A Résumé of My
Thought | Hans Urs von Balthasar
Translated by Kelly Hamilton
Translated by Kelly Hamilton
"... meeting Balthasar was for me the beginning of a lifelong
friendship I can only be thankful for. Never again have I found anyone with
such a comprehensive theological and humanistic education as Balthasar and de
Lubac, and I cannot even begin to say how much I owe to my encounter with
them." -- Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)
Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) was a Swiss theologian, considered to be one of the most important Catholic intellectuals and
writers of the twentieth century.
Incredibly prolific and diverse, he wrote over one hundred books and hundreds
of articles. In this essay, first published in 1988 in Communio, the
theological journal he helped found, and later in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work (Communio
Books/Ignatius Press, 1991; edited by David L. Schindler), he offers an
introduction to his thought and writing.
Visit this
IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page for more about Balthasar's life and
for a full listing of the sixty volumes of his work translated and published by
Ignatius Press.
When a man has published many large books, people will ask themselves: What,
fundamentally, did he want to say? If he is a prolific novelist-for example
Dickens or Dostoevsky-one would choose one or another of his works without
worrying oneself too much about all of them as a whole. But for a philosopher
or theologian it is totally different. One wishes to touch the heart of his thought,
because one presupposes that such a heart must exist.
The question has often been asked of me by those disconcerted by the large
number of my books: Where must one start in order to understand you? I am going
to attempt to condense my many fragments "in a nutshell", as the
English say, as far as that can be done without too many betrayals. The danger
of such a compression consists in being too abstract. It is necessary to
amplify what follows with my biographical works on the one hand (on the Fathers
of the Church, on Karl Barth, Buber, Bernanos, Guardini, Reinhold Schneider,
and all the authors treated in the trilogy), with the works on spirituality on
the other hand (such as those on contemplative prayer, on Christ, Mary and the
Church), and finally, with the numerous translations of the Fathers of the
Church, of the theologians of the Middle Ages, and of modern times. But here it
is necessary to limit ourselves to presenting a schema of the trilogy:
Aesthetic, Dramatic, and Logic. [1]
We start with a reflection on the situation of man. He exists as a limited
being in a limited world, but his reason is open to the unlimited, to all of
being. The proof consists in the recognition of his finitude, of his
contingence: I am, but I could not-be. Many things which do not exist could
exist. Essences are limited, but being (l'être) is not. That division,
the "real distinction" of St. Thomas, is the source of all the
religious and philosophical thought of humanity. It is not necessary to recall
that all human philosophy (if we abstract the biblical domain and its
influence) is essentially religious and theological at once, because it poses
the problem of the Absolute Being, whether one attributes to it a personal
character or not.
What are the major solutions to this enigma attempted by humanity? One can try
to leave behind the division between being (Être) and essence, between
the infinite and the finite; one will then say that all being is infinite and
immutable (Parmenides) or that all is movement, rhythm between contraries,
becoming (Heraclitus).
In the first case, the finite and limited will be non-being as such, thus an
illusion that one must detect: this is the solution of Buddhist mysticism with
its thousand nuances in the Far East. It is also the Plotinian solution: the
truth is only attained in ecstasy where one touches the One, which is at the
same time All and Nothing (relative to all the rest which only seems to exist).
The second case contradicts itself: pure becoming in pure finitude can only conceive
of itself in identifying the contraries: life and death, good fortune and
adversity, wisdom and folly (Heraclitus did this).
Thus it is necessary to commence from an inescapable duality: the finite is not
the infinite. In Plato the sensible, terrestrial world is not the ideal, divine
world. The question is then inevitable: Whence comes the division? Why are we
not God?
The first attempt at a response: there must have been a fall, a decline, and
the road to salvation can only be the return of the sensible finite into the
intelligible infinite. That is the way of all non-biblical mystics. The second
attempt at a response: the infinite God had need of a finite world. Why? To
perfect himself, to actualize all of his possibilities? Or even to have an object
to love? The two solutions lead to pantheism. In both cases, the Absolute, God
in himself, has again become indigent, thus finite. But if God has no need of
the world-yet again: Why does the world exist?
No philosophy could give a satisfactory response to that question. St. Paul
would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek
the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy
is theological at its summit. But, in fact, the true response to philosophy
could only be given by Being himself, revealing himself from himself. Will man
be capable of understanding this revelation? The affirmative response will be
given only by the God of the Bible. On the one hand, this God, Creator of the
world and of man, knows his creature. "I who have created the eye, do I
not see? I who have created the ear, do I not hear?" And we add "I
who have created language, could I not speak and make myself heard?" And
this posits a counterpart: to be able to hear and understand the
auto-revelation of God man must in himself be a search for God, a question
posed to him. Thus there is no biblical theology without a religious
philosophy. Human reason must be open to the infinite.
It is here that the substance of my thought inserts itself. Let us say above
all that the traditional term "metaphysical" signified the act of
transcending physics, which for the Greeks signified the totality of the
cosmos, of which man was a part. For us physics is something else: the science
of the material world. For us the cosmos perfects itself in man, who at the
same time sums up the world and surpasses it. Thus our philosophy will be
essentially a meta-anthropology, presupposing not only the cosmological
sciences, but also the anthropological sciences, and surpassing them towards
the question of the being and essence of man.
Now man exists only in dialogue with his neighbor. The infant is brought to
consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that
encounter the horizon of all unlimited being opens itself for him, revealing
four things to him: (i) that he is one in love with the mother, even in being
other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good,
therefore all being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all being is
true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all being is beautiful.
We add here that the epiphany of being has sense only if in the appearance (Erscheinung)
we grasp the essence which manifests itself (Ding an sich). The infant
comes to the knowledge not of a pure appearance, but of his mother in herself.
That does not exclude our grasping the essence only through the manifestation
and not in itself (St. Thomas).
The One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, these are what we call the
transcendental attributes of Being, because they surpass all the limits of
essences and are coextensive with Being. If there is an insurmountable distance
between God and his creature, but if there is also an analogy between them
which cannot be resolved in any form of identity, there must also exist an
analogy between the transcendentals– between those of the creature and those in
God.
There are two conclusions to draw from this: one positive, the other negative.
The positive: man exists only by interpersonal dialogue: therefore by language,
speech (in gestures, in mimic, or in words). Why then deny speech to Being
himself? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God" (Jn 1:1).
The negative: supposing that God is truly God (that is to say that he is the
totality of Being who has need of no creature), then God will be the plenitude
of the One, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and by consequence the
limited creature participates in the transcendentals only in a partial,
fragmentary fashion. Let us take an example: What is unity in a finite world?
Is it the species (each man is totally man, that is his unity), or is it
the individual (each man is indivisibly himself)? Unity is thus polarized in
the domain of finitude. One can demonstrate the same polarity for the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful.
I have thus tried to construct a philosophy and a theology starting from an
analogy not of an abstract Being, but of Being as it is encountered concretely
in its attributes (not categorical, but transcendental). And as the
transcendentals run through all Being, they must be interior to each other:
that which is truly true is also truly good and beautiful and one. A being appears,
it has an epiphany: in that it is beautiful and makes us marvel. In appearing
it gives itself, it delivers itself to us: it is good. And in giving itself up,
it speaks itself, it unveils itself: it is true (in itself, but in the other to
which it reveals itself).
Thus one can construct above all a theological aesthetique ("Gloria"):
God appears. He appeared to Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah, finally in Jesus
Christ. A theological question: How do we distinguish his appearance, his
epiphany among the thousand other phenomena in the world? How do we distinguish
the true and only living God of Israel from all the idols which surround him
and from all the philosophical and theological attempts to attain God? How do
we perceive the incomparable glory of God in the life, the Cross, the
Resurrection of Christ, a glory different from all other glory in this world?
One can then continue with a dramatique since this God enters into an
alliance with us: How does the absolute liberty of God in Jesus Christ confront
the relative, but true, liberty of man? Will there perhaps be a mortal struggle
between the two in which each one will defend against the other what it
conceives and chooses as the good? What will be the unfolding of the battle,
the final victory?
One can terminate with a logique (a theo-logique). How can God
come to make himself understood to man, how can an infinite Word express itself
in a finite word without losing its sense? That will be the problem of the two
natures of Jesus Christ. And how can the limited spirit of man come to grasp
the unlimited sense of the Word of God? That will be the problem of the Holy
Spirit.
This, then, is the articulation of my trilogy. I have meant only to mention the
questions posed by the method, without coming to the responses, because that
would go well beyond the limits of an introductory summary such as this.
In conclusion, it is nonetheless necessary to touch briefly on the Christian
response to the question posed in the beginning relative to the religious
philosophies of humanity. I say the Christian response, because the responses
of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially
in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a
satisfactory answer to the question of why Yahweh, why Allah, created a world
of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in
the two religions, not the why.
The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of
the Trinity and that of the Incarnation. In the trinitarian dogma God is one,
good, true, and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the
one, the other, and their unity. And if it is necessary to suppose the Other,
the Word, the Son, in God, then the otherness of the creation is not a fall, a
disgrace, but an image of God, even as it is not God.
And as the Son in God is the eternal icon of the Father, he can without
contradiction assume in himself the image that is the creation, purify it, and
make it enter into the communion of the divine life without dissolving it (in a
false mysticism). It is here that one must distinguish nature and grace.
All true solutions offered by the Christian Faith hold, therefore, to these two
mysteries, categorically refused by a human reason which makes itself absolute.
It is because of this that the true battle between religions begins only after
the coming of Christ. Humanity will prefer to renounce all philosophical
questions-in Marxism, or positivism of all stripes, rather than accept a
philosophy which finds its final response only in the revelation of Christ.
Forseeing that, Christ sent his believers into the whole world as sheep among
wolves.
Before making a pact with the world it is necessary to meditate on that
comparison.
Originally published in Communio 15 (Winter 1988). © 1988 by Communio:
International Catholic Review.
NOTES:
[1] In the trilogy, Hans Urs von Balthasar approaches Christian revelation
under the aspect of its beauty (Herrlichkeit), goodness (Theodramatik),
and truth (Theologik). See "English Translations of German
Titles" in Appendix of Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work for full titles.
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