Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar are the two most significant figures of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology. They were, roughly speaking, contemporaries. Both joined the Jesuits, and at one time they were collaborators, but they followed different paths, working in different contexts (Rahner had a much more traditional life as a Jesuit and an academic theologian than did Balthasar), and, as we shall see, doing theology in rather different ways. It has become customary to see Rahner and Balthasar as representing two roads down which Roman Catholic theology can go. Each had periods in the ascendancy and periods when they were, one might say, in the doghouse, and it is probably still too soon to say which will be taken as the more important thinker in the long run.

An interesting question to ask is whether Rahner and Balthasar ought to be construed as fundamentally opposed – whether the two roads go in genuinely different directions – or whether instead they can be seen as developing complementary kinds of theology. The answer, it seems, depends very much on whom one asks: Balthasar scholars usually, but not necessarily always, think there is a clear and important opposition; Rahner scholars are more likely than not to opt for complementarity.

ART AS RELATIVE SINGULARITY

Hans Urs von Balthasar liked to claim from time to time that he was really a Germanist rather than a theologian. As peculiar as that claim might sound to those who know him from his great theological trilogy, his patristic monographs, or even his work in the 1980s on the Vatican's International Theological Commission, his assertion certainly holds true of his professional training before he entered the Society of Jesus in 1929, when he was awarded a doctorate in Germanistik at the University of Zurich. But it is not as if his entrance in the Jesuit Order then meant he had abandoned literary studies for 'pure' theology. Indeed, it will be the burden of this chapter to show that his later work as a theologian is thoroughly intertwined with his earlier work in literary appreciation, criticism, and theory. Some might even argue that Balthasar's theology is so enmeshed with his literary sensibility that it undermines, confuses, or even vitiates that theology. The astute scholar, however, will find that the richness of Balthasar's theology is due, at least in part, to his literary training and sensibility, and that, conversely, his theology only lends weight and substance to his literary-critical insights, making those insights genuinely interdisciplinary, and in that way all the more original.

At least among professional theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar tends to perplex more than he manages to inspire. To be sure, he can inspire. For example, the journal he founded, Communio, now appears in twelve languages (including Arabic). But subscribers never exceed the number - itself already quite small - usual for most other professional theological journals. More to the point, few Catholic departments of theology in Europe or North America consider it essential to have a Balthasarian expert on their respective faculties (a similar attitude towards liberation theology, transcendental Thomism, or feminist theology, by comparison, would seem vaguely revanchist).

To some extent, however, this situation has begun to change. In fact, this volume in the Cambridge Companion series testifies to what seems to be an incipient sea change in attitudes towards this unusually productive, subtle, and complex theologian. For that reason, the editors wish to stress that this collection of essays by a wide array of scholars wishes not so much to inspire as to address the perplexity that seems to be an inherent part of everyone’s reaction to Balthasar’s thought. We make no claim to have resolved the perplexity that so many readers feel upon encountering his theology for the first (or even umpteenth) time.

INTRODUCTION

When Hans Urs von Balthasar set out in 1947 to write what would later become in 1985 the first volume of the Theologik, he was already convinced that Jesus Christ was the heart of the world. Historically, the Jesuit order (Society of Jesus), to which he belonged at the time, had often been linked with devotion to Jesus' Sacred Heart. But long before the Second Vatican Council this devotion had come under attack for its lachrymose sentimentality. So in Heart of the World (first published in German in 1945), Balthasar had tried to give more tough-minded consideration than was usual to that spiritual theme. Moreover, he realized that one could not flesh out the claim that Jesus Christ was the midpoint of being without a thoroughgoing investigation into the relations of christology with ontology, the study of being, the exploration of reality in its fundamental pith, shape, direction.

Normally speaking, an ‘ontological christology’ is simply an investigation of the reality of Christ as one personal being inhabiting two natures, divine and human, and accepting their union in himself. It is a christology that takes with full metaphysical seriousness the affirmation of the Council of Chalcedon about Christ’s two-in-one make-up, and tries to do it philosophical justice.

REASON, REVELATION, AND THE LIBERAL PROJECT

It must be admitted that 'revelation' as a theological topic is not without ambiguity. The very definition of revelation is in dispute, with critics pointing to its rather vague delineation as a separate topic of theological discourse well into the medieval period. Rather than getting bogged down in these sorts of questions, however, perhaps the best place to begin a treatment of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of revelation would be with his most basic assertion: in revelation we have a sovereign divine action pro nobis that makes God known to his creatures in a manner that they can apprehend (LA, 7-8). It is God who speaks in revelation and it is humanity who listens and responds. Even if it must be admitted that divine revelation makes use of worldly forms and words, these structures are 'taken up' into an essentially divine act and given a new context within a divinely constructed 'form' (Gestalt). For Balthasar, revelation is not a species of a much broader genus that can be loosely called 'religious manifestations' or 'divine epiphanies'. In Christ we have an utterly unique event without parallel that judges all human expectations rather than being judged and tamed by them. There are definite affinities with Barth here in Balthasar's insistence that revelation carries within itself its own theological warrant, its own self-authenticating, 'engracing' logic. Balthasar does not deny that there is a role for analogy, philosophy, and 'natural theology'. However, the issue is whether anthropology and/or cosmology will be allowed to govern christology, rather than the reverse. And on that issue he is consistently, even rigorously clear: Balthasar will reject any systematic approach that attempts to locate the significance of revelation within an overarching ideological scheme of some kind, especially when the attempt is made reductively to 'explain' revelation as an outcropping or even as an epiphenomenon of various anthropological capacities or cosmological processes.

The red thread of eschatology - thought and doctrine about ultimates - runs through Hans Urs von Balthasar's work from start to finish. He first took up this theme with his humanistic dissertation written at the University of Zurich on 'the history of the eschatological problem in modern German literature' (1930), a large study that was eventually incorporated into an even larger enterprise, a three-volume work on 'the apocalypse of the German soul' (1937-39). And in what may have been his last academic engagement before his death, Balthasar in April 1988 gave a lecture at the University of Trier on apokatastasis (the technical Greek term referring to 'the restoration of all things at the end of time'). But more than the sheer pervasiveness of the topic, his own version of eschatology has also been probably the most innovative - and therefore most controversial - theme in his theology. That was the case at least from the time when he published Mysterium Paschale in 1969, and he continued to radicalize his position in the last two decades of his life in the explicitly eschatological sections of the Theo-Drama and the Theo-Logic.

ESCHATOLOGY AS REVELATION

The thesis of Balthasar’s earliest work, both the dissertation and its later three-volume expansion, was that the ways in which a people envisions the End ‘reveal’ its ‘soul’.

INTRODUCTION: MOTIVATIONS AND SOURCES

If Hans Urs von Balthasar's theological aesthetics treats Christian theology under the rubric of contemplation (which entails 'seeing the form' of God's self-disclosure), then his theodramatics deals with action, both God's and ours. For Balthasar, this transition from contemplation to action in the context of his trilogy has an inherent necessity. But the 'logic' here is not the logic of formal argumentation, rather the logic of Christian existence, as perceived by Balthasar in its most basic patterns.

Motivations

As others have shown in this volume, Balthasar is aiming to write a deeply scholarly theology yet at the same time one fully in touch with lived Christian life – an aim unusual in the modern period. Whilst theology shares with other branches of learning a demand for academic discipline and the full use of the powers of the mind, Balthasar is clear that the subject matter of theology remains, first and last, the God who calls human beings into a more than merely intellectual relationship with him; the God who shapes people for his work; a personal God; the living God of the Bible and of faith.

INTRODUCTION

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 'the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics in our time' (GL5, 656).

Obviously, this tocsin represents a distinctive, even idiosyncratic, conception of metaphysics, one thoroughly incompatible with any of the standard conceptions of metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy. For Balthasar, metaphysics and Christian theology are distinct activities, each with its own sources and rules; but neither, he believes, can be properly conducted in ignorance of the other. Christian theologians cannot develop an account of biblical revelation which would pretend to be completely unconnected with pre-Christian and non-Christian traditions of metaphysical thinking. On the other hand, the experience of wonder which is central, in his view, in all philosophical traditions, is now almost completely invisible to philosophers who are not themselves practising Christians. In virtue of the biblically grounded awe at the divine glory which is made available to Christians, liturgically and in ascetical practice, it becomes possible to retrieve the 'experience of being' which, historically, philosophers from the beginning have sought to articulate, and with which any serious philosopher today should wish to engage.

In short, the true guardians of the experience of being are those philosophers who have the faith to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

INTRODUCTION

Hans Urs von Balthasar is a theologian whom one never reads indifferently. He himself decried the 'sleek and passionless' theological treatise as the sole form of theological presentation; and, while never suggesting any abandonment of intellectual rigour, he urged upon theology 'movement, sharp debate (quaestio disputata) [and] the virile language of deep and powerful emotion' (ET1, 204). Thus, if readers of Balthasar's oeuvre are oftentimes led to marvel at the sheer range and erudition of his presentation, just as much as they are sometimes left puzzling over the undeniable risk of his 'creative invention', it is when they come to his treatment of the saints - those men and women of prayer who have taken their sanctification by the triune God most seriously - that they become most profoundly aware of the passion and indeed strangeness of his theological itinerary. For what we have to reckon with here is the impact of that powerful and disturbing experience of lives formed and informed by divine love; that is to say, the making and remaking of human beings into the image of Christ. And this, as Augustine well demonstrated in his Confessions, involves no smooth and untroubled elevation to a higher plane of existence, but the struggle and turmoil of discovering at ever deeper levels of one's existence the purification that obedience to the call of Christ involves.

Anyone who is even casually familiar with the writings of Hans Urs von Balthasar must know of his lifelong engagement with those towering figures of early Christian theology known collectively as 'the Church Fathers'. So extensive are his works on these theologians of antiquity that, had he bequeathed to the theological world only his patristic scholarship, his reputation would, by that legacy alone, already be assured. Of course he is known for much more than his writings on early theologians. Indeed, so large and comprehensive is his total output - to say nothing of the wide-angled vision that animates the whole - that his patristic studies must be seen as really just one component, one partial, if essential, contribution to the total picture.

Precisely because a single vision animates the totality of Balthasar’s theology, his studies of the Fathers cannot be judged in isolation from his other works. In fact, so thoroughly has he exploited his patristic scholarship to advance his overall concerns that he often puzzles those whose interests are primarily directed towards understanding early Christian theology in its own context. One expert in the field, Dom Polycarp Sherwood, put it this way:

INTRODUCTION

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968) enjoyed a long and mutually but asymmetrically important relationship. On Barth's side, Balthasar was - with the possible exception of the Jesuit Erich Przywara, whom Barth got to know when he taught in Münster - his most significant Roman Catholic interlocutor. From the mid-1920s, Barth took Roman Catholic theology very seriously (the decisive early text is a searching lecture from 1928 on 'Roman Catholicism: a Question to the Protestant Church'), enjoying cordial relations with Catholic thinkers, studying Catholic texts in his seminar, and observing the changing life of Roman Catholicism: his last major trip was to Rome in 1966 to talk to those involved with the Second Vatican Council. But though Balthasar was Barth's most enduring contact with the Catholic world, he did not shape Barth's theology in any decisive way. Partly this was because when the two first came into contact early on in the Second World War, Barth was already the commanding figure of European Protestantism; he was Balthasar's senior by almost twenty years, and the direction of his magnum opus was already well set. Moreover, for all Barth's intense curiosity about all sorts of expressions of Christian faith, he was a good deal less receptive than Balthasar, and in the Church Dogmatics he is more explicitly in discussion with the classical thinkers of the Christian past than he is with his contemporaries. What cannot be doubted is that Barth thought very highly of Balthasar, both as a leading figure in a promising 'christological renaissance' in modern Catholic theology, and as an interpreter of his own work, one in whom he found 'an understanding of the concentration on Jesus Christ attempted in the Church Dogmatics, and the implied Christian concept of reality, which is incomparably more powerful than that of most of the books [on my theology] which have clustered around me'.

Even if this statement holds true for enough Christian theologians as to be almost a truism, it none the less bears stating at the outset: Jesus Christ stands at the centre of Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology. While such an opening thesis-statement as this may sound unremarkable, yet, for Balthasar, the incarnate Son illumines the work of theology itself in a way that is hard to describe - even by comparison to other modern theologians. Certainly Balthasar shares a form of christocentrism with a figure like Karl Barth, such that all other realities take their bearing from the developing impact of Christ in the world. Even beyond this, however, christology becomes in Balthasar's hands a beckoning to the human soul, drawing theology into a very particular way of being - a stance in which theologians find themselves gazing at the unfolding mystery of Christ with eyes opened by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, beholding a self-giving so unutterable that created life itself is surrendered and re-created. While this prayerful stance for theology may be rather unusual in the modern era, it streams naturally from Balthasar's christology.

In his view the Church’s unfolding understanding of Jesus becomes a transfiguring exposure to the divine momentum at work in the universe. He once described the calling to theology as follows: ‘We need individuals who devote their lives to the glory of theology, that fierce fire burning in the dark night of adoration and obedience, whose abysses it illuminates’ (ET1, 160). Not perhaps since Bonaventure has a theologian explored so profoundly those abysses made visible in Christ.

TRINITY AND HOLY SATURDAY

What does it mean to identify, as the definitive embodiment of God in human history, someone who declares himself abandoned by God? This is the question that motivates Hans Urs von Balthasar's entire theological vision; but it is particularly central to what he has to say about the trinitarian life of God. Throughout Balthasar's major writings, especially in his trinitarian thinking, there is a consistent stress on the governing priority of Jesus' crucifixion (with its necessary corollary, for Balthasar, of the descent into hell). If Jesus is the self-communication of God in flesh, then the cry of dereliction from the Cross is a communication of the selfhood of God: God is revealed when there is nothing to be said about God, nothing to be said about God by God incarnate. In Mysterium Paschale, Balthasar sets out with an astonishingly powerful clarity the necessary centrality to the work of Christ of this 'hiatus' represented by the silence of Holy Saturday. 'It is for the sake of this day that the Son became man' (MP, 49).

Why so? Because only in this way can God display the divine freedom to embrace completely what is not divine, and thus display what divinity concretely, triumphantly, and unalterably is. God’s ‘hiding’ of God in the dereliction of the Cross and the silence of Holy Saturday is in fact the definitive revelation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that all theology is hermeneutics: theologians should devote their energies to interpreting God's self-revelation in nature, history, and the Bible (TD2, 91). His principal theoretical remarks about scriptural interpretation are found in the first volume of The Glory of the Lord, the second volume of the Theo-Drama, the third volume of the Theo-Logic, and in a handful of essays. Although he sometimes emphasized different aspects of biblical hermeneutics in these discussions, several salient points, summarized briefly here, will be elaborated in this chapter. Balthasar argued that the atrophied aesthetic sensibilities of most modern theologians and biblical scholars have undermined the Church's biblical interpretation in various ways. Appropriating the lessons of premodern theological aesthetics would help to revive a set of ancient and medieval hermeneutical conventions that are not incompatible with certain features of contemporary biblical scholarship. These conventions include viewing the Bible as a self-glossing, christologically focused story, the proper interpretation of which is enabled by the Holy Spirit and nourished by regular liturgical worship. The range of ecclesially fruitful interpretation is constrained both by the intentions of its human and divine authors and by the rule of faith.

Readers who have read all, or even most, of the chapters of this volume will already have come to the conclusion of this chapter: Hans Urs von Balthasar has bequeathed to the world a theology that is extremely hard to assess. Subtle and vast, his theology is also composed of parts so densely and tightly interwoven that no component can be jettisoned, or even much altered, without affecting the whole. For that reason (among others), judging the future influence of his theology is even more difficult. Take, for example, this programmatic manifesto, tucked away in one of his more obscure writings, where he is speaking of the effort it cost him to revise his one-volume dissertation, Prometheus, into the large, three-volume work, Apocalypse of the German Soul, a labour he undertook, he says, because he was resolved to 'rebuild the world from its foundations'.

But how does an outsider to his project even begin to assess such a programme? At least for Balthasar himself, it would seem that the only way of guessing what the future might hold for his theology is to see if he will finally succeed in ‘rebuilding the world from its foundations’. Ambitious Balthasar certainly was, but will he prove successful in his ambitions? Very few readers, and among them only the captious ones, will deny that Balthasar was a great theologian; but will he prove an influential one in the long run?