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Home , Adrienne von Speyr, Consubstantiality, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Saward, Joseph Fessio, Peter Henrici

THE STRANGE WITNESS OF THE : ’S

EMBODIED OF MISSION

Thesis

Submitted to

The College of and Sciences of the

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

The Degree of

Master of Arts in Theological Studies

By

Carmel Klein

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Dayton, Ohio

December 2017

THE STRANGE WITNESS OF THE SAINTS: HANS URS VON BALTHASAR’S

EMBODIED THEOLOGY OF MISSION

Name: Klein, Carmel F.

APPROVED BY:

______William L. Portier, Ph.D. Thesis Advisor

______William Johnston, Ph.D. Reader

______Sandra Yocum, Ph.D. Reader

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ABSTRACT

THE STRANGE WITNESS OF THE SAINTS: HANS URS VON BALTHASAR’S

EMBODIED THEOLOGY OF MISSION

Name: Klein, Carmel F. University of Dayton

Advisor: Dr. William L. Portier

The thesis surveys Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology of mission as presented within the context of the first two parts of his trilogy: The Glory of the Lord: A

Theological ; and the Theo-. Primary characteristics of his theology of mission are highlighted regarding his assessment of the state of the discipline of theology and its ability to apologize for the faith and to dialogue with contemporary culture.

Balthasar envisions the of , goodness, and , as vital for reimagining the faith and the aggiornamento proposed by Vatican II. Balthasar identifies beauty as the transcendental that has been marginalized by an acquiescent academy deferential to modern pragmatism. For , the form of beauty that reconciles existential tensions is . The crucified Christ is the concrete, awe-inspiring, counter-intuitive beauty that demands a response.

Balthasar uses the doctrine of analogy of being to reunify the transcendentals and reconcile them with theology. By contemplating the three Persons of the and their perichoretic dynamism, Balthasar uses the analogy of the theater to disclose the drama of

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the Christian life. With the hinge of history, Christ, in the incarnation, cross and

resurrection, a space is opened up for persons to participate in Trinitarian relationship and

redemptive suffering for the salvation of the world. Individual subjects freely respond to

a personal encounter with Christ. Receptive assent and obedient submission to a

uniquely tailored personal mission transform individual subjects into theological persons,

or saints. The theological person lives out a theological mission, and existence takes on a theological hue quelling existential anxiety and instilling . As Jesus Christ is the full

utterance of the Father, so, by analogy, through Jesus Christ, each theological person can

utter anew a tiny fresh utterance of revelation.

After laying out the matrix of Balthasar’s theology of mission, the thesis seeks to illustrate how mission is actually lived out in individual lives beginning with the source of all missions, Jesus Christ. Mary, the mother of , and St. Thérèse of Lisieux are held up to the template of mission since Balthasar is vigorous in his assertion that concrete embodiment is paramount for the fresh relevant proclamation of the faith. The flesh and blood men and women who answer the call of Christ, and the idea of who God intended them to be, are born again as irresistible icons of meaningful living aligned and rooted within Scripture, Sacrament, and the . Mary and Thérèse prove to be holy fools or the strange witnesses that embody Christ to the world.

The thesis closes with a look at the healing power of the for the ruptures in theology as defined by Balthasar. A short reflection on mission as embodied theology, briefly explores his critique of Thérèse and his relationship with .

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Dr. William Portier for his guidance, encouragement, and astute comments during the writing of this thesis. A special thanks to my readers who also served as my academic advisors during my graduate studies, Dr. Sandra Yocum and

Dr. William Johnston.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... v

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS...... viii

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION...... 1

Thesis Objectives...... 3 Primary Sources...... 9 A Brief Biographical Sketch of Hans Urs von Balthasar...... 12

CHAPTER 2 ...... 17

Universal Longing...... 17 Universal Consciousness...... 19 By Way of Analogy...... 20 Faith in the Form of Forms...... 25 The Form is Love...... 28 They Know What They Have Seen...... 30 The Mediated Form in the Age of the Church...... 36

CHAPTER 3 THEOLOGY OF MISSION AS DRAMA...... 39

The Players in the Drama...... 39 The Freedom of the Actors...... 41 A Drama in Motion...... 42 The Exuberant Trinity and Personal Mission...... 44 Mission Rests on the Gift of Freedom...... 47 A Bit of Tension...... 50 Concrete Mission in the Concretissimum...... 52

CHAPTER 4 CHRIST IN MISSION...... 54

Oneness of Person and Mission in Christ...... 55 Jesus Christ: The Complete Revelation of God...... 56 Being and Becoming...... 57

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CHAPTER 4 CHRIST IN MISSION (CONT.)

Sending and Coming: The Gift of Mission...... 59 Mission Consciousness in Christ...... 61 Infinite and Finite Freedom in Christ...... 62 Prayer in Jesus’ Mission...... 63 The Theological Person in Mission...... 63 The Saints and Mission...... 66

CHAPTER 5 MARY IN MISSION...... 69

Becoming a Theological Person...... 69 Flesh and Blood Saints...... 71 Mary’s Consent in Freedom...... 72 Mary’s Obedience in Mission...... 79 Mary’s Suffering in Mission...... 83 Mary’s Fruitfulness in Mission...... 86 The Marian Church...... 90

CHAPTER 6 ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX IN MISSION...... 99

Thérèse’s Freedom...... 101 Theological Method as Lived Experience...... 105 Subjective Shadows in Objective Mission...... 112 Thérèse’s Suffering...... 114 Content of Thérèse’s Mission...... 116 The Fruit of the Little Way...... 118

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION...... 122

Healing with Beauty...... 122 Healing with Sanctity...... 127 Embodied Theology...... 128 Making Space for Hans Urs von Balthasar...... 136

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 141

APPENDIX Biographical Timeline of St. Thérèse of Lisieux...... 149

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

2SS Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity

ET I Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh

ET II Explorations in Theology II: Spouse of the Word

GL I The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics I: Seeing the Form

GL II The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics II: Studies in Theological : Clerical Styles

GL III The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics III: Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles

GL IV The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity

GL V The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age

GL VI The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics VI: Theology. The Old Covenant

GL VII The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics VII: Theology. The

TD I Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory I: Prolegomena

TD II Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory II: The Dramatis Personae: Man In God

TD III Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory III: The Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ

TD IV Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory IV: The Action

TD V Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory V: The Last Act

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TL II Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory II: Truth of God

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

My first encounter with the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar was through

Bishop ’s mention of the theologian in Barron’s popular Catholicism

series. While presenting the series to a couple of parishes in Indianapolis in 2012, I read

“The Trouble with a Beige Catholicism” in Barron’s book, Bridging the Great Divide. In his essay, Barron comments on American Catholicism’s loss of “particularity” and

“strangeness” in the initial years following Vatican II “with a drift toward the abstract”

seen in , , textbooks, and missalettes. “In place of richly colored and

densely textured saints, there were now stick figures and vague shapes.”1 It was in this

article that I, again, encountered Balthasar. The chapter’s critique references the contrast

between ’s transcendental theology that begins with the experience of the

subject, and Balthasar’s starting point in the definitive Christian objective form of the

crucified and risen Christ: “Balthasar says that the Kantian method of Rahner is like

trying to show someone the windows of Chartres Cathedral from outside the cathedral.” 2

In the person of Jesus Christ, the “concretissimus,”3 and not in the subject, is the power

1 Robert Barron, Bridging the Great Divide, (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward/Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 18. Note: Barron also credits Robert Orsi with these observations.

2 Ibid., 15-16.

3 Ibid., 37. Barron says this is Balthasar’s word for the person of Jesus Christ. I encountered the word “concretissimum” in Balthasar’s Prayer, p. 165.

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that transforms the one who beholds. Such a “spicy, troublesome, fascinating, and

culture-transforming person of Jesus Christ” is the object that affects “aesthetic arrest,”4

and puts one inside the cathedral at Chartres gazing at stained glass dazzled in sunlight.

Hans Urs von Balthasar is said to be one of the truly great theologians of the 20th

century alongside the Catholic Karl Rahner and the Protestant (and certainly

not limited to these three). While I had heard of the two “Karls,” Hans eluded me. After

picking up the first volume of Balthasar’s trilogy5, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological

Aesthetics, Seeing the Form, I was mesmerized by what I will call a stream-of-

consciousness, lyrical style. I read:

Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one...We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past---whether he admits it or not---can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. 6

This is a shocking claim poetically expressed.

The editors in the “Introduction” to The Beauty of Christ describe his writings “as

striking as much for their originality as for their magnitude.”7 The originality may be

4 WordonFire.org, “Father Barron on Hans Urs von Balthasar, Part 2 of 2,” posted May 19, 2014. (http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/fr-barron-on-hans-urs-von-balthasar-part-2-of-2/316/) Accessed January, 6, 2017.

5 Written over thirty years, Balthasar’s 15-volume work, not including the Epilogue, is divided into three sections: Theo-Aesthetics (or Glory of the Lord); Theo-Drama; Theo-Logic. Each subsection corresponds respectively to the transcendentals, beauty, goodness, and truth.

6 Hans Urs von Balthasar, GL I, 2nd ed., ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (: , 2009), 18.

7 McGregor, O.P. and Thomas Norris, eds. The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 2.

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accounted for by the “rather roundabout way”8 Balthasar came to theology after his study

of German culture covering its history, language, , and art. If there is any effort

by Balthasar to systematize or organize his work, the trilogy appears to be that attempt by

the theologian himself. The Epilogue presents “a justification for the presentation of the

traditional theological tracts on the basis of the transcendental colors of being, a

presentation which results in an easy transition from a true (and therefore religious)

philosophy to the biblical theology of revelation.”9 For me, it is certainly not “easy!”

However, Balthasar leads with beauty and that captured my imagination. Perhaps, Aidan

Nichols’ sentiment summarizes what keeps me sifting through his thinking---“It was to

try to get closer to the sheer spiritual greatness of the revelation to which the art of the

Church and the historic liturgies bore witness that I (and, I am sure, others) turned toward

Balthasar.”10

Thesis Objectives

The purpose of this paper is to assemble a sampling of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s

thinking into a sketch of his theology of mission and its importance for the fresh

revelation of the Trinitarian God in the world. The intent is certainly not to systematize

or to present a complete concept of mission but to glean an assortment of ideas from his

selected works, primarily from the first two parts of the trilogy, to create a perspective of

Balthasar’s theology of mission.

8 Rodney Howsare, Balthasar:A Guide for the Perplexed (: T&T Clark, 2009), 2.

9 Balthasar, Epilogue,7, as quoted in “The Symphonic Unity of His Theology: An Overview” by Thomas Norris, The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 213.

10 Aidan Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academics, 2011), viii. 3

As Balthasar disdained abstract , I hope to demonstrate how he

makes his theology of mission concrete by pairing his intellections with his illustrations

of the saints. In other words, how does Balthasar make philosophical and theological

categories come alive through the saints? He proposes that the ever-relevant message of

redemption is given echo and meaning in every era in the specific missions bestowed on

individuals who choose to assent with their entire lives to God’s call. Balthasar uses the unique and often very peculiar lives of the saints to give actual dimension to how his

theology of mission confers meaning. The consequence of saintly obedience to mission

is fruit for the Church and fulfillment of the saint’s personhood. The doctrine of the

Church is renewed and a brand new interpretation of the love of God is made accessible

to the Body of Christ.

While exploring Balthasar’s theology of mission, I will be sympathetic to his

laments over what he saw as the contemporary state of theology. Balthasar pinpoints a

series of separations by trekking through the history of religious and philosophical thinking beginning with classical antiquity into the 20th century that he believes has harmed the richness and vibrancy of theology. By reading Balthasar’s writings and the secondary works of scholars, I understand what he isolates as the primary fracture: The separation of philosophy and theology. Unlike gazing at the stained glass of Chartres,

Balthasar experienced his theological studies as “languishing in the desert of neo- scholasticism”11 filled with “sawdust .”12 He mourned that theology seemed to

11 , S.J., “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Books/Ignatius Press, 1991), 12.

12 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. and David Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.

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acquiesce totally to philosophical categories and adapt itself to the academy. His trilogy

is an attempt to reverse this by asserting the theological a priori of philosophy.13

Balthasar meanders through time investigating myth, cosmology, metaphysics, modern

philosophy, and how Christianity responds to challenges beginning with the Church

Fathers to his own time period. He identifies an overzealous empiricism and a pragmatic secularism that confines faith to the private sphere and relocates a diminished theology as one alongside a number of academic disciplines including an impoverished philosophy.

Balthasar, as a young man studying German culture, was aware of an intellectual snobbery in the academy toward specializing in theology. He recollected that before his call to the priesthood “it was seen as a real misfortune if someone changed course and took up the study of theology.”14

One major consequence of theology and philosophy’s “divorce” is diagnosed in

the first part of Balthasar’s trilogy, The Glory of the Lord: beauty’s banishment from the

transcendental triad. His previous doctorate in German language and culture and his

passion for shaped his sensitivity to the value of the aesthetic---a traditional sense

of the aesthetic, not the debased modern version that flattened by empiricism fails to

produce awe and can at best evoke admiration. In his unique approach to theology,

Balthasar reengages the classical philosophical transcendentals and argues for the

necessity of the unity of the triad: Goodness, examined in the second part of the trilogy,

Theo-Drama, and truth, explicated in the final third of the trilogy, Theo-Logic, lose their

13 The trilogy includes The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vols. I-VII; Theo-Drama, Vols. I- V; and Theo-Logic, Vols. I-III. There is also the Epilogue.

14 Henrici, 11.

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attractiveness without beauty’s gift of wonder to restore wholeness to the message of

salvation.

Balthasar identifies a second major estrangement to the severing of philosophy

and theology: the separation of sanctity and theology. Balthasar wonders that from the

time of St. so few theologians have been saints!15

In modern times, theology and sanctity have become divorced, to the great harm of both. Except in a few cases, the saints have not been theologians, and theologians have tended to treat their opinions as a sort of by-product, classifying them as spiritualité, or at best, as théologie spirituelle.16

In an eager attempt to adapt to the world of intellectual rationalism and scientific

empiricism, neither theology nor philosophy gains custody of holiness. Holiness

becomes the charge of spirituality. The relegation of holiness to the spiritual realm

isolates and theology from each other. This creates distortions in both:

...a strange anatomical dissection: on the one hand, the bones without the flesh, “traditional theology”; on the other, the flesh without bones, that very pious literature that serves up a compound of asceticism, mysticism, spirituality and rhetoric, a porridge that, in the end, becomes indigestible through lack of substance. Only the two together...constitute the unique “form” capable of being “seen” in the light of faith by the believer, a unique testimony, invisible to the world, and a “scandal” to it.17

What Balthasar recommends is a fresh look at the lives of the saints as a way of healing this divide. However, neither the hagiography of old nor the psychological profiles of will suffice:

...few things are so likely to vitalize and rejuvenate theology, and therefore the whole of Christian life, as a blood transfusion from hagiography. Yet this must be

15 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in Explorations in Theology I: The Word Made Flesh, trans. A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 181.

16 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity, trans. Donald Nichols, Anne Englund Nash, and Dennis Martin (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 26.

17 “Theology and Sanctity,” 193.

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done as a work of theology; the essence of sanctity has to be grasped as truly evangelical, as belonging to the Church, as a mission and not simply as an individual ascetical, mystical manifestation.18

It is the lives of the saints that Balthasar mines for fresh exegesis of doctrine and

Scripture. Theological persons responding wholly to theological missions are propitious for proclamation. The saint in assenting to his or her God-given mission becomes that

“‘form’ capable of being seen.” It is in the reception of the gift of mission and the grace

of assent to its particularities that the holy fool gives the Church and the world another

glimpse of the unbearable light of Being. The saint and the saint’s mission are taken up

into the Trinitarian life, wholly expropriated, for the good of the Church and the

reverberation of message throughout the world.

Balthasar begins with the Person of Jesus Christ as the One whose person and

mission perfectly coincide. He makes this claim only with regard to Christ due to his

perfect obedience out of love for the Father. To Balthasar, the saints are partial iterations

of the complete and perfect utterance of the Son of God.

Balthasar uses the examples of the canonized saints throughout his writing to

explicate theological personhood and theological mission. His book about St. Thérèse of

Lisieux is one of only two of his attempts at an independent theological hagiography.19

Balthasar claims “that Thérèse and the Curé d’Ars were the only two perfectly evident instances during the nineteenth century of a primarily theological mission.”20 (Although

he never wrote a separate work on St. John Vianney.) The importance for his theology is

18 2SS, 39.

19 The other hagiographical work by Balthasar is on St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, included with the profile of St. Thérèse of Lisieux in Two Sisters in the Spirit: Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity.

20 2SS, 28. 7

mission’s embodied form, to give flesh and blood to what could otherwise remain two-

dimensional “stick figures.” The saints give contour to a living theology rooted in Christ

and continually participating in the Trinity. For Balthasar, the Little Flower and her little

way concretize theological mission and person.

The thesis will be presented as follows: The next chapter will look at Balthasar’s

understanding of how philosophy and metaphysics intermingled with Christianity in the

early days of the Church, then proceed to Balthasar’s application of Aquinas and the

analogy of being, and finish with Christ as the fulfillment of all philosophical categories.

The chapter begins with natural religious eros and ends with the only form capable of

fulfilling that eros, Jesus Christ, the presupposition to the theological category of faith.

How one comes to faith in an encounter with beauty will be considered an overarching

concern of Balthasar’s, the theological a priori in his Theo-Aesthetics. Chapter 3

introduces the categories of Balthasar’s theology of mission through the lens of his Theo-

Drama. Balthasar’s wholly Christological/Trinitarian center of theological thought

requires the consideration of the mission of Jesus Christ in Chapter 4 before moving to

particular saints. As Christ is the source of all missions and theological categories of

mission, his mission is the casting call for all “spectators” to enter the drama of salvation

history. Chapter 5 spotlights Mary as the saint par excellence and the first to answer the

Christian clarion. We witness how Balthasar’s Theo-Drama puts forth not only a

theology of mission but also, generates a parallel theology of the saints (not formally, and

certainly not systematically dealt with in his work or this paper). Dramatic free space

opened up in the Christ event for all human beings to respond to the will of God, and, this

is in no person more evident than in the dynamic and obedient Mother of God. Her

8 complete surrender to her Son’s offer manifests fruit one hundredfold in not only bearing the Savior, but becoming the mother of the faithful and the model of the Church. Chapter

6 turns to one additional saint, one for whom Balthasar felt inspired to compose a hagiographic profile: Thérèse of Lisieux. How is his portrait of Thérèse consistent with the concept of mission as presented? How does Thérèse animate Balthasar’s theology of mission? Chapter 7 begins with a short round-up of Balthasar’s macro-concerns and concludes with the micro-relationships that helped him flesh out his theology: one with a canonized saint in , Thérèse, and the other with an uncanonized saint he knew on earth, Adrienne von Speyr. Can the saint in all the idiosyncratic details of her mission be a point of connection or reconciliation in Balthasar’s “separations”?

Primary Sources

The thesis objectives will be addressed by first organizing a theology of mission from Balthasar’s works. Given the breadth and depth of his output, I will necessarily have to sample his writings. I will not have the perspective to judge whether the selections I make are representative of his thought pattern, or even if I have interpreted his thinking correctly. I will use secondary scholarly literature as a guide. I do find some comfort in the assessment of various scholars that Balthasar’s theology shows consistency over the course of his life.

I will focus on the trilogy as it is considered to be the capstone and compendium of Balthasar’s thinking. The trilogy is organized around the transcendentals: beauty, goodness, and truth. Balthasar argues that through an overly rational approach to theology, beauty has been marginalized through theology’s capitulation to empiricism.

He aims to reunite the three suggesting that without beauty, both goodness and truth are

9 compromised. In sleuthing beauty’s disappearance from theology, Balthasar seeks to answer existential questions by traipsing across many disciplines on a forward but certainly not straight path through history engaging a crowd of churchmen, scholars, artists, mystics and a few women saints. A consequence, for Balthasar, of theologically reuniting the transcendentals is that human beings can perceive existential significance and attain personal fulfillment through an encounter with God’s self-revelation in the person of Jesus Christ through the . The Glory of the Lord, Vols. I-VII, or

Theological Aesthetics, focuses on the transcendental beauty and the beauty of the revelation of God in the incarnation, cross, and resurrection of Christ that transforms the one encountered so as to become transparent and able to hear the call to mission. In the

Theo-Drama, Vols. I-V, transcendental goodness is the hub; Balthasar posits that theological personhood allows the Christian to enter into participation in Trinitarian relationship through a unique charism or mission. Obedience to the demands of the mission gives not only soteriological direction but also grants meaning and fulfillment to life in time. It is only through faithfully responding to the will of God in the particulars of one’s mission that the Christian enters the drama of salvation in history and begins to understand the truth who is God, who is Word, who is Spirit, who is Trinity, who is Love.

The transcendental truth is expounded in the final section of the trilogy: Theo-Logic.

I hope to unfold Balthasar’s shape of mission and the saints using excerpts from the first two parts of the trilogy: Theological Aesthetics and Theo-Drama. I want to begin where Balthasar begins, with beauty: Theological Aesthetics includes highlights of the beauty of the saint in mission against the backdrop of the alienation of beauty from theology. How does the saint reflect the beauty of God? Could the saint under the

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mantle of mission and in the desire to do the will of God become a place where beauty can be restored to theology? It is from within the Balthasarian construction that the

Christian theologian acknowledges the foundation and source of any sound theological

structure: The source of the beauty and mission of the saint is in and from the beauty of

Christ in his mission of the incarnation, cross, and resurrection. It is through encounter

with the beauty of the Son of Man, that one is allowed the freedom to respond---and such

an encounter with the glory of God demands a response!

Next, approaching Balthasar’s Theodrama, each believer’s free “Yes!” is possible

through the perfect “Yes!” of the Son of God to the Father. It is in the Son of God’s gift

of himself back to the Father by accepting the mission given to him and his perfect

obedience to that mission to the point of death, even death on the cross, that he is exalted

and given the glory he had from eternity. It is from this center point of salvation history,

that is, the very person of Jesus Christ, that individual human beings can participate in the

mission of Christ for the world and share the glory of God, and the saints do this is in an

elevated and intensified way: “It is only when the church is seen as the Church of saints

that her image is irresistible.”21

Finally, Two Sisters in the Spirit, will be the source for what Balthasar has to say about St. Thérèse of Lisieux and how the beauty and holiness of her person and mission

can animate theology and offer a vital witness of Christ and the Church to believers, if

not to the world.

21 “Theology and Sanctity,” 200. 11

A Brief Biographical Sketch of Hans Urs von Balthasar

As it is not within the scope of this paper to present a complete biography,22 I have highlighted a few inflection points that I feel shaped the trajectory of his life and possibly account for his novel approach to theology.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was born in , in 1905 to an aristocratic Swiss family. He was raised as a Catholic when Catholicism was the minority Christian confession in Switzerland.23 Three of his great-grandparents on his

mother’s side were Protestant whose presence may have inspired him with an openness to

dialogue with Karl Barth and to .

Balthasar was musically gifted, had a particular passion for Mozart, and “...for a

long time, von Balthasar wavered between musical and literary studies.”24 He received

his doctorate in 1928 from the University of having studied German language, culture and literature; his dissertation History of the Eschatological Problem in Modern

German Literature was published in 1929. 25 His interest in was subsequently directed to the study of theology and the problem of meaning and faith in

22 In the chapter notes to the “Introduction” of The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the editors claim that at the time of publication (2004) only one biography had been written by Elio Guerriero which did not delve so much into the details of his life but his works. The editors predict that until the archives of the Jesuit Order in , the Community of St. John’s and the Swiss diocese of Chur are released can a solid biography be attempted. (p. 7N.4.) Academic inquiry must be content with the short piece by Balthasar’s cousin, Peter Henrici, SJ, “A Sketch of Von Balthasar’s Life,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, edited by David L. Schindler, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 7-43.

23 WordonFire.org, “Father Barron on Hans Urs von Balthasar, Part 2 of 2,” posted May 19, 2014. (http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/video/fr-barron-on-hans-urs-von-balthasar-part-2-of-2/316/) Accessed January 6, 2017.

24 Henrici, 8.

25 Stephen Wigley, Balthasar’s Trilogy: A Reader’s Guide (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 4. 12

contemporary culture. For all of his ensuing achievement in theology, he never pursued a

doctorate in the discipline.

It was during an Ignatian retreat in 1927 that he was surprised by the call to the

priesthood:

Even now, thirty years later, I could still go to that remote path in the Black Forest, not far from , and find again the tree beneath which I was struck as by lightning...And yet it was neither theology nor the priesthood which then came into my mind in a flash. It was simply this: you have nothing to choose, you have been called. You will not serve, you will be taken into service. You have no plans to make, you are just a little stone in a mosaic which has long been ready. All I needed to do was “to leave everything and follow,” without making plans, without wishes or insights. All I needed was to stand there and wait to see what I would be needed for.26

He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1929. Of the theologians who influenced him during

those days, and would be considered primary.27 Through

Jesuit formation he received a “double license in philosophy and theology” and took his

first assignment as a student chaplain at Basel rather than becoming a professor at the

Gregorian. 28 His decision marked a decisive turning point that in a way eschewed

academia and allowed him to attend to the spiritual and pastoral lacuna he diagnosed as

the malaise in the discipline: “...for he was a theologian only to be a pastor.”29

In 1940, Balthasar became the spiritual director of Adrienne von Speyr30 a Swiss

medical doctor whom Balthasar considered a mystic. The relationship resulted in the

26 Edward T. Oakes, S.J., Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994), 2, n.2.

27 Henrici, 12-13.

28 Wigley, 5.

29 McGregor and Norris, 1.

30 Matthew Lewis Sutton, Heaven Opens: The Trinitarian Mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014), xiv. 13

founding of a secular institution for men and women called the Community of St. John.31

This decision cost him his standing with the Jesuits and he would leave the society in order to be faithful to the establishing of foundations for the new community. Departing the Jesuits could be considered a contradiction to the obedience he espoused as the utmost virtue to the success of mission. He explained:

I took this step, for both sides a very grave one, after a long testing of the certainty I had reached through prayer that I was being called by God to certain definite tasks in the Church. The Society felt it could not release me to give these tasks my undivided commitment...So, for me, the step taken means an application of Christian obedience to God, who at any time has the right to call a man not only out of his physical home or his marriage, but also from his chosen spiritual home in a religious order, so that he can use him for his purposes within the Church...32

Notwithstanding his prolific written works, the foundations of the Community of St. John

were what he considered his essential mission.33

In addition to forming the Community of St. John’s, Balthasar recognized

the mutual influence that his relationship with von Speyr had upon his theology: “Her

work and mine cannot be separated from one another either psychologically or

theologically. They are two halves of one whole, with a single foundation at the

center.”34 It appears, however, from my reading of secondary literature, his claim to their

mutual influence has been routinely ignored and suspicion looms over the possibility of

her contribution.35

31 Balthasar’s Our Task oultines their joint mission.

32 Henrici, 21.

33 Ibid., 28.

34 Ibid.

35 Note Michele M. Schumacher’s observation in A Trinitarian Anthropology, “Introduction,” p.3: “...she (von Speyr) is rarely regarded as providing insights for contemporary theological discussion, even within 14

One factor of paramount importance making it possible to know the theology of

Balthasar, to examine the writings of von Speyr, as well as, consider the justification of their joint mission, is that Balthasar was a publisher. Although originally “intended for the publication of Adrienne’s writings,” Johannes Verlag, his publishing house, became a

key to his own enduring legacy.36 Balthasar acted as creator, producer, publicist, agent, and marketing and public relations for his own brand! Johannes Verlag was certainly a determining factor in making his thinking accessible to academic inquiry.

One final note is to look at Balthasar’s other friendships. Karl Barth was certainly one whose thinking permeated Balthasar’s own. Through their shared passion for

Mozart and for Christ, their conversations over dinner, and their mutual respect, each enriched the other’s theological speculation.

the context of Balthasar’s ‘own’ theology.” More than purely dismissive, are outright attempts to excise Von Speyr’s insights and influence as evidenced by Schumacher with regard to The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar by Kevin Mongrain: “This goal of mine is thus opposed to that of Kevin Mongrain, for example, who hopes to ‘give scholars the tools for refuting von Balthasar’s misleading claims about her (Adrienne’s) role in shaping his theology” (7). For a look at what Balthasar has to say about his relationship with von Speyr and her influence, see these two books: Our Task, trans. by Dr. , (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994) and My Work: In Retrospect, trans. by Brian McNeil, Kenneth Batinovich, John Saward and Kelly Hamilton, (SanFrancisco: Ignatius, 1993). Schumacher points to Edward Oakes evaluation in Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York & London: Continuum, 1994) p. 3, that Balthasar’s “isolation ‘from the wider guild of professional theologians’ (is) due ‘no doubt’ to Balthasar’s encounter with Adrienne ‘more than (to) any other event in Balthasar’s life” (A Trinitarian Anthropology, 5). Though I do not know the scope of Oakes’ scholarship, I find that he recognizes her “influence on his life,” but “postpone(s) a consideration...to the end of the book” (Pattern of Redemption, 10). Although he admits Balthasar may disapprove of “such a stance,” Oakes insists that “his is a building that not only can stand on its own, but does” (Pattern of Redemption, 10). The treatment of Adrienne von Speyr’s own work may be marginalized due to the very separation of theology from spirituality that Balthasar laments; her mystical experiences were off-putting to many, much like the reaction to mystics in the continuum of Catholic experience. Might then contemporary theologians deny a primary goal of Balthasar’s, to recover a kneeling theology, by marginalizing von Speyr’s mysticism? Or, in a way, by discrediting their relationship, undermine the notion of the participation in Trinitarian relationship that grounds his theology of mission?

36 Henrici, 29-30.

15

Another group of friends included his colleagues who along with Balthasar founded Communio: International Catholic II.Review in 1973.37

Of note, would certainly be his relationships with and influence on two recent : Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II.

______

37Wigley, 11.

16

CHAPTER 2

THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

Universal Longing

The first thing I will consider in a Balthasarian theology of saints and mission is

Balthasar’s understanding of how a person comes to faith in Christ. There is a common

quest for the meaning of existence that appears to inhere in the very nature of humankind

and can be evidenced through the witness of artists, poets, and philosophers in every era.

Even primitive cave demonstrate the thirst for puzzling out the workings of the

cosmos. Human intuition of a supreme power spars with the injustice of a finite life span

suffused with suffering and slighted by ephemeral beauty. As Balthasar contends, the

recognition of the contingency and finitude of existence is “the source of all the religious

and philosophical thought of humanity.”1 The Glory of the Lord, Vol. IV, covers the

efforts before to identify “those elements in the theological vision that are solidary with the thinking of humankind at large, and (especially) rooted in what he will call ‘general religious metaphysics’.”2 Balthasar knows that for his theologizing to have

apologetic value, and this appears to be the motivation for his life’s work, he must

1 Balthasar, “A Resume of my Thought,” 469, as quoted in Aidan Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011).

2 Aidan Nichols, The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide through Balthasar’s Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 128. GL IV also includes the , Catholic thinkers and mystics up to and including St. Thomas Aquinas. 17

consider the history of humankind’s hunt for God, a search that brings all time to its

midpoint, the epiphany of God as man. The Christ event impels Balthasar to include

humanity’s answers before revelation, a time when mystery permeated the world of

classical antiquity and intuition of the divine infused the work of myth-making and

philosophizing.

This universal longing to understand existence is coupled with a desire to

transcend visible reality as “the peoples feel the gloomy, diffuse pressure of a general

culpability of existence, a having fallen out of grace from fortune, from which they seek

to free themselves by means of rites and techniques.”3 These “rites and techniques” fail to

satisfy. Balthasar purports that “every religion wanted (and still does) to provide an answer to the question of the ultimate meaning of the world and of human existence

inside that world.”4 However, there is no myth that can explain, no pagan philosophy

that can calm the restless heart, no natural religion that can quell existential concerns but

the revelation of God the Creator, in the Word of the enfleshed Son, through the grace

and sustenance of the Holy Spirit. Balthasar echoes Christian theologians through history

who assert the uniqueness of Christian revelation which makes allowance for

...the apparent paradox of a nature directed toward reaching God but whose natural powers render that goal unattainable and---trumping this paradox---the grace of God’s self-disclosure inserted into an already “purely natural” freedom, a grace whose irradiation would be thought of as flowing out into the whole of history from its Christological center. 5

3 Balthasar, TD II as quoted in Raymond Gawronski, Word and Silence: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter Between East and West (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 8.

4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Epilogue trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 19.

5 Ibid.,18. 18

What human being could have anticipated, imagined, or predicted the answer to all existential questions and human longings as the person of Jesus Christ?6 Relationship to the person of Christ binds up the loose ends of angst and unfolds human dignity anew in the reconciliation of man to God through God’s descent into man’s flesh. In the paradoxical humiliation of the Son of God on the cross and his descent into , Christ defies all human expectations by deifying man in the hope of the resurrection.

Universal Consciousness

From a philosophical perspective, an encounter between a created subject and a created object provokes a tussle with several philosophical categories, albeit, with the theological a priori (distinguished from religious a priori in non-Christian thinking) that

Balthasar insists is an unquestioned antecedent of any speculative thought prior to the

“ruptures in theology.”7 Several terms to consider in understanding encounters among

6 Balthasar: “It is not that an eternally present cosmic law is now brought to consciousness in a new way by Christ; rather, out of the freedom of God’s love a mode of salvation is created by which all is safeguarded in God. To unite these two things more than a myth is required (even a Gnostic one) and more than a religious ethic: what is required is precisely that Christ-form which we have characterized by saying that it could not be invented by man” (GL I, 493). Again, on the uniqueness of Christ and Christianity: “these constructions are distinct from the Christian reality in the sense that, even though they could be the testimonies of religious persons---even, latently, of believers---they nonetheless cannot be God’s immediate self-witness in historical form and pre-eminently, in Christ, who, as a historical form, demands faith for himself: this is something which no religious founder or thinker or artist could ever or will ever do as long as he understands himself to be obedient to the eternal Light” (GL I, 163).

7 Since Balthasar laments the separation of philosophy and theology, his trilogy is an attempt to reunite them by re-assimilating to theology what he views as the unified and inseparable transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth. It is particularly beauty which he sets out to recapture, and beauty must have a form so as to be perceived. From Veronica Donnelly, O.P.’s dissertation, Saving Beauty: Form as the Key to Balthasar’s , vol. 34 of Religions and Discourse ed. James M.M. Francis (Ber, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2007): “There is...an evident continuity between the philosophical center of Balthasar’s work and its theological center. One can discern a chain of connections which lead from his philosophical aesthetics, rooted in a Goethean-Aristotelian philosophy of nature, to his Trinitarian theology, and theological aesthetics. Balthasar wants to transpose these categories and use them as a frame and vehicle of communication, albeit inadequate, of the revelation of God in the form of Christ...Balthasar warns that here can be no univocal transposition of categories from the philosophical to the theological. He also cautions that when the word ‘form’ is applied to Christ it must be used with care. Jesus Christ is a ‘legible’ form and not just a sign, but his form can be grasped for what it is only when it is accepted as the appearance of a divine depth transcending all worldly nature” (12). 19

created beings can, by way of analogy, help fathom faith in Christ; these include form,

being, and the relationship between subjective experience and objective evidence. The italicized words must be considered in the context of “relationship” and “encounter.”

Without the encounter between subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity make no sense. Form and being cannot be contemplated without acknowledging that as a created being one shares in being and stands among and in relation to countless other creatures and living things, and no power exists within created being that can create itself. Coming to consciousness of the “other” and the “Wholly Other” depends on and originates in relationship. The “most commonly encountered image in Balthasar’s corpus ...that of the mother, calling her child to I-consciousness by a smile,” is when “the child first becomes aware of itself as a “Thou.”8 Conscious of the I-Thou, the child then through the use of

analogy learns to make distinctions as the child encounters other “objects” or “Thou’s”,

as “language learning is inherently analogical.”9

By Way of Analogy

To describe beauty, Balthasar recommends relating “form” to “splendor” (or

“Gestalt” to “Glanz.”)10 The contemplation of the beautiful brings us into contact with

what can be “materially grasped.”11 “Only that which has form can snatch one up into a

Aidan Nichols quotes Thomas Schumacher: “...in its own special perspective, each part of the trilogy makes explicit (in a way both philosophical and theological) reality as a whole” (A Key to Balthasar, 4).

8 Gawronski, Word and Silence, 82.

9 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 19.

10 GL I, 115.

11 Ibid. 20

state of rapture. Only through form can the lightning-bolt of eternal beauty flash.” 12

What we can behold, however, is “fundamentally a sign and appearing of a depth and a fullness that, in themselves and in an abstract sense, remain beyond both our reach and our vision.”13 The depth or the glory or the splendor of the object is what keeps the beholder rapt; both revealed and hidden, there is that sense that the depths can never be

fully known:

The form as it appears to us is beautiful only because the delight that it arouses in us is founded upon the fact that, in it, the truth and goodness of the depths of reality itself are manifested and bestowed, and this manifestation and bestowal reveal themselves to us as being, something infinitely and inexhaustibly valuable and fascinating. The appearance of the form, as revelation of the depths, is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a reality pointing beyond itself to these depths...both aspects are inseparable from one another, and together, they constitute the fundamental configuration of Being.14

As created form appears, it is an indissoluble union of form or essence and existence or

being---esse and essentia.

At this point, we need to bring the wonder at being into relationship with the

Source of Being. In Balthasar’s history of metaphysics, St. Thomas Aquinas’ work brings a “restructured”15 Aristotle into association with revelation but more than that:

12 Ibid., 32.

13 Ibid., 115.

14 Ibid., 115-116.

15 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 30. Oakes chapter “Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being” is a well- organized, accessible explication of the history of the doctrine of analogy and the full Catholic appropriation of the language of analogy in speaking of God in light of St. Thomas Aquinas’ creative reinterpretation. Oakes claims that Thomas’ development of the real distinction “implies ...that ‘to be’ is the supreme act of all that is.” God’s essence is “to be” so that God’s essence and existence are one. And since, being as an essence is inconceivable, whatever similarity the creature has with the Creator, the dissimilarity is always greater. (Fourth Lateran Council). Oakes claims that understanding analogy of being is what also gives us access to Balthasar’s entire theology (31). Oakes credits Erich Przywara’s influence on Balthasar: “...he taught Balthasar to interpret the pathos of modern philosophy according to how it reacted to the doctrine of analogy...the dilemmas that human thought runs into when it abandons the 21

Thomas’s experience of Being gathered within itself and embodied the inheritance of antiquity in its entirety, of an Aristotle who is always transformed and imbued with a religious light by ...Dionysius and Augustine. For Thomas to contradict an experience of this kind would have been to cast doubt on whether the religious experience of mankind (which had drawn close to Christianity in its Greek guise) still had an obligatory character in the present.16

According to Balthasar, Thomas’ analogical thought subsumes the entire scope of metaphysical meditations and brings them into the light of revelation to the Creator God who spoke creation into existence ex nihlo.17 Prior to and outside the revealed scripture, imaginative speculation strained to fashion the Source of Being as the One in a chain of being or a either contained or uncontained by the cosmos. And although the

Hellenistic concept of gradation of beings admitted distinction in its hierarchy, it is

tensions represented in analogy. According to Przywara, the history of modern thought may be interpreted as the inability to hold together the polarity between God’s transcendence and immanence; that is as running aground either in the pathos of stressing God’s omnipotence, thereby robbing the world of its own reality by overwhelming it with God’s transcendence, as in Luther, or by the world absorbing God into itself through a pantheistic identification with him, as in Spinoza” (36). Balthasar on Przywara’s interpretation of the analogy of being as presented by Oakes: “The result is a philosophy in the Archimedean point: which means simultaneously the most radical formality and the most radical suspension of all systematics, finding the formula to annihilate every formula by pointing out the fault line in the creaturely to its very ultimate.” (43) Rodney Howsare gives Oakes’ book praise: “I think Oakes’ book is still the most accessible, best overview of Balthasar’s theology on the market. There may be better studies of Balthasar’s theology, but they are not as readable nor as comprehensive” (A Guide for the Perplexed, 184). For the most current scholarship on the doctrine of the analogy of being, please see The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? ed. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011). In the book, Balthasar and Anxiety (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009) John R. Cihak notes that Balthasar makes a departure from Przywara in that “positive affirmations take precedence while negations serve the affirmations by giving them the necessary qualifications” (18).

16 Balthasar, GL V trans. Oliver Davies et al., ed. Brian McNeil and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 9-10.

17 Howsare, Hans Urs von Balthasar and : The Ecumenical Implications of His Theological Style (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 81: “...Aquinas’s understanding of analogy was never a ‘neutral’ one, that is, one derived from ‘pure reason’, for it was intimately connected to the doctrine of creation.”

22

Thomas’ ferreting out the “real distinction” that opened a way to understand the

relatedness between God and human beings created in the image of God.18

The “real distinction” is that God’s essence is “to be.” God alone possesses an

essence that is pure existence or pure being and thereby God is a complete unity in

essence and being. Human beings by way of analogy of being are similar to God in their

being but not their essence. For essence is the form of created flesh in which existence is

the animating principle but with Thomistic qualifications: “The existence of a thing,

though distinct from its essence, is nevertheless not to be thought of as something

superadded in the manner of an accident, but as, so to speak, constituted by principles of

essence.”19 The person or thing is an indissoluble unity, however, a “unity in tension”20:

In what we might call the ‘real distinction’ (circumspectly, because here we are dealing with an inexplicable mystery) God contemplated his Creation with free, so to speak, stereoscopic sight, which means at the same time that God preserves for the creature this wholly new plasticity: it is precisely when the creature feels itself to be separate in being from God that it knows itself to be the most immediate object of God’s love and concern; and it is precisely when its essential finitude shows it to be something quite different from God that it knows that, as a real being, it has had bestowed upon it that most extravagant gift---participation in the real being of God.21

This free gift of participation in being endows the mortal participant with the ability to

reflect on being. That one can even propose an analogy when learning or encountering

something new discloses an analogical matrix to creation that allows for discovery. The

God who discloses God’s self as the “I AM WHO AM” opens up holy ground for new

18 See “Erich Przywara and the Analogy of Being” in Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 15-44.

19 Balthasar, GL IV trans. Brian McNeil et al., ed. John Riches (Edinburgh/San Francisco: T&T Clark/Ignatius Press, 1989) n.359, 402. From St. Thomas Aquinas as quoted by Balthasar.

20 Erich Przywara as quoted by Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 32.

21 GL IV, 404. 23 intimacy with God who gives his name, who wants to be known in the immanent self– disclosure of Word and the transcendent mystery of glory. It is in the covenantal

relationship between Yahweh and the people of Israel that the “I AM WHO AM” makes

known God’s self and, in turn, the people of Israel recognize their identity as a “Thou.”22

Christ, as covenantal hinge, makes full the promises of the Old Covenant and extends dignity beyond the nation of Israel to the whole world but in a personal way inconceivable until this turning point.23 The free gift of Crucified Love invites a free response, not from a family (Abraham), or a group (the twelve tribes), or a nation (Israel), but from each encountered individual, to participate in the Triune life of God.

The Christ-centered language of analogy24 is the language Balthasar uses to proclaim a God who intends to be in a love relationship with God’s own creation. The

22 GL VI, pp.134-197, Balthasar lays out the meaning of covenant for the people of Israel. God desires to disclose himself and be in relationship with all nations (see Isaiah) but first he elects the people of Israel to teach them what being in a covenantal relationship with God means. Balthasar shows that Israel would have been familiar with political covenants between kings and peoples but “the relationship of life between Yahweh and Israel...is something that lacks analogies...the manner in which this divine ‘I’ addresses and lays hold of the people that stands before him at the mountain of God shows two things: first, the fact that this living God enters upon a relationship with this crowd of men in a special manner that sets a mark of distinction upon them...is...pure, one-sided grace. Second, the same fact...lays claim to them in a total and unconditional way...”(141). This is the “I”-“Thou” relationship that opens up salvation history whereby creatures understand they are, in fact, and, therefore, want nothing but “to (give) back all glory to the ‘I’” (134). The covenant between God and his chosen people makes room in the world so that “God’s Word can become flesh” (197).

23 One of the ways Balthasar uses the dialectic of promise and fulfillment is to establish continuity between history and salvation history (which he proposes are one and the same, as history is salvation history). Promise and fulfillment are also used to show continuity between the Old and New Covenants: “The experience of God in the is under way to Christ...” (GL I, 323).

24 The key here is the modifier “Christ-centered.” This understanding of analogy of being as having its center in Christ is important especially for the conversation between Barth and Balthasar on analogy of being. Barth considered the doctrine of analogy of being “the work of the anti-Christ” because it represented to Barth an attempt by man to grasp God through natural reason. Leaving reason out instigates the opposing charge of fideism or theopanism. Fideism is a false charge against Barth, according to Rodney Howsare who frames this as a Catholic misunderstanding---“Barth’s thought is directed against autonomous, Enlightenment reason”(Howsare, Balthasar and Protestantism, 89). In addition, Balthasar saw a potential consequence of omitting reason from the equation as making questionable the incarnation. “...a Christocentric approach to theology need not result, indeed should not result, in denying the creaturely realm its legitimate autonomy.” (Ibid., 98.) As Balthasar’s thought on analogy of being was influenced by 24 gift of participation in God’s own Being allows us from the position of creature, one in which God is always greater, to pray, to worship, and understand relationship to Absolute

Being promised first in covenant with Israel, fulfilled in salvation history in the God-

Man, and eternally opened to eschatological glorification. The doctrine of analogy of being permits access to the revelation of the Form of forms while acknowledging the limits of using human language in attempts to explain the inexhaustible disclosing and concealing Word of God, who is Jesus Christ.

Faith in the Form of Forms

Balthasar says, “to be a Christian is precisely a form.”25 As it is inherent within the nature of humanity to make oneself available for the “superior command”26 or to seek to align to some form or image, Christianity claims it is the form of Christ that is the “real life-form” 27 and not just one alongside many forms, but the “form of forms:”

As God’s own appearance, it will have to stand in sharp contrast to all other creations of the religious imagination, no matter how and enrapturing these may be. God himself will have to assign it a distinctive place in the theatre of appearances, and this not only by himself shaping this form into an objectively unassailable and unmistakable figure, but by creating out of it and its surrounding forms a total configuration, which is both inconceivable and irreducible.28

Erich Przywara, Balthasar brings Barth and Przywara together: “Barth obviously (and justifiably) sees in [analogy] a formal structural principle that pervades everything: but ultimately [it is also] the anti-Christian attempt of man to place himself on a common level with God, to ‘grasp after’ God, which grasping is precisely the very meaning of . Now it is significant, however, that Erich Przywara in his analysis of the Barthian dialectic raises the very same objection against it: dialectic is for him the titanic attempt to leap over the boundary---a boundary that can only be guaranteed by the principle of analogy!---of creaturely distance to God. This highly paradoxical situation in the discussion, in which both opponents hurl the same objection at the other, and in fact defend the same underlying intent, must provoke us to test once more these two formal principles” (As quoted in Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 57).

25 GL I, 27.

26 Ibid., 35.

27 Ibid., 29.

28 Ibid., 165. 25

The unique and “unrepeatable” form of Christ piercing history at an appointed place and

time as the figure of Jesus of Nazareth opens up hope and points people and history to a

teleological end that reconciles relationship and raises humanity to its intended dignity as

children of God:

By being that historical existent who, in his (human) positivity, makes present the Being of God for the world in an unsurpassable manner, Christ becomes the measure, both in judgment and in redemption, of all other religious forms in mankind. This judgment and this redemption are internal to him, and secured by virtue of his very existence. He himself does not judge: he redeems; but the very fact that he is there means judgment for all worldly forms.29

For Balthasar, this is the Who that theological eros, (and philosophical and natural religious eros) pines for as the solution to existence. Unlike the many answers proposed by man in the religions of the world, it is the divine eros meeting humanity’s longing that out of love for humanity gives the captivating form of a Savior who is crucified, the One who claims to be the Son of God, and holds within himself his unified Trinitarian God- self and all the tensions of sinful humanity. This answer is proposed by love, by God, by

Trinitarian life, an answer impossible for humankind to conceive or achieve without the full revelation of God in Jesus. In manifesting in flesh, Christ is the only form who seeks to reconcile humanity to God while conferring dignity on earthly struggle.

The God-Man compels a personal decision like no other prophet or system of (not just the Greeks of antiquity, but so too atheism, individualism, materialism, and all the

“isms” that preoccupy contemporary culture) that humankind can imagine:

For Balthasar...natural man tries to escape from this world of limitation, finitude and death. Individualistic schemes of salvation lead him to dissolve his individual humanity or to dissolve his ties with the rest of humanity in attempts at union with an Absolute...without the revelation that comes from a , a personal

29 Ibid. 26

Absolute, reason tends to take over and reason projects itself into its monologue, the union is ultimately with oneself.30

The temptation is “to see man as the author of the beautiful...(in) “the mainstream of modern titanism,” 31 and this is a dead end, for humanity was made for dialogue and drama and not the closed and frozen circle of self-involvement.

The “Form of forms” is a puzzling form however. For it is Jesus Christ, the God- man, crucified who is the Form. The descent of Christ into the human condition of flesh and blood, time and place, birth and death pours out his being, leaving behind the equality he held with the Father and their love together in the Holy Spirit. In obedience to the will of the Father, out of their love for each other and for humanity, the Son’s kenotic activity and its power to save all is not in a form recognizable or appealing to the world: nailed to a cross and forsaken by the Father. In the words of Adrian Walker:

It has become something of a conferencier’s cliché to repeat Balthasar’s strictures against an “aesthetic theology,” but it is easy to forget that these strictures reflect his own keen awareness that the beauty of the Christ-form is an unwonted one that is satisfying precisely because it includes what at first is unbeautiful: the bloody death of the Lord of glory on a criminal’s gibbet.32

But Jesus Christ’s total surrender and obedience to the will of the Father is “God’s original language and self-expression.”33 The Son of God in his birth, death, and resurrection is God’s full revelation to the world.

30 Gawronski, 37.

31 GL I, 58.

32 Adrian Walker, “Every Thought Captive to Christ,” in How Balthasar Changed My Mind: 15 Scholars Reflect on the Meaning of Balthasar for Their Own Work eds. Rodney A. Howsare and Larry S. Chapp (New York: Crossroad, 2008), 261.

33 GL I, 29.

27

Since in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, it is beauty that draws us into

relationship with the beloved, what kind of beauty is the Crucified Christ? The

is the suffering and death of God on the cross; for Balthasar, this

particular historical concrete form and its inexhaustible eternal content are one in the

manifested in the Christ event. Jesus’ life and mission reconcile God

and creation, a creation that knows its need for redemption; the Creator lines the very

fabric of being with the necessity for wholeness, completeness. The God-man holds all

humanity’s tensions together as “existence and essence,” “flesh and spirit,” “heaven and

earth,” “judgment and salvation,”34 heaven and hell, mortality and immortality, time and eternity, the freedom of God and the freedom of the creature, assent and rejection, obedience and apostasy---all polarities are held within the human and divine indissoluble

Christ, and therefore, included in the dynamism of a constant procession of generative

love within the Trinity that continues to offer itself. No other form is trustworthy to take

up the suffering of humanity and transform it with new life. The form of the Crucified

Christ is an invitation to restored relationship and real participation in the Trinitarian love.

The Form is Love

What is ultimately attractive about Christ as man and God on the Cross is the love that it expresses:

Both the person who is transported by natural beauty and the one snatched up by the beauty of Christ must appear to the world to be fools, and the world will attempt to explain their state in terms of psychological or even physiological laws (Acts 2:13). But they know what they have seen, and they care not one farthing what people may say. They suffer because of their love, and it is only the fact

34 The pairs in quotes are chapter titles in Balthasar’s book on Prayer trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986). 28

that they have been inflamed by the most sublime of beauties---a beauty crowned with thorns and crucified---that justifies their sharing in that suffering.35

Drawn by the beauty of the cross, the subject encounters the object of faith, and through

faith knows the love of the Crucified. Balthasar explains in the preface to his book, Love

Alone is Credible, that it is an “elaboration of what I endeavored in my larger work The

Glory of the Lord, that is, it will be a ‘theological aesthetic’ in the twofold sense of a

subjective theory of and a theory of the objective self-interpretation of the

divine glory...”36

The four philosophical/theological terms presented thus far in this thesis include form, being, subjectivity and objectivity; they converge in the act of faith which is the proper response to love and is love. Balthasar further explicates: “What is here called an

‘aesthetic’ is therefore characterized as something properly theological, namely, as the reception, perceived with the eyes of faith, of the self-interpreting glory of the sovereignly free love of God.”37 Faith becomes concrete for Balthasar in the “deed” of

love of Christ’s death pro nobis. “Occurring thus in pure gratuity, the deed demonstrates

pure and absolute love: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners

Christ died for us...’”38 Balthasar brings faith and love together in that: “faith is ordered

35 GL I, 33.

36 Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible trans. David C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 11. The “self-interpretation” is Jesus Christ’s appearance in salvation history as the Son of God and the full revelation of God. Balthasar describes Jesus as the exegesis of God.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 100.

29 primarily to the inconceivability of God’s love, which surpasses us and anticipates us...Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed...”39

This, again, is not an abstract love or an abstract faith. It is attuned to participation in the free love of God pro nobis which elicits a free response from the beloved. “For love desires no recompense other than to be loved in return...”40 And if the deed is love in the concrete, and the Christian is “impressed” with Christ’s form, then such a one will act out this love in a particular charism or mission within the Church and to the world: “And

God does not impress upon the believer only one trait of his Son’s, but rather his indivisible essential image, even though this image appears in each soul differentiated by personal and charismatic particulars.”41 This is an ever-increasing love that Balthasar locates in the Son's constant going-forth and returning to the Father that is on-going and has no limit.42 The longing disciple is given entrance into the ever-oscillating, giving and receiving in Trinitarian relating which are love, which are faith. The ardent lover of

Christ desires conformity to Christ and therefore strives for complete attunement to the will of the Father perfectly accomplished only in the Son.

They Know What They Have Seen

Christ is the Form of forms, and the mystery of faith in that Form is possible because of the deed of love of the God-man that allows the disciple to enter into and become transformed through the relationship of the Trinity. Belief for Balthasar does not

39 Ibid., 101.

40 Ibid., 107.

41 GL I, 236.

42 There are many references to this activity of the generativity of the eternal procession of the Trinity throughout Balthasar’s work. For one, see GL I, (315) in the section on “Jesus’ Experience of God.” 30

disregard the human condition and the use of the senses in coming to that belief. In fact,

the first volume of The Glory of the Lord is entitled “Seeing the Form.” God reveals

God’s self through the flesh and blood of His Son who entered into the sensory world.

Balthasar introduces the interior or spiritual senses as integral to the subjective experience of faith (of course, not to be considered apart from the objective evidence of faith):

Faith appeared as the token of a total human vision and, indeed, as its hidden beginning, in the sense that God’s human and sensory appearance in Christ could be reciprocated only by a hidden perception and response on the part of man. Furthermore, it was only in this way that the faith of the could fulfill that of the Old. Perception, as a fully human act of encounter, necessarily had not only to include the senses, but to emphasize them, for it is only through the senses and in them that man perceives and acquires a sensibility for the reality of the world and of Being. And, what is more, in Christianity God appears to man right in the midst of worldly reality. The center of this act of encounter must, therefore, lie where the profane human senses, making possible the act of faith, become ‘spiritual’, and where faith becomes ‘sensory’ in order to be human.43

Balthasar does not reduce the senses in a dualistic way with a strict boundary between the body and the spirit as is found in Platonic thought.44 Balthasar maintains that the body and spirit are so intertwined that they cannot be separated:

The total, living person is a free spiritual subject which exists with others in a material cosmos as a percipient being. ‘Perception is an undivided act, in which awareness makes thinking possible and thinking awareness.’ These two aspects do not at all simply correspond to soul and body. It is ‘certainly not only my body, but also my soul which has awareness, and it is certainly not only my soul but also my body which thinks...’45

43 GL I, 356-357.

44 Gawronski, 15: “...(Balthasar) finds the Platonic separation of soul from body as having had disastrous consequences in the history of Western thought, culminating in Idealism where the ‘soul is elevated to be the creator of its corporeal world.’ Having approached the question of anthropology by ‘bypassing’ the question of man’s being a social being, the ‘other’ has disappeared, and man is left split.”

45 GL I, 377. Balthasar quotes Karl Barth from Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/2, 400. 31

He recognizes the senses have both an interior (spiritual) and exterior (“profane” or

physical) dimension to them and that both contribute to faith.

The subjective-objective balance must be retained as well. Though God initiates

the encounter through grace, the nature of the one being confronted with the object of

faith whether mediated through the Scripture or the Church or, as for the original eye-

witnesses, the historical Jesus, is allowed perfect freedom to reject or accept what is

perceived:

By not crushing and surpassing the form of the world with his revelation, but, rather, by taking it up and perfecting it, God honors his creature, honors himself in it as its Creator: the Son honors the Father and the Father the Son. The Christological form as such is, absolutely, the form of the encounter between God and man. This encounter bears the form of the Incarnation, already in the Old Testament and still in the Resurrection. For this reason (and not on account of a subjective theology of experience), this encounter also has the form of a totally human encounter with the God who has become man.46

Balthasar’s sensitivity to all the mysteries at work in this encounter reverences the distance between God and man and yet, the possibility for union through the perfection of the Son. He plays on the dialectic seesaw of analogy in pondering revelation and concealment, subjective and objective evidence, infinite and finite freedom, body and soul, contemplation and action, knowing and not-knowing, darkness and light, and on and

on, and up and down in mysticism and activism, in praying and theologizing... until he

finds that perfect fulcrum, that of the perfect form of Christ. 47 In that perfect form,

46 Ibid., 295-296.

47 This fulcrum is also the . An interesting essay by Balthasar, “ Seeing, Hearing, and Reading Within the Church” in Explorations in Theology, II: Spouse of the Word trans. A.V. Littledale et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 473-490, presents Balthasar’s thinking as to the priority of any one of the senses. After a discussion of the “intellectual senses”, Balthasar moves the dialectic to the spiritualized senses (as in , 478) bounded in a discussion of the Eastern Church, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. While the Eastern Church is limited to a mystical seeing that has “bypassed” the world and looks to the next, Protestantism (and he includes this possible “heresy” for the entire church of the West) is equally limited by hearing which results in either “the actualism of the pure word and the activism 32

Balthasar sees the perfect balance of dialogical communion as the redemption of these

pairs of seeming opposites. Each moves closer to the other because they move closer to

the fulcrum of Christ. The violent seesawing comes to rest in Christ, “for we are restless

until we rest in thee.”

A possible way to explore how one perceives the “beautiful form” of Christ is to

explore how the senses lead to the assent of faith that knows without a doubt what has

been encountered. Balthasar approves all the senses under an umbrella of theological aesthetics:

No metaphysics of being qua being and of its transcendental determinations is separable from concrete experience, which is always sensuous. The truth and the openness of being as a whole will be seen only where a judgment is made about some precise thing that is true; the goodness of being will be experienced only where something that is good meets one, something that simultaneously brings near the good and (through its finitude, fragility, lack of goodness) takes it away again. It is from the experience of the senses that we know that the beautiful exists: this experience makes it present to us and takes it away from us again, discloses it and conceals it in various layers of depth, freely and incomprehensibly---48

The light from within the subject that enlightens the senses is not due to anything

that is generated by the subject but is contingent upon the light being given to the subject

no matter how “the subjective conditions are varied and sophisticated.”49 The dance of

light is the dance of created freedom with Uncreated Freedom. This gift of freedom

allows for

of pure activity”(484). “The entire form of the Catholic Church stands between the extreme East and the extreme West, between Athos and Wittenberg, pure vision and pure hearing” (484). The liturgies of all three demonstrate for Balthasar that liturgy (balanced and unifying the exterior and interior senses) is really only possible within the Catholic Church: “This is initially the equilibrium between seeing and hearing, ‘sacrament’ and ‘word’, objective and existential event of salvation” (486).

48 GL IV, 28-29.

49 GL, I, 452.

33

the subjective condition of the possibility of seeing an object for what it is ...(and it) ought never ever to intrude upon the constitution of the object’s objective evidence...For if Christ is what he claims to be, then he cannot be so dependent on subjective conditions as to be hindered by these from making himself wholly understandable to man nor, contrariwise, can man without his grace, supply the sufficient conditions of receiving him with full understanding.50

Both object and subject are maintained in the freedom constitutive to the state of each,

whether created freedom or Uncreated Freedom. As the subject cannot make or

manipulate the object to satisfy its own self-seeking, neither will any Person of the

Trinity impinge upon the subject without the assent of the subject. The sense condition is

to “see the object” with the spiritual or interior eyes of faith and when this coincides with

“the exterior light that shines from Christ” then the one who sees knows what has been

seen.51

Balthasar emphasizes the importance of hearing for faith as well. It is difficult to

say which sense Balthasar privileges.52 Creation is spoken into existence. Yahweh is not

seen but heard as no one can see God and live. Concealed in the flames of the

unconsumed bush, Yahweh gives his name to Moses declaring: “I AM WHO AM.” Yet,

Balthasar acknowledges the import of the theophanies of the Old Testament and accounts them as indispensable for the people of Israel’s understanding of God, even if it is a representative of the people, as Moses or one of the prophets, who is given a glimpse of

50 Ibid., 453.

51 Ibid., 185.

52 Edward Oakes, in Pattern of Redemption: “Balthasar ...extends this preference for the musical mode to his analysis of the human sensorium, so that in his presentation of the sense-based knowledge, preference must be given to hearing over sight. Balthasar insists that hearing is above all the perceptive mode of surrender, while sight implies control, distance and perspective...”(136). Oakes does wonder, after establishing Balthasar’s leaning toward the ascendancy of hearing, why the first volume of The Glory of the Lord isn’t named “Hearing the Form?” (142). Oakes resolves this seeming contradiction in bringing the senses to the overarching theme of theological aesthetics which seems to privilege sight but is in actuality an assent to the beauty of creation that is similar to an assent from hearing. 34

the glory. For from these visions of God’s glory, the chosen people’s understanding

evolved from the immanent God of nature to include the transcendent God who “dwells on high.” Balthasar seems to equate seeing and hearing in their importance for the percipients: “Even if God who speaks from the cloud on Sinai is, to be sure, a God of the living word, of the mastering command, and of the unheard-of promise, nevertheless one cannot say that, on this account, ‘hearing the word’ is the sole foundation for this religion...At least as much is seen as is heard...”53

Balthasar does appear, however to privilege certain senses at different times of

history. For example, nowhere else in Scripture is sight more important, at least for the

establishment of Christianity, than for the apostles who are the “eyewitnesses.”

However, Balthasar contends “this phase comes to an end with Jesus’ death; the apostles’

senses, accustomed to his existence now fall into the void; there is no longer anything

there to see, to hear, to touch” until after the resurrection.54 All the senses are engaged

anew with the risen Christ: Thomas must put his hands in Christ’s wounds, Peter and

John must inspect the empty tomb, Mary Magdalene runs to tell all the disciples the

news. Jesus demands: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me and

see.” (Luke 24:30) Again, after the ascension, there appears to be a hiatus. Like the

hiatus of , the hiatus until Pentecost is a time of waiting for the Holy Spirit

to be apportioned to the disciples:

Until Jesus’ death, the Spirit rests on him alone; he alone is ‘God-with-us,’ even if the Apostles, by a lightning-flash of grace, do grasp something of the reality (Mt 16.17). It is only after he has breathed on them as the Risen One and, on the basis of their now common possession of the Spirit, after he has explained to them the

53 GL, I, 324-325.

54 Ibid., 335.

35

Scriptures and his own destiny on earth, that they understand what they have seen, heard, and touched, and that they can now also bear witness to it.55

Balthasar then distinguishes the apostles’ use of their senses as not yet elevated to

“spiritual senses.” It is in the Pentecost event that this occurs. But, for Balthasar, Paul is

the threshold to the time of the Church: “...Paul straddles the boundary between the

apostolic and the ecclesial era.”56

The Mediated Form in the Age of the Church

This leads us to the how one perceives the Form of forms and comes to faith in

the ecclesial age. This is important because we must reflect on how the saints “know

what they have seen,” that differs from the original eyewitnesses but can result in a

response of complete renunciation of self in total submission to the form of Christ and a

following of Christ in obedience to their unique missions.

Mediation describes the way the form of Christ becomes visible in the absence of

the incarnated Jesus Christ of history. The Christ-form is mediated primarily through the

Scriptures and through the Church according to Balthasar:

Looking back in the light of the Passion and the Eucharist of Christ’s flesh as it accomplishes redemption we can see what the form of the historical Jesus had been; just as, looking forward we begin to understand what the form of the ‘Christ of faith’ would be: a witnessing Scripture and community, both in strictest unity.57

The place of the Eucharist is not alongside Scripture but together they form an indissoluble whole that communicates the presence of Christ as Word and Sacrament as

55 Ibid., 336-337.

56 Ibid., 339.

57 Ibid., 514.

36

they abide in unity within the mediating form of the Church.58 Balthasar makes a

distinction between Scripture and Eucharist as he asserts that “the risen Christ...can be

separated only very inadequately from the reality of Scripture (as God sees it) and the

Eucharist. The Eucharist is a pure ‘mystery of faith’”, however, compared with the

Scriptures to which the apostles are eyewitnesses.59 Given that, Balthasar’s study, at least

in the Glory of the Lord, I, is confined to Sacred Scripture and the Church which he

describes as “both perceptible expressions of the Christ-form.”

The purpose of this paper is not to give an explication or full summary of

Balthasar’s , but to point to what might genuinely be beautiful about the form

of the Church as the form of Christ in the world, keeping in mind the objective evidence

that draws in the saints, rivets their eyes of faith, and results in Christ-bearing fruitfulness

to the world. To perceive this beauty we must return to the love deed of Christ on the

cross that lives on in the Church in the form of Word and Sacrament:

There can be no ecclesiology that is not, at its core, Christology; and if it is to proceed on the right lines, it must begin by renouncing itself...The Church so understood will ultimately be unable to be an object to herself but will see herself only as the outflowing love of the Lord (and, through him, of the Trinity) and, therefore, as the love flowing out over the world for her redemption.60

The love of the Trinity like no other love is poured out into the Church by the Holy Spirit

making its form and content one with Christ, although not fully realized and or made

perfect until the eschaton.

58 Ibid., 515. Balthasar’s distinguishes the “word” from the “Word”: “Scripture is the word of God that bears witness to God’s Word” (“The Word, Scripture and Tradition,” ET I, 11).

59 Ibid., 516.

60 Balthasar, “The Contemporary Experience of the Church,” ET II trans. A.V. Littledale (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 22.

37

What really makes Balthasar’s ecclesiology come alive is the way he concretizes

it in “a constellation of persons who as a whole embody the Church as the transparent

mediation of the Christ-event.”61 It is through the persons of Mary, Peter, John, and Paul

and their respective missions that we come to recognize the form of Christ in the world

which is the Church.

Balthasar’s saints are never rogue agents, operating individually, apart from the structural authority of the Church. The saint...receives an ecclesial charism. She performs in her own knowledge and love the mystery of the Church’s self-giving love, which itself is an image of the love of Father, Son, and Spirit.62

This dimension of ecclesiology is not Balthasar’s invention, but his unique descriptions

make these archetypes beautiful, so to speak, in how they live out of mission in Christ in

correspondence to the will of God extending Christ’s mission of salvation to the world.

Balthasar’s interpretations of these key pillars give flesh and blood to the characteristics

of Balthasar’s theology of mission that sees all authentic saintly mission as happening

within the Church.63

61 Cihak, 226.

62 Matthew A. Rothaus Moser, Love Itself is Understanding: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 277-278.

63 Balthasar does allow that “the range of Jesus’ eschatological work is such that he can operate directly, outside the Church; he may give grace to individual persons, and perhaps to groups, enabling them to act according to his mind; the Church must allow for this possibility” (TD III, 282). 38

CHAPTER 3

THEOLOGY OF MISSION AS DRAMA

In the previous chapter, I attempted to lay out some of Balthasar’s premises in

The Glory of the Lord that would allow us to approach the topic of his theology of mission. In his Theological Aesthetics, Balthasar desires to restore beauty to theology by focusing on the magnetic draw of the Form of forms, Jesus Christ. Balthasar explains the “conditions that make cognition possible (in our ‘believing in’ something that presents itself to us), and we found the answer in the primal, irreducible phenomenon of ‘seeing the form’.”1 Balthasar’s portrait of the Trinitarian Persons revealed through Christ in the events of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, however, is not static; it is an animated feature, so to speak.

The Players in the Drama

Balthasar’s Theo-Drama makes use of the analogy of theater2 that rests on his

analogy of the Trinity (which is established on his understanding of the analogy of

1 Balthasar, TD II, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 21.

2 Edward Oakes identifies what makes Balthasar’s use of the analogy of drama in theology innovative: “One of the most striking aspects about the Theodramatics is that such a perspective seems never to have occurred to anyone before. And it is not as if the very terminology of theology has not always been deeply indebted to the theater, especially in the use of persona as applied to the individuations of the Trinity. And yet one looks in vain for a systematic and thoroughgoing exploitation of these resources for theology” (Pattern of Redemption, 221).

39 being).3 The first volume of the Theo-Drama lays out the format for this analogy.

The triadic structure necessary for creating, directing and performing the drama on

the world stage is in Trinitarian terms: the Author, or ; the Actor, or

God the Son; and the Director, God the Spirit. The entire dramatic production is for

the benefit of the audience who is not merely a group of spectators but is to be drawn

into the action, prompted to come up on the stage and participate. As Balthasar

points out in the first volume, the Prologomena, the reasons

why human beings go to the theater...We spoke of a twofold need and a twofold pleasure: we project ourselves onto an ultimate plane that gives meaning, and thus we are given our selves. It can also be described as the twofold need to see and to surrender our selves to something that transcends and gives meaning to the limited horizon of everyday life. The dramatic presentation has to do justice to this ‘substantial pathos’, as Hegel calls it.4

Could we entitle this drama of salvation Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?5 It is within this theological framework that existence finds meaning; the life of faith due

3 Michelle Schumacher’s chapter “Analogies of the Trinity” in A Trinitarian Anthropology, situates Balthasar’s use of analogy within the Fourth Lateran Council’s formula to “consider the similitude within ‘greater dissimilitude’ between Creator and creature...not only from an analogical perspective, which proceeds upward (ana-) from the creature to the Creator in accord with the doctrine of creation as viewed from the perspective of causality, but also, and even primarily, from a katalogical one: a perspective which proceeds downward (kata-) from the revealed archetype to the created image” (30- 31). A footnote to this section points to the unique meaning Balthasar gives to the dissimilitude by the “dissimilarity of the cross”: “Balthasar’s understanding of the analogy between Creator and creature in these terms is clearly indebted to Erich Przywara who, in turn, recognizes in Balthasar’s work the ‘deeper form of analogy,’ or ‘the mystery of the cross that overcomes the ‘no matter how great a similarity’ by means of ‘even greater dissimilarity,’ so that the greatness of God can be participated in” (Erich Przywara, Anologia Entis [: Johannes Verlag, 1962 (2)],250).

4 Balthasar, TD I, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 308.

5 This work by Balthasar, expresses his hope for universal salvation, a theme that stirs controversy within the Church. The theologian has surely been influenced by the mystical musings of Adrienne von Speyr on Holy Saturday and Christ’s descent into hell. Within the trilogy, please refer to TD IV: The Action, Section III. “Acting From Within God’s Pathos” and TD V: The Last Act, Section II. “Aspects of the Final Act.” TD V is heavily peppered (or salted) with quotes form the works of von Speyr.

40

to the cross (the theology of which always includes the resurrection)6 opens up space

for the “guilty” to enter into the life of the Trinity.

The Freedom of the Actors

The guilty “partners,” Balthasar contends,

cannot simply be the object of God’s action: rather, in a mysterious way that in no way undermines God’s initiative...he must participate in uttering God’s word. In other words, there must be an interplay, in the liberation of man between the gratia sola, on the one hand, and man’s creaturely freedom, on the other---a freedom that has not been eradicated by sin.7

Neither God nor human being is a “mere Spectator.” With the incarnation in time and

space, “absolute freedom enters into created freedom, interacts with created freedom

and acts as created freedom.”8 Jesus Christ the Actor is the historical hinge that is

the “solution to the pre-Christian impasse”9 that left human beings (the exception

being the Israelites) prior to the salvation event, to create philosophies and religions

that denigrated humanity and all of creation in the desire to escape or transcend the

existential situation, culminating in the unavoidable result of being absorbed or being

destroyed. Given the Christ/Trinitarian event in history, all subsequent persons in

mission can enter into the “supra-temporal”10 vibrancy of Trinitarian relationships

through the main Actor---Christ. The Trinitarian relational dynamism, then, is what

6 TD IV, 317-319.

7 Ibid., 318.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid., 229.

10 “Supra-temporal” as defined by David Schindler as “’above’ time” with the caution that we “avoid thinking of the supra-temporality in reductively temporal terms as ‘always before’...” (David Schindler, “Ever Ancient, Ever New,” Communio, Vol. XXXIX, 1-2, (Spring-Summer, 2012), 37. 41

gives temporal life meaning and fulfills human freedom once human freedom is

drawn into the dramatic action of divine freedom, which has created human freedom

and includes human freedom within it.

A Drama in Motion

This constant but meaningful activity is a major theme of the second part of

his trilogy: Theo-Drama. The second part of Balthasar’s trilogy maintains that

dramatic action has been opened up to the world for participation. Each volume of

the Theo-Drama emphasizes the dramatic, lively character of life in mission, engaged

through grace in Trinitarian existence, in the on-going saving event (though, of

course, happening once-for-all in time through Christ’s cross). Volume I, the

Prologomena, introduces the theatrical analogy emphasizing the response after the

“first encounter”of “let(ting) ourselves be drawn into its dramatic arena. For God’s

revelation is not an object to be looked at: it is his action in and upon the world, and

the world can only respond and hence ‘understand’, through action on its part.”11

(All words in bold in this section are my emphases.)

Volume II, Dramatis Personae, describes the “’characters’ or subjective centers of action” and what “conditions...render action possible.” “Theodramatic theory is...concerned with acting and the ability to act” which “cannot be rendered intelligible apart from the ultimate revelation, namely, the mystery of the divine

Trinity and the soteriological mystery of the Church.”12 This volume sharpens the

11 TD I, 15.

12 TD II, 13.

42

dramatic analogy through the analogy of freedom, “the interplay of infinite and finite

freedom”13 which highlights the condition of created freedom as necessary to an

authentic consent and acceptance of one’s mission in God’s plan of salvation.

Volume III, Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, centers the dramatic action in Christ, the Trinity, and history as Balthasar states: “The encompassing

reality, the concrete figure of Jesus of Nazareth, is himself man, whereas the human

beings he encompasses are in part determined by his being and his destiny.”14 The

transformation of the conscious subject happens in the course of “the action already

under way” and through the mission conferred by Christ, accepted and performed by the theological person.15

In Volume IV, The Action, Balthasar reiterates the dynamic of the

dramatic analogy:

God’s glory, as it appears in the world---supremely in Christ---is not something static that could be observed by a neutral investigator. It manifests itself only through the personal involvement whereby God himself comes forth to do battle and is both victor and vanquished. If this glory is to come within our range at all, an analogous initiative is called for on our part.16

The Actor, Christ, enters the drama of fallen human existence that invites a response

in the form of a personal theological mission.

13 Balthasasr, TD V, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 55.

14 Balthasar, TD III, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 13.

15 Ibid., 13-22. For a full description of theological personhood, please see TD III, Section III. “Theological Persons,” (263-461).

16 Balthasar, TD IV, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 12.

43

In the final volume to the Theo-Drama, Volume V: The Last Act, the dramatic

action comes to its dramatic close according to Balthasar’s eschatological view:

...the action could not have been described without revealing its ultimate theme, namely the world’s ‘ever-greater’ (that is, ever-increasing) resistance to the ‘ever-greater’ divine, incarnate love. This theme, however, was not static, for it governed the dynamic course of the drama; accordingly the dénouement had to come to light, at least to some extent; it lay, fundamentally, in the Cross, which is the acceptance of the ‘ever’, (ever- increasing) resistance to God. 17

The Exuberant Trinity and Personal Mission

Personal mission has its source in Christ, in Trinitarian life, which “forms the

backdrop of the entire action.”18 I have attempted to summarize Balthasar’s analogy

of Trinitarian dynamism within the Trinitarian relationships and its implications for

Christian mission as follows:

(1) That space is opened up within the theo-drama for participation, for the free consent and action of the human being.

(2) That the distinction or the “distance” (a Balthasarian term) between the separate persons in the Trinity embraces the entire range of human response and the multiplicity of charisms or missions.

(3) That although “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever”

(Heb 13:8), there is an expansion in the realm (both immanent and transcendent) of the Trinity by the consent and action of disciples or theological persons---nothing is added to God in a way that, for Balthasar, contradicts immutability, nor is the action

17 TD V, 55.

18 TD IV, 318.

44

or the consent of an individual person necessary to God or Trinitarian life. But in a mysterious way, Balthasar imagines the intimacy of the Trinitarian persons as deepening along with those drawn into participation: God allows human response to

affect the economic and immanent Trinitarian relating (which is not the same,

according to Balthasar, as to what is meant by ).19

(4) That conscious subjects are transformed into theological persons in

obedience to their God-given missions which move these persons individually

through free action toward the fulfillment of their “idea(s)” in God, that, at the same

time, shapes and fulfills community. Such action is simultaneously fulfilling both

personally and socially.

(5) That the theological person’s obedience to mission in imitation of the

Son’s obedience to the Father is real participation in Trinitarian redemptive activity.

Though there is that center point of the cross that occurred in time, once, for all, “this

definitive event (is) being continually rendered concrete from below, as it were, by

continued sin: It is continually being implanted from above into all times, in the

sacrament instituted by Christ.”20 Christian obedience to mission is enabled preeminently to participate, in a very real and present way, in redemptive activity through the sacrament of the Eucharist.

(6) That the giving and receiving in the form of kenotic love between Father and Son, which is the Holy Spirit, is an eternally generative process that allows

19 For Balthasar’s discussion of these points please see TD IV & TD V. Also, TD III, 157-162, concerns the problem of assessing Jesus’ awareness of his mission within the two natures of the hypostasis.

20 TD IV, 363. 45

participants to imitate Christ in his kenosis pro nobis. Mission only makes sense

when it is given for others for Christ’s redemptive purposes.

(7) That the there is a constant and eternal procession of the Son from the

Father, and of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son to the world which

includes the Son’s continual return to the Father through the Spirit. This circular

processing not only includes creation and the mission of the Son, but all events in

salvation history. This processio is also qualified as “distance” between Persons of

the Trinity: “Balthasar argues more specifically...that because the divine processions

give rise to both creation and the Son’s earthly mission, “the infinite distance”

between God and his creation is founded in the ‘prototypical distance between God

(the Father) and God (the Son) as revealed in the Son’s ‘Eucharistic movement back

and forth from the Father.’”21 This movement sustains being and draws willing

theological persons up into Trinitarian activity, and finally, brings theological persons

to their teleological end.

(8) That the Trinitarian relationships are perpetually in transcendent

movement due to their love. Balthasar equates divine freedom with love itself. The

Trinity can transcend itself endlessly while remaining whole and complete. This is

the transcendence that human subjects of their own power are incapable of achieving

but are enabled through Christ to enter the opening in the drama of salvation by the

God-man’s incarnation and cross.

21 TD, V,81; TD II, 266; TD II, 268; As quoted in Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropology, 31, n. 25; n. 26; n.27.

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(9) That all of this activity can be described as love for “God is Love”

(1John4:8).22

Mission Rests on the Gift of Freedom

Balthasar uses the analogy of drama to show the significance of the subjective response given to an encounter with the form of Christ, and always given in complete creaturely freedom. Edward Oakes in Pattern of Redemption encapsulates

Balthasar’s Theo-Drama as “The Drama of Finite and Infinite Freedom.”23 Creaturely freedom or finite freedom is a gift predicated upon the open and free communication between the three Persons of the Trinity: “The core of the (dramatic) metaphor is the

22 Rodney Howsare in Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, refers to “Balthasar’s unwillingness to allow God to be anything less than love all the way down.” Howsare includes a footnote of Adrian Walker’s in the translated version of Balthasar’s Theo-Logic II: “It suggests, first, that God the Father has, so to say, already loved the Son before there is any chance of reflective deliberation about whether he wants to or not. It also suggests that God’s love is the context in which his intellect, and all other faculties and properties, take shape. Finally, it suggests that no human thought can get behind God’s love, which is thus the source of God mysteriousness for us” (140-141).

23 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 211-228. Oakes lays out theology’s struggle with the contradictions inherent in coming to terms with a human freedom that does not jeopardize the omnipotence of divine freedom, and yet maintains the responsibility of free human response that does not render human choice null through a doctrine of . The doctrine of predestination “once the idle workshop of the logical mind gets to humming...cause(s) problems on which theology has again and again run aground” (213). These problems include “a more or less distorted notion of God and his relation to the creature” which can lead to “presumption, despair, negligence, or an unchristian self- confidence” (Dom M. John Farrelly, O.S.B., Predestination, Grace, and Free Will [Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1964], 31) 213, n.3. Oakes continues: “What (Balthasar) has done by foregrounding all of the theatrical and dramatic metaphors embedded in theology is to alter in a stroke the entire perspective out of which theologians consider this problem” (217). In a footnote to this statement, Oakes further exclaims: “Admittedly, the ‘stroke’ has resulted in a 5-volume work, but the insight itself does come in a flash and, once grasped, leads to an immensely fruitful and heuristic way of looking at divine and human freedom. And that heuristic fertility is what really accounts for the length of this immense work” (217, n.15). Schumacher, in A Trinitarian Anthropology, compares and contrasts St. Thomas’ and Balthasar’s (which is really Adrienne von Speyr’s insight according to Schumacher) treatments of the analogy of freedom. One key difference is as follows: “While St. Thomas thus acknowledges human freedom as capable of analogically describing the life of the triune God despite its exteriorization (its ek-statsis out of its self in virtue of which it is related to all beings), Balthasar maintains...that it is precisely this exteriorization, this ‘movement (of finite freedom) toward self-realization within infinite freedom’ which enables human freedom to be an appropriate image of the triune God” (41).

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triad of playwright-actor-director as applied to the Trinity.”24 What finally allows the

drama of salvation history to unfold is centered in Christ:

Theologically speaking, the only thing that makes it possible to have history, in the deepest sense, within the space thus opened up is the fact that this space is an opening within the utter freedom of God. What could be more free, more completely unconditioned and gracious than the plan of the incarnation and its accomplishment in history? And that is why history is itself an area of freedom---the freedom of God giving space and scope to the freedom of man. Within this space man is free to make history happen. But since this space belongs to Christ, it is in no sense an empty space but one that is shaped and structured and completely conditioned by certain categories: the interior situations of his earthly existence...Each situation in the divine-human life is so infinitely rich, capable of such unlimited application, so full of meaning, that it generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations. (Balthasar, Theology of History, 66-67)25

Balthasar centers the drama precisely in “the interior situations of (Christ’s) earthly

existence” that in turn reveals the interiority of the Trinity. These “interior situations”

are from the life of the historical Jesus as revealed in Scripture. We can know about

God the Father but also the Trinity and the relationships between the three Persons

from the human life of Jesus. Here we see a fundamental principle of Balthasar for

doing theology---that it must be established on the ground of Scripture.26

It is the divine freedom and human freedom of the main Actor Jesus Christ

who, along with the Author God and the Director Holy Spirit, draws the audience into

the action of salvation history. The members of the audience are not mere armchair

spectators but are invited onto the “stage” of the world to participate “in the suffering

24 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 218, n.16.

25 As quoted by Oakes in Pattern of Redemption, 220.

26 I will add, two other factors for Balthasar’s approach to theology that are evidenced here: It is Ignatian in that one can imaginatively place oneself in the “situations of Christ’s earthly existence.” And it is undergirded with the doctrine of the analogy of being.

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of the God-man role...left for the believer...not a superfluous or dispensable one.”27

The Christological events are dynamic and present, inviting participation from all persons since the time of the historical presence of the God-man:

Let no one say that after the Christ-drama everything has basically been said and shown, that drama is exhausted. No one knows all the implications of God’s action which took place in Christ; the history of the Church and the world is there in order to bring them to light, not systematically, but dramatically.28

According to Balthasar, the “conscious subject,” in the subject’s created freedom, chooses to respond to the call from Absolute Freedom with a “Yes” or a

“No.” Balthasar proposes that either answer, either acceptance or rejection, is already

included within the Person of Christ, in the events of the cross and resurrection. But more dramatically, he contends that the distance between each of the three distinct persons of the Trinity embraces or contains the tension of the array of answers that human beings in their freedom can give to Christ. Balthasar’s penchant for bringing all philosophical speculation back to theology’s center, Christ, is the only solution to maintaining the glory of God’s divine freedom and the dignity of created freedom

that neither minimizes nor takes away from God’s power and omniscience nor limits

the free range of responses human freedom can make. In the range of created

freedom’s responses, Balthasar “discern(s) two layers or dimensions of (created)

freedom here: one moves toward making a definite Yes or No decision, and the other

forms a kind of vast, inexhaustible space within which these definite decisions fall.”29

27 TD, I, 118.

28 Ibid.

29 TD II, 38. This statement suggests an accounting for all of humanity’s definite acceptances or rejections of Christ across time. It seems possible that it could also indicate how closely a theological person moves toward “becoming” the God-given mission within a “Yes” response. It seems that it 49

Here within this free choice, allowed for within the gratuity of grace and undergirded and underwritten by a boundless Trinitarian reciprocity, lies the existential potential for an individual human. The conscious subject who gives her “Yes” will be

“socialized” in Trinitarian love and transformed for true communion with other living beings.

In accepting the gift or the invitation, always initiated by God, a conscious subject is given the grace to become a theological person through a unique mission poured out in service for others. God-given mission is the key to personal becoming and fulfillment that results in palpable holiness---really what Balthasar describes as beauty!

A Bit of Tension

The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the full revelation of God to the world. He is God’s Word, God’s exegete, the Father’s full utterance. Yet what the God-man has to disclose about the Father still remains mystery, as Balthasar brings hiddenness and disclosure together in dialogue within Christ. Balthasar’s theology is consistently centered in Christ, and consequently, centered in the Trinity, and this is the place where infinite space opens outward in invitation or election for “conscious subjects”

(or potential saints) to enter into relationship with the Other or “I AM” who is God.

Transformation into theological persons is what comes with mission so that if lived completely and faithfully it is “no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”

(Gal. 2:20) Theological personhood or sainthood (canonized or not) always

could also allow for individual conversion from a “No” to a “Yes,” and the reverse, from a “Yes” to a “No,” or apostasy. 50 manifests itself in deeds of love according to the will of God. For Balthasar, it is through these deeds that God continues to “utter” anew the mystery of the Word both concealed and revealed in the event of the full revelation in Christ crucified and risen to the world.

Balthasar’s way of bringing all tensions30 in created being into lively dramatic interplay is to locate them in Christ where the reconciliation of flesh and blood with divinity is possible in the unity of love: “There is a locus at which the pneumatic unity of Cross and Resurrection is especially evident to the disciple...”31 The drama of entering into discipleship “brings with it the gift of participation in the Cross and

Resurrection of Christ...” 32 This assimilation into the life of Christ, however, is not just for the earthly realm but continues on a trajectory to the goal of eternity, returning to the telos, the original Trinitarian Source:

30 The tensions in temporal existence are spelled out in TD II in the chapter entitled “Man.” Balthasar describes human beings as seeming “to be built according to a polarity, obliged to engage in reciprocity, always seeking complementarity and peace in the other pole. And for that very reason he is pointed beyond his whole polar structure” (TD II, 355). Balthasar identifies these polar tensions as: (1) body and spirit (TD II, 355); (2) “sexual differentiation into man and woman” (TD II, 365); and (3) individual and community (TD II, 382): “Of the three anthropological tensions, this last one, in the pre-Christian period, is the most subdued...when it is taken beyond itself in the Christian framework, it is not made into a problem but only rendered more intense. The two poles acquire dimensions hitherto undreamed-of: the individual is seen to be an eternal person and the community is revealed as a reflection, in the ‘Mystical Body’ of Christ, of the life of God” (TD II, 382-383). Although Balthasar refers to three tensions, Michelle Schumacher has identified in his work a fourth tension: “the mystery of difference-in-unity...Balthasar presents in terms...of certain anthropological ‘tensions’...those of body and soul; the individual and the community’ man and woman; and finally of nature and grace, or person and mission” (A Trinitarian Anthropology, 9). Balthasar describes “The Tensions of Contemplation” in Part Three in his book, Prayer (241- 311). The polarities include: “Existence and Essence”; “Flesh and Spirit”; “Heaven and Earth”; and “Cross and Resurrection”. Other tensions, not systematically categorized as such, could include but not exhaust: Finite and Infinite Freedom; Human and Divine Surrender; Unity and Difference; I and Thou; Objectivity and Subjectivity.

31 TD IV, 386.

32 Ibid., 387.

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Only the offer addressed to (mortal human beings) by God, that is, to attain eternal life as a full human being within the sphere of God’s freedom, can open up to his empty transcendence a sphere in which he can develop positive hopes of fulfillment; he can direct his divergent possibilities to converge toward this sphere...33

Although the descent of God into history happened once for all, this irruption into

time broke time open through Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the eternal

dimension connecting heaven and earth:

...the Christian is in principle someone who has risen and ascended into heaven (Eph 2:6; Col 3:1-4) and that Christ’s Resurrection glory radiates through his whole being and activity (2 Cor 3:16-4:6), as is plain to anyone who looks, “not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen” (ibid., 4:18). Whether these phases of darkness and light, distress and consolation (2 Cor 1:4-7) are synchronous or diachronous for the individual Christian is a secondary matter; where the Spirit of the Lord is involved, there is nothing against these phases being simultaneous...The Christian is both crucified with the Lord and risen with him: both these existentiales stamp his existence, simultaneously and inseparably.34

This elevates and broadens the Christian’s awareness of the tension involved in

Christian mission and its field of activity. The main event, not only continues to be

re-presented in the Eucharist, mediated through the Scriptures, and the Church, but

also radiates through the witness of the lives of the saints.

Concrete Mission in the Concretissimum

The communion of saints, or the Body of Christ, is in a sense, the

prolongation of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.35 The saint is the theological person

33 TD, III, 20.

34 TD IV, 386.

35 This concept is explored in TD V, 131-141. “ The Church is the prolongation of Christ’s mediatorial nature and work and possesses a knowledge that comes by faith; she lives objectively (in her institution and her sacraments) and subjectively (in her saints and, fundamentally, in all of her members) in the interchange between heaven and earth. Her life comes from heaven and extends to earth, and extends from earth to heaven” (TD V, 131). 52

par excellence and will become the locus of explicating Balthasar’s theology of

mission. As Balthasar opens his third volume of the Theo-Drama: The Dramatis

Personae: The Person in Christ, “Everything remains abstract if it is not brought

back to and explained by the Concretissimum,” where “individual and collective

human persons...discover their uniqueness and their interrelatedness within that

sphere of action that is Christ.”36 Therefore, the next chapter will begin with Christ’s

mission, as this is the origin of all subsequent Christian missions and the only place that dramatic action is possible. Chapters 5 & 6 will be devoted to how Balthasar’s theology of mission is embodied in the lives of two saints, particularly through the missions of Mary the Mother of God and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

Aidan Nichols interprets Balthasar’s theology: “that continuation of the Incarnation which is the Church” (No Bloodless Myth, 201). Also, there are implications for the individual as Oakes interprets Balthasar: “And by virtue of the grace of the continuation of that drama after Christ in the mission of the Church, the individual has the chance of being inserted into that same drama” (Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 224).

36 TD, III, 13. 53

CHAPTER 4

CHRIST IN MISSION

All missions are rooted in Christ’s mission: “If a world is to come into being

containing people endowed with finite freedom, requiring a drama to be played and a

stage on which to play it, the Son alone can be its ground and goal...”1 and Christ’s

mission cannot be separated from the life of the Trinity and the relationships between

and among the three Persons. This is how Balthasar conceives of the “eternal (Triune)

decision” for the mission of the Son of God:

...it is not made by the Son in lonely isolation; it is always a triune decision in which the hierarchy of the hypostatic processions is preserved, notwithstanding the consubstantiality and coeternity of the Persons. It is always in the Holy Spirit that the Son takes up the mission that comes from the Father.2

Balthasar “allow(s) the concept of ‘mission’ to guide (his) interpretation” of his “outline of Christology” in the third volume of the Theo-Drama. Primarily from this selection, I will identify the characteristics of Christ’s mission and allow these characteristics “to guide (the) interpretation” of mission in the lives of two saints in

1 TD II, 268. This section concerns the grounding of all finite freedom in Christ: “The world, and finite freedom within it, will not have its ground in itself, like God, not even in an ‘idea’: its ground is exclusively in God’s freedom, which will always distinguish its nature from that of God, even at the highest level of union between divine and created freedom. But, being totally dependent on divine freedom, the world can receive its possibility and reality nowhere else but in the eternal Son, who eternally owes his divine being to the Father’s generosity” (261). This section becomes Trinitarian pointing to the fact that Balthasar’s Christology is always grounded ultimately in the Trinity.

2 TD III, 199. 54 the next chapter of the thesis.3 For it is the “incarnation (that) is the ground for the possibility not only of creation but is also the basis for all other in world history.”4

Oneness of Person and Mission in Christ

The sole reason there is a mission or a part for anyone to play in the drama of salvation history is because of the event of the incarnation: The Son of God took on human flesh and entered into the world’s condition and, eventually, was crucified bearing the breadth and depth of humanity’s distortions so that all might be saved and reconciled to God. It is because of the Son of God and his messianic appearance embodied in flesh and blood that he “bring(s) about, in his own person, an ultimate saving event;”5 Balthasar puts these words into Jesus’ voice: “I am the one who must accomplish this task.”6 Christ’s mission is not a mission among missions or merely above other missions, but the one that is the source that holds all other missions within it, and is the “mission that knows no measure.”7 For through the particular “I” of the God-Man Jesus Christ the whole world is saved, a universal mission in all of its ramifications. It is unique and unrepeatable because Christ’s mission, unlike any other person’s mission, is not only universal but, Balthasar asserts, is one with his

3 Ibid., 149.

4 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 220.

5 TD III, 152.

6 Ibid., 166.

7 Ibid., 151. 55

person: “...this is a ‘role’ that cannot be exchanged for any other role, since it is a

‘mission’ that has ultimately fused with the person and become identical with him.”8

“...indeed, he is the task...” 9

Jesus Christ: The Complete Revelation of God

Not only are mission and person one in Christ alone, but also “together (His

mission and person) constitute God’s exhaustive self-communication.”10 Only Jesus

Christ fully conveys the revelation of God as the Word- Made-Flesh:

“The task given him by the Father, that is, that of expressing God’s Fatherhood through his entire being, through his life and death in and for the world, totally occupies his self-consciousness and fills it to the very brim...He does not reveal the Father merely from time to time; he reveals him in every situation of his life---even if part of his task in the long years of his hidden life and ultimately on the Cross, was to manifest God’s hiddenness.”11

Balthasar purports that for any other being, function and person can be

distinguished.12 Since all other missions (which lead to true identity) “that provide

scope for the world’s drama are contained ‘in Christ,’”13 the person who consents and

commits to God-given mission participates in a small, fragmentary way in the self-

8 Ibid., 150. The phrase is used in a discussion of Jesus’ awareness of his mission and the fact, that he surrenders to the Father’s will, meaning that his exaltation after the crucifixion was not something he accomplished in and of himself: “He identified himself with what God expected of him (and in him) above and beyond what he was able to achieve” (160). The discussion touches on the immutability of God yet Jesus’ “development...addressed by the doctrine of the two natures” (159). It also considers what Jesus actually knew about the details of his mission--- again highlighting the paradoxical nature of his existence “hung between two states human and divine, humiliated and exalted. The perfect obedience of his sinless nature allows Jesus to turn over the salvific result of his and the “maintaining of his two status” to the Father and the ‘blowing’ of the Spirit...” (162).

9 Ibid., 168.

10 Ibid., 150.

11 Ibid., 172-3.

12 Ibid., 149-150.

13 Ibid., 163. 56

communication of God. The saints can proclaim afresh a tiny utterance of what

Christ has already fully revealed; although, as Balthasar attests, revelation is always

held in the dialectic of hiddenness and disclosure.

Being and Becoming

In addition to the unity of person and mission in Jesus Christ, the unity of

“being” and “becoming” is another locus where Balthasar’s theology rests on the

doctrine of analogy of being. When differentiating between essence and existence in

God, the doctrine speaks of God’s essence as sheer being, and that therefore God’s

essence consists of pure existing, and are one and the same. This possibly allows for

Balthasar’s extrapolation that Christ’s person and mission, and his being and

becoming in that mission, are identical. When writing of Jesus’ mission, Balthasar

hypothesizes: “It is highly probable, however, that both in “Servant-Son” and in

“Chosen-Beloved”, the imparting of being coincides with the imparting of mission.”14

Possibly, then, given the analogy of being, Balthasar can conclude that Jesus’ mission is his person. He states also that “Jesus’ existence-in-mission manifests a paradoxical unity of being (and a being that has always been) and becoming” (Balthasar’s italics).15 If in God, the I-AM-WHO-AM is pure act, then the phrase “existence-in-

mission” might mean existence-as-mission or existence-is-mission or person-am-

mission. Applying Balthasar’s understanding of Christ in mission, could we show

this unity in speaking of Jesus as God-Man-Am-God-Man understood as Savior-

14 Ibid., 156.

15 Ibid., 157.

57

Who-Am-Saving? Because “both being and becoming in the Incarnate One---express a single being...we may not call it becoming...”16 The Son of God did not become the

Savior but has existed eternally as his mission, and is pure saving.

Although there is an analogy for the Christian or theological person becoming or developing, or maturing, or being perfected, or becoming fulfilled in the Person of

Christ, it cannot be declared the same but only similar, for “Jesus does not belong exclusively to the worldly side of his being: its ultimate presuppositions lie in the divine life itself.”17 Again, Balthasar is emphatic concerning the greater dissimilitude between Jesus and his followers, and locates the abyss of the dissimilarity in the cross:

Balthasar’s understanding of the analogy between Creator and creature in these terms is clearly indebted to Erich Przywara who, in turn, recognizes in Balthasar’s work the “deeper form of analogy,” or “the mystery of the cross that overcomes the ‘no matter how great a similarity’ by means of ‘even greater dissimilarity,’ so that the greatness of God can be participated in.”18

The fruit of the cross---total dissimilitude---bears and incorporates the fruit of the

Church. The Church allows the saint to enter into the analogy by locating earthly

16 Ibid., 159.

17 Ibid. This leads to a discussion of the two natures of Christ and how the human side of Christ relates to the rest of human nature. Christ’s certainly was a sinless human nature but one that, in theological speculation, ranges from immutability and impassibility to imagining a changeable God somehow contingent on God’s own creation. Balthasar’s discussion in TD V, “The Pain of God” (212-246), applies to the passibility question; the last section, “If You Comprehend It, It Is Not God,” What Does God Gain from the World, refers to the question of whether God can change: “Eternal life, as the word itself says, is not a complete state of rest, but a constant vitality, implying that everything is always new. ‘We must not imagine the unchangability of God as something static: it is the movement of all movements, a streaming of eternity out into endlessness.’ ‘Eternal life is not a state of rest,’ so, as we have already said, the incarnate Son is a ‘truth’ that is ‘always growing’ since he is ‘the way’” (TD V, 511; All quotes within this quotation, Balthasar attributes to Adrienne von Speyr’s work). Also, TD III, discusses how theology has debated Jesus’ human nature awareness, spread on a continuum that attributes perfect knowledge to Jesus on one end, to his learning everything in a “historical learning process” (179).

18 Erich Przywara, Anologia Entis [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962 (2)], as quoted in A Trinitarian Anthropology (30n23) by Michele Schumacher. 58

suffering in the horizontal beam of the cross. When horizontal earthly suffering is

joined to the vertical post, the saint’s mission fruitfulness takes on an eternal

significance.

Sending and Coming: The Gift of Mission

Balthasar declares: “No one can give himself a mission.”19 One is called, one

is sent. But for Jesus Christ, his sending and his coming are in union, for the Son of

God allows himself to be “sent” by the Father in order to “come” into the world for

its salvation. The being sent by the Father and the free undertaking of his coming into the world from the Father is movement that manifests both “a Trinitarian relationship to the Father and the soteriological goal.”20 Both of these are held

together in the person of Christ, and again point to the uniqueness of Christ’s mission.

For it is the Trinitarian reciprocal surrendering of the Father who offers up the Son

for the world and the decision of the Son who offers himself to the Father’s will for

the sake of the world. The Trinitarian relationship makes for the complete unity of

the Father’s sending and the Son’s obedient coming into the flesh of man and the

circumstances of time. This can be contrasted with other Christian missions:

If men are to have a part in the One who is sent, they in turn must be sent out by him (albeit only after : (John) 20:21[“ Jesus said to them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.”], clearly anticipated in (John) 17:18 [“As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”]); accordingly, the man who has a part in the “Son” must be sent out from the Son’s source, that is, he must be “born of God” (1:13), “born anew” (3:5, 7). This implies something much more radical than the mere appointment of a messenger or representative...or even the choosing of a prophet (even prophets chosen “from the womb”, like Jeremiah, John the

19 TD III, 154.

20 Ibid., 153.

59

Baptist, Paul). Rather, the sending (missio) has its roots in the primordial proceeding (processio) from God (I proceeded and came forth from God”, 8:42). 21

What this demonstrates is that the dramatic arena is opened up beyond the stage of the Old Covenant for the possibility of every human being to enter salvific action.

However, it is important to remember the “gift” attribute; both unique mission and unique “personality” are conferred on the consenting believer as gift and always with freedom. When referring to the unity in the Body of Christ, Balthasar makes it clear, nonetheless, that the “ ‘acting area’ is a personal and personalizing area”; “for the individual participant is given a free space that grants, along with a particular mission, a share in the universal mission of Christ.” 22 More so, this post-Easter participation is rooted in the Trinitarian processing through Jesus Christ. The

Christian can, by surrendering self to God’s will, proceed from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit by being “born anew” in mission which is qualitatively different from receiving the mantle from Elijah.

For Balthasar, this characteristic of sending in mission is fully operational in

Jesus’ person: “He knows and understands that he is utterly and completely the ‘One sent.’”23 And he knows and is in complete unity with “the One who sends him.”

Balthasar is quick to point out that such unity, and thus far we have only made reference to “being and becoming,” “sending” and “coming,” and to reciprocal

“surrendering,” does not destroy the distinction of Persons within the Trinity. The

21 Ibid., 153-154.

22 Ibid., 249.

23 Ibid., 169. 60

Father is not absorbed into the Son, nor is the Son dissolved into the Father. For neither love, nor the bond of the Holy Spirit, nor Divine Freedom needs to destroy for the sake of itself, but allows for multiplicity to make its free choices.

Mission Consciousness in Christ

Jesus’ own understanding or awareness of his mission is, again, one that theologians stretch across the hypostasis. Balthasar relies on Scripture, to show that although we have to honor the mystery of the connection between the two natures yet one substance of Christ, we should acknowledge that “ Jesus was aware of his eschatological and universal mission”24 by what he said: His Messianic “I- utterances” and his call for obedience from his disciples are two examples.25 But “the fact that he could not fully vindicate his claims during his life span” nor did he know the hour when the event of the cross would occur become, perhaps, attributable to his assumed fleshly nature which was necessary to redeem all flesh.26 In another example of Balthasar’s grounding his Christology in the Trinity is the proposition that

“maintaining the union of his two status was not his business.”27 He leaves the fulfillment of his mission to the Father and the ‘blowing’ of the Spirit...”28

24 TD III, 160.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid., 160-161.

27 Ibid., 162.

28 Ibid. 61

Infinite and Finite Freedom in Christ

All Jesus’ prayer and action are directed to doing the will of the Father. It is

true that the divine nature of Christ coheres with divine freedom, and at the same time is joined as one with creaturely freedom. His finite freedom was not shattered or dissolved by divine freedom. How these freedoms operate within Christ is surely mysterious but Balthasar is able to imagine how the human freedom operated within the God-man: His mission “must be carried out with the human energies of the one who is sent, and since he is free, its implementation will under certain circumstances need to be considered, planned and tested.”29 Balthasar selects the temptations in the

desert as a demonstration of Jesus’ free human nature, certainly not divine nature,

since God cannot be tempted. Jesus makes free obedient choices in the wilderness of

the devil’s false alternatives. The mission “coincides with his filial freedom”30 in perfect union with the will of the Father: “Not for a moment can the mission be separated from the One who sends him...”31 Both Jesus’ person and mission “spring

in unity from the source that is the Father” without jeopardizing the “autonomy” of

Jesus’ own person and mission.32 “The paradox is this: the mission is not imposed on

him from outside, like a ‘law’; we have seen that his ‘I’ is identical with it.”33

29 Ibid., 168.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 169.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 167.

62

Prayer in Jesus’ Mission

Jesus in Scripture is constantly engaged in the activity of prayer, which

according to Balthasar, is “part of the activity of mission (Lk 22:32; Jn 11:41), and

mission is also the subject matter of prayer (Jn 17).”34 For Balthasar, this indicates a

complete dependence of the Son on the will of the Father through the Holy Spirit for

the moment-by-moment sequence of actions the Son must take. His prayer reveals the intimacy of relationship between Father and the Son, and the complete trust that

the Son has in the Father for bringing him to the “hour” for which he was sent and for

which he has come. It is through Jesus’ prayer that the Father’s will is revealed in

temporal increments through the Holy Spirit; it is through prayer that Jesus trusts that

the Father will accomplish the Son’s mission in the flesh.

The Theological Person in Mission

These exclusive characteristics of (1) complete oneness of person and

mission, (2) personal mission without measure, with (3) the universal effect of

reconciling God and humanity, and (4) wholly expressing the total revelation of God

(which is also the revelation of the intimacy of Trinitarian relationship), cannot be said of any other mission or theological person except , Jesus Christ.

However, mission and theological personhood are available through Christ to human beings. There is opportunity through Christ’s mission to imitate him, and in reality, to be joined with him in mission---and this is the point of the Theo-Drama.

34 Ibid., 170. 63

Jesus’ oneness of person and mission is only possible for the Son of God. But

there is a way to participate that ushers a person from conscious subject to theological

personhood: “In Christo, however, every man can cherish the hope of not remaining a

merely individual conscious subject but of receiving personhood from God, becoming

a person, with a mission that is likewise defined in Christo.”35 By following the concrete examples of Christ, the conscious subject is enabled through the gift of grace and the response of faith to surrender and freely receive the personalized plan of God, a personal mission, and to become a theological person, a saint: “...we only receive our mission on the basis of our coming to faith, whereas Jesus has and is his mission;

in his mission, he has utterly abandoned himself to the Father who guides him and in

whom he has complete trust.”36 For the theological person: “...the mission that comes

to him from God is not added per accidens to this original identity; rather, it is given

a preeminence over it so that his life and being heretofore seem to be instrumental,

leading up to what he is to be (and, in the mind of God, has always been).”37 Through

abandonment to the mission given, the theological person never becomes her mission

but approaches the particular “idea” of who she was always meant to be in the plan of

God before the foundation of the world.

The oneness of mission and person can be approached through cooperation

with grace but is never achieved solely by the person engaged in earthly mission (nor

would this be something the saint would strive for; humility is an important virtue in

35 Ibid., 220.

36 Ibid., 149-259.

37 Ibid., 154.

64

Balthasar’s theology). The more that the person submits to and becomes available to

the God-given mission, the more she comes into her self, becomes herself, knows

herself in God. 38 There is a collaboration between divine and created freedom that

allows the divine freedom to appropriate for its purposes the theological person for

mission, never violating the original gift of created freedom. The self-kenotic or self-

sacrificial denial of self, or losing oneself so that “He may increase” (Jn 3:30), allows

the expropriated person’s mission to be expanded for the good of the universal

church.

To be expropriated in mission, means to be divested of selfish goals; one can

completely lose oneself in a worldly sense and find oneself for the first time by

entering or being assumed into the love of the Trinity through the performing of God-

given mission. This implies kenotic activity and, in such a self-emptying for others,

the saint, the prototypical theological person is, according to Balthasar, deprivatized.

The saints through denying themselves, not for the sake of themselves, but in and for

Christ, paradoxically become most fully themselves.39 “Thus in the very discipleship in which the Christian ‘loses his soul’, he can attain his true identity.”40 Theological

persons are fulfilled through cooperation and complete disponibility to mission,

which is the Trinitarian mission for the salvation of the world.

38 Ibid., 208.

39 “Now according to our faith, Jesus Christ possesses human nature in its perfection, which is why we can say with the , that Jesus Christ reveals man to himself” (Schindler, “Ever Ancient, Ever New,”44).

40 TD III, 162.

65

The Saints and Mission

Although Jesus has a mission without measure, his earthly mission, had a

limited time span that culminated in the “hour.” What is prior to Jesus Christ, as in

the Old Testament, is fragmentary, and leads to his appearance that is fulfillment of

all that has come before. What comes after Jesus is the new area that is opened up for

participation by human beings:

The world is qualified by the biblical assertion that it has been created “from nothing” and is called to participate in the divine life: this seems to rob anthropology of all foothold within the world (but God alone), while it slides hither and thither between nothingness and infinity. But it gains a new foothold, as it were, a concrete system of coordinates, in the central figure of biblical revelation, the God-man Jesus Christ.41

The “concrete system of coordinates” is visible and available to humanity in the

Concrete Analogy of Being, Jesus Christ.42 The new foothold is visible in the Jesus

Christ of the Scriptures: “we have to say that the historical action of Jesus is intrinsic

to (the) revelation” “of the meaning of being”:

There is no separation between who Jesus is and what he does. This means that the events of salvation have metaphysical significance: indeed, the free acts, the most concrete gestures, in the life of Christ---the tender embrace of the children, the angry overturning of tables at the market, the loving look at the rich young man, the anxious prayer in Gethsemane, and so forth---give meaning in a creative way to reality coming in the fullness of time...43

The that always existed allowed covenantal participation by a chosen people.

The Israelites could enter into dialogue with God through chosen representatives,

41 TD II, 406.

42 TD, III, 220. Besides making reference to Jesus Christ as the Concretissium, Balthasar refers to Christ as the Concrete Analogy of Being (TD III, “Christ in Mission”). Please see David Schindler’s article “Ever Ancient, Ever New”: Jesus Christ as the Concrete Analogy of Being,” Communio, (Spring-Summer 2012), 33-48.

43 Schindler, “Ever Ancient, Ever New,” 44. 66

priests, kings or prophets. What God brings about by coming as the Word-made-

flesh in the events of the cross and resurrection is the opening into personal and real participation in Christ’s redemptive activity.

Though Jesus’ mission is unique and unrepeatable, in that his person and

mission are one, that his particular mission is universal, that he is the second Person

of the Trinity, that his mission is eternally rooted in Trinitarian love, that he took on

human flesh but remained divine, and that his sacrifice reconciled God to human

beings---it is the triadic structure in the event of the cross that opens up the acting

area for meaningful participation in the life of love of the Trinity. Theological

persons participate by first giving the response of faith to the encounter with Christ,

and then receiving the gift of mission that participates in Christ’s mission. Such

mission must be immersed in doing God’s will, and not as an isolated monad, but in community.

Theological persons can imitate Christ and enter into his mission through consent, availability, self-denial, readiness, and receptivity, all predicated, of course, on that initial encounter between the Messianic-I and the Thou that resituates human existence into one of dramatic proportions. Jesus prayed, knew Scripture, and instituted the Eucharist. Theological persons pray, know Scripture and take part in the sacraments. Jesus received his mission, executed in total surrender and obedience to the Father. Theological persons when wholly identified in mission with Christ’s

mission become wholly expropriated and disponible to God’s own purposes. Such

intensity of commitment forms the saint who with St. Paul proclaims: “It is no longer

I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

67

In the following two chapters, I will attempt to portray Bathasar’s theology of mission in the concrete actions of mission in the lives of two particular saints: Mary, the Queen of Saints, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.

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CHAPTER 5

MARY IN MISSION

Becoming a Theological Person

Balthasar is routinely described as being a theologian who abhors abstraction and shies away from systemization. His center point in Christ depends, first and foremost, on the incarnation in history---the Son of God taking on the flesh of man:

Balthasar’s understanding of the central mystery of Christianity is most expressly summarized in the first ‘Preface of Christmas’: “In the wonder of the incarnation your eternal word has brought to the eyes of faith a new and radiant vision of your glory. In him we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see.”1

This fact is what makes contemplation of the mysteries possible, and the encompassing mystery is the love of God.

Consequently, through the appearance of Jesus in history, the Persons of the

Trinity can be introduced: “ In Christian faith...it is only on the basis of Jesus Christ’s own behavior and attitude that we can distinguish such a plurality in God...We know about the Father, Son and Spirit as divine “Persons” only through the figure and disposition of Jesus Christ.”2 Balthasar states: “From the standpoint of revelation,

1 Deirdre Carabine, “The Fathers,” in The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, eds. McGregor and Norris (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 78.

2 TD III, 507-508, as quoted in Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 280. 69

there is simply no real truth which does not have to be incarnated in an act or in some

action, so that the incarnation of Christ is the criterion of all real truth (1Jn 2:22; 4:2),

and ‘walking in the truth’ is the way the believer possesses the truth.”3

Balthasar’s theology is caught up in the senses of what can be perceived through touch, and sight and hearing. Jesus Christ is the full exegesis of the Father in a very concrete corporeal way:

One of Balthasar’s recurring themes is that the self-revelation of the glory of God is not something which somehow leaves behind it some aspect of the Godhead as unknowable and untouchable. It is not the case in this supreme condescending (katabasis) that in Christ only certain aspects of God are disclosed while other aspects remain hidden. Both the Son and the Father are revealed fully and are known entirely, not partially. Christ is, as says, the visibility of the invisible...4

However, Balthasar recognizes the dialectic of hiddenness and disclosure that will not go away until the eschaton. Manifestation maintains mystery, and the mind and the heart of the saint play their part reflecting upon and rendezvousing with the lively forms, phenomena and the Thou that make known one’s I. It is finally in the contemplation of the cross of Christ that the saint understands the kenotic love of

Trinitarian existence.

The unified multiplicity in the Trinity is what makes it possible to analogize saintly drama as possible in the unique and personal mission granted to a particular

person in lineal time. The unity of the Trinity mediated through the Church as the

Body of Christ confers a shard of God’s complete utterance on a finite mission meant

3 ET I, “Theology and Sanctity,” 181-182.

4 Carabine, 78. What Balthasar is doing here is “reject(ing) the earlier Greek Patristic conception of the ‘unknowable’ father and the ‘knowable’ Son: for him the two concepts, manifestation and hiddenness, are brought together in the incarnation of God himself” (80). 70

for a particular point in history. Though Christ’s mission never points beyond

himself, the saint’s mission aims at showing Christ through the saint’s movement

closer and closer to a complete identification with his or her mission.5 In this way,

transparency to the Full Utterance refracts an infinitesimal6 expression of the beauty, goodness and truth of God.

Balthasar’s temptation is beauty.7 His lens is dramatic. His desire is communion with the Concrete Analogy of Being who is Jesus Christ, together with all the saints. And, finally, Balthasar’s Christ is not only the means, but also the end, and that end is the Glory of God. From the Concretissimum, gushes existential meaning and the saints stand under the tap dripping in the dew of consent and the of mission.

Flesh and Blood Saints

With Balthasar’s penchant for engagement with the world in concrete

Christian mission, it would make sense that he sees hagiography as able to infuse theology with new life and sanctity---however, a reworked, refashioned genre in contrast with the sanitized medieval or psychologized contemporary accounts.

Balthasar assigns some of the blame for this to the saints: “We have seen that the

5 Balthasar states that Mary is the one in whom mission and person are “indistinguishable” (2SS, 28), whereas he claims that Jesus’s person and mission are “one” and “identical.”

6 It is somewhat paradoxical that “infinitesimal” which means tiny, close to zero, contains the word “infinite” as the particular is an expression of the whole.

7 In chapter 4 of this thesis, I stated that, for Balthasar, Jesus’ temptations in the desert demonstrate the freedom of his human nature. Satan offered him counterfeit alternatives. Balthasar surely does not pin his hope on counterfeit beauty for the future of theology. He would warn that all beauty should be looked at for its unity with truth and goodness, and ultimately, its form being that of the crucified Christ.

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modern saints themselves are not without their share of responsibility for this state of

affairs. They are not taken seriously in theology because they themselves did not

venture to be theologically minded.”8 Rather than saints being relegated to the

spiritual and subjective side of the experience of faith, they must embody theology in

a way that becomes objective, and thereby understandable and imitable. Balthasar in

describing, for example, “what the episcopal office really is, we must think of it as

embodied (my emphasis) in one who has reached perfection...”9 Whatever the

mission of the saint, spirituality and theology feed each other. True “pillars of the

Church” present a living theology; they are “complete personalities: what they taught

they lived with such directness...”10

Now is the time to consider the real live flesh and blood participants in the

Trinitarian drama that reveal revelation. For “It is only when the Church is seen as the

church of saints that her image is irresistible.”11

Mary’s Consent in Freedom

Balthasar presents Mary’s role in salvation history as unique since she was the

woman chosen from before all time to be presented with a mission that would fulfill the very “idea” of who God created Mary to be:

The mission that each individual receives contains within itself the form of sanctity that has been granted to him and is required of him. In following that mission, he fulfills his appropriate capacity for sanctity. This sanctity is essentially social and outside the arbitrary disposition of any individual. For

8 “Theology and Sanctity,” 191.

9 Ibid., 184.

10 Ibid., 182.

11 Ibid., 200.

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each Christian, God has an idea that fixes his place within the membership of the Church; this idea is unique and personal, embodying for each his appropriate sanctity. There is no danger that it will not prove high enough or broad enough in any instance. Indeed, it is so sublime, so intimately bound to divine infinity, that it is perfectly achieved by no one except Mary. The Christian’s supreme aim is to transform his life into this idea of himself secreted in God, this ‘individual law’ freely promulgated for him by the pure grace of God.12

For Mary, her “idea” secreted in God was that Mary was to be secreted with the

Savior at the annunciation. Her capacity for sanctity was fulfilled in bearing the

Fulfillment of creation and history. Her “individual law” bore the One who freed

from the law.

Mary possessed the God-given finite freedom to assent or reject the call of the

Trinitarian God (Balthasar points to all three Persons being present at the annunciation indicated in the words of the angel: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (RSV, Luke 1:35)). Her creaturely freedom is intact like any other created being, but it is a freedom that is unimpaired by original sin due to prevenient grace;13 therefore, she is oriented and attuned to the will of God.

Being disposed toward the will of God, however, does not take away Mary’s freedom to utter a “yes” or a “no” to the angel’s request.

12 2SS, 20-21.

13 Although prevenient grace was operative, in that Mary was “pre-redeemed” or saved by Christ’s sacrifice in advance, grace was continually at work in Mary’s life, as it is even now continually offered as a gift to be received. In Love Alone is Credible, Balthasar asserts the necessity of God’s grace as a condition for coming to faith: “But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace ---in the image of his Son” (76).

73

Within the framework of finite freedom, Rodney Howsare identifies the

freedom of consent as “Balthasar’s first type of freedom.”14 Balthasar defines the

freedom of consent as “an elevated position of ‘indifference’: from this vantage point we can choose, and indeed we must choose, because we can only realize this elevated indifference by making choices, choices which affect everything with which we share existence.”15

Certainly, Mary’s “Yes” is one that is so attuned to the will of God that it

might be considered the most self-forgetting, other-oriented consent in the history of

salvation (that is, outside of her Son’s). According to Balthasar, her indifference is

not quietist but surely the most active cooperation yielding the fruit of her womb to

the world. Howsare, notes that “even in the natural reflections of the philosopher...we

have seen that (human) freedom is oriented towards the good.” In addition to the

natural human orientation to the good, there is the “gift of grace...required to reorient freedom to its natural end” who is God. Perhaps, Mary’s orientation is predicated upon her knowledge of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. She knows the

Creator, and this is grace at work in Mary that, although different from prevenient

grace, is also at work and is available to all humanity. Although Howsare is not

applying any of this to Mary in his chapter on freedom, it is from the “Christian

14 Howsare, Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed, 100. Howsare ties Balthasar’s notion of freedom of consent and his freedom of autonomous motion to the ancient philosophers: “But in Aristotle’s notion of freedom of consent is also lurking the notion of freedom as self-movement, or what Balthasar calls “freedom as autonomous motion” (100). Howsare refers the reader to Robert Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) “for a discussion of Aristotle’s notion of virtue and freedom” (N. 9., 174).

15 TD II, 228.

74 doctrine of creation...comes the notion that human freedom is a gift,”16 and this is what Mary is supremely aware of:

Going out of ourselves and into “the other” is a sign both of poverty and of wealth, and this twofold character precipitates a further choice: will finite freedom use the wealth of its being open to enrich itself further or will it regard its being open as the opportunity to hand itself over to infinite free Being, to the Being who is the Giver of this free openness?17

Hence Mary gushes, a prayer of praise and gratitude after accepting her mission--- the Magnificat, chock full of paradoxical tension and positioned in the pregnant pause between the Covenants.

Freedom as autonomous motion follows freedom of consent in created freedom. In assenting to God’s will, Mary’s response continues as she makes haste to the house of Elizabeth, dauntingly trails the darkness to the foot of her Son’s cross, and finally, huddles with the trembling disciples in the light of the resurrection as the

Holy Spirit pours out power at Pentecost.

Balthasar elevates Mary’s creaturely freedom to a “central mystery” in contemplating the Gospel passages about her:

...in comparison with all other human beings (even within the Church), Mary’s freedom is unique. But it is also different from that of Jesus Christ. The figure of Mary exhibits an utterly exuberant form of creaturely freedom (and for this reason, it is utterly simple); as such she is the prototype who fulfills everything said in the previous volume concerning the relationship between finite and infinite freedom. 18

16 Howsare, A Guide for the Perplexed, 102.

17 TD II, 228.

18 TD III, 299.

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Mary’s freedom though “unique” is finite. The essence of Mary’s humility is founded

on her understanding of the relationship of her freedom to Absolute Freedom. When

Balthasar says that she “fulfills” this relationship, it is certainly not in the way that the

two natures of Christ reconcile these freedoms. Jesus possessed both the divine

infinite freedom and creaturely finite freedom within him as a unity:

Jesus Christ brings the Old Covenant to its completion; thus he is the realization of God’s Yes, which was inherent in all his promises...Jesus is both God’s Yes to the world and also, together with the world (“with us”), the world’s answering Yes (Amen) to God. He perfectly seals and implements the truth of the relationship between God and the world, in terms of a Covenant between infinite and finite freedom.19

Thus her “biblical experience of the world,” which is due in part to Mary’s formation

in Judaism, builds on the foundation of the Immaculate Conception (her pre- redeemed status). Perhaps reflecting on the binding covenantal relationship of Israel

to God, she is opened to perceive both the gulf between her finitude and the infinitude

of the Holy One. According to Balthasar, this does not rule out the “sense of the

nonabsoluteness of the finite” outside “biblical experience” but privileges the nation of Israel prior to the incarnation.20 Prior to Christ’s death on the cross but considering

her antecedent salvation, Mary could be said to be gifted with what might be

described as a

19 TD II, 252. Though finite freedom is created by Infinite freedom that “penetrates everything creaturely”, there is no access to infinite freedom that can be grasped by finite freedom. “The ‘understanding’ of the wise remains somehow intellectual, failing to take into account the concrete waywardness of finite freedom; it is unprepared for the paths God’s freedom will take, in Jesus Christ, to redeem this waywardness from within. Jesus Christ who being made sin “shows (infinite freedom’s) ultimate most extreme capability for the first time: it can be itself even in the finitude that ‘loses itself...yet only here, where ‘God’s love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us,’ is finite freedom driven out of its last refuge and set on the path toward infinite freedom...” (TD II, 244). Choosing this path gives access to love because of the freedom of love.

20 TD II, 253. Balthasar claims the process of the “becoming” of creation hints at infinite freedom.

76

Christian sense of creatureliness...that discovers that it has no ground under its feet but ‘stands above itself’ (Augustine) in the sole Will of infinite freedom, which is as such a Will of wisdom and salvation... (finite freedom) originates in infinite freedom and receives its own freedom thence, it is willed and affirmed in its finitude down to the last detail. However unsure of itself it may become, it must hold fast to this Yes that has been pronounced upon it.21

Mary is humbly aware of the affirmation of her existence stamped with the image of the Creator. The givenness of her being and her freedom as solely dependent on and existing in God’s freedom, is what allows her to make herself wholly available to

God’s plans for her life. In Mary’s submission to and cooperation with the will of

God, she knows true freedom.

Mary has been graced with an encounter that she, as created being, cannot initiate. Perhaps a quote from Balthasar’s book Love Alone is Credible, about how humanity in general comes to know the love of God may help illuminate Mary’s fiat:

Prior to an individual’s encounter with the love of God at a particular time in history...there has to be another, more fundamental and archetypal encounter which belongs to the conditions of possibility of the appearance of divine love to man. There has to be an encounter, in which the unilateral movement of God’s love toward man is understood as such and that means also appropriately received and answered...it can be only the living response of love from a human spirit, as it is accomplished in man through God’s loving grace: the response of the “Bride”, who in grace calls out, “Come!” (Rev 22:17) and “Let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38), who “carries within the seed of God” and therefore “does not sin” (IJn 3:9), but “kept all of these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19, 51).22

Mary’s “Yes” becomes the prototype for all subsequent “Yesses”. The “Yes” given

to her first by the Giver allows her to return the gift. The Creator’s “Yes” to Mary

awakens her to the love that generated her and quickens the “Yes” to the love

21 Ibid., 254. Balthasar does not refer to Mary in this quote.

22 Love Alone is Credible, 77.

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generating within her. Balthasar asserts that a human being whose consciousness

“(awakens) to its own being and freedom...utters an involuntary, limitless Yes to the

reality it has been given. The man who utters this Yes knows that he himself has

been affirmed from some quarter: someone has bestowed on him the Yes of being.

To be, really to be, is precious.”23 Mary impressed with the “Yes” of being and freedom, and open to receiving such a precious gift through grace, desires only to respond in love to love and that is through a perfect disponibility to God. It is by

“being servants of our mission, we enjoy a freedom that is boundless.”24

The interplay between finite and infinite freedom, the characteristics of freedom as “freedom of consent” and “freedom of autonomous motion”, the necessity of prevenient grace for Mary, and grace for all who come to faith that orients freedom to its proper end in God, have been shown to be present in the actions and prayer (her fiat, the Magnificat) of Mary’s mission. The effects of grace and Mary’s free consent indicate receptivity, the paramount attitude of a saint for Balthasar. Openness to the will of God is, for Balthasar, readiness and availability (or disponibility) that attunes the saint to the direction of the Holy Spirit. Balthasar builds on receptivity, suggesting the primary posture of one who actually succeeds in saintly mission must show itself in obedience. Obedience moves attentiveness to effective action and produces fruit for the Church.

23 TD II, 286.

24 TD III, 266. 78

Mary’s Obedience in Mission

Looking to the mission of Jesus Christ as the source for all missions, we must

look to him as the source for obedience to that mission---this virtue is what makes for

mission fruitfulness for the Church and the salvation of the world. Christ’s obedience becomes the revelation of Trinitarian obedience which is always connected to kenotic love. Obedience without love would be slavery to a principle or an ideology, but

Christ’s love and Trinitarian relationship proffer a life-giving obedience that transforms one into a full and lively theological person through Christian mission.

Obedience in love, calls for poverty of spirit. Balthasar says that obedience and poverty are connected: “For the (disciples), perfect poverty is one with perfect

obedience...the unconditional leaving of all things is the presupposition of the necessary readiness for all things on the part of the disciple.”25 The disciples are to

depend, not on themselves, not on worldly definitions of success, but on following

Jesus in his absolute dependence on his Father and the Holy Spirit:

It is for this reason that he warns those who follow him, ‘The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Lk 9.58). He has entrusted his cause so exclusively to the future which belongs to God that he can dare to do what is humanly speaking irresponsible: He can make others exclusively dependent upon himself, and thereby expose them to complete poverty, in order to give them in return the absolute promise of God as responding gift and guarantee (Mt 19.29 par.).26

What constitutes Mary’s obedience is fundamentally inseparable from her poverty of

spirit. She is the anawim27 who realizes the absolute gulf that exists between her and

25 Balthasar, GL VII, trans. Brian McNeil, ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 132- 133.

26 Ibid., 133-134.

27 See Chapter 4, “Hochzeitlichkeit: The Word Weds Silence,” in Word and Silence by Raymond Gawronski, S.J., 112-146. 79

the Creator. For Balthasar, Mary’s poverty of spirit does not grasp after anything for

herself, but in prayerful readiness, can hear the strange call on her life---and trust it---

to become pregnant with God’s Son appearing ever poorer to the world for her out-of-

wedlock obedience. She may have done what the world calls irresponsible by leaving

behind cultural conventions, but her dependence upon Gabriel’s announcement as the

pronouncement of the Word of God takes root in her both physically and spiritually,

and achieves in her something impossible for her of her own. Her cooperation is

solicited, and she responds by renouncing everything that she could claim for herself.

Her obedience and poverty give her not only to herself, but give true wealth to the

world. The “idea” of Mary is achieved, and Jesus Christ is poured out for salvation.

In Mary we can see the ecstasis and kenosis achieved in her by reflecting on

Christ:

Now we must see how Jesus translates his claim and commission into poverty (or into obedience) in such a way that he lets his entire formless and therefore wordless existence (as ‘flesh’) be yielded up in an ultimate gesture, so that it may become something that God’s hand can form in its entirety, including his mother’s womb and his burial, into ‘the Word of God’...as Jesus’ handing over of himself...that by the power of this handing over, he may become what he should be for God and men.28

In what Balthasar calls the Trinitarian inversion, Jesus hands himself over to the

Father’s will in his divinity and submits himself to the Holy Spirit in his humanity.29

Mary’s response “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord (Lk 1:38a, RSV)” exhibits a similar obedient trust. Unlike Jesus, she did not make her decision in the pre-

28 GL VII, 147-148.

29 For an explanation of the Trinitarian inversion please refer to TD III, 183-202.

80 existence of the Trinitarian relationship to hand herself over to God’s will, nor, of course, is she privy to the divine mind in the way of her Son: “The voice from heaven

(bat qol) referring to him as the ‘beloved Son’ does not tell him anything he did not know already...whereas the bat qol that introduces Mary to her vocation and mission does tell her something totally new.”30 In her humanity, she trusts not in herself but in the God to whom she allows: “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk.

1:38b, RSV). Mary is completely dependent upon the God with whom “nothing is impossible” (Lk. 1:37, RSV). Balthasar describes this as the comportment necessary for saintly mission:

All the saints---they especially---realize how inadequately they fulfill their mission, and they are to be taken seriously when they insist on their inadequacy. What matters about them is not their personal “heroic achievement” but the resolute obedience with which they have utterly surrendered themselves to serving a mission and have come to see their very existence in light of it.31

As Balthasar states:

...people are overtaken by an unexpected vocation in the midst of their ordinary lives and entrusted with a theological role. The event is totally unexpected; not only are there no exceptions to this rule: it is very often underlined by the paradox that the man chosen is apparently the least suited to the task...32

Mary, herself, knows that she is in this position for she is betrothed to Joseph and a virgin: “...the Virgin Mary is even less suited for bringing the ‘Son of the Most High’ into the world.”33 The Magnificat of Mary shows her absolute faith in the surrender

30 TD III, 268.

31 2SS, 27.

32 TD III, 263.

33 Ibid., 264.

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to the One who inverts all that has exalted itself over and against God. The holy fool joins with her in proclaiming: “He has put down the mighty from their thrones, and

exalted those of low degree!” (Lk. 1:52, RSV).

As Jesus submitted himself to the inspirations and directions of the Holy Spirit

in his earthly existence, Mary does not hear the whole plan for her life at once, but must assent to it moment-by-moment, step-by-step, in keeping with the unfolding of time but always in close communion with her Son.34 This communion is concrete for

nothing could be closer for Balthasar than Mary’s womb in bodily contact with the

flesh and blood of the incarnated Savior: “...her womanly experience begins with the

tactus---sensing by touching---and then unfolds from it only to return to it, to the

point of developing a spiritual perception and sense of touch for all that pertains to

her Son.”35 This implies the most intimate of relationships, one that is sensitive to the moving of his Spirit and is able then to assent to an overshadowing, an overshadowing that trammels the conventions of worldly wisdom, allowing the Word of God, the Logos, true Wisdom to impress the untrammeled. Being thus formed,

Mary follows obediently, not robotically, but with the impress of the form of Christ unfolding salvation history in the midst of her mission as the Mother of God.

34 Balthasar allows this closeness not just for Jesus’ disciples and for his Mother, but for all who are chosen and choose to follow Christ. To do so is to act “in the acting area that is, Christ,” and this confers identity: “...we are to assimilate our own ‘I’ more and more completely to our God-given mission and to discover in this mission our own identity, which is both personal and social” (TD III, 270-271).

35 GL I, 353. 82

Mary’s Suffering in Mission

Obedience to the will of God brings the saint to a kenotic existence that

paradoxically brings fulfillment of personhood, iterates revelation in some nuanced

way, and participates in Trinitarian relationship. Like Jesus, Mary’s obedience

involved suffering. All Christian missions are cruciform, rooted in the mission of her

Son.

Mary shares in the suffering of Christ for the redemption of the world. The

concrete assent to the particular and unique mission of bearing the Savior bore within

it the complete assent and handing over of her Son to the crucifixion: “Her consent

was so pure, so far above the failings of even the great figures of the Old Testament,

so unlimited and definitive, that it included all that was to befall the Son who was the

object of her consent.”36 Mary follows behind her Son, a journey that participates in the desolation of abandonment by the Father and the culmination of the cross:

“Hidden behind the multitude of sinners, embracing them all, she is objectively closest to him: she makes his suffering possible and guarantees its goal.”37 She must

integrate Gabriel’s announcement that she will give birth to the Messiah and, soon

after, Simeon’s prophecy that her Son will be a sign of contradiction; her heart will be

pierced as by a sword for her Son’s appearance will reveal the darkness of the human

condition. As Jesus begins his public ministry, he knows that all circumstances are

pushing toward conclusion. He knows that the hour is coming, although not precisely

36 TD IV, 352.

37 Ibid., 356.

83 its timing, when he will experience the dereliction of death, hell, and the distortion of non-form: this is the “hour” “with its special discontinuous content.”38

As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem and comes closer to his Passion, the distance widens between his mother and himself. This distance finds its locus within the distance that Jesus and the Father will experience at the cross. Balthasar locates their abandonment within the separation that “includes and grounds every other separation---be it never so dark and bitter”---that is the Father’s kenosis in giving his entire essence to the Son without the Father losing anything: “He brings forth a God who is of equal substance and therefore uncreated, even if, in this self-surrender, he must go to the very extreme of self-lessness.” 39 And the Son reciprocates and returns all to the Father without holding anything back. So it is in the Trinitarian love of kenotic selflessness that makes possible Mary’s giving of herself to the plan of God and allows her to trust in the increasing distance from him in his public ministry.

Mary, given the expanse of thirty years to ponder the tumultuous upheaval of the initial call on her life and the embryonic inklings of the meaning of her child’s life, is given no other insight beyond the twelve year old Jesus’ declaration that he must be about his Father’s business. In the few passages in the Gospels where Mary makes her appearance during her Son’s public ministry, Balthasar points to Jesus’ interactions with his mother as revealing in some small way the distance that he must experience from his Father in Heaven:

Now, however he can only see her as the farthest from him; this is how he must see her. He is forsaken absolutely, and the only way of fellowship with

38 Ibid., 383.

39 Ibid., 325.

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him is to take leave of him and plunge into forsakenness. He must withdraw from his Mother just as the Father has withdrawn from him: “Woman behold your son.”40

In Balthasar’s final work, Unless You Become Like This Child, he describes this

distancing:

The Mother’s long period of life with her growing Son is, for the Mother, a life in faith. She does not see the God in him; only from afar does she suspect his particular relationship to the Father. She does not understand what the twelve-year-old says to her. And, left behind with the unbelieving “brothers”, how much will she understand about his public actions? The Son shall leave her behind and hardly acknowledge her any more: “Woman, what is there between us?” When she wants to visit him, he is so busy with his new family that he has no time for her. When a woman from the crowd calls her blessed, she is pushed back into the anonymity of the crowd: “Indeed, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”...All of this is now the school of the Son, her training in his own abandonment, in which she will receive her share under the Cross.41

Under the cross is the place where Balthasar sees a transformation occurring

from Mary as Virgin Mother to Mary as Bride of Christ. Mary as Bride of Christ is in some way the development of what he recalls the Church Fathers (Augustine and

Gregory the Great) describing as connubium because of the “Virgin’s active role” in

the coming together of the two natures of Christ in her womb. Aquinas takes up this

teaching, observing: “It was appropriate that the Blessed Virgin should be told that

she would conceive the Messiah..., for thus it was made plain that there was to be a

spiritual marriage between the Son of God and human nature.” 42 Although, Balthasar

40 Ibid., 356.

41 Balthasasr, Unless You Become Like This Child, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 71-72.

42 I would have to explore Aquinas’ thinking before I, myself, could see the connection. The ellipsis in the quote is Balthasar’s and not mine. What’s missing may be necessary, for this is anything but “plain” to me.

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would never desire to crudely separate the natures in Christ, for Mary is the

Theotokos, he does feel free to imagine two stages to Mary’s Immaculate Conception.

It is under the cross then, that Mary assumes a new role in salvation history: “In her first conception, she was the “vessel (not the bride) of the Spirit” for the sake of her virginal motherhood vis-à-vis the Son; in her second conception, she becomes the equally virginal Bride of the Son of God himself, who gives himself away eucharistically.”43 Balthasar continues: “This silence of death is the indefinable

moment in which the “new man” is conceived and born of the Church’s womb, a

womb that has become so poor that, spiritually, it shares the Son’s death.”44

Mary’s Fruitfulness in Mission

Mary’s acceptance of the will of God in the mission for her life, first and

foremost, made possible the First Fruit: the incarnation. Through the Immaculate

Conception she was the perfect vessel to bear the fruit of her womb: Jesus Christ the

Messiah. Her consent and obedience to her unique mission that coincides with the perfect “idea” of Mary in God, is made in perfect freedom: “Mary cannot be the impersonal ‘place’ where the covenant between the natures is concluded: God does not overpower his creature, least of all the woman who represents his covenant, but respects her dignity as a person.”45 Although the incarnation is a pre-decision by the

Trinity, it does not then impose itself on the players to bring about this irruption into

history. Mary’s perfect receptivity, which for Balthasar is never passive but is always

43 TD IV, 358-359.

44 Ibid., 359.

45 Ibid., 354. 86

an active receptivity, provides the perfect answer to God’s call played out in

collaborative personal relationship between the subject and the Redeemer. Mary becomes the model for all individuals in the universal call to be holy and is

considered the Queen of the Saints. While she moves in perfect attunement to the

demands of a cruciform mission, she is moved from subjective personhood to the

objective prototype for the saint. She is, according to the Balthasarian arc of saintly

mission, expropriated for the good of the Church. One is, in a certain sense, de-

privatized, socialized, and made into a locus and a bearer of community.46 “You are

not your own”---Self-renouncement becomes the space where the Son of Man who

has no place to lay his head can, in a sense, rest. Mary is the prototype for the saint in

her individual mission. The saint can imitate Mary although, of course, without the

pre-redeemed status.

Mary’s second conception lies within the Immaculate Conception from which

the social fruit of her mission becomes visible. For Mary is conceived again at the

foot of the cross as the vessel through which the Church is born. She is NOT the

activating principle, for that is the death of Christ, the piercing of his side, his

resurrection, and the sending of his Spirit. She is the recipient---but this is not a

passive reception, for with Balthasar, receptivity when joined to mission in Christ, is

always active in the freedom of cooperation. Under the cross, Christ points to the

birth of the Church when he binds Mary and John together with him: “When Jesus

saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother,

“Woman, behold your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold your mother!”

46 TD III, 271.

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(John 19:26-27, RSV). Mary is transfigured as Virgin Mother to Virgin Bride of

Christ, the ecclesial archetype!

For Balthasar, the key to the success of mission is its fruitfulness; it must open

itself outward both kenotically and ecstatically47, rooted in the pro nobis of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice, and may, in fact participate in this redemptive activity:

While it is impossible for those redeemed by Christ (and this includes Mary, in an eminent manner) to have an active part in their own redemption, it is not impossible for Jesus to give those he has redeemed the opportunity of sharing in his power to intervene, in a redemptive, liberating, helping way, in the realm of human freedom. There is no question, of course, of one human being directly penetrating the personal intimacy of another; but, according to the laws of the communion of saints, he can offer himself to God on behalf of other people...by asking, suffering and being for them.48

Mary is both Mother of God and Mother of the Church. She represents the Body of

Christ as Church in a very concrete way: “...the community’s place is occupied by a

person, most concretely by the Mother of Jesus: her mission is also to be the Mother

of his brothers, of his “Mystical Body...”49 Such an analogy must always be grounded

47 For a handy summary of what Balthasar means when he uses the “ecstasis” and “kenosis” please see John Roten, SM ,“Marian Light on our Human Mystery,” pp. 128-129, in The Beauty of Christ. Ecstasis is connected to the theo-aesthetics, whereas kenosis occurs in the theo-drama. Ecstasis occurs when we are seized by beauty and enraptured. It is what keeps us in “suspension”, “hung” between heaven and earth. Balthasar does not see this as anything alienating because being suspended has a “wonderfully moving and driving quality, the healing power to make us whole.” In contrast “kenosis...is synonymous with existential tension.” It is the pull inherent between what is most personalizing in mission and what is most expropriating. Finally they are brought together in analogia entis: “Being...is both love and freedom, which means that ecstasis ultimately represents the human answer to the comparative character of love, and kenosis the proper reaction to the comparative dynamics of freedom.” And again, ‘suspension’ can be associated with the Johannine menein (existence in love) and ‘tension’ with the Pauline hypomone. (129). Hypomone translated: endurance, patience, steadfastness.

48 TD III, 271.

49 Ibid., 273.

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in Christ: “Solely through God’s act is the individual expanded to become the mission-bearer, the epitome of the collective.” 50

The fruitfulness51 then of a mission, purely and intentionally followed to its

end, is social in its ramifications (although, of course, it has personal implications,

primarily in transformation from an individual subject to a theological person):

...in fact, the theological person radiates as far as his vocation and mission reaches. Insofar as he takes the initiative in carrying out this mission, this potential radiation becomes actual; and to that same extent, en Christōi and in analogy with him, he opens up within his own person an area where others can receive freedom to act.52

Balthasar gives examples of those where this fruitful “sphere” of freedom and

community is opened up:

...we think of theologians like Augustine, founders of orders like Benedict, Francis and Ignatius, popes like Gregory, women like Hildegard, Gertrude and Mary Ward...But behind the great ones, those exhibited to our , there are the countless others whose missions, in God’s sight, are no less far-reaching. Such are the missions of , of prayer, of charity, of suffering, which remain unknown or, once known, have now been forgotten.53

Of these saints, however, no one has a more fundamentally unique personal mission

that extends to immeasurable proportions in communal mission than Mary (except

her Son). For Balthasar claims her personal mission “is the source of all universality

in the Church.” 54

50 Ibid., 275.

51 For a summary of Balthasar’s thoughts on fruitfulness, see the chapter, “Fruitfulness” in the Epilogue. “It was above all the task of the third part of the trilogy, the Theo-Logic, to show in detail how the miracle of cosmic fertility is the stamp of the original mystery of Being as such, of its Trinitarian constitution...” (109-110).

52 TD III, 271-272.

53 Ibid., 280.

54 Ibid., 279.

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The Marian Church

Primary to the understanding of Balthasar’s ecclesiology is his Mariology.

Although this thesis is not the place to treat either his ecclesiology or a complete theology of Mary, it is important to note what Balthasar describes as “the Marian principle.” It stands at the center of how Balthasar understands the Church’s

relationship to Jesus Christ, both as individual members and as the Body of Christ (or the people of God, or the Bride of Christ, or the office of the Church, or the

community, even the collective). 55

Before defining the Marian principle which is the key to comprehending

Mary’s fruitfulness, it is important to know where Balthasar situates Mary in

relationship to other players within the Church and to the Church as a whole.

According to Balthasar, since Mary is the Theotokos, the saint par excellence and the undergirding of the pillars of the Church (Peter, Paul, John, and James)56 her mission

55 See Balthasar’s ET II. His ecclesiology, in the author’s own words is “not a systematic ecclesiology, but perhaps a few building stones for a future one” (7). Balthasar does not use the terms in parentheses interchangeably. He makes distinctions. For example, John Cihak points this out in the particular relationship between identity and non-identity: The Church is established in her essence through a twofold relationship with Christ: identity (the Body of Christ) and non-identity (the Bride of Christ). As the body of Christ, the Church “is, and cannot be other than an extension, a communication, a partaking of the personality of Christ.” The identity of Christ and the Church as Body, however, is not such that the Church dissolves into the identity of Christ. Christ’s spousal relationship to the Church founds her non-identity with Christ. This non- identity is important so that the relationship between Christ and his Church can be constituted as love. The non-identity of the Church as Bride also allows the existence of personal subjects in her. (Cihak, Balthasar and Anxiety, (227); From Sponsa Verba, p.151; Engl, p. 145).

56 “The threefold archetypal experience of Christ, which is conferred by the apostles on the Church for its use, remains permanently sustained and undergirded by the Marian experience of Christ...the Marian experience existed prior to the apostolic experience, and it thus wholly conditions it...” (GL I, 353). The threefold refers to Peter, Paul and John. Although James is not mentioned here, Balthasar does include him as a pillar in other writing. For example, he names four “pillars” including James and describes his role as “supplementary” and as “embodying the principle of ‘tradition’ in the infant Church’” (TD III, 279).

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(always secondary to Christ’s) must be held up as the pinnacle of fruitfulness.

Mary’s mission then, by way of analogy, is vital for both the individual’s conversion

to a theological person in two ways, personal and communal.57 It must first be

personal, just as Mary herself was a person with a unique incomparable personal mission:

Mary’s mission, arising from her personal relationship with her Child, is not to be compared to that of the individual members of the Mystical Body who will come later; for it belonged to her official role to add her consent to his and to affirm all his---universal---concerns; more: her mission was to respond personally to those concerns for his sake.58

In embracing her unique personal mission of “consenting” to Christ’s mission,

Mary’s mission becomes universal within the framework of Christ’s universal

mission; “the sphere of a (theological) person extends as far as that person’ mission

(when fully carried out).”59 The tension between the personal and social aspects of

mission are radically illustrated in Mary. As Balthasar explains: “The truth is that the

more personal and unique Mary’s relationship with Christ is understood to be, the more she represents the concrete epitome of what we mean by “Church”. “For her mission, and hers alone, is universal (for christological reasons); that is, it is Catholic, of the whole Church.”60

57 Balthasar also connects the call of the collective to the call of the individual: “...there is an analogy between the election of an entire people, be it the Synagogue or the Church---Where the new member enters the sphere of ordinary vocation by birth (involving circumcision) or by rebirth (in Baptism)--- and the call of individuals” (TD III, 266-267).

58 TD III, 304.

59 TD II or TD III, (?)

60 TD III, 304-305.

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A theological person experiences this same tension inherent in obedience to mission, both in its personal and social implications. This same said subject also has both a personal and communal experience of Mary. In conversion, a Christian is born into the Church and, in a particular way, can relate to Mary as a person who is not only the Spouse of Christ but Mother to the neophyte61 (through the Trinity) by way of baptism: “...just as she has a direct, personal relationship with her Child, so now she has a similar relationship with all his ‘members’ or brothers.”62 After entering the Church, the neophyte is “becoming” that “idea” that God has always had in God’s mind for that particular person---always in the context of community, the communio sanctorum. Mary’s person takes on communal meaning--- In “becoming”, the theological person is protected and instructed in the “womb” of the Church (or

Mother Church, “type of church”63). This is the “locus” where Mary’s person becomes co-extensive with the Church as Mother,64 however, never to the point that

Mary eclipses the Church but is in “subordination to the Church.”65 At the same

61 “What in patristic times was ...largely implicit, that is, Mary’s motherhood not only of Christ but also of the faithful---which means that she has a bridal relationship with Christ...” (TD, III, 300).

62 TD III, 307.

63 Ibid., 300.

64 Ibid., 271. “When a human being becomes a person, theologically, by being given a unique vocation and mission, he is simultaneously de-privatized, socialized, made into a locus and a bearer of community.”

65 Balthasar quotes Augustine: “Mary is holy, Mary is blessed, but the Church is more excellent than the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is a part of the church; a holy member, certainly, an outstanding member, a supereminent member, but nonetheless a member of the whole Body. And there can be no doubt that the whole Body is more than a single member” ([Sermo Denis 25; Morin, 163],TD III, 300- 301). Balthasar uses Augustine’s quote in the context of a discussion about the development of Mariology and how to understand Mary’s relationship to Christ, to believers, and then to the Church. Mary, at various seasons in history, has been seen to be above the Church because she gave birth to the head. “...Mary the prototype and Real-symbol who anticipates the Church, the individual person who is Christ’s ‘counterpart’---will initially outstrip the church.” (TD III, 306) 92 time, Mary’s mantle is also the Bride of Christ; given this dramatic role her mission proportions expand to stainless Bride as the entire communio sanctorum is

represented in her and by her, always, of course, held within and by Christ.66 The

Church can enter into the drama of salvation by imagining itself as the Bride of Christ being made ready to meet the Bridegroom at the heavenly banquet.

Mary becomes imitable for the theological person in Mary’s complete disponibility and unreserved fiat, the foundation of the Marian principle. Depending on how the one called embraces the mission, the fruits, both personal and mostly social, can be “thirty-, sixty- or a hundredfold.” If the mission is lived out faithfully, a closer communion with Christ and the saints is a reality and, for Balthasar, one that connects heaven and earth, permeating that boundaries of finitude to infinitude. The theological mission-bearing person then, is given a share in the redemption of the

Please see TD III, 300-318, in which Balthasar lays out the history of the development of Mariology culminating in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, Chapter 8. Balthasar seems to desire a more robust theology of Mary and is critical of the council’s results that “(have) set a landmark that will not easily be moved” (TD III, 316). He regards the “Council’s Mariology” as a “readoption of that ‘minimalism’ (which we noted in the passage from Augustine’s De virginitate, 5-6) which sees Mary’s relationship to the faithful and particularly their relationship to Mary primarily, if not exclusively, in moral terms...The Council stays at the level of the type-antitype parallelism; there is no mention of the supplementary theme of identity that began to develop from Irenaeus on...We should also mention...that the introduction of the quotation from ---Mary’s cooperation does not add anything...to the work of Christ...is over-cautious: while it does justice to the relationship between God, the sole source of grace, and the creature, it does not give full weight to the man-woman aspect...The council document leaves all these questions open; so we are spurred on to take a new and deeper approach ...that reveal(s) Mary as a genuine dramatic role in the theo-drama” (TD III, 317-318). However, this does not mean Balthasar gives so much room to Mary as to view her as co- redemptrix or even mediatrix. (TD III, 298). Lucy Gardner (“Balthasar and the figure of Mary,” The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 64-78) points to Balthasar’s Elucidations for an elaboration of Balthasar’s critique of an ‘unmoored’ Mariology...” (78).

66 In Balthasar’s summary of the history of Mariology, the title “Bride of Christ “ is a later “attribute” given to Mary (TDIII, 307). Balthasar claims the idea is “implicit” in the Fathers but becomes “explicit in medieval times” (TD III, 300). Balthasar declares “the visionary Syrian poet Eprhem...anticipat(es) the medieval synthesis, he is the first to call Mary ‘bride’: ‘I am your sister, of the House of David, who is father to both of us. I am mother too, for I bore you in my womb. I am also your bride, for you are chaste; I am the handmaid and daughter of the blood and the water, for you have bought me and baptized me’” (TD III, 305 n.19).

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world, already fully consummated by the Trinitarian cross, resurrection and ascension but not yet fully realized for creation, reserved until the eschaton. The participant in

the full life of Christ is enabled, with the Church, to enter analogous and mystical

nuptial experience, and together with the Church, is transformed into the Bride of

Christ without stain or blemish as Mary is the Bride of Christ through her “second”

Immaculate Conception.

The strange witness of the saints also plays a fruit-bearing role in bearing new

members through Christ67, and thereby, participates in Marian fecundity always

expropriated through and in the Trinity. The Marian principle, then, for Balthasar,

indicates the apogee in attitude and orientation to Christ and stipulates the saintly

silhouette: feminine receptivity. Receptivity is the essential orientation to the mission bestowed and crucial for mission fruitfulness.

According to Balthasar, receptivity is a feminine trait, inseparable from biology.68 In order to understand how Mary becomes Balthasar’s archetype for the

Church, one must come to grips with how Balthasar comprehends gender roles; the

difference between male and female endeavors in the world appears to be reduced to

a symbol, to his seemingly constricted view of the sexual act.69 For Balthasar, man is

the activating principle or word (Wort, Litz---“primary fruitfulness”)70 and is fruitful

67 “...these believers, who are members of the Church, can become spiritual “mothers” of Christ through their obedience of faith” (TD III, 301).

68 “At the same time both (man and woman) share an identical human nature, but at no point does it protrude, neutrally, beyond the sexual difference, as if to provide neutral ground for mutual understanding” (TD II, 365).

69 For Balthasar, man-woman polarity “can stand as a paradigm” for the tension “between the individual and the community...”It is not good for man to be alone...” (TD II, 365).

70 TD III, 285-287. 94 in a monadic fashion offering the seed and needing woman’s answer in order to complete man’s fruitfulness.71 Woman has a dyadic fruitfulness in being both answer to man (Antwort, Antlitz--- “answering fruitfulness”)72 and bearing the fruit of the union as child. For reproduction, that fruit is the child.73 In mission, the success of that mission is its fruitfulness for the salvation of the world.

Balthasar relates the polarity of the sexes to the creation story in a couple of ways. First, he recounts the necessity of reproduction to death in the post-lapsarian state.74 Although he admits that we have no notion of what pre-lapsarian relations were between man and woman, and particularly in the story of Adam and Eve, it was the Fall that made biological reproduction necessary.75 Second, Adam and Eve become the type/anti-type that allows the new Adam, Christ, and the new Eve, Mary, to initiate a new relationship for the sexes in the analogy of Christ/Bride of Christ in

71 For all that can be found in Balthasar’s writing that shows a rigid determination of gender roles and the polarity of male and female, and considering contemporary charges from theologians of purported sexism (see Gonzalez, Crammer, Beattie), Balthasar inveighs against ancient metaphysics in “the danger of equating the male, the heavenly, with the ‘spirit’, and the female, earthly, with ‘matter’, or at least with ‘nature’ in the modern sense, that is, the danger of depreciating the latter. So it is from Plato...to Aristotle (woman as ‘material’ and hence something to be ‘used’...and on to the well-known misogynistic utterances of the Fathers and the Scholastics” (TD II, 367). In referring to the creation account, Balthasar sums up the relative position of the two genders with regard to one another: “In the relationship between the two, where each is created by God and dependent on the other, even though one is ‘taken’ out of the other, the man’s (persisting) priority is located within the equality of man and woman” (TD II, 373). The “persisting priority” of man makes woman “secondary.” Balthasar insists: “The primary needs a partner of equal rank and dignity” for the end of man’s “own fulfillment.” (TD III, 284). Balthasar, when explaining the difference between the fruitfulness of man and woman, warns again: “(bear) in mind that we must not adopt the Greek subordination of the female dyad to the male monad” (TD III, 290). Please see “Woman’s Answer” (TD III, 283-360).

72 TD III, 285-287.

73 Ibid., 286.

74 Ibid., 286-289.

75 “...for sexuality is intimately bound up with the death of individuals” (286).

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eschatological terms. It is certain for Balthasar, based on what Jesus says in the

Gospels and what the Church Fathers imagined, that the virginal state is associated with the supra-lapsarian state:

The suprasexual (and not sexless) relationship between the incarnate Word and his Church is a genuinely human one; human beings can be enabled to participate in it. Consequently the sexual man/woman fruitfulness need be no longer the exclusive model of human fruitfulness. On the contrary, this form of fruitfulness is seen to be the purely worldly metaphor of a unique fruitfulness that bursts throughout the cycle of successive generations and of which Christ says: ‘He who is able to receive this, let him receive it” (Mt 19:12)...man is enabled to transcend the sexual---as a function specific to earthly existence---in favor of a form of existence in which God’s Agape, which also reveals its nuptial aspect (sealed in the death on the Cross), becomes the all-inclusive total meaning of life.76

There is a wider analogy that encompasses the man-woman polarity: Balthasar

situates this dialectic of difference first within the “analogy for the relationship

between God and the creature” but ultimately within the analogy of Trinitarian

relations.77 Balthasar describes the Son of God’s attitude as one of total receptivity

and assigns the same adjective to Christ’s receptivity as to Mary’s: feminine. The

Son of God exercised perfect feminine receptivity to the will of the Father and the direction of the Holy Spirit. In doing likewise, theological persons become like

Christ by adopting this same posture. So regardless of Christ’s male gender, all disciples, male or female are to be “femininely” receptive to the missional call, and all disciples are then to act out of this virtue according to the demands of mission.

Being receptive is a potential for men, as it is the necessary orientation for both men and women if they are to become saints engaged in mission.

76 TD II, 413-414.

77 TD III, 287.

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For Balthasar, there is a “letting be” to mission which might be mistaken for passivity. Balthasar assigns this manner to Mary as she had to “let be” her Son’s mission. She had to let his Crucifixion happen, not only for her son’s mission to bear the fruit of salvation, but for her own mission fruitfulness as well. “Balthasar would reject a pure passivity, seeking the ‘passivity correctly understood of a being already active in its receptivity, whose basic act consists in being able to receive.’”78 Active receptivity could apply to the fact that Mary had to follow in her son’s footsteps all the way to the cross. An active receptivity finds its home in the fruit of Trinitarian love caught up in the dynamic relationships among the three Persons for “receptivity characterizes the Son in His relation to the Father.”79 Anchored in the analogy of the

Trinity, it is possible to see how Balthasar imagines that Mary’s fruitfulness exists

within the fruitfulness of the unity of the three Persons. A very brief summary of

Trinitarian fruitfulness would begin with the “Logos who proceeds eternally from the

eternal Father”80, and the Father and the Son who together spirate the Spirit; the

Father and the Holy Spirit incarnate the Son (the Trinitarian inversion, decided

among the three---a pre-existing, eternal decision).

From the blood and water from the side of Jesus, the Church is born. This,

again, requires the consent of Mary so she can be extended in mission from the

personal Mother of Christ to the social role, Mother of the Church:

Both redemption and preredemption spring from the same Cross but in such a way that she who is preredeemed is used in the Church’s coming-to-be. She

78 Gawronski, 114.

79 Ibid.

80 TD III, 283. Balthasar questions here if “the Logos proceeds eternally from the eternal Father, is he not at least quasi-feminine vis-à-vis the latter?”

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is overshadowed by the spirit; her task, in the wake of her consent, is to form the Redeemer within her. Now, together with the disciples, she receives the Spirit in a new way---the Spirit whom her son sends upon the Church...81

And more than that, what Mary is really consenting to, is to become the spotless

Bride of her Son so that the Church can be born not only in a collective or institutional or hierarchical sense, but also in the bearing of individual members.

Mary becomes the exemplar and the prototype for mission fruitfulness, not only for the individual Christian but also for the community who is the Church.82 She

models the receptive attitude necessary to respond with readiness and detachment to

the will of God and thereby, is both an archetype for the Church and the prototype for the saint.

It is time now to descend from the heights of the Queen of Heaven to a more contemporary example of saintly witness in mission, and that is to St. Thérèse of

Lisieux. The next chapter will attempt to demonstrate how Balthasar’s theology of mission is acted out in the drama of one intentional Christian existence. What makes good art or good theatre comes alive in saintly action (and contemplation) through the promptings of a Good Director. Darkness is changed into light when one has the courage to enter the unknowable horizon of discipleship and to follow with laser-like focus the fine-tuned whisperings of the Holy Spirit. St. Thérèse lived one such life;

she is a tiny star dancing in the Balthasarian constellation of saints, theologians, and

mystics who circle the cross of Christ and give witness to the love of the Trinity.

81 Ibid., 351-352.

82 Please see “Who is the Church?,” ET II, 143-191. 98

CHAPTER 6

ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX IN MISSION

In 1970, Balthasar combined two previously published manuscripts, one on

St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1950) and the other on St. Elizabeth of the Trinity (1953),

entitling it Two Sisters in the Spirit. Balthasar wrote these monographs earlier in his

career when compared to the timing of the trilogy, its publishing taking place over almost 30 years from approximately 1961 to 1987. He makes reference to Thérèse in the trilogy, but from what I have read, he does not introduce any new ideas concerning the saint in these volumes. The Thérèsean references help to illustrate his ideas and count as mere mentions.1 This treatment contrasts with how Balthasar

typically uses the saints, canonized or not, throughout the trilogy; one might suggest

that they become the vehicles for concretely explicating the transcendentals in his

trilogy. However, citations on St. Thérèse’s life and teaching are barely noticeable

when one considers the vast sections of the trilogy devoted to the thoughts, not

1 For example, in TD IV, in “The Book of Revelation: Outline” concerning the dialectics of heaven and earth, and time and eternity, Balthasar proposes St. John’s visions as an indication of the possibility of existing in both the temporal and the supra-temporal at once: “Thus John sees himself---without recognizing himself. Even now, before his death, he plays his part in heaven. The saints who are alive can exert an influence not only on earth but in heaven too...For example, when St. Thérèse says with such certainty that she will spend her heaven doing good on earth, this is because, in some mysterious way, she had already begun her heavenly activity and was actually aware of it to some extent...She says this on the basis of insight into her mission, which is both earthly and heavenly, inseparably one...Her mission comes to her from heaven and has its center of gravity in heaven” (A. von Speyr, Apocalypse, 226-27), TD IV, 24. 99 necessarily the lives, of the canonized saints, churchmen, philosophers, poets and writers.2 One of Balthasar’s last works, Unless You Become Like This Child (1988)

makes no mention of St. Thérèse or her “little way” although it fits with the theme of

the book. Thérèse’s “little way,” defined as the “way of spiritual childhood,”3 is the doctrine, the fruit of her mission, described in Two Sisters in the Spirit. The Ignatius website promotes Unless You Become Like This Child as follows: “The profound and technical knower of the Fathers of the Church and all Western philosophy and theology reveals himself gladly in the end as a humble disciple of ... the Little Flower,

Thérèse of the Child Jesus!” 4 It may well be, that Thérèse’s little way percolated in the back of Balthasar’s mind, but he quotes Aquinas and Cicero in the body and positions Holderlin and Novalis in the epigraphs.5 Considering the absence of material on Thérèse in the works of Balthasar that I was able to survey, Two Sisters in the Spirit became the only viable resource and has been relied on for this section of my thesis. 6

2 The GL II, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian Mc Neil, ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006) and GL III, trans. Andrew Louth et al., ed. John Riches (Edinburgh/San Francisco: T&T Clark/Ignatius Press, 1986) are cases in point. GL II, (Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles) includes Balthasar’s understanding of the of Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm and , and how they relate to his theme of theological aesthetics. GL III, (Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles) comprises the thoughts of Dante, St. , Pascal, Hamann, Soloviev, Hopkins, and Péguy, again, in how they connect to Balthasar’s retrieval of the transcendental beauty for theology.

3 2SS, 297.

4 https://www.ignatius.com/Products/UYB-P/unless-you-become-like-this-child.aspx (Accessed 6/19/17).

5 Unless You Become Like This Child, 14; 57.

6 Balthasar links Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth together in the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity: “...Thérèse wants scripture and dogma to take on flesh and blood in her existence, and this brings the accompanying risk that objective truth might disappear into existential truth...In contrast, Elizabeth permits her entire existence to disappear into the truth of the Gospel to the extent that the overpowering objectivity of divine truth threatens to destroy her subjectivity. Each tries to be fully 100

I will treat Thérèse’s mission within the framework of Balthasar’s attributes of

theological mission identified in his sketch of the saint’s life and, in addition, apply

two dialectical themes to the Thérèsean piece as presented in his trilogy: objectivity and subjectivity; finite freedom and infinite freedom. There is correlation between the offerings of theology of mission; however, the presentation of the elements of mission that Balthasar presents in the work on Thérèse are not laid out in the same configuration as those that emerge in the trilogy identified previously in this paper.

Neither are the aspects of mission in the work on Thérèse as developed as in the trilogy. Though Balthasar shuns systemization, may I propose that the organization of the trilogy would lend itself better to structuring a theology of mission than does

Two Sisters in the Spirit? Thérèsean mission, as elaborated by Balthasar, appears a bit inchoate in Two Sisters when compared to saintly mission as presented in the trilogy.

Thérèse’s Freedom

Though the topic of Thérèse’s freedom is not specified in Balthasar’s thematic approach of the interplay of infinite and finite freedom as it was for Mary in the Theo-

Drama, there is nothing to suggest that this dialectical lens cannot be widened to

Balthasar’s presentation of Thérèse’s freedom in the Two Sisters. Thérèse’s freedom to engage with uncreated freedom is certainly not limited by what might be described

as the restricted stage of her life. Balthasar does not reiterate a full biographical study

of the Carmelite. He includes details of her life in sporadic fashion wherever they are

obedient to her own task but each remains dependent on a task that complements the task of the other” (2SS, 11). 101 useful for communicating his theology about the saint, or the theology emanating from her. I will do the same for the purposes of this thesis.7

The narrow corridor of Thérèse’s worldly experience was limited in both breadth and length. Her range of activity was anchored in family life, as she made the daily rounds of church, home, and school. Fundamentally, her life was shaped by the conservative religious fervor of late 19th century French Catholicism transmitted by her family’s dedication to its practice.8 Perhaps in some way Thérèse’s pilgrimage to

Rome expanded her provincial outlook. She took the memories of the journey with her to the convent, not only the bold request she made of the Pope9, but also the landscape she viewed from the railcar.10 Thérèse, however, was not intrigued by what

the world offered but was determined to constrict her course further by gaining the grille of the cloister. After submitting to the rule, her life was cut short at the age of

24 due to tuberculosis.

7 Please see Appendix I for an abridged timeline of the events in the life of Thérèse Martin. (Condensed from “Chronology” included in the Appendices of St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Story of a Soul, Study Edition, trans. John Clarke, O.C.D., prepared by Mark Foley, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2005).

8 See the section on “Vocation” (2SS, 117-144). Here Balthasar demonstrates Thérèse’s understanding of marriage, family, and the religious life in the context of her upbringing: “...likewise the vital rhythm of the Church lies in the interplay between the secular and the religious states of life, the two forms bound in a fruitful interchange in the strength of the family and the strength of the Rule, so that the secular state opens the way to the religious, which in its turn justifies and sanctifies the secular. For truly Catholic periods and people and countries, this is self-evident; it presents no special problem to them; a sort of equilibrium between life in the world and life in the cloister is established as the normal relationship; with modest pride, the family knows itself to be the seed-ground for vocations...” (2SS, 118).

9 Thérèse approached Pope Leo XIII without permission during an audience with the pilgrims and boldly pleaded her request to enter the Carmel at the age of fifteen, a year earlier than most admissions (2SS, 304-305).

10 2SS, 189.

102

What looked on the surface to be a thin slice of life was otherwise as the annals of the reveal; Balthasar’s account of Thérèse discloses the depth and height of theological mission discernible in the concrete embodiment of her unique role in the plan of God.11 Just as the young Mary was a Jewish girl about to be married and perform the predictable circuit of domestic life, Thérèse’s life could be assigned an equally unremarkable place in the dusty archives of convent life. Each had unique encounters with God that culminated in particular calls to theological missions. The “ ‘fulfillment of God’s will’ does not mean carrying out an anonymous universal law that is the same for all; nor does it mean the slavish imitation of some fixed blue print.” Thérèse, like Mary, responded to the “idea” that God had always

had for her in “freely realizing God’s loving plan.”12 What could appear to the world to be a drab, even droll, existence, was really dramatic and dynamic liveliness (or theological existence) played out in the “little way.”

11 In the “Introduction” to “Thérèse of Lisieux”, Balthasar makes a distinction between subjective and objective missions (as similarly iterated in the trilogy as well). Subjective sanctity is every Christian’s mission which is the “aim of the institutional Church”; the Church represents an objective sanctity. But this can happen at the personal level, where one’s mission is so fruitful to the complete expropriation of self that it becomes, not a method or a “blueprint,” but an exemplar of objective holiness. Balthasar further nuances missions using “customary”, what all Christians are to aspire to, and “representative”, “a special type of sanctity...or “a model of sanctity” for the community. He adds a further distinction within “representative” missions, between those missions that “come from above” or “direct” from God. In both groups are canonized saints, “ (b)ut the first group is incomparably more distinctive than the second. It includes those unmistakable types of saints whom God sets as cornerstones of the Church, whom he selects to serve for centuries as living interpretations of the gospel” (24); (See pp 19-28). Balthasar claims Thérèse had such a mission. Balthasar in the trilogy defines office as an “objective” form of sanctity. For Balthasar, this does not mean that the individual who holds the office attains subjective sanctity. However, the objective sanctity of the office is maintained independently of the officeholder. Balthasar shows the relationship between office and person, objectivity and subjectivity in his portrait of Thérèse: “There is a gap between what is subjective and what is objective, between the demand that cannot be fulfilled and what in the end is achieved. It is precisely this gap that demands that she place all her subjective power completely at the disposal of the objective office” (2SS 181).

12 2SS, 21.

103

Thérèse, as portrayed by Balthasar, presents a complex picture of finite

freedom in the two forms of “freedom of consent” and “freedom of autonomous

movement” although he never uses these terms in Two Sisters. The all-encompassing

mission of the “little way” was one of which Thérèse gradually became aware. To

demonstrate Thérèse’s freedom of consent, Balthasar uses the word “surrender” and

quotes Thérèse: “In order really to be a victim of love, one must utterly surrender

oneself.”13 Thérèse gave her initial fiat to God in her desire to enter Carmel. Her

determined pursuit of this goal may be the first exhibition of the “freedom of

autonomous motion” in her unique theological mission. Thérèse was aware of the

need to move, to embody the mission: “Truth must be realized in action. ‘The most

beautiful thoughts are nothing without good works.’”14 Could we assign “movement” to what Balthasar calls a “continual battle” in her relentless search for the truth?15

Could her disciplined self-reflection aimed at “throwing off her false skin” and shifting her focus from self to others be labeled “autonomous motion”? And what about the energy required to relentlessly pour oneself into her mission to be “love” in the Church even when she was suffering in her final illness? Could both freedoms be pendulating as she penned the final pages of her “little way” and surrendered to the darkness of the waning hours?

13 Ibid., 44.

14 Ibid. Balthasar’s words followed by a quote from Thérèse.

15 Ibid., 43.

104

Theological Method as Lived Experience

Balthasar describes Thérèse’s theological mission as grounded in the concrete

experience of her circumstances. She lived before she wrote her “doctrine” of the

“little way.” This is how she tested the truth of her inspiration; she lived what she

taught resulting in “existential theology.”16 Although, Balthasar warns that “her

method of testing all Christian truth and doctrine by living it might lead to the

narrowing and impoverishment of divine truth, which can never be completely

represented by anyone except the revealed Word,” he defends Thérèse’s existential

method for tossing out “the theoretical aspects of Christianity into the fiery crucible

from which everything emerges new.”17

Balthasar may see in Thérèse, the performance of what Balthasar describes as

“theological phenomenology”,18 which he proposes as the replacement genre for the saccharine saintly legends of the past.19 Meant to inject apologetic value into the

stories of the saints, Balthasar wishes to attempt “theological phenomenology” in

telling his story of Thérèse. Perhaps, it is not so much Balthasar’s technique as what has already been accomplished through Thérèse’s documentation of her own experience---she performed her theology, and recorded her experiences in her autobiography, The Story of a Soul. Thus, Balthasar can make the claim that her

16 Ibid., 79.

17 Ibid., 79-80.

18 Ibid., 39.

19 Balthasar may desire to do this, but he himself engages at times in making Thérèse drip with hyperbole: “Thus, in virtue of her office, Thérèse’s love becomes selfless, as selfless as the love of the divine Shepherd...” (2SS, 178).

105

“existential method” results in doctrine with an irrefutable veracity, packed with

evangelical power. Rather than “pious nonsense” or purely psychological profiles20,

Balthasar seeks to enliven contemporary hagiography by changing its focus to the

saint’s mission so as to clearly demonstrate how the saint or theological person lived

out her unique call in the concrete details of her individual circumstances which

include the uniquely personal: “(F)or the mission’s incarnation takes place precisely

in their persons, their history, and psychology, and in all those little anecdotes and

details...”21 In other words, personality is not to be eliminated even if it must take backseat to the mission: “In a saint, it is primarily the mission that is perfect; only secondarily is he himself described as perfect, insofar as he integrates the whole of his gifts and strength into fulfilling his mission.”22 Further, if psychology is applied to

the saint, it must be through the lens of theology.23 For, according to Balthasar, there

will always be tension between a person (including all neuroses, , and

shortcomings) and the mission itself.

Taking tension then as both integral and unavoidable in living out mission, tension must be the vital pulse that makes a saint’s experience ring true, wooing the uninitiated. Pretending tension doesn’t exist keeps the saints in “isolation,”24 locked

20 Balthasar was not opposed to psychology unless it was elevated above theology or excluded theology: “(I)t is precisely the advances in psychology that call the theologian to take the results of this science into account in order to open the way to a new theological hagiography. ‘Our Scholastic theology, which only too often remains abstract and schematic, would greatly profit from more profound research into the psychology of the saints, provided that its explanations are based on theological principles...’” (Balthasar quotes P.M. Philipon, O.P.); (2SS, 37).

21 Ibid., 27.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 37.

24 Ibid., 39. 106 away in the salon of an exclusive society. Instead, Balthasar hopes to open the doors of hagiography so as to observe the struggles of real people becoming saints in all their strangeness and weakness. We could summarize that a theological person in the achievement of her theological mission exists in dynamic theological tension, and this holy tension is “the fiery crucible” resounding the Gospel message anew and making it meaningful now.

Certainly, a theology solely based on one’s experience would contradict what

Balthasar criticizes about an overly subjective approach, one that he alludes to in his comparison of the “two sisters,” Thérèse and Elizabeth of the Trinity: For Thérèse, the “risk is that objective truth might disappear into existential truth”; for Elizabeth,

“the overpowering objectivity of divine truth threatens to destroy her subjectivity”.25

Balthasar further examines Thérèse’s method and roots it in revelation (“as it has been recorded in Scripture and tradition, then interpreted by the teaching authority and the consensus of theologians”).26 Though Thérèse had no spiritual director (but

25 Balthasar appears to be opposed to an overly objective approach as well as overly subjective, given his warning that Elizabeth of the Trinity’s objective theology risks “destroying her subjectivity” (2SS, 11). However, it seems to me, that the scales are tipped, for Balthasar, to an objective approach as evidenced in dialogue with Rahner and Barth. See Howsare, A Guide for the Perplexed, “The Problem of Theological Method,” (28-32). Howsare begins the section: “It is axiomatic for Balthasar that the method for any science must be determined by the object of that science” (28). For context, the broader discussion is what David Tracy sees as a “conflict between two basic theological strategies on the proper Christian response to modernity.” Howsare puts Rahner in the “mediating school” (subjective) and Barth in the “revelocentric school” (objective) although he admits that “both Rahner and Barth work very hard to eschew this either/or” (32). In GL I, the subjective and objective evidence for faith has been neatly divided into two sections, and Howsare claims in his notes (165) that in this volume Balthsar repeatedly asserts that method is to be determined by its object. Adrian Nichols makes a statement showing how subjective and objective experiences inhere in each other but perhaps, not in equal parts. The precedence is give to the object by Balthasar: Nichols states: “...this is the innovatory part of Balthasar’s analysis at least insofar as modern theology is concerned---the subjective evidence in question cannot really be properly described in abstraction from the objective evidence for God’s self-revelation in Christ” (The Word Has Been Abroad, 28).

26 2SS, 54.

107

Jesus Christ)27 and had no formal theological or philosophical training28, her school is

Scripture, and she attended mostly to the Gospels. From the address of Pius XI upon

Thérèse’s canonization:

The new saint, Thérèse, had thoroughly learned this teaching of the Gospels and translated it into her daily life. Moreover, she taught the way of spiritual childhood by word and example to the novices ...In her catechism lessons, she drank in the pure doctrine of faith; from the golden book of ...the writings of Saint John of the Cross...Above all, she nourished heart and soul with the inspired word of God... 29

Thérèse’s theological existence was informed by Scripture, lived out in deed, and translated into “doctrine” for the Church. For Balthasar, Thérèse’s turn to Scripture guarantees Thérèse’s status as an ecclesial figure. Balthasar defends her:

Her “lack of tradition” (which she shares with certain dominating figures of Church history such as Francis and Ignatius---without ever attaining their stature) is automatically remedied by the Holy Scriptures. It is not her mission to continue interpreting and developing the tradition (as, say, Thomas Aquinas did) but to press back unflinchingly to its sources in the Scriptures, from which the tradition can derive fresh inspiration.30

Her subjectivity must be brought into encounter with objectivity, as Balthasar

contends: “For if the subjective ability to experience finds the reason and justification

for its existence in an experienceable object, then without this object that experiential

ability can by no means be demonstrated in its totality nor indeed be made

comprehensible.”31 The reason then that Balthasar can latch on to Thérèse’s

27 Ibid., 56.

28 Ibid., 55.

29 Ibid., 32.

30 Ibid., 81.

31 GL I, 419.

108

existential theology is because it is deprivatized to an extent, made universal to a

degree, by becoming linked to the object of Christian faith, Jesus Christ, as revealed

in Scripture. Balthasar does not vanish into the abstraction of his “trilogy” language,

but uses subject-object dialectical language in a comparatively simple manner in his

piece on Thérèse:

Scripture sets the seal on Thérèse’s belief that her task is from God and that the form of life she has chosen is embedded in the objective deposit of revelation. For, although she reads the Scriptures without any previous study of theology or tradition and freely compares the objective revelation with her subjective, supernatural mission, setting one beside the other, nevertheless she reads in obedience, in the context of the daily round of self-denial and self- conquest.32

Balthasar, satisfied with establishing Thérèse’s reciprocal relationship with the object

of faith, gives his usual warning, although somewhat warily, about an overweight

subjectivity:

The danger in her case---if one can speak of danger at all---does not come from slipping into doctrinal subjectivity. It is rather the danger that she will start measuring God’s love in terms of the love granted to her personally. She is prepared to abandon this standard once she is shown a higher one, but until then she firmly sticks to it...33

Could that higher standard be the analogy of being? Could it be that Mary knew the

unfathomable distance between creature and Creator but Thérèse did not? For

Balthasar justifies the greater dissimilarity in his trilogy:

Once the spiritual creature realizes the content of the concept “God”, it immediately becomes evident that God can be evident to him in his knowing and loving only in such a way that, as the free cause of all that is, God must withdraw more and more from a comprehension within the finite object and the finite structure of spirit...the mystery of Being, which is manifest, invites the creaturely spirit to move away from and beyond itself and entrust and

32 2SS, 95.

33 Ibid., 96.

109

surrender itself to that mystery. If this were not so then the intuition of Being...would be nothing other than the apprehension of finite, creaturely Being without its relation to the absolute, which in every respect would be absurd and self-contradictory. This means that the evidence itself points to and indicates the nature of the anaolgia entis within itself.34

Herein may lie the key to the importance of the concrete theological person’s

concrete theological mission in a particular example such as Thérèse---In the context of Thérèse’s 19th century Catholic Carmelite experience she grasped her smallness,

her littleness, her complete dependence on Absolute Being and could only imagine

approaching the Infinite as a child. Thérèse’s orientation in the “little way” was

made tenable by her faith relationship with the concrete object of revelation---Christ

in his incarnation as the Child Jesus:

(Balthasar)...Thérèse truly lives up to her name, “of the Child Jesus”. Although the substance of her piety is more fittingly described by her title “of the Holy Face”, she conceals the pain of it in the imagery of childhood. It makes all her movements light and quick, unhampered by care. Childish imagery is the reflection of a much wider reality---of the all-embracing universe of love---the universe of play. While the adult groans under the curse of original sin, the child abandons himself to play, which originates in Paradise and is the creaturely reflection of God’s creative act...Thérèse entered into the spirit of divine play (my emphasis): “For some time past, I had offered myself to the Child Jesus to be his little plaything (Balthasar’s emphasis)....”35

This became the entrée into the theo-drama for Thérèse and shaped her analogical

language:

(Thérèse) “ ...O little Child Jesus! My own treasure, I abandon myself to your divine whims, I wish for no other joy but that of making you smile... Most people on earth are only willing to serve the King of Glory; if Jesus goes to

34 GL I, 439.

35 2SS, 290-291. For amusement, I quote here the full sentence of Balthasar’s: “Quite early (perhaps through contact with the Italian people?), Thérèse entered into the spirit of divine play...” (291)

110

sleep, they stop serving him or believing in him. But the Child Jesus loves to go to sleep in safety, without fear of being awakened.”36

Thérèse was also in communion with the objective evidence of Scripture. As

Balthasar warrants: “...Scripture seems to her a guarantee for what the ‘teacher within’ has taught her.”37 So Thérèse searched Scripture: “I looked for the desired elevator in the Sacred Scriptures and found the words coming from Eternal Wisdom,

“Whoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Prov 9:4).38 Thérèse’s firm footing on objective truth minimizes what Balthasar fears, that Thérèse would limit the love of

God to the confines of her own subjective experience. Thérèse began to imagine herself in relation to the Concrete Analogy of Being39 as he was in his incarnational beginning as a baby. Her analogizing was possible because the analogy not only exists within the person of Jesus Christ but he is himself the Analogy of Being.

Thérèse may be said to have experienced this growing understanding of the yawning distance between Creator and creature when she adopted the additional qualifying clause to her name, “and of the Holy Face”, to the name she chose upon her profession: Theresa of the Child Jesus. Like her predecessors, Simon and Saul, perhaps her name change signified a growing understanding of who Christ was and what her mission was in the light of Christ. Like Peter and Paul, Theresa of the Child

Jesus and the Holy Face matured in her contemplation and unconditional surrender to mission as she shifted her gaze from the crib of Jesus to the cross of Christ.

36 Ibid., 291, 293.

37 Ibid., 84.

38 Ibid.

39 Please see pp. 64-66 of this thesis for a brief description of the Concrete Analogy of Being. 111

Subjective Shadows in Objective Mission

If the personal circumstances of one’s life are not to be annihilated in mission,

then how does Balthasar deal with the stumbling block of human frailty in Thérèse’s

life? The “shadow” side of one’s personality is not a category in the Theo-Drama as

far as a placement alongside the familiar attributes of mission, for example,

“surrender” and “receptivity”. What is consistent between the works is that the

theological person need not be perfect for the theological mission to be perfect. In

doing theological phenomenology, Balthasar looks at personal characteristics of the

saints in light of the mission, including negative features or “shadows.” He declares:

“Nothing is more delicate and fragile than a mission; it can be secretly, or even

openly, spoiled and can occasionally become an irretrievable failure. Coarse hands

may do great harm, no matter how well-intentioned their groping interventions.”40

Balthasar identifies two key incidents that lead to damaging Thérèse’s

“childlike soul”.41 The first was her disclosure of her vision of the smiling Virgin that

healed Thérèse from her mysterious childhood illness. Her sister “began to probe

her”42 as Thérèse exhibited joy in the wake of the miracle. Thérèse went against her

intuition to “Guard the secret!”43 and succumbed to her sister’s questions and, as a

consequence, experienced disconsolation. Thérèse was pressured to tell her story to

the Carmelites, which in turn sets the stage for Thérèse to be viewed as a “miracle

40 2SS, 98.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

112

child...which means that she is not like other people...she is set upon a pedestal...(and)

becomes isolated.”44 Balthasar’s prognosis: “It is simply that the plaster sanctity in

which her companions encase her hampers the development of her real self.”45

Placed in this predicament, Thérèse, who had been looked up to or perhaps, just

looked at, compounded the spectacle by promoting herself:

In spite of the fact that Thérèse’s existential method is considerably amplified though her reading of Scripture, one cannot help feeling uneasy as one reads her writings and sayings. Is it really necessary or possible to be talking about oneself so constantly and setting oneself in the limelight so much? Doing so even more persistently than either Paul or Augustine? Is it sufficient justification to say that one has a special mission? Is there not something more to it than that? In that case, what is it? Can it be found, as the psychological school maintains, in the very “littleness” of her mission and her love of analyzing herself? Or in the dark background of pride and a desire for approbations that she never mastered?46

Further compounding her self-preoccupation was a second crucial incident in which Thérèse’s confessor declared her to be almost another immaculate conception

(Balthasar’s comparison):

“In the presence of God, of the Blessed Virgin, the angels and the saints, I declare to you that you have never been guilty of a single grievous sin. Thank God for what he has done for you; had he abandoned you, instead of being a little angel, you would have become a little demon.” So the damage was done. The confessor had spoken, the authority in a nun’s eyes; and with what solemnity! Nothing remained for Thérèse but to accept the judgment in obedience and to believe what had been said.47

This pronouncement marked a departure for her from the scrupulosity of her early

years and promoted her to a premature membership in the company of the saints.

44 Ibid., 99.

45 Ibid., 100.

46 Ibid., 97.

47 Ibid., 105.

113

Balthasar limits this section of the manuscript, “Shadows,” to these two incidents but persists in underlining Thérèse’s weaknesses throughout the book. Can God’s power be made perfect in Thérèse’s weakness like her self-promoting predecessor, St. Paul?

Can Christ feed his sheep in the aftermath of Thérèse’s denial of sin, as he promised to do through the thrice-denying Peter, Rock of the Church?

Thérèse’s Suffering

Thérèse lived her life in that “fiery crucible” of suffering, in an unceasing string of self-renunciation that began in rooting out her imperfections and pouring her life out in self-sacrifice. Thérèse desired to suffer for souls and the rule of Carmel provided the framework for her life’s work: “I have come to save souls and, in particular, to pray for priests.”48 Her sister Celine after Thérèse’s death explained the connection between submitting to the Rule and participating in the redemptive sacrifice of Christ:

She chose the Carmelite vocation...in order to suffer more and so win more souls for Christ. It seemed to her harder for our natures to work without ever seeing the fruits of our labors...Thérèse chose this life of dying for herself because it is more fruitful than any other in saving souls. In particular she entered Carmel in order to pray for priests and to make for the sake of the Church.49

Upon entrance to Carmel, Thérèse “must strip herself of her own personality to enter the world of Christ and share his plans and answer his demands.”50 This echoes the

48 Ibid., 146.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid., 149.

114

same kenotic form of Christian mission that Balthasar identifies in his trilogy’s theology as embedded in the crucifixion.51 “(Thérèse)...the good God says to me,

‘Just give, and keep on giving without worrying about the results.’”52 According to

Balthasar, in the cloister it was a possibility, and for Thérèse, a reality, to foster

“complete readiness to become the pure instrument in the hand of the Lord...to

station herself wherever God may need her, in the position of obedience, of complete

availability to his will.”53 Balthasar defines indifference as “allowing ones natural

ties and affections to be linked to supernatural ones that allow them to swing freely

wherever they are needed.” 54 (The bold highlights are mine and for this reason:

These attributes of mission that are developed in the trilogy are highlighted to

demonstrate that Balthasar in his early works has at least coined the configuration

(albeit loosely and a bit haphazardly) of saintly mission, although not using these

terms in a formal way.)

All of these virtues were developed in the spirit of renouncing self, the form

of suffering Thérèse shouldered in the cloister. Thérèse did not take on the strict

ascetical disciplines of the body that were prevalent in her time, but immersed herself in a practice of self-denial regarding her relationships with the other nuns and in the exercise of office.

51 Balthasar was adamant about centering all prayer, contemplation, action, mission, and theology in Christ. In being Christo-centric, one is led to the Trinity---Although Thérèse is certainly Christo- centric in her mission, Balthasar denies her a Trinitarian understanding. Please see (2SS, 298-302) for his rationale.

52 2SS, 182.

53 Ibid., 151.

54 Ibid., 161. 115

Content of Thérèse’s Mission

Interestingly, Balthasar does not concretely spell out what the “little way” is.

He writes about her mission, but her mission appears to be broader than the “little way.” As Balthasar portrays Thérèse, she doggedly sought the truth, and this, for him, bares the content of her mission: “Her whole life becomes an exposition of God’s word, as sacrifice of all her own truth to the unique truth of God within her. That is her obedience, and it bestows her mission upon her.”55 Balthasar illustrates Thérèse’s keen awareness of the truth as she sifted the real humanity out of embellished projections of Jesus and Mary:

(Balthasar)If a on Mary is to bear fruit, it must give a genuine picture of her life, as we are allowed to glimpse it in the Gospels, instead of something imagined. And it is surely easy to sense that her life in Nazareth and later must have been perfectly ordinary. (Thérèse)“He was subject to them.” How simple that is! The Mother of God is depicted as unapproachable. Whereas one ought to show how she is to be imitated by the practice of hidden virtues: one ought to say that, just like ourselves, she lived by faith and cite the references for this in the Gospels, where we read: “and they did not understand what he said to them” Or again: “His father and mother were amazed at the things that were said of him.”56

Balthasar highlights what Thérèse cited as the importance of action, the necessity of good works, the dedication to duty, and the endless commitment to self- sacrifice. He brings Thérèse’s action together with contemplation under the umbrella of vocation and mission:

An apostle of apostles, that is how Thérèse sees her vocation; and the gift of priest-brothers thrills her to the marrow; her deepest longings are awakened, the tenderest fiber of her being is stirred. Everything else in her Carmelite

55 Ibid., 44.

56 Ibid., 47.

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life, her sacrifices and self-denial, her prayers and her silence, is woven around this deep, interior secret, the heart of her Carmelite mission. Thérèse formulated few parts of her teaching so clearly as this, her mission to the Church, which is primarily concerned with the relation between contemplation and action. In a word, the mystery of contemplation as action.57

For a cloistered nun, the realm of action is confined to the convent. The actions that

Thérèse could perform were performed in obedience to the Rule, the Rule being an

expression for the very will of God. She could act in the spirit of detachment in her

appointment to aid in the spiritual formation of her fellow novices58, as well as, in the

daily duties of community life. Considering the confines of the range of action, it is

the contemplation that became active in Thérèse’s “theology.” Balthasar qualifies:

“This is the sense in which contemplation is more active than action, if the latter is

taken to mean external deeds.”59

Remembering that all Christian missions are meant for the Church, Balthasar

sees that “no action can be more effective than the contemplation by which she

inspires all forms of action in the Church.”60 Balthasar turns to the words of Thérèse

to finally sum up the crux of her mission to the Church:

(Thérèse) To be your spouse, O Jesus!, to be a Carmelite and, in union with you, the mother of souls, should this not be enough for me? And yet it is not so. No doubt, these three privileges sum up my true vocation: Carmelite, spouse, mother. Yet I feel other vocations within me; I feel within the vocation of warrior, of priest, of apostle, doctor and martyr...61

57 Ibid., 190. Balthasar makes this evaluation about Thérèse---He never quotes Thérèse as actually using the language “contemplation as action”, but nonetheless crowns her thus: “The little Thérèse is the first to rid contemplation of its Neoplatonic relics; this fact alone is sufficient to guarantee her place in the ” (2SS, 195).

58 Clarke/Foley, Story of a Soul, 442.

59 2SS, 195.

60 Ibid., 241.

61 Ibid., 202.

117

In meditating on 1 Corinthians 13, Thérèse was fired with apostolic zeal and framed

her mission in ambitious language:

(Thérèse) The Apostle explains that even the most perfect gifts are nothing without Love...At last I had found rest...love gave me the key to my vocation...O Jesus, my love! At last I have found my vocation! My final vocation is love. Yes, I have found my place in the Church, and it is you, O my God, who have given me this place---in the heart of my Mother, the Church, I shall be love! Thus I shall be all...62

And though Balthasar has said that personality is not to be annihilated, hers was

“hollowed out like a bowl,” to be used as God wills.

The Fruit of the Little Way

Balthasar says there is nothing really new in Thérèse’s “little way”, but

Thérèse believed that it was “quite new.”63 What makes the “Little Way” doctrinal for

Balthasar is that it is based on Scripture and in a long line of tradition. Her “doctrine”

is tied to Scripture and formed by “the power of unconditional surrender in

Carmel.”64 Balthasar presents the “little way” in rhythm of “pulling

down and building up” splitting her doctrine into two parts: “Demolition” and

“Construction.”65 What Thérèse realized was her own incapability at reaching

perfection, and stripped away all pretenses to do so. She was, remember, dogged

after truth, and wished to deconstruct any methodology that proposed grand methods.

Balthasar notes that reaching perfection is a “special danger for those living the

62 2SS, 203.

63 Ibid., 235-236.

64 Ibid., 237.

65 Ibid., 237, 270.

118

monastic life and, particularly for contemplatives...”66 She had no use for the way of

mystical ascent or ascetical practices67 but preferred to trust that Jesus will reach

down to her and pick her up. There were, for her, no works that could move one to

heaven either, and here Balthasar sees a “parallel” with Luther. Thérèse held as part

of the “little way”: (Balthasar) “the personal certainty of salvation, the stress upon trusting fiducia as opposed to ascetic practices and other good works, the clear-cut

preference for New Testament mercy as against Old Testament justice.”68 In

contradistinction to passivity, Balthasar claims that Thérèse’s “demoli(tion) (of) the

ethic of good works produces the very opposite of Quietism. In fact, it empties the soul of all its own perfections...”69

What Balthasar calls “construction”, however, seems bent on a type of

“demolition” or deconstruction. For Balthasar, construction of the “little way” is

evidenced by a series of “self-renunciations.” Balthasar delineates the various “types

of renunciations” that are necessary in her construction of doctrine: first, “of the pleasure and joy that accompany love”; of the knowledge of the results or fruits of one’s faith and love; of strength and progress.70 Aware of the paradox, Balthasar

defends his heading “Construction” as follows: “The whole succession of

renunciations demanded by Thérèse has been entitled “Construction” because they

66 Ibid., 242.

67 Ibid., 246. “...Thérèse mistrusts every form of penance and asceticism that is easily liable to become an occasion for showing-off.”

68 Ibid., 95-96.

69 Ibid., 268.

70 Ibid., 270-301.

119

represent the steps leading directly to the state where each new call of God’s love

finds its response in faith.”71 She used the example of the elevator to show that

although one must be involved in good works and self-renunciation, she, herself,

could not place herself in the balance that weighs performance but would wholly

remain dependent on being brought to Jesus by his power “because I am too little to

climb the steep stairway of perfection.”72 Balthasar says the “elevator” is nothing else but the love that destroys all distances and eliminates all calculable continuity.”73

So what did she build in the place of the “steep stairway of perfection”? Balthasar

explains the essence of the “little way”:

The “little way” that Thérèse now constructs comes from renouncing everything in Christian love that seems to lend it greatness, power and glory. Love is brought to a state of weakness in which it learns the power of divine love, of littleness and darkness in which the greatness and glory of divine love are displayed. The basis of the little way, therefore, is one series of renunciations after another.74

Perhaps, in the end, the “little way” need not be bifurcated into “tearing down” and

“building up,” nor practically made into a method through steps of renunciation.

Thérèse’s existential doctrine communicates her littleness, her powerlessness, and her

complete dependence on God and opens up a tiny window to the immeasurable

chasm within the anolgia entis. Her concrete “little way” highlights her relationship

with the Thou, the Concrete Analogy of Being, Jesus Christ. Perhaps the theological

person when living out a theological mission may find it most existentially consoling

71 Ibid., 284.

72 Ibid., 251.

73 Ibid.

74 Ibid., 272.

120

to focus on Thérèse’s simple observation: “Jesus does not demand great deeds but only gratitude and self-surrender.”75 And this always in love.

75 Ibid., 242. 121

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

Healing with Beauty

This thesis began with a look at Balthasar’s protests against the state of the discipline of theology that he encountered in his day: The separation of theology and philosophy, and the separation of theology and holiness or sanctity. Balthasar searched for a cure to the malaise he confronted, not only in the academy but also in the lives of persons caught in the web of increasing secularization. Cloaked with the

drab existence of materialism and individualism, utilitarianism turned its subjects

inward and barricaded the belvedere; spectators no longer gathered on the veranda to

meditate on the majesty of being and the meaning of life.

Balthasar sought not to make Christianity relative but relevant by restoring the transcendentals in their unity to theology. He made his appeal to the culture to

proceed beyond philosophy’s “forecourt” and to bring all three transcendentals inside

the “cathedral”. 1 With the separation of philosophy from theology, Balthasar also

detected that one transcendental had been altogether banished; truth may still have

resided in dogma, and goodness may have been relegated to moralizing, but beauty went missing in the neo-scholastic downsize. Balthasar claimed that both truth and

1 Epilogue, 89. 122

goodness are distorted without the presence of beauty, and as a result, one “can no

longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”2 For beauty always hints at its

source: “In order to be a radiant appearance, it needs the referential ability to point

beyond itself, a faculty that, paradoxically, lies within itself.” 3 Without beauty, the world loses its reference point---For true beauty elicits awe and wonder, and

contemplating the beautiful opens one outward to mystery, to the mystery of Absolute

Being.

Intending to bring beauty out of exile, Balthasar tapped anew the wellspring

of Scripture, and allowed the authentic Aquinas to flow by engaging the doctrine of

analogy of being. Through the analogy of being, Balthasar hoped to reintegrate all

three transcendentals, including beauty, into the Christian form of life based on the

underlying transcendental of unity. This is only possible due to the Concrete Analogy

of Being who is Christ in Trinitarian unity:

How can Jesus say of himself “I am the Truth”? This is possible only because all that is true in the world “hold(s) together” in him (Col 1:17), which in turn presupposes that the analogia entis is personified in him, that he is the adequate sign, surrender, and expression of God within finite being. To approach this mystery we must try to think: In God himself the total epiphany, self-surrender, and self-expression of God the Father is the Son, identical with him as God, in whom everything---even everything that is possible for God---is expressed.4

The ability to enter the analogy is possible because Christ entered the human

condition. Through him, whatever is beautiful, good, or true in the world, can be

glimpsed in its unity within the divine due to the hypostasis. But only a glimpse!

2 GL I, 18.

3 Epilogue, 61.

4 Ibid., 89-90. 123

Any attempt at analogy must be held up to the Concrete Analogy of Being, Jesus

Christ: “His person reveals itself so convincingly in his sensible appearance (in the

three transcendentals) that he can say: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn

14:9).”5 The concretely expressed events of the incarnation, the crucifixion, the

resurrection, and the ascension reveal the “always greater dissimilarity” between the

divine and human. These concrete events reveal and conceal the mysterious distance

between God and creature held in the expansive, respectful space of distinction

between Trinitarian Persons, and proffer the hope that overcomes.

Balthasar elaborated a plan, however unsystematic, for healing theology and

philosophy by inviting beauty to return to its theological chair. What remained was

to bring theology to its knees so that theology could flourish in holiness. Balthasar

began with the encounter between the subject and the object, seeing and being seen,

and knowing what has been seen. In Balthasar’s Epilogue, Beauty is “self-showing”6

in the Form of Christ and all the events of his life: For example, “...we can now see

the necessity of Christ’s Ascension into heaven, for it is necessary that the appearance

disappear so that it is finally made clear that Christ’s appearance really was the

revelation of the Absolute.”7 There is, for Balthasar, one Form that both points

beyond itself and to itself: Christ in his inseparable humanity and divinity is the full

revelation of God in Trinitarian glory and the fullest expression of redeemed

5 Ibid., 90.

6 Ibid., 59-68. Three of the sections under the heading “Threshold” include: “Self-Showing”; “Self- Giving”; “Self-Saying”. These subtitles refer to the three parts of the trilogy, respectively: Theo- Aesthetics (Glory of the Lord); Theo-Drama; Theo-Logic.

7 Ibid., 65. 124

humanity. For Balthasar, the crucified and risen Christ is the Form of Beauty that

astonishes the beholder and demands a response.

Drawn to the beauty of the person of Christ, individual subjects are given

hope by entering the gate of similarity, no longer condemned to a univocal

or an equivocal but “grateful that a primal ground of being ‘lets them be.’”8

The givenness of being, then is goodness itself. Goodness is the “self-giving”9 love

of the Trinity, not only in Trinitarian and in the act of creation, but also

in the Trinity’s mutual decision for the Son to enter human flesh and to pour his life out for all so that all can enter Trinitarian life.

Finally, the expression of the truth is what Balthasar refers to as “self- saying”.10 And the truth is love. The self-revelation or self-expression of the truth of the Trinity can only be expressed in a unity-in-difference.

...“To Be”, as perfect self-expression and as self-surrender within the identity, will be the personal difference of Father and Son, a difference that must, as love, have its fruitfulness as Holy Spirit. “Son” is therefore at the same time “Word” (as self-expression). He is “expression” (as the One who shows himself). He is also, and equally, “child” (the One lovingly begotten). And this personal difference must be overtaken in the personal unity of the different Persons, a unity that does not abolish these differences but rather unites them in the unity of the fruitfulness transcending the differences.11

The difference between the three Persons allows for a multiplicity of missions, and therefore, the possibility of an unending procession of unique theological persons who can be united in the communion of saints because of the unity of the three

8 Ibid., 66.

9 Ibid., 69-76.

10 Ibid., 77-88.

11 Ibid., 85-85. 125

Persons. Thus the subject is transformed into a saint by receiving the concrete expression of her personhood to be lived out in the unique expression of mission, always lively, dynamic and most of all, cruciform. Christ is also the door to the drama of meaningful existence: participation in Trinitarian relationship. Real concrete participation in the salvation drama is opened to everyone who gives fiat to the initiative of grace in the call of God. In complete surrender, and through prayer, the saint enters into and participates through the Concrete Analogy of Being. Individual missions lived out faithfully in the midst of all the mission-bearers’ particularities and historical contexts not only transform subjects into theological persons (saints), bestow meaning on earthly existence, but also, and most importantly, bear fruit for the Church in each era: The saints become microscopic concrete utterances of truth, of the love of Christ, whose very fleshly circumstances echo anew the Gospel message.

Scripture and tradition in the Church with the communion of saints continues to mediate the form of Christ or what Balthasar calls the prolongation of Christ’s incarnation to the world. As the Concrete Analogy of Being, Jesus Christ is the complete exegesis of the Father (and the Trinity), so the saint offers a fresh exegetical breath to Proclamation, ever ancient, ever new. The theological mission supplies a singular hermeneutical lens to glimpse the glory of God, and the theological person becomes a concrete expression of Christ. The enacting of theological mission confers holiness on the saint. Holy men and women are convincing and “irresistible” and are enabled (through the Concretissimum) to embody the true apology of the Christian message.

126

Healing with Sanctity

Balthasar’s theology of mission then, supplies the absent sanctity to theology.

A calling to the vocation of doing theology, like any theological mission, presupposes

an encounter with Jesus Christ. After receiving the mission in freedom, the theologian becomes a theological person by obediently carrying out the God-given mission to do theology. The step-by-step, moment-by-moment, missional duties of the theologian are inspired through prayer “as a direct hearing and obeying of the living Spirit of Jesus.”12 In an active contemplation, like Thérèse, or in contemplative

action, like Ignatius, the rhythm of a theological existence is given its shape and

movement. Like Christ who journeyed to the cross in the cadenced pulse of prayer,

preaching, and healing, so the theologian’s mission must likewise follow. The

cruciform life is the pattern that bears fruit for others through participation in the

Christ’s salvific undertaking for all. For Balthasar, if the theologian is engaged in obedient theological mission that never excludes prayer, the sacraments, or the

communio sanctorum, then the theologian is a holy exemplar and a beautiful draw to

the Concrete Analogy of Being. The theologian becomes leaven in the world, another

image of Christ, a form of beauty, reflecting a ray of the glory of God that may just

happen to catch the eye of an individual subject trapped in the vacuum of

meaninglessness.

Balthasar asserted that the theologian, in faithfully following a unique

theological mission, can bring holiness back to theology, and may even enter the

12 Balthasar, A Theology of History, 108; (as quoted in Schumacher, 396).

127

ranks of the canonized. And, vice versa, the saints must take responsibility, no matter

their theological mission, to become more acquainted with theology so that they do

not deserve to be pigeonholed in a cordoned-off spirituality. “Wisdom and

holiness”13 go hand-in-hand for Balthasar. Theology and spirituality must be

embodied: “They [those who preach] long to discover the living organism of the

Church’s doctrine...”14

Embodied Theology

I return to a question that I asked at the beginning of the thesis: Can

philosophical and theological categories come alive through the saints, one in

particular, Thérèse of Lisieux? An embodied theology or a theological

phenomenological account of a theological existence could certainly demonstrate the

“self-showing”, “self-giving”, and “self-saying” of the Christian life form. One might

detect the beauty, goodness, and truth of Trinitarian relatedness worked out in a saint’s relationships as the form of holiness or beauty that points beyond itself.

Thérèse sought to work out a living theology of relatedness, by renouncing self in service of her sisters in and for the love of Christ. Balthasar held this hope that obedience in mission served to signal the Greater Glory but criticized the hagiographic genre left in the wake of a saint’s death. Balthasar evaluated Thérèse’s manuscripts: “...if more had been demanded from Thérèse of Lisieux than a pious account of her life, accommodated, moreover, to the of her own sisters, we

13 “Theology and Sanctity”, 193.

14 Ibid.

128

might have learned even more astonishing things than she herself infiltrated throughout her pages.”15 He proposed in Two Sisters in the Spirit that not only does

spirituality need the backbone of theology, but theology a “blood transfusion from

hagiography.”16 The two spheres must “interpenetrate.”

Balthasar recognized that as God took on the form of flesh and blood and revealed the source and teleological end of humanity in the Person of Jesus Christ, so human flesh became dignified with a part in salvation drama through Christ.

Theology becomes a light reflecting the Light, only if it is performed. Holiness and theology can only establish a contact point through a theological person engaged in theological mission that presupposes a spiritual component. I believe that Balthasar himself desired to perform a “kneeling” theology according to a

Christological/Trinitarian pattern in his own life. Balthasar received a unique and unrepeatable call through an encounter with the Concrete Analogy of Being: “You have nothing to choose, you have been called. You will not serve, you will be taken into service. You have no plans to make, you are just a little stone in a mosaic which has long been ready.”17 He spent his entire life trying to perform the mission given to

him:

...in spite of his prodigious literary output, he is primarily a pastor of souls, convinced of the splendor of Christ as the magnetic center of history, and ready to squander every human effort so that the desired encounter between the Redeemer and the human being happen with maximum speed and lasting fruitfulness.18

15 Ibid., 192.

16 2SS, 39.

17 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 2, n.2.

18 McGregor and Norris, The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, 1. 129

He surrendered to the call, and moment-by-moment prayerfully worked out his

mission in all its turns and strangeness: refusing a professorship, leaving the Jesuits,

starting the community of St. John’s, beginning a publishing house, recording the

mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr, and amassing a bibliography of over one thousand

works.19 These recorded works may help us intuit his lived theology, but his

writings can be abstract to the point that we do not know much about how he actually

embodied his theology, which he claimed was key to apologizing for the faith: “It is

not dry manuals (full as these may be of unquestionable ) that express with

plausibility for the world the truth of Christ’s Gospel; it is the existence of the saints

who have been grasped by Christ’s Holy Spirit. And Christ himself foresaw no other

kind of .”20 I turn his criticism of Thérèse on him: If more had been

demanded from Hans Urs von Balthasar, than abstract theory about what theological mission entails, moreover, to the taste of the Office, we might have learned even more astonishing things than he himself infiltrated throughout his pages (and so many

more than Thérèse!) Of course, I am amazed, like all, at his prolific output, and I

realize his unique contribution to contemporary theology. What I am saying is

missing is a more thorough account of his life, a biography21 that reveals the personal

details of his relationships with other theologians, his Jesuit superiors and brothers,

19 Ibid.

20 GL I, 482.

21 Oakes claims: “Balthasar had little interest in his own biography...” (Pattern of Redemption, 1, n.1).

130

the community of St. John’s, and with Adrienne von Speyr. His cousin Peter Henrici,

S.J. understands this as a missing piece:

According to Pascal, “it is a bad sign when you see a man and immediately think of his books.” The danger of focusing on the writer and forgetting the human being is almost unavoidable in the case of someone like Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote more books than a normal person can be expected to read in his lifetime...After the death of Adrienne von Speyr, he was increasingly ready to make autobiographical statements, and yet these are too scattered and fragmentary to give a proper picture of Hans Urs von Balthasar the man...22

How did Balthasar pray? What was he like as a “pastor,” a spiritual director, a friend, a colleague? Again, at the end of his sketch, Henrici comments:

In human terms, love showed itself in the way he preferred “fellowship” (communion), indeed friendship, to structures and organization. It shone through his theological eros, in his wonder at id quo majus cogitari nequit, but also in his jealous protection of the prerogatives of God. And it constantly fed itself, unnoticed by the world and even by friends, on the “silence of the Word”.23

As Balthasar commended Thérèse for her “existential method” of living out

her “theology” before she recorded her “little way”, perhaps we may take it on faith,

that Balthasar was busy embodying his theology in contemplative action. He may

have feared a slide into subjectivism and took seriously his own warnings against

“limiting” God to one’s own experience.24 However, a well-lived mission did not mean for him that one was depersonalized but deprivatized. His mission could

22 Henrici, “Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Sketch of His Life,” 7.

23 Ibid., 43.

24 presents an interesting comparison of Rahner and Balthasar (which includes the dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity). “That apologetics was important, that neo-scholasticism was unsatisfactory, that modernity posed distinctive problems they agreed on---but how to do apologetics, why neo-scholasticism was unsatisfactory, and what problems precisely modernity posed, they did not” (“Balthasar and Karl Rahner,” in Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Oakes and Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 262.)

131 become “for the Church” to the extent that he objectively fulfilled its requirements.

His personality was still intact; however, could we conjecture that he intuited his make-up was being transformed as he performed his theological mission? Perhaps, he was aware that his own “shadows” might overwhelm his God-given mission instead of God’s mission overtaking him. He was acutely aware that “(n)othing is more delicate and fragile than a mission; it can be secretly, or even openly spoiled and can occasionally become an irretrievable failure. Coarse hands may do great harm, no matter how well-intentioned their groping interventions.”25 Perhaps when Balthasar wrote this, he was not only thinking about his own mission, but also that of the mystic, Adrienne von Speyr.

Balthasar’s relationship with Adrienne von Speyr mutually impacted their theological missions in profound ways. Their relationship began when she sought spiritual direction from Balthasar and began to relate her mystical experiences to him.

Their joint formation in may have provided them with a bond and a common language for imagining their missions and theology.26 Balthasar saw one

25 2SS, 98.

26 In a recently released monograph (2016), Love Itself is Understanding: Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s Theology of the Saints, Matthew A. Rothaus Moser calls Balthasar “The Ignatian Theologian” not so as to “identify the chief source of Balthasar’s theological imagination...but that Ignatius plays a substantially formative role in Balthasar’s theology”(19). Other theological ideas that Moser sees as grounded in Ignatian spirituality include its’ “missional thrust” and “the encounter between God and man” as from the Exercises (18-19). Moser also notes that Bathasar’s perspective on the Church’s engagement with the world is Ignatian in character, too, (giving credit to the particular influences of Erich Przywara and Adrienne von Speyr’s understanding of Ignatius’ spirituality), (21). The Rule of life for the Community of St. John was Ignatian as described by Moser: “The community was grounded in this idea of obedience and surrender especially as it was performed in the regular act of praying the Suspice: ‘take, Lord, and receive my liberty’” (22). As to Balthasar’s “themes of receptivity and obedience”: “These two themes are derived from Ignatius and structure every major doctrine in the Balthasarian corpus.” In his final statements of the chapter, Moser sums: “Theology, for Balthasar, is the Suspice; to theologize is ultimately, to pray, to offer oneself in receptivity and obedience. It is...to imitate Christ. This is why, for Balthasar, theology (and therefore metaphysics) is most truly performed by the saints” (23).

132 of his tasks as “providing a comprehensive theological horizon” for her mystical insights, as well as “gather(ing) (them) and embed(ding) (them) in the horizon of the

Christian tradition.”27 He was safeguarding the fruit of her theological mission with his own theological mission. The fruit of their theological relationship was the joint theological task of establishing the lay community of St. John’s, which Balthasar lays out in his book, Our Task.28

Some scholars choose to deny von Speyr’s influence on Balthasar, or minimize it, declaring that Balthasar’s theology “can stand on its own.”29 Others, such as Johann Roten, S.M., take seriously Balthasar’s own appraisal that “affirms that it would be a hopeless enterprise to cleanly separate Adrienne’s part from his own part in the writings after 1940.”30 There are many other scholars in addition to

Roten who support Balthasar’s repeated declarations that von Speyr’s and his

theology should be considered as a whole.31 Roten is able to identify von Speyr’s

27 Sutton, 28.

28 Balthasar, Our Task: A Report and a Plan. Trans. by John Saward. (San Francisco: Ignatious Press/Communio, 1994).

29 Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 10. Oakes’ assessment: “I have...decided to postpone a consideration of the greatest influence on his life, Adrienne von Speyr, to the end of the book, where I finally attempt to step back from the edifice and make some critical evaluations and assessments of my own. I must admit that such a stance might not have met with the approval of the master of the house, were he still alive and able to hire and fire tour guides at will, for in his later years he had often expressly insisted that his and her work are two parts of one whole (and of which his is indeed the more insignificant contribution). But for the purposes of this book...I shall be insisting on the opposite: that his is a building that not only can stand on its own, but does. There is, to be sure, a perhaps initially intimidating manor next door, the one built by Adrienne von Speyr, but its relationship to the edifice we shall be visiting in this book will be taken up only at the end of the tour” (10-11).

30 Johann Roten, S.M., “The Two Halves of the Moon: Marian Anthropological Dimensions in the Common Mission of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, ed. Schindler (San Francisco: Communio Books/Ignatius Press, 1991), 76.

31 Michele Schumacher in A Trinitarian Anthropology: “...it is among the most important goals of this volume to point to the profound unity of the theological perspectives of Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr” (2). Schumacher surveys scholarship in her “Introduction” for various viewpoints as to the 133

“direct influence” on at least twelve topics, and three are fundamentally related to the topic of this paper:

1. Christian mission: “In the context of mysticism, and especially that of the

theology of mission, there are writings which would never have been

produced, according to von Balthasar, without Adrienne von Speyr’s

theology of mission. This is true for Schwestern im Geist (1970).”32

2. The relationship between finite and infinite freedom in the context of

mission. Roten links von Speyr’s “overall Ignatian and Johannine

theology” to what is relayed in Balthasar’s Theo-Drama.33

3. “Holiness as related to the communion of saints and to prayer.” Roten

alleges: “The often-treated topic, theology and holiness, receives its first

impulse from the study of the Fathers, but even more so from the

participation in the daily life of Adrienne von Speyr, who unites both,

theology and holiness, in the admirable synthesis of her life as a physician

and a mystic.”34

Whether we can admit of von Speyr’s influence on Balthasar as he assembled Two

Sisters in the Spirit, it was his first hagiographical attempt to show how theology and

influence of Balthasar and von Speyr on each other--“Jacques Servais argues for ‘the strictly unified work of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr’” (6). “Joseph Ratzinger recognizes Balthasar as ‘inconceivable without Adrienne von Speyr” (6). In addition, there is Matthew Sutton’s Heaven Opens, its concern being von Speyr’s Trinitarian theology. Although he declares “there is much mutual influence between the two”, he admits that “much work remains to be done on this decisive relationship in both von Balthasar and von Speyr studies” (29).

32 Ibid.,76-77.

33 Ibid., 77.

34 Roten, 77.

134

holiness might manifest themselves in one theological person, Thérèse. Holiness

becomes the warrant then for credible existential theology, always, of course,

Christological, Trinitarian, and steeped in Scripture. In his quest to purify overly

pious hagiography, he struggled to balance the subjective and the objective, the

personal and the universal:

What matters about (the saints) is not their personal “heroic achievement” but the resolute obedience with which they have utterly surrendered themselves to serving a mission and have come to see their very existence in the light of it. We must bring to light what they wished to bring to light, what they were bound to: their representation of Christ and the Scriptures. We should leave in obscurity what they wished to leave in obscurity: their poor personalities. Therefore we should strive to penetrate through their holiness to understand their message from God to the Church, trying as far as possible to distinguish between their holy mission and their inadequate realization of it. Not that the two can be separated, for the mission’s incarnation takes place precisely in their persons, their history, and psychology, and in all those little anecdotes and details that characterize saintly lives. The living, concrete reality must not be transformed into a series of abstract concepts, into a depersonalization of what is uniquely personal, for we can only reach toward a person’s essence (his Gestalt) by means of the phenomenological method, discerning it in its concrete manifestations, intelligibile in sensibili. And we must remember that here the intelligibile is something supernatural, the discernment of which presupposes faith or even a participation in the life of sanctity.35

Perhaps this was Balthasar’s defense of his unique relationship and joint mission with

von Speyr that he knew was “more than any other event in his life...led to (his)

isolation from the wider guild of professional theologians.”36 Perhaps, too, he put his

pen to the task of rendering Thérèse and her doctrine of the “little way” (one of the most popular saints of at least the 20th century) as a preface and an apology for the

strange “mystical way” of von Speyr. It could be said that, for Balathasar, Adrienne

35 2SS, 27.

36 Oakes and Moss, Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, 4-5.

135

von Speyr represented another example of theology and holiness fused in one

theological person as she bore the missions of mystic and physician. (Could not

physician be called a theological mission as well if brought into the context of

analogy?) We can, however, only guess at this synthesis. Michele Schumacher, in the

context of dealing with the authenticity of von Speyr’s mysticism, considers:

Even if her works (other than some of the posthumous volumes) reveal little if anything of Adrienne’s subjective experience: a fact which corresponds to her own insistence that the mystic must be transparent before the divine object, even to the point of anonymity; hence the constant emphasis upon the objective word of God revealed by Christ rather than upon her own subjective state or experience.37

Von Speyr may have influenced Balthasar’s partiality to objectivity and his

eschewing biographical details. Balthasar “esteems” her objectivity and “describes

her personality ‘with her spontaneity and humor’ as ‘only indirectly ‘ implicated therein.”38 We might wonder, was Balthasar constructing a phenomenological

hagiography in a paradoxically objective fashion (or so he thought) as he recorded

von Speyr’s mystical experiences?

Making Space for Hans Urs von Balthasasr

I turn now to Balthasar’s imaginative understanding of the analogy of being in

understanding how one theological person could embody or “shine-out” something of

the beauty, goodness and truth of God. It was imperative for Balthasar that Christian

faith presupposes a correct understanding of this doctrine, and that the only

acceptable perspective is the very givenness of being in freedom by the One who has

37 Schumacher, 374.

38 Ibid., 90. Schumacher quotes Balthasar: “le charisma d’Adrienne” (190). 136

no need to create but gives the gift of being out of sheer love.39 When one realizes

what one has been given, one only desires to return the gift! Love gives the gift and

the one who receives knows that they have been accounted an “I” by the Thou. The

only proper response is to return everything to the Giver in love. Balthasar continued

to use the mother-child encounter as the encounter that first alerts a being that there

are other beings. Through intersubjectivity, in the I-Thou discovery, the created “I’s”

know what they share with other created “Thou’s” knowing that all are dependent

upon having been given being, and that being is nothing that can be willed by any

created subject. Faith, then, is necessary to appropriate the proper analogy of being

that demands distance increase when similarity is revealed. This distance, for

Balthasar, is grounded in the distance between the three Persons and has the decisive

unrepeatable form of the cross of the Son. The cross stands as the sign of hope that

love must have its reasons known only to the three Persons that allows a person to

participate in Trinitarian life. We can know who God is in some analogous way

through Christ, the Concrete Analogy of Being, always realizing, with Balthasar, that

for every similarity the distance increases, and the dissimilarity grows greater. We

can know who God is in some small unique analogous way through the saint whose

life is intimately related and grounded in the Concrete Analogy of Being.

I think that, for Balthasar, since the Trinity is grounded in a relationship of

self-giving love caught up in a continual surrendering of everything to the beloved, a

39 For a short explanation on how Balthasar interacts with Thomism and responds to Heidegger’s conception of the “fourfold difference,” see Fergus Kerr’s “Balthasar and Metaphysics”, Cambridge Companion, 224-240. “Balthasar expands Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between existence and essence in created beings in the light of Heidegger’s mytho-poetic account of the difference...” (235). 137

kenotic outpouring that never diminishes the giver or overwhelms the receiver, but

only expands the space for unique participation in the other in love and to love----this

leads the theological person in faith to the broad place of the Concretissium and a

meaningful horizon comes into view for the saints who surrender to this pattern of

Being. The contact with the holiness that can convince another of love is then

analogously depicted and evidenced in the concrete relationship of theology and

holiness in the theological person engaged in theological mission. This always

requires relationship with other persons or subjects. Encounter is repeated over and

over, like the replication of an image sandwiched between two facing mirrors,

brought to its teleological conclusion in the infinite Christ. Relationships are

deepened, not only with and in Christ, but also in solidarity with the communion of

saints, as a theological mission is intrinsically social. By performing in obedience a

tiny, relational, missional aspect of the Complete Utterance, the saints are held,

sustained, and given free movement within the Trinitarian circumincession.

Balthasar exercised his theological mission, not always in sync with the

demands of his superiors, but in faithful surrender to his theological mission. On the

occasion of leaving the Jesuits to form the Community of St. John’s he offers:

So, for me, the step taken means an application of Christian obedience to God, who at any time has the right to call a man not only out of his physical home or his marriage, but also from his chosen spiritual home in a religious order, so that he can use him for his purposes within the Church. Any resulting advantages or disadvantages in the secular sphere were not under discussion and not taken into account.40

When Balthasar risked receiving this mission, he not only continued to imagine

himself entering analogously into the life of Christ, but by engaging in relationship

40 Henrici, 21. 138

with von Speyr, he participated in her mysticism; he entered her tiny concrete

utterance of Trinitarian exegesis: Her “self-showing” (maybe the stigmata), her “self-

giving” (perhaps in the reciprocal sharing of theological insights), and her “self-

saying” (by creating a religious community together, the recording of her mysticism,

and the faithful publication of all their combined works). In turn, he may have known

that he experienced in some small analogous way the always greater, periochoretic

Trinity.

Balthasar not only witnessed the performance of analogy in a Thérèse and a

von Speyr, but possibly projected his desire for meaning and his hope that holiness

and theology could be fused, onto both the heavenly, hagiographical Thérèse and the flesh and blood, mystical Adrienne. In connecting the two, they became a triangle, so to speak: Thérèse became the stage on which Balthasar could star Adrienne, and

Adrienne emerges as an apology for his own existence. Since the dramatic analogy is thought to be a creation of Balthasar’s when it comes to applying it to theology, it becomes the hermeneutical lens through which to view the participatory character of the salvific Christ event and his own engagement with the saints both dead and alive.

I recall here a quote from the Theo-Drama about “why human beings go to the theater:”

We spoke of a twofold need and a twofold pleasure: we project ourselves onto an ultimate plane that gives meaning, and thus we are given our selves. It can also be described as the twofold need to see and to surrender our selves to something that transcends and gives meaning to the limited horizon of everyday life. The dramatic presentation has to do justice to this “substantial pathos”...41

41 TD I, 308. (Quoted above on page 38.)

139

Balthasar allowed himself to be drawn into the drama of Adrienne and to enact his

role conceivably with analogously Trinitarian implications: “...in his relationship to the Father as the obedient, ever-available, fully surrendered Son, ‘he takes over the whole truth of the Father---not simply theoretically, but by living it, indeed by being it.’” 42 Perhaps in the presence of Adrienne he found the theological free space to be

more than he could be on his own. This is what love does. Love is the dynamic life

of the Trinity, a kaleidoscopic lens, through which to know something of the

Concrete Analogy of Being in the ever-ancient revelation of God in Jesus as played

out ever-new in the real life dramas of Thérèse, Adrienne, and Balthasar himself. As

Balthsar saw his own mission as one stone in the mosaic of the mystery of Absolute

Being, so Thérèse and von Speyr and all the saints, canonized or not, can again

inspire awe anew through their creative and sometimes strange engagement with each

other in the drama of salvation. As a three-mirrored kaleidoscope43 produces an

unrepeatable ever-changing stream of color and beautiful forms, so the beauty of the

Trinity can shine afresh through each transparent saint as a credible witness and an

image of Christ.

42 Schumacher, A Trinitarian Anthropolgy, 84. Von Speyr as quoted by Schumacher. Her footnote claims: “This might well be the origin of the seemingly original insight of Balthasar expressed in his “Fides Christi: An Essay on the Consciousness of Christ” in ET II, 43-79; and My Work, 60-61.

43 For an understanding of how kaleidoscopes work, please see this website: http://www.kaleidoscopesusa.com/about/how-kaleidoscopes-work/. (Accessed July 4, 2017). 140

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APPENDIX

Biographical Timeline St. Thérèse of Lisieux

1873 Birth of Thérèse Martin at Alencon. Her mother falls ill, and Thérèse is sent to live with a nursemaid.

1874 Thérèse is returned to her birth family.

1877 Thérèse’s mother dies.

The family moves to Lisieux to be assisted by the Guerin family.

1882 Thérèse loses her older sister Pauline to Lisieux Carmel.

1883 Thérèse becomes ill with “nervous trembling, hallucinations.” After several months, Thérèse has a vision of the Virgin Mary and is healed.

1884 Thérèse receives her First Communion and Confirmation.

1886 Thérèse leaves the Abbey school due to headaches and is educated at home. Older sister Leonie enters the Poor Clares. Another sister, Marie enters Lisieux Carmel. Leonie returns home. Thérèse receives freedom from scruples. Christmas Conversion (the beginning of the awareness of an over- preoccupation with self and over-sensitivity.)

1887 Thérèse’ father becomes ill. Thérèse receives her father’s permission to enter Carmel at age 15. The bishop will not grant permission. Pilgrimage to Rome and audience with Pope Leo XIII: Thérèse beseeches the Pope’s permission. The Pope refers the matter to the bishop. The bishop grants permission.

1888 Thérèse enters Carmel. Thérèse’s father suffers from “mental trouble.”

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1889 Thérèse receives the habit.

1890 Thérèse receives the veil.

1894 Thérèse “attains majority.” Thérèse’s father dies. Mother Agnes of Jesus (her sister Pauline) orders Thérèse to “write her childhood memories.

1895 Thérèse writes Manuscript A.

1896 First signs of tuberculosis. Thérèse writes Manuscript B.

1897 Thérèse “falls gravely ill.” “Mother Marie de Gonzague orders Thérèse to continue her autobiography. “Thérèse writes Manuscript C.” Thérèse dies September 30th.

1898 One year after Thérèse’s death, “2000 copies of Histoire d’une Ame are printed.”

1899 Second edition printed.

1925 Canonization “before an audience of 60,000 people.” “As many as 500,000 pilgrims” descend on St. Peter’s square.

Compiled from St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Story of a Soul, Study Edition, Trans. John Clarke, O.C.D. Prepared by Marc Foley, O.C. D. (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 2005), 439-450.

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