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?

It is entirely understandable that English-speaking readers with theological interests who pick up the first volume of The Glory of the Lord should feel that they are about to enter a somewhat inhospitable land. It may be discomforting for them to think that this is followed by six more, equally generous, volumes in the same series, or by fourteen further volumes if we are to include the Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic, which together make up Balthasar's project as a whole. Use of a tape measure or weighing scales will confirm that this is a very Germanic way of 'doing theology'. Readers will also quickly note that multi-volume works of this kind have to be read in their own particular way. Much of what is included is intended to exemplify the key ideas and does not need to be scrutinized with the same attentiveness as those passages or sections which set out the governing ideas of the entire project. The skill of reading a multi-volume work of this kind, then, is to identify as quickly as possible the guideline passages which are decisive for reading the whole. Many of these can be found in the first volume, Seeing the Form, and in the fifth volume (of the English edition) on modern metaphysics, although it is part of Balthasar's method to scatter highly judicious and insightful theoretical passages in the interstices of lengthy historical discussions.

In the solemnly promulgated teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the Church defines herself as 'an instrument for the redemption of all, sent forth into the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth'. But the Church also defines herself as the 'sacrament [efficacious sign; embodied form] by which Christ's mission is extended to include the whole of man, body and soul, and through that totality the whole of nature created by God'. As the mystical body of Christ, the Church thus is the instrument for God's plan to gather 'all things' (Eph. 1:10) in Christ, as well as the eschatological form of redeemed creation. In other words, the Church is indeed a tool, but also (at least by anticipation) that for which the tool is used: she is paradoxically both means and end - however provisionally that end is to be understood. But even provisionally, she embodies the end above all in her celebration of the Eucharist. For in the gift of the Eucharist, Christ endows the Church with the 'real presence' of his body and blood together with an inner participation in his mission to the world. If the mission of the Son is to redeem creation by means of an exchange (admirabile commercium) in which he offers himself eucharistically to the world and receives the world as gift from the Father, then the Church is called to enter into Christ's life and mission by eucharistically receiving creation in its entirety as a gift that mediates and expresses the triune life - thereby confirming and fulfilling God's original plan for the world.

EXPOSITION

For Hans Urs von Balthasar a fundamental truth about being human is the limit imposed on human nature by the polarity of sexual difference: one is born either male or female (TD3, 283). To be human is to be not simply one but one of two, a dyad, with one sex opposite to or over against the 'other'. 'Man only exists in the opposition of the sexes, in the dependence of both forms of humanity, the one on the other.' There has never been a universal, sexually neutral person, no original 'androgynous primal being' or 'sexless first man' (TD3, 290):

INTRODUCTION

From the earliest years of Christianity, mention of Mary in the Gospels and creeds has ensured that whenever the Good News of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, the name of his Mother, Mary, has also been heard. For that reason, the earliest doctrinal debates nearly always included reflections upon this woman's significance as part of the early Church's efforts to come to terms with the significance and uniqueness of how God was acting in Christ. But in later Christianity, theology and devotion have not always reflected on the place of Mary when considering the person and work of Christ, with the result that the Blessed Mother began to take on a certain quasi-independent role in Catholic theology while she receded far into the background in Protestant theology and devotion.

One of the more curious passages by Harriet Beecher Stowe appears in a novel by someone else. In August 1857 she contributed a “Preface” for the second novel by an African-American author, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends. After acknowledging violence against free black people and abolitionists in the north, especially virulent in the 1830s and a matter central to the novel, Stowe claimed that “this spirit was subdued, and the right of free inquiry established . . .” Had she concluded there, this might simply be an example of a northerner congratulating her section on its moral superiority to the south. She added, however, that “the question [of freedom for African Americans], so far from being dangerous in the Free States, is now begun to be allowed in the slave States . . .” Stowe must have known how wrong this was. Her second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), appeared a year before The Garies and a large part of its plot revolved around southern suppression, often violent, of anti-slavery speeches and publications.

The key to understanding how someone who went to great lengths to defend her accuracy could be so misguided is in the final words of the paragraph. “[T]here are,” she wrote, “some subjects the mere discussion of which is a half-victory.” Stowe was less interested in southern openness to antislavery views – which hostile southern responses to her novels should have led her to doubt – than in defending the power of words to change individuals and, through them, society. As she put it in her 1854 “Appeal to the Women of the Free States,” “there is not a woman in the United States, when the question [of slavery] is fairly put before her, who thinks these things are right.”

Two views on the nature and derivation of Bruckner's orchestral practices have predominated. In the early part of the twentieth century, the prevailing attitude styled Bruckner as a Wagnerian symphonist, and thus characterized his orchestration as a (more or less successful) imitation of Wagner's instrumental textures. With the publication in the 1930s and 1940s of the complete edition under Robert Haas, this view proved hard to sustain, relying as it did on the first published editions, the orchestration of which was often changed, to overtly Wagnerian ends, and without Bruckner's consent. The Wagnerian interpretation consequently ceded to an ‘organistic’ conception: orchestral technique was conditioned above all by the composer's long association with the organ loft.

Opinions on this matter crystallized in the mid-1930s, in a debate between Max Auer, then president of the Bruckner Gesellschaft, and the theorist and analyst Alfred Lorenz. Auer presented perhaps the classic formulation of the organistic view. The basis of his attitude was a belief in the importance of formative musical experience: whatever subsequent influences Bruckner accrued, his aural imagination was crucially formed during his period of employment at the monastery of St. Florian, and afterwards as organist of Linz Cathedral. His concept of orchestration was therefore predicated on the soundworld of the organ and its technical possibilities. The link between the organ and orchestration was located in the resemblance of Bruckner's way of constructing orchestral texture to the technique of organ registration, a connection mediated by the composer's predilection for keyboard improvisation.