French Writer: Paul Claudel
As Hans Urs was now in Lyon, France in the Jesuit seminary, laboring under the dreariness of neo-scholasticism, he not only had the work of Eric Pryzwara and the mentoring of Henri de Lubac to occupy his thoughts, but also it was here that he discovered great French Catholic poets and writers that would turn his theological insight continuously towards the glory of the Lord. Three French writers in particular stood out to him: Paul Claudel, George Barnanos, and Charles Peguy. Balthasar was immersed in the world of the image, of lively imagination and beauty, which appealed to his heart far more than philosophy and the abstract. Encountering the literary approach to theology became his life, absorbing the great literature of half a dozen countries by this time, such as his mastering of Shakespeare in English.
Paul Claudel was arguably the most important figure, because they actually had a personal encounter, of which von Balthasar saw in him a formidable, immeasurable learning. But then again, so was Hans Urs. Authentically Catholic literature had not lost in the intervening years what neo-scholasticism had lost: the beauty of nature and its intimate relationship with the supernatural. What theology discarded, Balthasar recovered in literature.
What most impressed Balthasar with Claudel was the "Celebration of the Finite." This finite world is the immediate backdrop and horizon for the whole drama between God and man. This is the setting, the theater, the "rhapsodic context" as Dr. Regis Martin- a professor of mine at Franciscan University who taught our Texts of von Balthasar class- put it, of the faith. Claudel had an immensely Catholic heart and an astounding ability to take everything in and see it all in the mantel of eternity, which illumines every line of his works.
Regarding Claudel, von Balthasar wrote:
"The question of the horizon can only be solved in God and Claudel understood this more than anyone else. Furthermore, Claudel knows that into this solution through all death, all mortality, all disaster, the unlimited fullness of the earth must enter. This double knowledge is decisive for his Catholicism. No worldly value may be despised out of pride or resentment. Every good is necessar for the Catholic person. He cannot all himself the smallest 'no' when he stands before the worldly good."
This vision of the world is sacramental, incarnational. Every good comes from God, He alone is its author, and it is through the finite that we encounter the Infinite God who freely chose to enter into this finite horizon of human existence, of nature. That is why Cardinal Newman could say, "Nature is a parable". Claudel would say that "we know that the world is, in effect, a text and that it speaks to us humbly and joyously; of its own emptiness and also of the presence of Someone else." The world is not meaningless, for even in its own emptiness it speaks of joy and wonder, "but ultimately" says Dr. Martin, "Nature speaks God's name."
This is an explicitly French literary contribution. These seminal writers poured out an incarnational, sacramental worldview combined with their own personal passion and lucidity, a rare but fertile combination. Soon after Hans Urs von Balthasar was ordained a priest and sent to Basil, Switzerland, a place where immensely important pastoral work was needed and where Catholicism was still illegal to practice in public and the Jesuits were barely tolerable. This was also during the rise of that dark barbarism, the Nazi movement, throughout central Europe. Amazingly, during this time there is a cultural rebirth of Catholicism within Switzerland as they themselves engage is a ressourcement of their own culture and values, surrounded as they were by Nazi barbarism.
Claudel's influence can be seen even in these times. Since public displays of Catholicism were illegal, von Balthasar would hold lectures and conferences under a secular pretext. While in seminary and after, he would spend years perfecting his translations into German of these great French Catholic writers, one of particular importance was "The Satin Slipper" by Claudel. In 1943, in the Zurich Playhouse, Balthasar stage the premiere of "The Satin Slipper", working to evangelize through culture because the front door to faith was closed. More plays would follow, such as Bernanos' play, "The Carmelites", which was about the Carmelite nuns that were murdered in the French Revolution in 1789.
It was through these cultural exchanges in a time of cultural upheaval that Hans Urs von Balthasar became known as a convert maker. He was most successful with the people who occupied the Humanities departments and gained renown as a spiritual director.
Karl Rahner: Rejection of Transcendental Thomism by Balthasar
With the figure of Maurice Blondel and his theology of immanence at the end of the 19 century, we find that there are two distinct lines of development of this theological impulse. The first follows Eric Pryzwara and is completed by Hans Urs von Balthasar. The second goes to a Belgian theologian, Joseph Marechal, and his great pupil who will rise to make this movment more explicit, Karl Rahner.
Transcendental Thomism, to be brief, is a halfway house between the purity of the thought and strict realism of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the idealism of Immanuel Kant's subjectivity. The Transcendental Thomists are less interested in the real, in being, but rather in the processes of consciousness itself, the mind, the thinking subject in its inner movement. This theology rooted God's immanence in the operations of the spirit - intellection and will- and thus they focused on consciousness. A key Rahnerian concept is the Vorgriff, the pre-apprehension of God, of Being, before He reveals Himself, through acts of understanding and willing.
Balthasar rejects this subjective turn, especially the vorgriff of Rahner. From Blondel, they both share an understanding that there is in the human person and in Nature itself the desire for God, for the supernatural, for grace, which will bring completeness. Nature cannot complete itself. But for Rahner, what and how God completes us is pre-apprehended before we even encounter Him, saying basically that I know my lack and that is what God will come and fulfill. For Balthasar, this vorgriff rejects divine freedom and especially the shock of Christ's coming into the world. God does not "fill in the gaps", as Dr. Martin put it, for we cannot deduce Christ from human need. Grace, God, Jesus, the supernatural, is entirely gift. Balthasar sees Rahner's theology missing this essential point.
That is why it is the moment of Christology that separates von Balthasar from Rahner. Rahner is accused of trying to escape the scandalous reality of the Cross. Faith in Jesus is never straight forward, as if He "is the guy who answers my questions and fulfills my needs", but rather the form of Jesus Christ is always "a revelation of my untruth, my sin" according to Dr. Matin. In fact, Jesus reveals a shameful capacity of the human person to chose self-deceit and self-enslavement, so not every act of the spirit is a transcendental encounter with God.
"The framework of God's message to man in Christ cannot be tied to the world in general nor to man in particular. God's message is theological, or better, theo-pragmatic. It is the act of God upon man, for and on behalf of man, and only then to man and in man. Only then can we say it is credible in love." (Love Alone is Credible)
Thus the remedy for Transcendental Thomism is the way of divine love, of revelation. What Balthasar is proposing is that God's divine drama can only finally be understood by God himself and so he wants to reject any understanding of that plan that would reduce it to the proportions of created reality (cosmos, the world, or created). As Dr. Martin so elegantly put it in class, "When man merges with God, it cannot be that God has been swindled!"
Jesus does not just come to us like the much anticipated missing piece to the puzzle that is my life, but in the shock of his coming, he reveals far more about myself than I was hoping to know. If Rahner's Christ is the answer to all human questions, than Hans Urs von Balthasar's Christ remains a question mark in the face of all human answers and all attempts to achieve some sort of metaphysical closure. Transcendental Thomism appreciates the immanence of God, but makes this Presence too automatic, too predictable. God provides exactly what the human question demanded, already inscribed upon my consciousness.
Balthasar continually points to revelation as the "self-authenticating glory of God's gift of love" to the world, and Rahner and the rest would have seen the Word in advance, which would destroy revelation itself. Any understanding of revelation whose point of departure is other than God Himself is flat out wrong, bringing down the whole order of the supernatural. Only God can validate God, and the scriptures are filled with precisely this self-ratifying, "self-authenticating" affirmation. This is way "the Incarnation is the historical manifestation of the self-emptying of the eternal self-interpretation of the Father in the Son."
Thus the 20th century was divided up between these two giants of von Balthasar and Karl Rahner. In his book, The Moment of Christian Witness, Balthasar makes it clear for the first time that he and Rahner have parted ways. In the words of Dr. Regis Martin in our class, this book "is the most sharply polemical of all his works. He names names and take Rahner by the throat; and not only Rahner but the whole school of Rahner." In that book his points of objection are threefold: Rahner reduces the love of God to mere philanthropy, he seems to reject the notion of the hiddenness of grace, and holds to the idea that man is somehow endowed with, possessed of, a natural aptitude for a transcendental revelation that comes to man through the structures of his own dynamism, somehow knowing the story that God has yet to tell about salvation.
To finish here with the critique of Rahner and his school, the overarching criticism against Rahner is that when you confront the majesty of Christ's power and love, you cannot appeal to some theological a priori and say, "Yes, this is how it will happen." Rather, it must happen as an event whose logic is entirely internal to itself and is a manifestation of freedom. "No outer or external condition" according to Dr. Martin's summation, "can dictate in advance the structure and movement of this grace. It determines its own unfolding because it carries its own justification on every line, every page."
Conclusion
From the celebration of all things finite of Paul Claudel to the rejection of the Rahnerian school of Transcendental Thomism, Hans Urs von Balthasar's life and work remains shaped by these key figures. The third and final post will be on the famous Protestant theologian and personal friend to Balthasar, Karl Barth, and the mystic convert to Catholicism and single most influential person in his life and work, Adrienne von Speyr.
Peace,
gomer
AMDG
"It is the perception of faith of the self-authenticating glory of God's utterly free gift of love." - Love Alone is Credible, von Balthasar
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