Bible as self-glossing presupposes its canonical integrity, which Balthasar of course firmly believed. Though the Bible was composed over hundreds of years by numerous authors and consists of diverse parts, Balthasar emphasized the received or final form of the canon as the standard for Christian life and thought (p. 178). Consequently, in interpretative endeavors one must keep the biblical drama in its entirety in mind when attempting to interpret any of its parts, just as one must keep the entire symphony in mind when analyzing one of its movements or smaller melodic fragments.

Notes
[1] Though I have not discussed this point here, for Balthasar, proper biblical interpretation is nourished through regular participation in the liturgy.

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.

“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].