1. INTRODUCCIÓN Y ANTECEDENTES
1.2. EL PERRO EVOLUCIÓN.
1.2.3. EL PERRO, ANIMAL CARNÍVORO NO ESTRICTO
Even though Balthasar, as mentioned in the previous chapter, had hoped to compose a “theology of the dramatic” from the time he first arrived in Basel,4 he eventually decided that the ‘first word’ of his extended project in dogmatics would be on ‘beauty’ and that the theological dramatics he had envisioned, would be preceded by, and emanate from, a theological aesthetics. It is, therefore, important at the start of this section on Balthasar’s theodramatic theory to also make a few brief remarks regarding his aesthetics (published, in English, as The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics), and the significant ways in which this work lays the foundation for and leads into his dramatics.
Balthasar’s seven-volume work, The Glory of the Lord, which is regarded by someone like Donald MacKinnon as “potentially one of the greatest theological works of the twentieth century”,5 can be described as an ambitious and, in the context of modern theology, novel attempt to “recover for Christian theology a proper aesthetic”.6 According to Balthasar, beauty has not only become irrelevant in and for the secular world today, but it has also, disturbingly, been eschewed by the Christian faith and modern theology (importantly, in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions). “We no longer dare to believe in beauty”, he writes, “and make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it”.7 For Balthasar, this repudiation of beauty, especially in contemporary Christian thought, is a devastating development that
4 Henrici, ‘A Sketch of von Balthasar’s Life,’ 33.
5 David M. MacKinnon, ‘A Master in Israel, Hans Urs von Balthasar,’ in Engagement with God: The Drama of
Christian Discipleship, by Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. R. John Halliburton, foreword by E. L. Mascall, and
introductory essay by David. M. MacKinnon (London: S.P.C.K., 1975), 9.
6 Stephen Wigley, Balthasar’s Trilogy, Reader’s Guides (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2010), 25.
7 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I, Seeing the Form, trans.
urgently needs to be remedied. For, he holds, “in a world without beauty … [a world] which can no longer see it or reckon with it … the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out … and the proofs of the truth [lose] their cogency”.8 In accordance with the Platonic and later also Patristic and Scholastic tradition(s), Balthasar believes that the three transcendentals, namely, the good, the true and the beautiful,9 are intrinsically linked to one another, and that if beauty is done away with, truth and goodness will also soon disappear into thin air. Beauty, he holds, will “not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance”.10 This is then why Balthasar, before tending to goodness (in his dramatics) and truth (in his work, Theo- logic), first attempts to develop a Christian theology in the light of (what is often regarded as) the “third transcendental”.11
Balthasar accordingly sets out to show that ‘beauty’ is not something that simply lies in ‘the eye of the beholder’, something that can be relativized and dismissed as a mere subjective sensibility (as has become commonplace in our modern day and age).12 For him, it is rather an objective reality, something which, importantly, comes to the fore in, and enraptures the onlooker through, the forms of this world. This connection between beauty and form (in German, Gestalt) is of utmost importance to Balthasar and stands at the very heart of his aesthetics. According to him, one can only speak of beauty, if one also takes the mystery, revelatory potential, and “indissolubility” of form into account.13 For, in beholding the ‘beautiful’, he writes, one is simultaneously confronted “with both the figure [or, then, form] and that which shines forth from the figure, making it into a worthy, a love-worthy thing”.14 With the beautiful, there is thus a unity between that which expresses beauty and the beauty being expressed, between the visible and the invisible that is revealed, between the surface of
8 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 19.
9 For an informative discussion on the history of these and other ‘transcendental categories of being’, and how
they have been construed and used by Balthasar, see Van Erp, The Art of Theology, 98–107.
10 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 18. It is important to note that Balthasar also explicitly connects
beauty (and its demise) to our ability (or then, inability) to pray and to love: “We can be sure that whoever sneers at [beauty’s] name as if she was an ornament of a bourgeois past – whoever he admits it or not – can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love”. Balthasar also explore this theme in his work Theo-Logic. See, for example, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, Volume I, Truth of the World, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 9. See also the essay by Francesca Murphy, ‘Hans Urs Balthasar: Beauty as the Gateway to Love,’ in Theological Aesthetics after Von Balthasar, 5-18.
11 The very first line of the foreword to Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, Volume I reads: “We here attempt to
develop a Christian theology in light of the third transcendental, that is to say: to complement the vision of the true and the good with that of the beautiful (pulchrum). See Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 9.
12 This is mostly a result of the way in which someone like Immanuel Kant relegated beauty “to the realm of the
non-real, the realm of subjectivity and taste”. See Stephen M. Garret, God’s Beauty-in-Act, Participating in God’s
Suffering Glory (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick, 2013), 62.
13 See Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 26. 14 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 20.
the image and the splendour radiating forth from in and beneath this surface.15 It is form, in its visible materiality,16 that discloses beauty to us, and form which draws us into beauty’s radiant depths (while, notably, also concealing it from us, so that “the invisible is not exhausted in the appearing”).17 In this regard, Balthasar writes the following:
The beautiful is above all a form, and the light does not fall on this form from above and from outside, rather it breaks forth from the form’s interior. Species and lumen in beauty are one… Visible form not only ‘points’ to an invisible, unfathomable mystery; form is the apparition of this mystery, and reveals it while, naturally, at the same time protecting and veiling it. The content (Gehalt) does not lie behind the form (Gestalt), but within it… Whoever is not capable of seeing and ‘reading’ the form will … fail to perceive its content. Whoever is not illuminated by the form will see no light in the content either.18
With his thought firmly grounded in the principle of the analogia entis (as discussed in the previous chapter), Balthasar goes on to argue that the forms of this world, and the beauty they reveal, are not closed off from the reality of the divine, but, in fact, have the inherent potential, in their time-and-space-bound state, to analogically disclose something of the beauty of the triune God in this world. According to Balthasar, it is indeed in and through the finite forms of this world, that the infinite beauty of God comes to expression and that the glory (doxa, as divine correlate of beauty) of God is made present on earth.19 Balthasar’s theological aesthetics (and his understanding of the working of the analogy of being) is, however, not a naïve form of natural theology. For him, the only way in which God’s beauty and glory can truly be perceived in this world, is in the light of God’s self-disclosure in and through the unique form
15 In terms of this unity, Balthasar writes: “The appearance of the form [of the beautiful], as revelation of the
depths, in an indissoluble union of two things… We ‘behold’ the form; but, if we really behold it, it is not a detached form, rather in its unity with the depths that make their appearance in it … We are ‘enraptured’ by our contemplation of these depths and are ‘transported’ to them. But, so long as we are dealing with the beautiful, this never happens in a way that we leave the (horizontal) form behind us in order to plunge (vertically) into the naked depths”. See Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 118-9. See also, Aidan Nichols, A Key to Hans Urs Von
Balthasar: Hans Urs Von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 12-
48; Kevin Mongrain, ‘Balthasar’s Way from Doxology to Theology,’ Theology Today 64, no. 1 (April 2007), 58- 70; and Stephan van Erp, The Art of Theology, 33-6.
16 Mark McInroy emphasises that, for Balthasar, “the materiality of the form does not in any way compromise or
diminish the beauty that shines through it”. Mark McInroy, Balthasar and the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving
Splendour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 149.
17 Garret, God’s Beauty-in-Act, 40, 69.
18 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 151. Garret notes that Balthasar uses the Thomistic terms ‘species’
and ‘lumen’, interchangeably with ‘forma’ and ‘splendour’ (or form and beauty). See Garret, God’s Beauty-in-
Act, 68. For more on Aquinas own use of these terms see Umberto Eco, Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20-48; 80-98.
of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, the ‘analogia entis in person’ (a notion we will return to in what follows), who comes to perfect “the whole ontology and aesthetics of created being”.20
Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, like the rest of his theological project, can indeed be described as being explicitly Christocentric.21 According to him, Christ, the Word who became flesh, is the “super-form” (Übergestalt), in and through whom the triune God, in his infinite glory and beauty, is definitively revealed in the world, and in and through whom all other earthly forms (and therefore also all earthly instances of beauty), are redeemed and renewed.22 For Balthasar, the God-man, Jesus Christ, is thus not merely a sign pointing to the divine, but the ‘form of all forms', and ‘image of all images’, who, in the here and now, expresses the invisible God in our midst, and who brings all other forms, and the beauty they disclose, to their God-intended end.23 Aidan Nichols, one of the foremost interpreters of Balthasar’s thought, writes in this regard:
[For Balthasar], the incarnation is precisely the pouring out of God’s glory into the form of the world in one of its principle embodiments, human-kind. A form is thus taken up so that God may transfigure the whole of creation. This self-revelation of God in Christ is not a mere prolongation or intensification of the revelation given with the creation. The personal substance of the Father in his Word is now lavished on the world. And yet, because the creation was from the beginning orientated towards its own supernatural elevation, and because too the incarnation, taken in the fullness of its unfolding, from the annunciation, through the resurrection to the parousia, entails the bringing together of everything in heaven and on earth under one divine-human Head, it follows that the self-
20 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 28.
21 See Wigley, Balthasar’s Trilogy, 32; and Mark McIntosh, ‘Christology,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Hans
Urs Balthasar, eds. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24-36.
McIntosh writes: “Even if the statement holds true for enough Christian theologians as to be almost a truism, it none the less bears stating … Jesus Christ stands at the centre of Hans Urs Balthasar’s theology. [F]or Balthasar, the incarnate Son illumines the work of theology itself in a way that is hard to describe – even by comparison to other modern theologians”, 24. Balthasar’s Christocentrism should, however, not be confused with Christomonism, as Graham Ward warns, as his Christology is deeply grounded in Trinitarian thinking, as will be seen in the next chapter. See Graham Ward, ‘Kenosis: Death, Discourse and Resurrection,’ in Balthasar at the
End of Modernity, eds. Lucy Gardner, David Moss, Ben Quash and Graham Ward, (London: T&T Clark, 1999),
45.
22 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 432; McInroy, Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses, 152. Aidan
Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 18-23; Dupré, ‘The Glory of the Lord,’ 184.
23 In terms of Christ not being a mere sign pointing to God, but the form expressing Godself, Balthasar writes:
“Christ can work and produce signs (semeia), and these signs will stand in a significant relationship to him. But he himself is more and other than merely a sign. It is not as if one can could, by means of rational enquiry and argument, recognise him to be a (perfect? religious? inspired?) man, and then, following the pointers provided by the rational knowledge, move to the conclusion that he is God’s Son and himself God. The witness of the Gospels, and John’s in particular, has it rather this way: Christ is recognised in his form only when his form has been seen and understood to be the form of the God-man…” Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 153. See also Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 437; and Van Erp, The Art of Theology, 129, 134.
manifestation of God in Jesus Christ brings the form of the world to its perfection, and in that way uncovers the fullness of its significance for the first time.24
All seven volumes of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics are then concerned with this seeing of the Gestalt Christi, as the definitive revelation of God and his glory and beauty in history, which in-forms and trans-forms all other earthly forms and our seeing and understanding of their beauty. After the important introductory volume titled Seeing the Form, in which Balthasar offers a first extended reflection on the beautiful form of Jesus Christ, the second and third volumes of the work deal with twelve Christian thinkers (from the Patristic period up until the 20th century) whose theologies, according to Balthasar, are marked by an attentiveness to
the beauty of God’s revelation in the form of Christ, as well as in the forms of creation.25 The fourth and fifth volumes of the Glory of the Lord deal with how different metaphysical conceptions throughout the ages either stood in service of, or hampered, our perception and appreciation of divine and earthly beauty, while the last two volumes of the work focuses respectively on the beauty of the form of revelation in the Old Testament (which, for Balthasar, has a “proleptic character” and reveals an anticipated Christology),26 and, finally, on the beautiful form of Christ in the light of the writings of the New Testament.27
Following this last volume of the Glory of the Lord, Balthasar deliberately makes the transition from aesthetics to dramatics, which, as the etymology of the word ‘drama’ denotes, has to do with the ‘performance’ of certain actions in a specified time and place.28 It is a transition he
24 Nichols, The Word has been Abroad, 35.
25 Balthasar writes that his aim is to present a “series of Christian theologies and world-pictures of the highest
rank, each of which, having been marked at its centre by the glory of God’s revelation, has sought to give the impact of this glory a central place in its vision”. He states that this “is naturally, not to deny that, between these twelve figures picked out as typical, there is not a host of others who could have clarified the intellectual and historical relations and transitions between them and would in themselves also have been worthy of presentation”. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume II, Studies in Theological
Style: Clerical Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil, CRV (San Francisco, Ignatius
Press, 1984), 13, 20. The twelve figures, who are divided into ‘theologians’ working from within formal church structures (which he calls clerical styles) and theologians working on the margins of (or even from outside) formal church structures (which he calls “lay styles”), are: Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm, Bonaventure (as ‘clerical styles’); and Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Jakob Hamann, Vladimir Solovyov, Gerald Manley Hopkins, and Charles Péguy (as “Lay Styles”). For an informative introduction to Balthasar’s engagement with each of these figures see Nichols, The Word has been Abroad, 65-127.
26 Wigley, Balthasar’s Trilogy, 37; Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, 336.
27 For an overview of each of the seven volumes, see the section ‘A Guide through Herrlichkeit’ in Van Erp, The
Art of Theology, 146-153.
28 The word ‘drama’ comes from the Greek word ‘dran’ which means ‘action’ or ‘deed’. See Ben Quash, Theology
and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-4; and David C. Schindler, Hans Urs Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 17. See also
Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 413, where Balthasar writes: “drama is essentially human action”; and Theo-
Drama, Volume I, 451, where he affirms: drama “means action”; as well as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Theological Dramatic Theory Volume II, The Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 13, where he states: “A theodramatic theory is … concerned with … acting and the ability to act”.
explains and expounds on in the opening pages of the first volume of Theo-drama, and which he often again addresses in the other volumes of the work. According to him, it is of the utmost importance to realise that this beautiful form of Christ, as examined in his aesthetics, is not, as has already started to become apparent (especially in his volume on the New Testament),29 merely some static image, icon, or artwork (“crystallised in immobile perfection”),30 but a dynamic event, a dramatic act, an embodied performance which reveals to us, along with God’s glory and beauty, God’s absolute and unbounded goodness.31 In perceiving the Gestalt Christi, it indeed becomes clear that who Christ is, cannot be separated from what Christ does;32 that God’s beauty and glory is tied up with, and comes to expression in and through Christ’s actions here on earth – actions that are aimed at bringing about the good “for us” and also “in us”.33 Balthasar writes that there “is nothing ambiguous about what God does [in and through Christ] for man: it is simply good”.34 According to him, we, as human beings, are also then called, in the moment of perception, when we are transported towards him whom we have perceived, to respond through action on our own part; to follow and imitate Christ in performing ‘the good’ in our own lives; to become part of, and play our part in, God’s redemptive activity in the world. This “good which God does to us”, he holds, can “only be experienced as the truth if