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

Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 3

So let us recap the posts so far: first, we talked about how growing up in Lucerne, Switzerland with the patrician and cosmopolitan von Balthasar family wedded Catholicism to his very bones. Then we treated the influence in his seminary days of Eric Pryzwara and Henri de Lubac, rescuing him from the extrinsicism of that dreary "sawdust Thomism" of the Suarezian neo-scholasticism of his day. Then in the next post we talked about the French literary tradition within Catholicism and how their passion and lucidity, especially of Paul Claudel, affected his approach to God's self-disclosure. And we spoke of the rejection of the Rahnerian school of Transcendental Thomism because the concept of vorgriff destroyed the need for revelation.

Now we turn to one of the most positive and direct contributors to the life and work of Hans Urs von Balthasar: the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth (pronounced "Bart") and the analogy of faith. Next post (and last!) will be about Adrienne von Speyr. Karl just took up so much space!

Karl Barth and the Analogy of Faith

Karl Barth is one of the most important theologians in the modern history of Protestantism. His goal was to throw off of Christian faith the dead weight of Liberal Protestantism that reduced Jesus to a moral teacher and wise man, rather than the Savior and Redeemer that we all desperately need. In a sense you could say that he was engaged in his own ressourcement of Martin Luther, understanding anew the judgment of God against the hopeless world made clear in his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Though Balthasar was known as a convert maker, Barth would be the one that got away. Here was Protestantism in its most challenging and most critical phase, and the two would become both great friends and fierce adversaries.

First and foremost, Karl Barth rejected wholly the concept of the analogy of being, which was the set of philosophical presuppositions that Balthasar held to from his mentor, Pryzwara. Now, when I say "rejected" I mean this is the strongest possible way. Barth saw the analogy of being as a doctrine of the Anti-Christ, pure and simple, and as long as the Catholic Church upheld this analogy of being, then the Church is in league with the devil. This wholesale rejection would forever keep Barth out of the Catholic Church.

For Balthasar, the analogy of being remains the only answer without which no possibility in Christian thought could even begin. The reason it is possible for us to think and feel as Christians is precisely our recourse to the analogy of being, and this is the greatest difference between Catholic and Protestant theologies. The analogy of being allows one to navigate the tension between the extreme polarities of, on the one hand, complete and total identity of everything and the other extreme of complete contradiction in which nothing is the same. Applied to God, we have the identity of God and the world on one side and on the other is that complete "dialectic of opposition" between God and the world, finding in the world only evil and depravity. One elevates the transcendence of God that it robs the world of any meaning or reality, and the other is so overwhelmed by God's presence that either God absorbs the world (theopanism) or the world absorbs God (pantheism).

Barthian opposition of God to the world is appealing in its simplicity, but Balthasar finds it unsatisfactory, for he said, "That posture is finally impossible to sustain." It is impossible because you are blotting out all hope if God stands in absolute judgment against the world. There must be a common ground between God and man - being - otherwise God could not judge the world, for the world would find the divine judgment unintelligible. "Only the analogy of being" says Hans Urs, "is the contradiction of sin understood. Otherwise creation and sin would collapse together into the same thing." Just by being a living thing, in the Barthian vision, I am a condemned thing. Balthasar continues:

"Every real contra presupposes a constantly to be understood relationship, and thus at least a minimal community in order to be really a contra and not a totally unrelated Other. Only on the basis of an analogy is sin possible."

Dr. Regis Martin, commenting in his lectures about this situation, says that it is "only on the basis of the analogy of being that grace is possible. Covenant completes creation, God completes man in Jesus Christ." He continues that "in the absence of this analogy (of being), sin is not possible because creation becomes that sin. Virtue, grace, these things are only possible in an analogical universe." In other words, there has to be a real relationship between God and man for man to even sin against that relationship. For God to stand in opposition to man, to the world, there has to first be a correspondance between the two that this opposition is rooted in. God created man and all of nature to be completed in Him. God is existence, we share in that existence. Our being is solely participatory in the existence of God. This is the analogy of being that restrains the poles of absolute identification and absolute contradiction.

But all is not lost between the two geniuses! Balthasar seeks out something they can both agree upon, and this agreement becomes the mold of the rest of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological writings: the analogy of faith centered on the person of Jesus Christ. Through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God himself creates a community between himself and the world he made. We can speak of this community as a saving space of grace and salvation. To the extent to which we believe this we are able to achieve this relationship with God himself. Both Protestants and Catholics believe that with my identification in Christ, something new enters the world, a distinct and ontological difference occurs in Christ. This is the analogy of faith.

For Balthasar, in the concrete order of salvation the analogy of faith comes to represent the final form of the relationship between God and humanity, and it is this relationship that God has intended from the beginning for humanity. This is due probably to the influence of Henri de Lubac's understanding of the paradox of the spiritual creature who is "ordained beyond itself by the innermost reality of its nature to a goal that is unreachable by that nature, that can only be given by a gift of grace." As Dr. Martin expressed it: "Hence is the paradox: I hunger for a food that I cannot bake. I aspire to the heaven that I cannot attain."

This goal that is at the core of my humanity cannot be attained by my humanity alone, but rather it is through grace alone that all can be attained. It is in relationship to Jesus Christ that all things are to be judged. He is the line of horizon between the temporal and the eternal, between nature and grace. Jesus sets the standard, or rather, he is the standard, the benchmark. But for Hans Urs and not for Karl, the presuppositions of the whole natural order remain in tact, and this is where the two part company.

Both grace and nature find their ultimate meaning in Christ while at the same time they remain themselves, they do not collapse into one another. There is a place for natural theology, for philosophy, for nature. Reason can accomplish great things for God and even sin cannot and does not completely displace God in nature and in the human heart. Even as sin contradicts and corrupts the relationship between God and man, it is not wholly thrown away. The doctrine of total depravity is a hopeless starting point. C.S. Lewis rejected total depravity because he thought that if the individual person was completely depraved then no one would ever accept the Good News because they would not think it was good, in any way! Nature is made for grace and when it fell from grace it was not totally obliterated.

There is room in the analogy of faith for Balthasar's analogy of being, but he puts that conversation on hold for the time being in order to honestly engage Barth in his project, which is the Christocentric revolution in theology. What each one sought to do was "to make Christ the center towards which all things tend" (Pascal). Christ himself becomes the object of all analogical predications, the still point of the turning universe. In the analogy of faith Christ still remains utterly different while at the same time we are wholly united to Christ and as such Christ identifies with everything and everyone. In him all things are united, while still allowed to remain itself. What these two men wanted in their respective theologies to do was to make the center of gravity, the most profound point of unity, is Jesus Christ.

"Not for a single moment can theology forget its roots from which all of its nourishments are drawn. Adoration in which we see in faith the heavens opened and obedience in living which frees us in understanding the truth." (Balthasar, Explorations in Theology)

Barth led von Balthasar into this Christocentric revolution in Catholic theology, which can be traced back to Barth's Church Dogmatics. There are three themes in this Christocentric revolution of the analogy of faith. First, all theology must begin with Jesus, the relation between God and man, as "the historical self-emptying of the eternal self-interpretation of the Father in the Son." Jesus is the "form of all forms" Who am I and what I must do is contained in Christ's sacred humanity, for in him the whole meaning of Adam is completed.

Secondly, Christology is at the center of Christianity and the cross is at the center of Christology. The life of the God-Man culminates in the Paschal Mystery of his suffering, death and Resurrection. Jesus always remains in obedience to the Father. The Father always comes first, and so it is Jesus who climbs the cross to overcome all alienation.

Third and finally, the theology of history has Christ as the central protagonist. Christ is the concrete expression of that universality of being and meaning which belongs to God by virtue of his being god. In his humanness, all universality and the particularity are gathered up and given weight - he saves everything in the ambit of his sacred humanity. And as God, he is the fullness of meaning. Here is Dr. Martin made this illuminating contribution to the Christological revolution of Balthasar. He said that

"Jesus is unable to be assumed under a larger rubic. All things are measured in relation to him and paradoxically, in him are absolute exclusivity and absolute inclusivity."

Thus in the work of Karl Barth on the Christocentric revolution of Protestant theology, Balthasar, his friend and adversary, were able to build the analogy of faith, seeing in Jesus the center point of all mediation with God. However, much to Hans Urs von Balthasar's great sadness at the end of his life, this project was not fully undertaken in the Catholic Church. There are several reasons for this that Dr. Regis Martin posits.

First, there were those theologians who found their lives and work adverse to this Christocentrism because they were too enamored with Kantian idealism. For these Transcendental Thomists, it was the turn to subjectivity that was the approach, the point of departure. Balthasar saw this as bad, for the real point should always be Christ at the center.

Second, there is the evolutionary progress in theology of Teilhard de Chardin. He swept up the thought of Catholicism after the Council with this theology, though it was presented not under theological prose, but as poetry. He was a faithful son of the Church and a friend to de Lubac, but this theology actually led people away from the Church, losing their faith, and preventing this revolution from bearing its fruit.

Third, we have Marxism, or rather, we have the imposition of ideological faith. Christ is lost, his image is exchanged for Che or Castro. Theologians became ideologues and co-opted Christ for their ideologies, not allowing Christ to be the center.

Fourth and finally, there was a tremendous loss of energy after the Council. Much of the energy was shifted from renewal to restructuring, that is, according to Martin, there was "administrative reform and not renewing her heart, not focusing on the mysteries of the faith. This drew people away from the Church."

But the analogy of faith represents for von Balthasar the pro nobis character of our Lord at the heart of the Creed.

"It was for us that the Son came down from heaven, for us that he was crucified, died and was buried. And this means not only for our benefit but in our place, taking over what is our due. If this is watered down, then the fundamental tenant of the New Testament disappears, and it looks as if God is always reconciled, as if sin is always forgiving... Then the cross would just be a symbol, effecting nothing. There would no longer be the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. ...Without noticing it we have beocme like the men of the Enlightenment, acknowledging his countenance but ignoring his anger towards sin. We run the risk of loosing sight of the integrity of that image [of the severely blood crucifix] and we view it as some Medieval exaggeration, and costly grace becomes a cheap price."

We can say that all of Balthasar's theologizing turns to this event of the Cross, and in response to this we live between the two poles of Adoration and Obedience, of Saint John the Apostle and Saint Ignatius of Loyola, of the contemplative and the active life.

"The life of Jesus was at first a life of teaching. But finally it became a life of suffering unto death. The blazing absolute character of the teaching that shine in everything he said can only be understood if the whole movement of his life is seen as a movement toward the cross; sot that the words and deeds are validated by the passion, which explains everything if one interprets the passion as a subsequent catastrophe then every word, not excluding the Sermon on the Mount, becomes unintelligible. The intelligible content, the Logos of teh teaching and everything he did, can only be read in the light of his Hour, the Hour he waited for, the baptism he longed for, the Hour of the Father, of glory." (Love Alone is Credible)

Christocentrism focuses us on Jesus and his cross. Our response to the moment of Jesus' full self-disclosure that "God is love" in the mysteries of Good Friday and Holy Saturday is adoration and obedience.

Next post we will - finally! - finish with the influences of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar with the most important one of all, Adrienne von Speyr.

Peace,

gomer

AMDG

“God is not a sealed fortress to be attacked and seized by our engines of war: ascetic practices, meditative techniques, but rather God is a house of open doors through which one can enter…” - von Balthasar

Influences on Hans Urs von Balthasar Theology, part 1

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