So much of the life and thought of Hans Urs may be said to have been enriched by a series of encounters with important figures of 20th century Christianity. I'm going to explain the fallout from these friendships and how they helped give distinctive shape to his theological vision.
The von Balthasar Family: Child-like Faith
The roots of his family go back before the Reformation. He was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 1905. Lucerne is a place that is practically synonymous with Catholicism in Switzerland, for it was the center of cultural resistance of the Reformation. It was an outpost of Catholic Christendom. It is today still filled with the world of Baroque Catholicism. Hans Urs von Balthasar was steeped in this world, this Catholicism was in his bones. His family represents the old patrician stock, providing men of rank, prestige and distinction. They were pretty cosmopolitan and therefore fluency of the various languages, including English, as a mainstay. He absorbed that environment entirely. It was here that his mother's simple and childlike faith, undisturbed by doubt, would remain with him for his entire life.
The encounter with music in his childhood would give shape and form to his theological aesthetics. He was gifted with a perfect pitch and had given away all of his Mozart records because he had memorized them all and could replay each note, each composition in his own mind. He was a roommate for a time with Rudolph Allers, who was a medical doctor, theologian and translator. In the evenings they would play an entire composition together. The proportion, harmony, and the graced notes always stayed with him. For many, the Word became music before it became flesh, the "song that lies at the base of all that is made" (Ratzinger).
An interesting note: when von Balthasar left the world to enter the Jesuits, he gave up all of his music as a sacrificial offering. This is pretty similar to what Gerard Manley Hopkins did when he entered the Jesuits, giving up his poetry, until his superior asked for a poem to commemorate a tragic event when a boat, the Deutschland, sunk.
"Sawdust Thomism" in the Jesuit seminary
For Hans Urs von Balthasar, seminary was not easy. The curriculum of the day consisted of neo-scholasticism, that is, the philosophical and theological approach of Saint Thomas Aquinas as interpreted by later followers, such as Suarez and Fr. Reginald Garague-Lagrange (who was the neo-scholastic superstar of the day). Balthasar cringed under the "sawdust Thomism" of the neo-scholasticism that dominated all of Catholic thought until the middle of the 20 Century, For him it was a "grim struggle with the deariness of theology" for they had removed the glory of revelation and reduced it to a series of syllogisms. In this desert came his first great mentor: Eric Pryzwara.
Neo-scholasticism tended to produced what many would end up calling a "separated theology" which introduced an extrinsic relationship between grace and nature. Extrinsicism put forward a pure human nature, and because it was self-contained, was endowed and prescribed with a structure and finality entirely immanent to itself. The ultimate end - telos - of the person was hermetically sealed within this nature and therefore remained neutral and even indifferent to grace, for grace was understood as a quality wholly outside this world- extrinsic- and then attached to this human nature.
In the neo-scholastic mind grace never quite reached the depths of the created spirit, created nature. It always remained on the outside, almost accidental to the life of man, in a sort of parallel line where the two are moving in the same direction, but never intersect. It is a two-leveled universe where grace and nature never really have anything to do with one another, which leads one to question or doubt why a man would need grace if he is already in possession of a pure human nature.
Opposition to Neo-Scholasticism
In the 1890's a man named Maurice Blondel was one of the greatest adversaries of this neo-scholastic extrinsicism. His attack on it was in his book Action, which was to try and demonstrate the inner human desire (intrinsic) for the supernatural life. Even after the Fall we never lose the desire for God and that to be human means to be possessed by this desire for God. This is Blondel's method of immanence, inspired by Saint Augustine's landmark quote: "You have made us for Yourself and so our hearts are restless until they rest in You." Blondel labored to show that there is a real correspondence between human nature and the whole realm of the supernatural, and that this nature will never be satisfied short of union with God, and His revelation gives us communion with Him.
Blondel's method of immanence became a movement that revealed the dynamism and intensity between revelation and reason, between human experience and divine faith, but done so in a way that does not disturb the difference. Grace is not nature and nature is not grace, but only grace can complete nature. Grace is a pure gift from God freely given in order to save man, which is the only thing that will bring happiness to the human person.
From Maurice Blondel's immanence theology came two different lines of development within theology. On the one side, you have Joseph Marechal, a Belgian theologian, and his great pupil who will make this movement more explicit, which is Karl Rahner. The other line of development would be taken up by Pryzwara and deepened further by his student, Hans Urs von Balthasar.
Eric Pryzwara and the Analogy of Being
Eric Pryzwara (1889 - 1972) became a seminal figure in the life of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He introduced him to the centerpiece of theology, the analogy of being, was a disciple of the famous Anglican convert, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and saw mysticism in the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Pryzwara was one of the brightest minds that Balthasar would ever meet, eventually being the source of why Balthasar and Rahner would break with one another.
Pryzwara was decisive in his life and thought for through him Balthasar would have a set of philosophical presuppositions that enabled him to surpass the "sawdust Thomism". It was Eric Pryzwara whose great work was to rehabilitate, re-pristinate the ancient doctrine of the analogy of being, which would bring the neo-scholastic model to an end in the 20 Century. The analogy of being shows the paradoxical structure of existence: that I am is never reducible to what I am. Essence is not existence, which is always held in sufferance. My being (act-of-existing) is participatory. "Grace is nature's finality" for nature does not have its own finality. Extrinsicism holds that nature has its own finality in itself, which produces alienation from the supernatural and produces this "separated theology".
My being is wholly derivative, for I am not identical to existence; essence is not existence. The analogy of being shows this real correspondance between God and man in the participatory act of existence and is a real communion. This is the human point of departure that Pryzwara gave to von Balthasar and that is why his later theology reflects the idea that this world was never "purely natural", but is completed in the supernatural. Christianity, then, is a totalizing event in the encounter with Jesus, where at that is true, good and beautiful is caught up in him.
Henri de Lubac and the Return to the Sources
Henri de Lubac opened up vistas of possibilities of theology to von Balthasar while he endured the "sawdust Thomism" of the seminary. De Lubac opened up for him the Fathers of the Church in the attempt to resource the past and recover it. It was during this time that the whole corpus of Augustine was devoured by von Balthasar, as well as Orien, Maximus the Confessor and the "Father of Western Theology", Irenaeus.
Henri de Lubac was key in the ressourcement movement to turn back to the great saint-theologians of the past and mine these sources for vitality in the Christian faith. In de Lubac's book The Mystery of the Supernatural he caused great controversy in the 40's concerning the nature-grace question, attacking the neo-scholastic theory, by returning to the source of Saint Thomas' unique contribution to theology and philosophy.
De Lubac had struggled with neo-scholasticism for years, which he described as "rear-guard Suarezianism." The scholastic worldview of Spanish Jesuit Francesco Suarez of the 16-17 century had produced a closed system that supposedly explained everything. Though Suarez traces much of this thought to Aquinas, he departed in significant ways from him, such as the distinction between essence and existence. As de Lubac resisted the whole Suarezian closed system, he became known as a "pure Thomist" and was put out by the Jesuits, which were Suarezian. De Lubac had to reject this, because for him, nature cannot be fully natural without grace. It is not self-contained.
"It is the end, the vision of God, that is primordial and summons up the means... We cannot envisage nature in its concrete reality that existed before it had its finality imprinted upon it... The supernatural comes first in the order of intention. The whole initiative is and will always be God's."(The Mystery of the Supernatural, 123)
God gives us nature to anticipate grace. This is why the neo-scholastics had to be resisted, because they posited a finality of the created order that is wholly foreign from God. This gives permission to the world to be re-founded on wholly secularist grounds. Henri de Lubac saw that there "was a sort of unconscious conspiracy between the movement which led to secularism and a certain theology which had less to say to people of faith." Theologians left a void between God and the world, which man's response was to fill with secularism. "It put dogma beyond thought and reason and secondly it placed the supernatural world outside the world of nature." Neo-scholasticism, to end this point, committed the fault on the basis of their false intention to try and maintain nature and reason but doing so without allowing grace and the supernatural to penetrate nature and reason. It was a two-story house with no staircase!
In returning to the sources, especially the Fathers of the Church, Henri de Lubac would positively influence the theology and life of Hans Urs von Balthasar. His studies of Augustine and the rest revealed a beauty in theology that rested up the self-disclosing glory of God in His revelation, especially in His definitive self-communication to the world in the Incarnation. The Fathers and Aquinas' analogy of being would combine with his childlike faith to produce a powerful theologian in the Church during the 20 century with unique contributions that are truly unrivaled.
In the next and last post I will talk about the two Karls (Rahner and Barth), as well as French Catholic writer Paul Claudel and finally, the mystic and personal friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar who definitively shaped all of this theology, Adrienne von Speyr.
Peace,
gomer
AMDG
"God is so fully alive that He can afford to be dead."
-von Balthasar
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