Despite the sub-title, this substantial work is essentially a study of the theological writing of the Swiss physician and devout Catholic laywoman Adrienne von Speyr. The references to Balthasar and Aquinas are, however, by no means superfluous in the book's titling. Its author, a Privatdozent in the University of Fribourg, recognizes the symbiotic relation between Adrienne's work and that of her countryman, the dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar who was her theological instructor, spiritual director, stenographer, editor and interpreter. Those are five very different roles which point up the hazards of establishing the direction of influence between them on any given matter, yet at the same time strongly indicate the likelihood of their possessing a common mind. As to Thomas Aquinas, he enters the picture not only because Schumacher taker him to be the classical Latin theologian whose function as a touchstone of probity in doctrine has been asserted by modern popes, from Leo XIII to John Paul II. Probably of greater consequence for the future (to judge by the case of Jorge Bergoglio, the first bishop of Rome to have had, in effect, an exclusively post-Conciliar theological formation), Aquinas is a desirable dialogue-partner for a further reason: the tradition of Thomist thought is notably strong on metaphysical clarity, a quality in which the theological idiom of von Speyr, with its predominantly imagistic rather than conceptual modus operandi, might be considered especially weak.
Schumacher's focus is on how Adrienne views theological anthropology in its connexion with the theology of the Holy Trinity. Her aim is to convince Thomists that they have something to learn here about how human freedom enters into communion with the divine Three-in-One who live out their unity by way of mutual surrender. Her manner is confident so far as the worthwhileness of Adrienne's work is concerned, even if she seems hesitant to affirm her mystical credentials rather than simply the spiritual depth of her commentaries on Scripture, though this is less so as the book proceeds, when we start to hear in so many words of ‘the mystic of Basel’. Her approach is not only expository but critical, especially in regard to Adrienne's theology of the Atonement but also on the rhetorical excesses which mar her writing about the inter-relations of the divine Persons, above all in the moment of the Cross. Her overall conclusion, however, is that Adrienne (and by implication Balthasar) passes with flying colours the tests to which they have been submitted. This is so for critics who are liberal/radical writers with Feminist or Gay agendas (Beattie, Loughlin – both British, one notes in passing, an interesting sidelight on the theological culture of modern English Catholicism), and, with adjustments, can do the same for those from the Thomist school (De Margerie, Durand, Blankenhorn: Pitstick evidently strikes Schumacher as too enragée to be convertible).
The two opening Chapters are largely by way of preamble, inviting the reader to consider the notion of Trinitarian analogies as well as the more foundational issue of faith itself, both as content and as act. They introduce us to (Chapter 1) the Trinitarian processions as archetypal for what in the world can genuinely count as love in the mode of self-surrender, and (Chapter 2) the self-surrendering of the Son in his divine nature, and his correlative obedience in his human nature, which so conspire in revealing the Father to us that they not only mediate the content of revelation but also model the act of faith which is our appropriate response – by which criterion Adrienne's life could be construed as exemplary indeed. Four succeeding chapters (3 to 6) explore a quartet of anthropological ‘tensions’ or examples of difference – nature and grace, body and soul, individual and community, man and woman. Once again, they find in the notion of surrender – the German word, Hingabe, is richer than the English in its connotations of not only self-renunciation but generous outflow – the key to how a unity-in-difference comparable to that of the Holy Trinity can be achieved. Subtly worked out for each theme, it is always through graced participation in Christ's transforming action as he relates the redeemed to the Father and the Holy Spirit. The differences between the divine Persons in the service of their consubstantiality, are, for Adrienne – and Schumacher finds in this the one utterly certain element in her putative legacy to Balthasar – continuously relevant to the resolution of the various ‘tensions’ concerned. The sympathetic reader is struck by the ingenuity and profundity whereby Adrienne von Speyr winkles out from the historic revelation what Balthasar terms in the Epilogue to his Trilogy (aesthetics, dramatics, logic) ‘traces and images of the intra-divine difference’ that issue from God's own quite gratuitous self-revelation. Such traces are not deducible, then, ‘from below’, moving analogically from worldly being to its Origin, yet they can plausibly be presented ‘katalogically’, when seen ‘from above’.
But what of the unsympathetic reader of this material? Schumacher seeks to reassure those who do not care for the ‘penal substitution’ element in the von Speyrian-Balthasarian theology of the Atonement by the drastic surgery of amputation. But within a multifaceted theology of the redemption such as theirs, it has a proper – albeit not super-ordinate – place. It is a rendering of the ancient theology of Christ's death as sacrifice which, seen against the background of the sin-offerings and guilt-offerings of the Hebrew Bible, means precisely the substitution of a precious victim for the offerer's self. The entirety of Chapter 7, ‘A Critical Appraisal’, is given over to the more distinctively Thomist criticisms, concerned as these are with issues of ontology: divine immutability, the inter-relation of the divine and human natures in Christ, and the possibility of extending to the entire divine Trinity some version or versions of the kenosis ascribed to the Son in the celebrated Philippians hymn. Schumacher's judicious discussion prepares the way for her ‘General Conclusion’. Here she calls for the further contextualising of Adrienne von Speyr's ‘Trinitarian anthropology’ in the wider tradition (a work begun by Balthasar but by no means completed by him). Not at the expense, however, of losing the powerful language with which Adrienne re-expressed the classical themes of consubstantiality and circumincession and the vocation of human beings to be ‘intimately associated with the processions of the Divine Persons’ and thus come to ‘share in the bliss of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity’. Words not of von Speyr but of Pius XII.
