Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 4

And now we reach the fourth and final post, which initially was supposed to be only two posts, but I got a little long winded along the way. We speak about the woman that changed and challenge much of what von Balthasar would write and reflect about the theology of the Cross. Her name is Adrienne von Speyr, she was a mystic and a convert to the Catholic faith, and he was her spiritual director.

Adrienne von Speyr: Doctor, Convert, Mystic, Theologian

No other person was more important to the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar than this remarkable woman, Adrienne von Speyr. He would say in 1965, years after her death, "her work and mine cannot be separated. They cannot be separated psychologically or theologically." His focus on the kenosis of Christ reaches is fullness in the descent into Hell on Holy Saturday, a descent that she experienced repeatedly.

She was born in 1902 in Switzerland from an old family of Basil. She married in '27 to an historian for seven years until his death. This event began a break between her and God as she found herself fallen out of faith and estranged from God for a long time. In fact, it was so difficult for her to believe that she found she could not even say the words of the Our Father, though she wanted to be a Christian.

Shortly after encountering Hans Urs von Balthasar she would convert to Catholicism, of which he remarked,

"While von Speyr had almost no previous experience of the Catholic Church, nevertheless the entire outline of Catholicism seemed to be hollowed out in her like the interior of a mold."

It was as if there was a space ready to be made for Catholicism inside of her. This may be attributable to the fact that she had mystical experiences as a young child and protestant. After her conversion it was these and newer mystical experiences that drove her to seek his direction in sorting it all out. It is it here that the intersection of these two lives bore amazing fruit for the Church.

In one year after her conversion, in the Spring of '41, she had an encounter with an angel who told her, "Now it will soon begin." She was asked for her consent to something that would require absolute trust and complete openness to what God would ask of her. And so began the first of those Passions ending with Holy Saturday's descent into hell, repeated year after year. For her, she did not receive so much instructions or visions, but rather she underwent the interior sufferings of Jesus in all their fullness and diversity. It was the internal pain of Christ on Good Friday and Holy Saturday that she experienced time and again: the isolation, the exile, the infernal separation from God. She would find herself in hell in unimaginable pains, enduring what Christ endured, and then express them to von Balthasar what she saw, heard and felt.

"Now it will soon begin." This was terrifying for her, but she saw this as an invitation to open herself to anything and everything that God might desire to give her so that she might carry out her mission within the Church. These mystical transports into hell become the centerpiece of her mission and the focus of Balthasar's theology. This openness was reconfirmed while at a funeral for a friend's son she felt that if she were to storm heaven with her prayers, she could raise this boy from the dead. In that moment, though, she made a decision to become entirely Marian: choosing for herself a life of renunciation and submitting in silence to whatever God's will for her should be.

"The theory of mysticism," von Balthasar relates, "which she formulated, culminates in this one single statement: Mysticism is a particular mission, service, to the Church, which can only be properly carried out in a continual and complete movement away from oneself in complete movement."

This was her Marian mission, her Marian contemplation of what her role was in the life and work of the Church. She loved to describe this as effacement - to disappear, to lose myself in this Marian contemplation of the Word. "He must increase, I must decrease." These words of John the Baptist form the core of mysticism, the whole mystery of Mary's fiat.

Mary, according to von Balthasar, was the only human being who remained "infinitely at the disposal of the infinite God." This form of disposability is about being ready for everything, even the Incarnation, even the Passion. All of that is caught up in her consent, her absolute 'yes' to the Father. This is unlimited openness.

"Coming from God, this 'Yes' that Mary makes is the highest possible grace. Coming from Mary, it is also the highest possible human achievement made possible by grace."

Mary's 'yes' to God would become expanded, extended, filled with the reality of the Church. Her 'yes' to God becomes the Church's - our - 'yes' to God. Adrienne's mission and her identity are interchangeable, which was already given expression in Mary, which was possible because her Son exemplified it. He is Son and so is Savior; he can only be Savior if he is Son. Her mystical transports become her identity, the purpose of her life and in this she discovers the origin of her being.

Adrienne von Speyr's mystical experiences would become the foreground of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. His Christology comes from her mission, and in this the centrality not only of the Cross, but of Holy Saturday, draws its form. Holy Saturday, the descent of the God-Man into hell, is the fullness of the self-emptying mission of the Incarnation. As Dr. Regis Martin expounded in a class lecture:

"This is the consuming focus of his theological interest. The Church has placed the descent right in the middle of the Creed, and rightly so, for this is the deepest kenosis (emptying) of Christ. The Christ of Holy Saturday becomes the consummate icon of what it means for God to be loved. This love is fully revealed in the depths of Sheol... through the final alienation of Christ from the Father."

The modern man wants to begin his search for meaning with himself, with self-consciousness. This is altogether the wrong course. The first awareness of the human person, the child only comes to know "I" after encountering the "Thou" in the smile of the mother. It is only in the encounter with the "other" that self-consciousness begins, and thus it begins only as gift, as something bestowed by another. The "initial formative event" in the mother's smile is thus one of love, and Dr. Martin observes that it implants "within the child forever the instinct that perhaps infinite love is possible. This original intuition abides".

What makes the proposition, "God is love" credible? That is, how are we to believe that being itself and love itself are co-extensive, co-terminating? Here we see the theological anthropology of God: what God has made himself to become for man. For von Balthasar, it is precisely the way, the style, the manner in which God reveals himself to man, the form in which God has become Love Incarnate: Jesus Christ. God demonstrates his being love in Jesus Christ. It is the manifestation of a person and not the validation of a principle. He is love because he freely and totally entered into the brokenness of man's condition. Only with the cross, with this descent into the hell of our human wretchedness, can we put our lives on the line for this truth.

"God is always on the side of the suffering. Indeed, his being all-powerful is manifested in the fact that he freely chose to suffer. In fact, it was proposed to him ('Come down from the cross, that we may believe'). But he stayed on the cross. On the cross he could say, as all can who suffer, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.' This has remained in human history the strongest argument. If the agony of the Cross had not happened, the truth that 'God is love' is left unfounded... Christ is the one who loved to the end. 'To the end' means accepting all of the consequences of man's sin, taking it all upon himself. And this happened exactly as the prophet Isaiah said, 'It was our infirmities that he bore'."

The cross and the descent are one single movement of divine love. "Uproot the cross and you cannot prove that He loves to the end" says Dr. Martin, because:

"for Balthasar, God is not God as a result of some triumphant display of power, nor does he prove himself syllogistically, but it is the drama, the story, that God is both being and love that carries conviction. Only carrying the weight of our consequences into the depths of hell does he reveal himself as being love."

Adrienne von Speyr imparted to von Balthasar through an intensely real way, the way of mystical experience, the inner dimensions of the love of God. Jesus, love incarnate, took upon himself, absorbed the whole of human misery with absolute inclusivity in a way that only the God-Man could do, and climbed the Cross as the beginning of his complete self-emptying love. The descent into hell, in the inferno of man's loudest "NO!" to God, in silent solidarity, Jesus expresses God's "Yes" to man. This is for von Balthasar and for von Speyr the heart of Christianity: "the ineffable poverty of the divine, incarnate, crucified love."

Everything in the Godhead is reduced to love, a love that fully discloses itself in the self-emptying movement from the Incarnation to the Cross and finally into the descent of Holy Saturday. This is how we know that "God is love", for now we see what God has made himself to become for man, for me, pro nobis.

Peace,

gomer

AMDG

"At the most fundamental level the dawn of self-awareness and freedom is not the realization that we are simply 'there,' even 'there with others;' it is rooted in the fact that we are gift and we are gifted, which presupposes that reality is gift." - von Balthasar