Factores relacionados con la probabilidad de recidiva post-tratamiento

general, we turn our attention now to three contributions toward a response to the question at hand: Balthasar and the nature of sin/moral evil. As will become clear in doing so, if these scholars do speak of moral evil, they do so in light of the classic

theodicy approach – that is, looking for the cause of the first sin, be it human or angelic, and subsequently attempting to defend/attack either the concept of divine

survey not only all of world history, but all of history in relation to God, and God's own inner life, and describe the whole to us as a single play”. Kilby, 5.

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omnipotence, or divine benevolence, on the basis of that information. As already stated above, however, the present work is not concerned with the “legal proceedings” as it were of an attempted “God-Defense”, and certainly does not wish to concern itself with issues of morality or ethical systems, but rather with the metaphysics underlying some of Balthasar’s bolder/more controversial soteriological statements on the issue. These same statements that alarmed both Pitstick and Oakes as “unorthodox” or “troubling” (i.e. innovative and anti-traditional) strike me as a carefully mined Ressourcement of Archaic, Patristic, and Medieval perspectives on the Paschal Mystery. Therein, Balthasar wrote of the substantial nature of human sin, amassed and assumed by Christ on Good Friday, passively experienced as the viso mortis in His descent to Sheol on Holy

Saturday, and finally overcome (from within) on Easter. To be even more precise, the area of metaphysics underlying this soteriology that needs further elucidation is ontological in nature. While the works mentioned do attend to metaphysical questions (these would be hard to avoid in writing of Balthasar), few of those questions are ontological in nature. None of them try to explain what, for Balthasar, sin is – qua sin.

The first of these three works to appear did so even before the more holistic studies of Balthasar’s project mentioned above (Oakes, et al). Gerard O’Hanlon’s 1990 The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar not only introduced Balthasar’s idea’s on the divine nature and humanity’s conception of impassibility to American theologians, but it remains one of the foremost studies on the topic over 25

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years after its initial publication.43 _{His contributions to this particular question in}

Balthasarian studies, which will be explored further in Chapter 5, centers around his foregrounding of Balthasar’s ideas on “unterfessing”, a German term he employs to stress the metaphysical grounding of all extra-Divine existences within the intra-Divine procession of Son from Father. However, as much as O’Hanlon’s work deals with

Balthasar’s assertions that, because of this cosmic Christological structure, all of

humanity’s collective “no’s” to the good are, while still free, subsumed in (because only possible through) the Divine “yes”, the nature of evil itself remains a secondary concern, never fully explored.

Nicholas Healy’s, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as

Communion has received the most attention among Balthasarian scholars of late. This is not unexpected; Balthasar’s eschatological ideas are still those that draw the most readers into his theology. His hope (never expressed as a certainty) for universal salvation and an Origen-like apocatastasis, most clearly presented in the late-in-life Dare We Hope ...?, is one of the major topics of dispute in his theological reception,

deeply tied to his theology of Christ’s Descent.44 _{However, for Healy, in exploring these}

themes, “evil” while a consideration, remains so only in universal-eschatological

terms.45 _{While he reaches similar conclusions as those of O’Hanlon on Balthasar’s}

43 _{Gerard O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York:}

Cambridge University Press, 1990).

44 _{Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? – With a Short Discourse on}

Hell. Translated by David Kipp and Lothar Karuth. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989).

45 _{Nicholas Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion (New York,}

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conception of the Christological girding of all reality, Healy’s proposal, that the goal of all reality is to function according to this ontic law (kenosis, or “being as communion”), is not applied to sin, is not examined as the “control group” against which sin could be examined.

One finds a similar situation at work in Jacob Friesenhahn’s The Trinity and Theodicy: The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and the Problem of Evil.46 _Once

again, while some metaphysical consideration is afforded to the possibility of “evil”, given Balthasar’s understanding of the “distance between the Persons of the Godhead, (as seen in O’Hanlon, and Healy), he offers no talk of its substantiality, its quiddity. As one reviewer accurately summarized, “His goal here is to reassess the Trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and to uncover its potential as a resource for a new

constructive response to the ‘problem of evil’.”47 _{In short, an attempt to present a}

Balthasarian response to “the problem of evil” once again prevents an actual examination of what evil is.

It takes very little sifting through this brief survey to uncover the common thread present in all three studies, each an otherwise excellent exploration of its respective theodicical questions via direct discussion with Balthasar’s work. The

problem, from the perspective of this study, however, is the shared refusal to enter into the realm of the ontological – even while hard at work in metaphysics. This is to say, quite plainly, that none of these works, or any others that I have encountered thus far in

46 _{Jacob H. Friesenhahnn, The Trinity and Theodicy: The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and}

the Problem of Evil (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011).

47 _{Thomas Cattoi. Review of above (see no. 32) in Theological Studies, 74, 1. (March 2013): 212-}

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the rapidly expanding field of Balthasarian studies, deals with the question most

repeatedly raised in any prolonged engagement with his work on evil: the substantiality of sin. The cause of this avoidance should be quite clear. The question of sin’s quiddity is never raised because the traditional (note: not The Tradition’s) theological grammar does not even allow for the question to be, properly speaking, posed. And so this study’s first task will be to turn and face the imposing wall that seems to deflect further

exploration into the present subject: Augustine’s theory of moral evil as accidental, and specifically privative of substantial existence per se.

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