Factura Comercial

God’s own creation, which depends for its existence on God’s power and art and wisdom, has borne God.

St Irenaeus1 The theologians discussed in the previous and present chapters were united in their common rejection of the neo-scholastic separation of nature and the supernatural and their appropriation of a sacramental ontology. Not all of them pursued a sacramental ontology in exactly the same manner or even with the same degree of consistency. The present chapter, therefore, has several aims. First, I wish to make clear that Hans Urs von Balthasar and Marie-Dominique Chenu Wt the general mould of nouvelle the
ologie’s sacramental ontology. Second, it will become clear that Balthasar and Chenu stressed the relative autonomy of nature more strongly than Henri de Lubac and Henri Bouillard. Whereas de Lubac and Bouillard highlighted that it was truly supernatural grace in which nature participated (so that they focused on the upward movement of divine ascent), Balthasar and Chenu stressed that it was nature itself that participated in supernatural grace (and thus they emphasized divine descent into created reality).2 Third, with regard to Chenu, I will question the consistency of his sacramental ontology. His sacramental ontol-ogy was based on the Incarnation and was certainly genuine. None the less, his positive appraisal of the desacralizing of the created order in the High Middle Ages raises questions about the consistency of his sacramental approach.

1 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, V.18.1 (quot. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus against the Heresies, trans. John Saward (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1990), 54).

2 To be sure, the present chapter will qualify this contrast in several ways.

H A N S U R S VO N B A LT H A S A R : A N A LO G Y A S S AC R A M E N TA L PA RT I C I PAT I O N

InXuence of Lubacian Ressourcement

Balthasar’s theology was characterized by a deep immersion in the Church Fathers.3 In order to appreciate what he tried to do in this ressourcement of the Fathers, it may be helpful to analyse in some detail the profound inXuence that de Lubac had both in this regard and in terms of Balthasar’s overall theology.4 After all, Balthasar’s Fourvie`re mentor was largely responsible for his patristic explorations. De Lubac’s inXuence made itself felt already in Balthasar’s 1939 essay ‘Patristik, Scholastik und wir’.5 Here Balthasar indicated, in line with de Lubac, that the Fathers were of continuing interest because of their determina-tive impact on the development of Christian doctrine. As we have seen, de Lubac sought to overcome the neo-Thomist intellectualism and turned to the Fathers in order to explore their more direct interaction with Scripture and to recover a sacramental relationship between nature and the supernatural. The same desire motivated Balthasar to explore the Fathers, as well. Balthasar also found in de Lubac and the Fathers support for his opposition to the allegedly ‘neutral’

character of historical critical exegesis. Balthasar was intrigued with the Fathers’

3 For overviews of Balthasar’s main patristic publications, see Charles Kannengiesser, ‘Listening to the Fathers’, in David L. Schindler (ed), Hans Urs Von Balthasar: His Life and Work (San Francisco, Calif.: Communio/Ignatius, 1991), 59–63; Brian E. Daley, ‘Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers’, in Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 193–5. The main publications on the Greek Fathers are the following. On Origen: Balthasar, Geist und Feuer: Ein Aufbau aus seinen Werken (Salzburg: Mu¨ller, 1938; rev. edn, 1953); English trans.: Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of his Writings, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984); id., Parole et myste`re chez Orige`ne (Paris: Cerf, 1957). The last book stems from two earlier essays: ‘Le Mysterion d’Orige`ne’, RSR 26 (1936), 513–62; 27 (1937), 38–64. On Irenaeus:

Balthasar, Irena¨us: Geduld des Reifens: Die christliche Antwort auf den gnostischen Mythos des 2.

Jahrhunderts (Basle: Schwabe, 1943; rev. edn, 1956); new edn: Irena¨us: Gott in Fleisch und Blut:

Ein Durchblick in Texten (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1981); English trans.: Scandal of the Incarnation. On Gregory of Nyssa: Balthasar, Der versiegelte Quell: Auslegung des Hohen Liedes (Salzburg: Mu¨ller, 1939; rev. edn, 1954); id., Pre
sence et pense
e: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Gre
goire de Nysse (Paris: Beauchesne, 1942); English trans.: Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa, trans. Mark Sebanc (San Francisco, Calif.: Communio/Ignatius, 1995). On Maximus the Confessor: Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie: Ho¨he und Krise des griechischen Weltbildes bei Maximus Confessor (Freiburg: Herder, 1941); rev. edn: Die gnostischen Centurien des Maximus Confessor and Das Scholienwerk des Johannes von Scythopolis (Einsiedeln: Johannes, 1961); English trans.: id., Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor, trans. Brian E. Daley (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 2003).

4 For a brief historical discussion of the link between de Lubac and Balthasar, see Chap. 1, sect.:

Controversy over Ressourcement (1944–50).

5 Balthasar, ‘Patristik, Scholastik und wir’, TZ 3 (1939), 65–104; English trans.: ‘The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves’, trans. Edward T. Oakes, Comm 24 (1997), 347–96. For an analysis of this essay, see Edward T. Oakes, Pattern of Redemption: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Continuum, 1994), 102–30.

Balthasar and Chenu 117

hermeneutic, since it had insisted on Christian experience, on the centrality of Christology, and on the ecclesial context as necessary prerequisites for the interpretation of Scripture.6

Particularly signiWcant for understanding Balthasar’s ressourcement is his adop-tion of de Lubac’s approach to the nature–supernatural relaadop-tionship, including de Lubac’s trepidation regarding the notion of pure nature and his insistence on natural desire for the vision of God. In theWrst volume of his Theologik, Wrst published as a separate volume in 1947, Balthasar presented a discussion on the relationship between philosophy and theology. Here he made a strong case for the reintegration of nature and the supernatural: ‘After all, the supernatural takes root in the deepest structures of being, leavens them through and through, and permeates them like a breath or an omnipresent fragrance.’7 Philosophy, Balthasar insisted time and again, raised theological questions but was unable to provide the answers to its own questions. The relationship between the two disciplines was asymmetrical. While philosophy was in need of theology for its own fulWlment, theology did not need philosophy in the same way. To be sure, theology was impossible without philosophy, and one could say that there was a

‘reciprocal interpenetration’ between the two.8 But if inner-worldly structures pointed to the divine Logos, and if revelation elevated and perfected worldly truth,9 this meant that Christians should ‘acknowledge and accept the indelible presence of . . . theologoumena at the heart of concrete philosophical thinking’.10 In an important sense, then, theology had priority over philosophy.

In this same context, Balthasar insisted that ‘the supernatural has impregnated nature so deeply that there is simply no way to reconstruct it in its pure state (natura pura)’.11 Also here, his approach was obviously Lubacian.12 Balthasar felt that de Lubac had dealt with the supernaturalWnality of the created spirit ‘so lucidly. . . that we no longer need to recapitulate the main lines of his argu-ment’.13 Pure nature seemed to serve little purpose in a world that from the beginning was stamped with a supernatural Wnality. As a result, Balthasar preferred to speak of the ‘formal concept of nature’, underlining thereby that

6 For further discussion of de Lubac’s inXuence on Balthasar, see Peter Henrici, ‘Hans Urs von Balthasar und der franzo¨sische Katholizismus’, in Walter Kasper (ed.), Logik der Liebe und Herrlichkeit Gottes: Hans Urs von Balthasar im Gespra¨ch (OstWldern: Matthias-Gru¨newald, 2006), 169–74; Rudolf Voderholzer, ‘Die Bedeutung der so genannten ‘‘Nouvelle The´ologie’’ (insbeson-dere Henri de Lubacs) fu¨r die Theologie Hans Urs von Balthasars’, ibid. 208–12.

7 Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, trans. Adrian J. Walker and Graham Harrison, 3 vols (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 2000–5), i (Truth of the World ), 12.

8 Ibid. 7. Balthasar described the relationship as analogical in character (ibid. 15).

9 Ibid. 11.

10 Ibid. 12.

11 Ibid.

12 Cf. Chap. 3, sect.: Pure Nature and Natural Desire.

13 Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco, Calif.:

Communio/Ignatius, 1992), 267 n. 1.

there had never been a state of pure nature.14 Nature and the supernatural were not two separate compartments, as the neo-Thomist position appeared to argue.

Balthasar’s indebtedness to de Lubac also made him careful, however, not to discard the notion of pure nature altogether. Just as de Lubac occasionally acknowledged the polemical value of a hypothetical pura natura, so Balthasar agreed that the notion might serve to safeguard divine grace:

To pose such a hypothesis, to maintain that a graceless order of nature or creation is at least possible, became urgent for theology only when a heretic wanted to make theXuid bond between nature and the supernatural a forced and juridical one. This happened when Baius chose to derive a de jure compulsory right to grace understood as a strict requirement (debitum) from nature based on the de facto conWguration of both orders, which were linked because of free grace, not necessity.15

Balthasar acknowledged that it might be necessary to speak of a hypothetical notion of pure nature in order to maintain that God was under no necessity or obligation to give divine grace.16 According to Balthasar, the radical Augusti-nianism of Michael Baius (1513–89) had uncritically applied Aristotle’s philo-sophical deWnition of nature to a theological context. Aristotle’s philosophy had included theWnality of a thing in its nature. Baius, by applying this philosophical approach to theology, had made the mistake of including the supernatural Wnality of human beings in the very deWnition of their nature. Balthasar rejected this Baianist ‘naturalization’ of grace. He insisted it overlooked the fact that in theology one could use the concept of nature only in an analogical fashion.17 The notion of pura natura could thus counter an erroneous inclusion of supernatural Wnality in the very deWnition of human nature and, as a result, could safeguard God’s freedom in granting supernatural grace. In short, Balthasar appreciated that historically the hypothetical notion of pura natura had served to safeguard the theological integrity of divine grace.

Balthasar none the less agreed with de Lubac that the hypothesis of pure nature had never played a role in the theology of St Thomas, and they both regretted that the hypothesis had ‘soon managed to develop into a full system detached from its theological presuppositions, and on that basis . . . took on a life on its own’.18 Like de Lubac, Balthasar wanted to root his doctrine of creation in the world as God had actually created it. That world, Balthasar believed, was suVused with grace, both in the form of the free gift of creation itself and in the form of the free gift of supernatural grace.19 It might perhaps be helpful to ‘abstract’ or

‘subtract’ the elements of grace from the totality of this actual created order in

14 Ibid. 285.

15 Ibid. 269.

16 Cf. ibid. 272, where Balthasar commented that the Catholic Church, in opposition to Protestant ‘naturalization of grace’, had ‘to safeguard the purity of the concept of grace’.

17 Ibid. 273–5, 281.

18 Ibid. 270.

19 Cf. Balthasar’s discussion on de Lubac (ibid. 295–302).

Balthasar and Chenu 119

order to emphasize the contingent and free character of God’s grace.20 But such a hypothetical removal of grace from the created order was by no means an easy or straightforward process. Since the world of people’s actual lives was infused with grace from the very outset and was thus a supernatural world, it was almost impossible to describe what a hypothetical pure nature might look like:

The questions, for example, of how far ‘ignorance and hardship belong to natural existence’, how much concupiscence, disease, death (and the forms that death takes) are the result of sin or are part of the deWnition of being human and animal; but also questions about marriage, community, the State, our relation to a God who might not have revealed himself in his personal, interior life, the necessity for prayer in a natural state (which many people deny, for good reasons), the eschatological fate of the soul, resur-rection of the body, Last Judgement, eternal bliss: all such questions addressed to pure nature are simply unanswerable.21

Balthasar clearly wanted to take his starting-point in theology and in the de facto world that God had created. This meant for him that human beings, even after the Fall, or when they rejected God’s grace, continued to exist in a world imbued by grace. The world remained supernatural in character. There was, in our actual world, no human being devoid of a supernatural vocation or of divine grace.

Balthasar went so far as to say that not only did all human beings have a supernatural goal, they also had the means of grace to attain this goal:

All, in their own way, share humanity’s supernatural goal; hence all somehow share in the supernatural means to attain it. Through Christ, who died for us all, and the Church his Bride, outside of which there is no salvation, all human beings somehow, either openly or hiddenly, partake in the grace of the divine–Christic–ecclesial order, whether they lived before or will have lived after him.22

For Balthasar, the supernatural goal of human beings had its counterpart in the supernatural gift of the means to attain this goal.23

Not surprisingly, given his reticence with regard to the concept of pura natura and his insistence on the supernaturalWnality of creation as such, Balthasar also agreed with de Lubac that human beings had a natural desire (desiderium naturale) for the vision of God. Human nature always had a supernatural end, and human beings were created with more than merely a passive obediential potency (oboedientia potentialis). Following one of his mentors, Romano Guar-dini (1885–1968), Balthasar spoke of this human capacity as a ‘third domain’

between nature and the supernatural, which he described as ‘the depths of nature

20 Balthasar, Theology of Karl Barth, 280.

21 Ibid. 283.

22 Ibid. 288.

23 This is not the place to discuss Balthasar’s views on universalism, which he discussed especially in his book, Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Be Saved’? With a Short Discourse on Hell, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1988).

that do not emerge into visibility until the light of grace falls on them’.24 To be sure, this did not mean that human natural desire always attained its appropriate supernatural end. Balthasar agreed with de Lubac that divine grace was needed to attain it, and he expressed himself at times quite strongly: ‘Human nature must necessarily retain something of this expectant hovering, insofar as man’s ultimate, supernatural destination is beyond the range and scope of nature; consequently, faith is again and again experienced as the unexpected, as something neither deducible from nature nor founded upon it.’25 Grace was not something that God owed to human beings.

Balthasar’s ressourcement of the Fathers was thoroughly Lubacian in character.

The patristic scholar from Fourvie`re introduced him to the Church Fathers. De Lubac’s recovery of patristic exegesis fuelled Balthasar’s scepticism with regard to a historical critical hermeneutic that might wish to claim neutrality for its methodology. Balthasar’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology was patterned on de Lubac’s attempt to reintegrate nature and the supernatural. And Balthasar also agreed with de Lubac’s views on pure nature and natural desire, insisting that the created order was never beyond the pale of God’s grace. In each of these ways Balthasar showed himself a true disciple of de Lubac’s programme of ressourcement.

Irenaeus, Denys, and Maximus: Analogous Participation Balthasar’s understanding of the nature–supernatural relationship was closely modelled after de Lubac’s theological approach and displayed the same sacra-mental structure. Kevin Mongrain turns Balthasar’s sacrasacra-mental sensibility into a central interpretive key for his work: ‘God redeems creation qua creation, and hence sacramentally infuses and unites worldly beauty, goodness, and truth with supernatural grace.’26 Mongrain rightly speaks in this connection of a ‘sacramen-tal ontology’ in Balthasar.27 De Lubac’s and Balthasar’s emphases are none the less subtly diVerent from one another. De Lubac used his sacramental ontology in order to highlight that it was truly supernatural grace in which nature partici-pated, while Balthasar used the same sacramental ontology to stress that nature itself participated in supernatural grace. In other words, de Lubac, ever the Greek patristic scholar, emphasized the upward movement of divine ascent, while

24 Id., Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, ii (Truth of God ), 96. Cf. ibid. i. 13: ‘But perhaps we need to go beyond the simple juxtaposition of the natural and supernatural domains and to posit a third domain of truths that genuinely belongs to creaturely nature yet do not emerge into the light of consciousness until they are illumined by a ray of the supernatural.’

25 Balthasar, Prayer, trans. Graham Harrisson (San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius, 1986), 42.

26 Kevin Mongrain, The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval (New York: Crossroad/Herder, 2002), 61.

27 Ibid. Mongrain emphasizes Balthasar’s sacramental mindset throughout his book. See also Kevin Mongrain, ‘Von Balthasar’s Way from Doxology to Theology’, TTod 64 (2007), 58–70.

Balthasar and Chenu 121

Balthasar’s incarnational approach emphasized divine descent into the created realities of this-worldly time and space.28

Balthasar’s distinctive emphasis on created realities came to the fore in his writings on the Church Fathers. His ‘Patristik, Scholastik und wir’ presented a remarkable analysis of the patristic period and its borrowing of Platonic categor-ies. Balthasar did recognize in this essay the Fathers’ opposition to Platonic pantheism,29 and he acknowledged that in many ways the danger of Platonism had been ‘hemmed in’.30 Overall, however, he was convinced that the Fathers had insuYciently recognized the otherness implied in the Creator–creature distinc-tion. He identiWed this as a ‘danger zone’, particularly evident in Alexandrian theology.31 The danger was that ‘participation’ in God would become natural participation rather than participation by grace and so would turn into panthe-ism.32 Balthasar observed the Alexandrian over-reliance on Platonic philosophy in (1) the schema of descent and emanation; (2) the strict monotheism of Denys and Maximus, which had not done justice to the Trinitarian character of God;

(3) the docetic and Eutychian tendencies in which the purely spiritual took over from the goodness of the Incarnation; (4) the far-reaching asceticism and mysticism of the patristic epoch; and (5) the tendency to look to the Church’s hierarchical structure as symbolic of an inner spiritual hierarchy as its lasting truth.33

Balthasar was obviously pleased that the patristic borrowing from the Platonic tradition had later been counterbalanced by the introduction of Aristotelianism in medieval scholastic thought. Its acknowledgement of the goodness of creation had been more congenial to a true mutual otherness between God and creature:

‘With the Scholastic concept of nature, the possibility isWnally taken seriously that the incarnation can be seriously misinterpreted as a transitorium to a purely spiritual condition. The Scholastic concept of nature also obviates every mistrust and hostility towards the material and its natural laws, for with the concept of created nature this danger is avoided in principle.’34 To be sure, Balthasar

28 Brian Daley also draws attention to Balthasar’s quest for a ‘sacramental understanding’ of the world in his engagement with the Church Fathers, an understanding that does not just press ‘through worldly images’ but ‘recognizes the presence of transcendent holiness in sensible things’ (‘Balthasar’s Reading’, 190–1). Cf. also Ben Quash’s comment on the ‘almost sacramental character’ of the mediation of the ‘diVerentiated diversity of material things’ (‘Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in David

28 Brian Daley also draws attention to Balthasar’s quest for a ‘sacramental understanding’ of the world in his engagement with the Church Fathers, an understanding that does not just press ‘through worldly images’ but ‘recognizes the presence of transcendent holiness in sensible things’ (‘Balthasar’s Reading’, 190–1). Cf. also Ben Quash’s comment on the ‘almost sacramental character’ of the mediation of the ‘diVerentiated diversity of material things’ (‘Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in David