II. ABREVIATURAS
2. CÁNCER Y SUFRIMIENTO AL FINAL DE LA VIDA
2.2. Modelos teóricos del sufrimiento
At the start of our discussion of Balthasar’s understanding of the Christian life on the world stage, it is important to return to comments that were made at the start of the previous chapter. Here it was noted that, for Balthasar, the ‘form’ of Christ is not merely an image or an icon that asked to be contemplated, but a dramatic act in and upon the world, which discloses God’s goodness to humanity and the whole created order. This is indeed then what became apparent in our discussion above: that the beautiful form of Christ, as explored in Balthasar’s aesthetics, should be seen as a liberating performance that consists out of three distinct-yet-united acts, which has engendered an all-determining transformation on earth. It was also noted at the beginning of the previous chapter that this performance of Christ invites a dramatic response; that it is not merely a “self-sufficient armchair drama”,226 but that it beckons the onlooker, as an actor in his or her own right, to join in on the action and to become part of the theodrama. This is something that is made possible by Christ’s resurrection, which is the concluding ‘syllable’ of his mission, and also, it should be added, by his ascension and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, who bears witness to Christ, and who convinces and enables us to “carry out, recall, and follow” our mission.227 It is then to this dramatic ‘response’, which is the topic of many section in Balthasar’s theodramatic project and other monographs such as The Christian
Webster, ‘Balthasar and Karl Barth’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Balthasar, 241-55 (especially 252), and Walatka, Balthasar and the Option for the Poor, 132-33.
224 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume III, 28-9.
225 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, Volume VII, 129; Walatka, Balthasar and the Option for the Poor, 137. 226 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 22.
227 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume III, 51-4. See also Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, Volume III, The
Spirit of Truth, trans. Graham Harris (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005) 80, 297; and Mysterium Paschale, 210-
217, where he writes: “The resurrection of the Son is the revelation of the Spirit… He must depart so that the Spirit may come; he will ask the Father … to send to the disciples another Paraclete, who will abide with them for ever” (210). See also Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness, 114, where he writes: “The event of Pentecost is closely linked with the precise details of the Ascension. The disciples’ gaze is held fast by the Lord’s upward motion; without seeing him, their eyes follow him as he disappears into the clouds and proceeds to a destination beyond their imagining. As to the logic and ethics of [their] mission, the Spirit will [now] instruct them”. For a helpful discussion of the relationship between Christ’s Resurrection, his Ascension, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit in Balthasar’s dramatics see the section ‘Resurrection and the Sending of the Spirit’ in Walatka, Balthasar and the Option for the Poor, 135-6.
State of Life,228 and which also stood at the very heart of his own life-narrative,229 that we will now turn.
It can be said that, for Balthasar, the ‘Christian life’ has to do with the heeding of what Ignatius termed the “call of Christ”,230 and with discovering and enacting one’s God-given role, or mission, on the world stage. This mission typically mirrors and stands in continuation with the missio Christi itself, as it originally took place in first century, Roman-occupied Palestine, as discussed above. The ‘Christian life’ is thus about saying ‘Yes’, 231 with Mary,232 to the drama of the Christ-event, about entering, ever deeper, into the ‘acting area’ that is opened up by Christ’s death and resurrection, and about faithfully embodying and re-performing, through the grace of God and the working of the Spirit, Jesus’ liberating truth in and to the world, through the drama of one’s own existence. Balthasar’s understanding of the ‘Christian life’ is indeed then strongly dependent on the logic and language of analogy. Just as every creaturely reality, it its particularity, is contingent on, shares in, and analogically expresses something of the reality of God, as affirmed in the analogia entis, so every Christian mission, in its particularity, is also contingent on, shares in, and analogically expresses something of Christ’s mission,
228 See Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 15-23 (the introduction to his theodramatic theory), 481-644 (the
section ‘Transition: From Role to Mission’); Theo-Drama, Volume II, 53-89 (the section ‘The Unfolding Drama’), 302-11 (the section ‘The Form of Life: Being Born of God’), 394-416 (the section ‘The New Christian Reality), 417-29 (the section ‘Man without Measure’); Theo-Drama, Volume III, 33-56 (the section ‘Christ’s Position in the Theodrama’), 202-59 (the section ‘Christ’s Mission and Person’), 263-83 (The section ‘Theological Persons’);
Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 427-504 (the section ‘The Battle of the Logos’); Theo-Drama, Volume V, 175-80 (the
section ‘Integrating the Horizontal Dimension’).
229 As noted in the second chapter, Balthasar’s himself experienced a life-altering moment of ‘calling’ during an
Ignatian retreat just before his doctoral exam (which prompted his decision to become a priest and sustained his ministry and work as theologian throughout his life, even after he left the Society of Jesus). He wrote that even after thirty years he could still find the exact tree where he received his mission (“as by lightning”), and first heard the words: “you have been called”. This notion of ‘calling’ (and fulfilling one’s God-given mission) also played an important role in his work as student chaplain in Basel, where he regularly led Ignatius retreats in the Black Forest, and continually engaged in pastoral discussions focused on helping (especially young) people discern their
vocation on earth (in the light of the missio Christi). See Henrici, ‘A Sketch of von Balthasar’s life,’ 16.
230 See Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 9, 391. Balthasar writes that this ‘call’ “is not just something required
for the establishment of a Christian state of life; it is the very essence of the Christian state of life and even of the Christian life, as such”.
231 See Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 399, where he writes: “Mission … requires man’s ‘Yes’ – an act not
less important that the act by which God calls his chosen one… [Man’s yes] is … the acceptance of God’s call and mission – his simple cooperation in the eternal ‘Yes’ of God”.
232 For Balthasar, the ‘prototype’ of the human ‘Yes’ (uttered in response to, and in continuity with, the divine
‘Yes’ spoken in Jesus), is found, first and foremost, with Mary, the mother of Jesus (Luke 1:26-38). Mary’s ‘Yes’, Balthasar writes, is the “supreme instance of the true Christian and human attitude before God … [It is] without a trace of mere passivity or resignation … [but] calls for the active participation of man’s united powers, a wholehearted effort to banish anything that could spoil the purity of first receiving the divine message and substance, and then living it”. See Balthasar, A Theology of History, 121, and especially the Mariology which he develops in Theo-Drama, Volume III, 283-360 (aptly titled ‘Woman’s Answer’). See also the ecumenically- minded discussion of this aspect of Balthasar’s theology in Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 250-273 (a chapter titled ‘The Finite Yes’).
resulting in what could be called an analogia missio.233 By making use of the logic and language of analogy, Balthasar can speak of an “inexhaustible multiplication” of Christ’s “once-and-for- all and unique” mission on the world stage;234 of how, instead of bringing an end to all drama, the drama of the Christ-event is transposed into an infinite number of further dramatic expressions. These dramatic expressions, while being utterly unique, personal, and contextual,235 arises “centrally” out of Christ’s “own centre”.236 Every “nuanced mission”, Balthasar affirms, is “a participation in the whole mission of Christ”.237 Marc Ouellet explains:
Between Christ and the Christian, as between God and a creature, there is no univocity, but an analogy, i.e. a certain similarity, but only within the greatest dissimilarity. There is an analogy of being, but also an analogy of acting and of attitudes [that is to say, of mission] … [W]e become persons in Christ, by a gift of our freedom to the mission which likens us to, and associates us with, [him]. The ethical decision in response to the call of grace constitutes a theological person.238
Balthasar is thus convinced that, as human beings respond to the “call of Christ” and re-perform the drama of his existence, Christ continues to play in “ten-thousand places”, to quote the words of Gerald Manley Hopkins, which serve as the epigraph of this dissertation. What could, however, be asked at this point, is what does it look like when someone re-performs the mission of Christ, through the mission of their own lives? What does a life of Christian mission, which
233 See Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-linguistic Approach to Christian Theology
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005). He writes, for example, that the “analogia missio is more than an arbitrary or superficial similarity; it is rather a matter of the Church actually and actively participating in the missions of Son and Spirit. This is what it means for the Church to have a speaking and acting part in the theo- drama. To be sure, it is a supporting role, but no less vital for that. Mission is ‘the whole Church taking the whole gospel to the whole world’. To engage in mission after the pattern of Christ’s mission has nothing to do with triumphalism but everything to do with passion: ‘that travail in mission … the expending of life itself, for the sake of more life”, 72. Cf. also Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, 387; Angelo Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar, A
Theological Style (Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995[1991]), 79; Ward, ‘Kenosis,’ 45; and also, the essay
on similar ideas in Aquinas’ thought written by Michael Waldstein titled ‘The Analogy of Mission and Obedience,’ in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas, eds. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington: The Catholic University Press, 2005), 92-114.
234 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume II, 270.
235 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 406. For Balthasar, it is important to emphasise that each person’s God-
given mission is indeed utterly unique (“every call is a personal one,” he writes; The Christian State of Life, 410); typically involves a very specific task “as part of God’s [greater] plan for the world” (The Christian State of Life, 359); and that it is tied to, and constitutive of, the individual’s innermost ‘self’ (a ‘self’ created and called, in love, by God ‘before the foundations of the world’; Eph 1:4-5), Theo-Drama, Volume II, 402. In responding to, and sharing in Christ’s mission, we are “equipped by the Holy Spirit with [the] most personal mission”, which becomes (and has, in fact, always been) the “very core of our being”, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 138. The one “who is called”, he affirms, “becomes himself [or herself] by serving and sharing in God’s work in Christ”, The
Christian State of Life, 136-7. For Balthasar, ‘mission’ is thus intrinsically linked to ‘personhood’; to what it
means to be an individual ‘person’ in the fullest sense of the word. See Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume III, 50- 1, 207-8.
236 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume V, 393. 237 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 68-9.
238 Marc Ouellet, ‘The Foundations of Christian Ethics according to Hans Urs Balthasar,’ in Hans Urs Balthasar,
stems from, and analogically expresses something of, the mission of Christ, practically entails? While acknowledging the complexities of these questions,239 Balthasar argues that, for him, a life of authentic Christian mission, principally means to have the same ‘mind as Christ’ (Phil 2:5), and to live, in the particular context of one’s own life, as Christ himself lived. This is a life that is not marked by egoism and self-interest, but by servitude, solidarity, and sacrifice; a life of “faith, hope, and love”,240 which is aimed, in its entirety, at bringing about God’s goodness in and for the world. At the beginning of his ‘Nine Propositions on Christian Morality’, Balthasar states that Christ himself can be seen as the “concrete categorical imperative”, the “personal norm” of how humanity should think and act on earth.241 The person who is called by God, and whose mission is “cut from Christ’s”, is thus not sent into the world with an idea or a philosophy, but with a ‘form’ (or then ‘performance’) that asked to be imitated in the most concrete manner possible. It is the “beloved Son, who in his mission” brings “the kingdom of heaven to earth”, who is the “presupposition for all Christian existence and action”.242 Christ, Balthasar asserts, is the “the ‘syllogistic form’ of all Christian thinking and living”.243
Balthasar then holds that, when looking at Jesus’ performance on the world stage, as described above, it is evident that the Word-made-flesh “did not live to please himself (Rom 15:3), ‘did not seek his own honour’ (Jn 5:41)”, and “‘did not cling to his form of divinity’ (Phil 2:6)”.244
239 Given the fact that each Christian mission, as a reflection of Christ’s mission, is unique (as emphasised above),
Balthasar warns that we should be wary of “overly narrow interpretations” of what it means to be “sent on mission into the world”. Walatka, Balthasar and the Option for the Poor, 143. Just as it can be said that “truth is symphonic”, Christian mission, arising from the infinite depths of Christ’s own mission, undoubtedly has a rich diversity to it. See Balthasar’s monograph, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), wherein he makes a passionate plea for the importance of ‘plurality’ (also then within the ‘body of Christ’), through making use of the metaphor of a symphony orchestra. He writes: “Symphony means ‘sound together’. First there is sound, then different sounds and then we hear the different sounds singing together in a dance of song… In the symphony … all the instruments are integrated in a whole sound… The orchestra must be pluralist in order to unfold the wealth of the totality that resounds in the composer’s mind”. He then goes on to argue that the same can be said about the ‘truth’ of God (and, it could be added, something such as Christian discipleship). He notes: “Today, therefore, perhaps the most necessary thing to proclaim and take to heart is that Christian truth is symphonic… The Church’s reservoir, which lies at its core, is ‘the depth of the riches of God’ in Jesus Christ. The Church exhibits this fullness in an inexhaustible multiplicity, which keeps flowing, irresistibly, from its unity”. Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic, 7, 15, and also 81- 4 (a section dealing with Christian action and ethics in the world). See also Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 435.
240 With regards to the ‘Christian virtues’, Balthasar writes: “Faith, hope and love are the life of Christ incarnate
in his members”. Balthasar, A Theology of History, 112.
241 See Hans Urs Von Balthasar, ‘Nine Propositions on Christian Ethics,’ in Principles of Christian Morality, ed.
Heinz Schurmann and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 79-84. Balthasar wrote these propositions for the ‘International Theological Commission’ right in the middle of working on his theodramatic project. See Scola, Hans Urs Balthasar, 101-2. See also Balthasar, New Elucidations, 206.
242 Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness, 43. 243 Balthasar, You Crown the Year with Your Goodness, 107.
He rather lived a life of kenosis, a life of self-donation, which revolved around loving and serving the Father, from whom he had been sent, and, importantly, loving and serving others, to whom, and for whose sake, he had been sent. This, Balthasar remarks, is also then the core of ever Christian mission, the commission that rings forth from the missio Christi on the world stage, namely, to love and serve God and to love and serve other human beings, especially the poor, hungry, and persecuted, as Christ himself did.245 Following Christ’s resurrection, he writes, human beings are called “to subordinate the form of their existence to that of Christ”, following in his footsteps by loving “both God and men”.246 Every Christian mission, he asserts, is indeed marked by “love of God and love of neighbour as revealed by Christ”, which can be “accomplished only by taking one’s stand where” Christ took his, by recalling “to the world the form of Christ”.247
In reading through Balthasar’s writings, it is rather surprising to see how much emphasis he places on the second part of this commission, contrary to what is often thought. Part of the reason for this, has to do with Balthasar’s conviction that “love of God” and “love of neighbour” are “perfectly one”, and that the latter can, in fact, be seen as an expression, sign, and even ‘sacrament’ of the former, especially given Christ’s kenotic solidarity with every last person.248 According to Balthasar, a life of Christian mission in obedience and servitude to God, presupposes “the habitual act of a loving readiness for service” in the world”.249 It is not “complacent and self-absorbed, but is ready to take initiatives in the social area”.250 Christian mission, he writes, can thus be said to involve: opening up “the very depths of one’s heart” to the other, and affirming their “unique worth and dignity”;251 pressing “for the removal of injustices in the distribution of goods, or racial discrimination, or the repression of classes or people”;252 being “in solidarity with the poor and not with the rich”;253 and actively taking part
245 Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 25, 57, 71, 75, 81,169, 385, 427. 246 Balthasar, A Theology of History, 117-8.
247 Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 221-2.
248 Balthasar, The Christian State of Life, 418. Balthasar writes that, since Christ lived, died and was raised for
and also with every last human being, “Christ is the Brother in all brothers, the divine Neighbour in all human neighbours. That is why we can speak of our brother, not as ‘Christ in disguise’ but as the sacrament of Christ’”; “for this turning to the neighbour is more than just a command of God. The divine Son and Friend lives so truly in the neighbour that it is henceforth possible to seek and find him wholly in one’s neighbour”. See Balthasar,
Prayer, 215.
249 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 420. See also Balthasar, New Elucidations, 238, where he writes: “[It is]
no longer a matter of merely recognising the rights of other people, but rather, according to Jesus’ example … a question of vital service to one’s neighbour … The ‘greater’, more Christian person is the person who serves more deeply, like Jesus”.
250 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 420.
251 Balthasar, Engagement with God, 56-9. Balthasar continues to write: “We must learn from the very beginning
not to use our natural eyes when looking at our neighbour… Rather must we look at him ‘with the eyes of faith’ so that we may see him as God sees him in Jesus Christ”.
252 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 422.