When I initially embarked on this chapter, I mentioned it to a well-known scholar of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His response was “That is indeed a risky venture.” This attitude is probably fairly typical. The idea of a critical social science is, at best, unclear and, at worst, invested in a variety of outdated philosophical commitments of the early Frankfurt School. As Axel Honneth says in his contribution to this volume, many of the original ideas of this school seem, at least at first glance, to be “antiquated, dusty, and irretrievably lost.”

Frankfurt School can be retrieved. My approach will be to take up the claim of the early Critical Theorists that they provided a philosophical basis for a systematic orientation to social science. To use more recent terminology, they imagined that their work constituted a “research program” or “research tradition” of a distinctive, critical sort. My argument is that this tradition can, when appropriately revised, constitute a defensible, critical social science. The necessary revisions come from two sources, one internal and the other external. The first is Habermas’s work after Knowledge and Human Interests, when he began developing the idea of communicative rationality as the ontological centerpiece of Critical Theory. It will hardly come as news to anyone to say that this turn constituted a substantial revision of the Frankfurt tradition. But what has not been adequately teased out is how this clear ontological modification impacts the possibility of a critical social science.

At the center of the contentious debates that have engaged second generation Critical Theorists and poststructuralists since the publication of Habermas's “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” (1980) and The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) lie several embattled epistemological and political presuppositions: on the one hand, the normative validity claims underpinning Habermas's theory of communicative action; on the other, the antifoundationalism of poststructuralism. In the wake of modernity's “legitimation crisis,” Habermas argued for the retention of the Enlightenment legacy of reason, vowing to complete the unfinished project of political modernity, whose anatomy was radically different from the aesthetic modernity initiated by Baudelaire, from Nietzsche's aestheticism, or even from a “presentist” culture of the “now.” Poststructuralist thinkers, by contrast, rejected the principles of universalism and consensus formation, together with the defunct narratives of rationality, legitimacy, and normative justification, either in the name of a postmodern agonistic pragmatism (Lyotard), a postmetaphysical deconstruction (Derrida), or a critical genealogy of the historical vicissitudes of reason (Foucault).

The theorists who conceptualized Critical Theory's general framework set themselves a double task: they sought to critically illuminate the great historical changes of the twentieth century while reflexively grounding the possibility of their critique with reference to its historical context. Most attempts to contextualize Critical Theory have done so in terms of contemporary historical developments, such as the failure of revolution in the West after World War One and the Russian Revolution, the development of Stalinism, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the growing importance of mass mediated forms of consumption, culture, and politics. Too often, however, such attempts do not consider that Critical Theory sought to make sense of such developments with reference to a superordinate historical context - an epochal transformation of capitalism in the first part of the twentieth century. In grappling with this transformation, the Frankfurt School theorists formulated sophisticated and interrelated critiques of instrumental reason, the domination of nature, political domination, culture, and ideology. Yet they also encountered fundamental conceptual difficulties. These difficulties were related to a theoretical turn taken in the late 1930s, in which the newer configuration of capitalism came to be conceived as a society that, while remaining antagonistic, had become completely administered and one-dimensional.

REVOLUTION

A story has it that during the storming of the Bastille in 1789, King Louis XVI, hearing the commotion, asked one of his courtiers what was going on, a riot (émeute) perhaps? “No, Sire,” the courtier is said to have replied, “a revolution.” One of several reasons for being suspicious of this story is that it seems to attribute to the courtier preternatural prescience. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe were to be the age of revolution, and this is at least as much a claim about intellectual history as it is about real political and social history. To be sure, the history of this period, from the Oath of the Tennis Court at the start of the first French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, can be told as the story of a series of radical transformations of the political and socioeconomic structures of various European societies. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, were not just a period of actual instability and change, but one in which people acquired certain general ideas about the possibilities of large-scale social change and the human ability to unleash and perhaps control it. More or less spontaneous urban and rural violence, rebellions, jacqueries, uprisings of subjugated populations, conspiracies to seize established power, have been the stuff of much of human history for a long time, but events like this come to take on a new character altogether when the actual and potential participants (and the actual and potential opponents) acquire even a rudimentary general conceptual framework with which to understand their situation, the possible courses of action they could undertake, and the possible outcomes.

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.