6. RESULTADOS Y DISCUSIÓN
6.1. TIEMPOS E INTERVALOS DE CONSUMO DIARIOS
For Balthasar, a helpful way of addressing, at least in a provisional manner, this question of the freedom of the actor on the world stage (from within the Christian worldview), is by looking at the relationship between the playwright and the actor in the actual theatre. When examining the theatre-making process, he writes, it is interesting to see that, although the playwright is the one who creates the play, as well as the characters in it, and can therefore be seen to have a certain “ontological primacy” with regard to everyone else involved,239 his or her relationship with the actor “cannot be expressed in terms of master and servant”.240 The actor is not simply a slave to the playwright’s text, he emphasises, and there is “nothing mechanical” about how he or she makes the ideas and intentions of the author present.241 It is, in fact, far more interesting than that. Quoting Gabriel Marcel, Balthasar writes that dramatic creation usually involves a “self-alienation on the part of the author, for the benefit of the beings to whom he gives life”.242 While the author may have certain ideas and intentions for the characters he invents, and offers these intentions and ideas to the actor by means of the script that has been written, he or she nonetheless grants cast-members a certain amount of autonomy, so as to creatively contribute to the ‘making present’ of the play’s truth, through their own performance. Any skilled playwright, Balthasar argues, chooses to leave room in his or her work, “both in terms of the depth of inspiration (the ‘higher task’), and of the details of gesture, intonation, and so forth”, for a “creative act” on the part of the actor.243 The author is not interested in merely projecting him- or herself onto the stage and only hearing his or her own voice from the actor’s lips, but longs to see and experience how his or her characters come to life, and fulfil their intended purposes, through the free and inventive contribution of someone
237 Thomas Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von
Balthasar (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000), 118. See also Julien Green, Journal 1 (Paris: Plon, 1938), quoted in Theo-Drama, Volume I, 268.
238 Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter, 118-9. 239 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 270. 240 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 283.
241 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 284; Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter, 121.
242 Balthasar Theo-Drama, Volume I, 271. This quotation is from Gabriel Marcel, ‘L’Influence du théâtre,’ Revue
des Jeunes (Mar. 5, 1935).
else, even if there is a chance that this will not be the case. For Balthasar, part of the “mystery of inspiration” lies precisely in allowing “the characters to develop in their own way”, while guiding their actions and interactions ‘from above’.244 This is the risk of being a playwright – of writing plays and creating characters that will be performed by others.
According to Balthasar, this obviously does not mean that all is permissible on the stage, and that the actor could or should merely do as he or she likes. For this would be a regrettable misuse of the freedom granted to the actor by the author, and most certainly lead to a failed performance. What is rather asked of the actor is to enter – through a “creative effort” on his or her own part – into the “author’s vision”.245 As a free and creative agent, the actors should indeed come to cooperate with the author, by putting “all the power of his or her physical, emotional, and spiritual self, at the service of” the role that he or she has been given.246 It can be seen as an act of consent to the author’s intentions; as a deliberate ‘Yes’ that is uttered in response to, and in continuity with, the playwright’s original thoughts. Quoting George Simmel, Balthasar writes that the actor’s “freedom is of the kind customarily described as ethical”.247 He or she must “give the impression of wanting to do what, on the basis of his role, he ought to do”.248 For Balthasar, this is exactly what the great Russian theatre theorist, Konstantin Stanislavski, who is often described as the father of modern acting, was referring to when he developed his acting ‘system’ and spoke of the “actor’s disponibilité for his role”.249 With this notion of ‘disponibilité’, which can be translated into English as ‘well-disposedness’, Stanislavski pointed to the way in which the actor should open him- or herself up to the ‘role’ that has been imparted to him or her by the author, through a process of “character formation”.250 It thus has to do with the actor’s “dedication, encompassing body, mind, and soul” to the given role; a “mobilisation” of the self that is “initiated by the actor’s belief in the truth of the role” – something that can only but occur in absolute freedom, if the role in to be performed authentically. 251
In the theatre, one can thus speak of both the playwright’s primal freedom to create, and of the actor’s derived freedom to creatively take up, and give life to, his or her assigned role, either
244 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 276-7. 245 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 284.
246 Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom, 121.
247 George Simmel, Logos IX (1920/21): 360, quoted in Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 284. 248 George Simmel, Logos IX (1920/21): 360, quoted in Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 284. 249 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 288-9.
250 See Vander Lugt, Wesley. Living Theodrama, Reimagining Theological Ethics (London: Routledge, 2014) 33. 251 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 288-9. Balthasar quotes Stanislavski saying: “My method consists in
allowing the interior and exterior processes to deepen each other and in summoning a feeling for the role through the physical experience of the human body”.
in continuity with, or in defiance of, the author’s original intentions. The hope is normally that these two freedoms (which, it should be said, are not equal, as the one stems from, and is contingent on, the other), will coincide; that the author’s intentions for the character whom he or she has fashioned in freedom and love, and the actor’s portrayal of this character in response to the author’s original creative act, will somehow intersect with one another. It is here, Balthasar believes, that the director or producer of the production – as “mediator” between author and actor – has an important role to play.252 For Balthasar, this relationship between the author and the actor in the actual theatre, indeed then provides a helpful ‘model’ – within the Christian worldview – for understanding and describing something of the relationship between humanity (as actors on the world stage) and God (as the playwright of the drama of existence). Balthasar argues that, in much the same manner as the playwright in the theatre, God, as the author of the play of life, does not forcefully subdue the ‘characters’ whom he brings forth in love, but allows them to come into being, and play their part on the world stage, in and with freedom.253 God’s decision to create the world and humanity, Balthasar believes, includes his decision to create finite freedom, so that he might have covenant partners for his love. God’s act of creation, he writes, can thus be seen as a “letting be”, as a “making space for otherness”.254 While God, as playwright, undoubtedly has a definitive and good plan for creation, and has endowed each actor on the world stage with a specific role or mission, human beings “are not slave to” a “Most High Master of the play”, but are invited, in freedom, to enter into God’s ‘vision’ for their individual lives and the greater world which he creates, and devotes himself to, in infinite love.255
Once again, as in the theatre, this derived freedom that is graciously granted by God to humanity does not mean that everything is permissible, and that human beings can simply do as they like, as if God was completely indifferent to the drama of human existence. For, as
252 The director, Balthasar writes, should help in bringing forth “a unified vision embracing both the drama [with
the author’s entire creative contribution] and the art of the actors [with their very different creative abilities]” … he or she is “most profoundly dependent on the two extreme elements [that needs to be integrated]; [the director’s] whole raison d’être consists in the way he [or she] mediates between them”. The director is thus responsible to (and can be seen as an extension of) the author (and his or text); while, on the other hand, also being in service of the actor, who he or she is tasked with inspiring and guiding – without ever impeding on his or her freedom – so that he or she can perform the given role as faithfully as possible. See Balthasar’s description of the role of the director in Theo-Drama, Volume I, 298-305.
253 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 277. 254 Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 55.
255 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume I, 252. Balthasar argues that in creating the world, God has devoted himself
fully to this play. Quoting Kierkegaard, he writes that God does not pursue his poetical activity as a pastime: “It is a serious matter for him: to love and to be loved is God’s passion … as if he himself were subject to the power of his passion, almost as if it were a weakness on his part, whereas in fact it is his strength, his almighty love”. See Kierkegaard, Diaries, 630-31, quoted in Theo-Drama, Volume I, 277.
mentioned above, God’s whole intention with granting freedom to human beings – a freedom which analogically shares in, and expresses something of, his own infinite freedom – is so that they would become his covenant partners in the world, and go on to perform the roles that they have been called and predestined to play; not because they have to, but as an act of loving devotion and obedience to the One who has created them, loves them, and, from the very start, only wills their ‘good’. Only in being directed towards God and his goodness, can finite freedom come to fulfilment, and can human beings become who they have been created to be. God, Balthasar affirms, “is the space within which finite freedom finds liberation”, the space within which “it can attain completion”.256 What is thus asked of humanity, as actors on the world stage, is a disponibilité to God’s will, a “readiness to step”, in freedom, into “whatever role in the play God has in mind”.257
The freedom of humanity, and the way it is related to, and intersects with, the infinite freedom of God, can then be seen to form the subject matter of much of the second volume of Balthasar’s theodramatic project. By engaging with philosophers and theologians throughout the ages, while continuously making use of the language and categories of drama and theatre, Balthasar sets out to defend his conviction that human beings really are free,258 and that this finite freedom analogically shares in,259 and finds fulfilment in, God’s freedom.260 For Balthasar, freedom is the condition that renders action possible, and allows human beings to take up and perform a certain role or mission on the world stage.261 When a person is “struck by something truly
256 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume III, 19.
257 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume II, 59; David L. Schindler, Love Alone is Credible: Hans Urs von Balthasar
as Interpreter of the Catholic Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 247.
258 Balthasar argues: “Christian theology will have to confront [contrary views] with an unalterable, twofold
postulate of its own, arising from its fundamental nature: first, that the ‘Absolute’ is free (which the philosopher can concede, in a limited sense); and second, that the ‘Absolute’ has a sovereign ability, out of its own freedom, to create and send forth finite but genuinely free beings (which is bound to cause the philosopher the greatest embarrassment), in such a way that, without vitiating the infinite nature of God’s freedom, a genuine oppositions of freedom can come about … It is one of the fundamental assertions of the Bible and of theology that such opposition exist and that it works itself out dramatically in a variety of forms”. See Balthasar, Theo-Drama,
Volume II, 190.
259 Balthasar writes: “The basic presupposition for all understanding of existing things and of Being is the
relationship between uncreated and created freedom; it is the creature’s freedom that causes him to be termed the ‘image and likeness of God’ – and this likewise is the thrust of the ‘analogia entis’”. See Theo-Drama, Volume
II, 123. See also, in this regard, Nichols, A Key to Balthasar, 60, as well as Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter, 59-
100 (a section titled ‘Freedom in the Context of the Analogia Entis’).
260 Balthasar writes: “Thus, finally, it becomes clear why finite freedom can really fulfil itself in infinite freedom
and in no other way. If letting-be belongs to the nature of infinite freedom – the Father lets the Son be consubstantial God, and so forth – there is no danger of finite freedom, which cannot fulfil itself on its own account (because it can neither go back to take possession of its origins nor can it attain its absolute goal by its own power), becoming alienated from itself in the realm of the Infinite. It can only be what it is, that is, an image of infinite freedom, imbued with a freedom of its own, by getting in tune with the (Trinitarian) ‘law’ of absolute freedom (of self-surrender): and this law is not foreign to it – for after all it is the ‘law’ of absolute being – but most authentically its own”. Theo-Drama, Volume II, 259.
significant”, he or she can either “live in response to” the “revelation” that has been received, or choose not to do so. 262 He or she can either let his or her life be “marked by the unique encounter offered”, or resist and rebel against what has been seen, heard, and experienced.263 This can be true of the ‘revelation’ received in the theatre, as described above, and also, ultimately, of the ‘revelation’ received from God – with the former, in Balthasar’s thought, often serving as a doorway to, and even expression of, the latter.
For Balthasar, it can accordingly be said that a central part of being human is to continually go “through the point of decision”, either for or against “God’s absolute freedom”.264 The problem, however, with this reality, is that humanity, draped in sinfulness and selfish desires, mostly decides against God’s will; mostly refrain from doing what they are called to do; mostly ignore the mission that has been bestowed on their lives; mostly disregard ‘the good’, and oftentimes even actively seek what is unjust and evil – which explains why the world is in such disarray.265 The lives of humanity, Edward Oakes writes, are marked by a constant “misfiring of intent”, by an “inevitable going astray”.266 We initially see this in the Genesis narrative, where Adam and Even choose to disobey God and, in doing so, reject the role they have been assigned to play, an event that sets the whole history of sinful disobedience into motion. It is also evident in the drama of Israel, who, as God’s chosen people, are called to perform God’s goodness and love to all the nations, but continually fails to do so.267 Even Paul, while recognising the folly of rebellion against God, would come to write: “What I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate doing, that is what I end up doing” (Rm 7:15). This statement shows how human freedom that
262 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume II, 30-31. 263 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume II, 31.
264 Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume II, 190; and Theo-Drama, Volume III, 36, where he writes: “Man can freely
choose which freedom he prefers. He can choose the freedom of being his own origin, in which case he must pay the price of never being able to find any sufficient reason or satisfying goal for this self-manufactured freedom but must content himself with the exercise of his autonomy; or he can choose the freedom of continually acknowledging his indebtedness, in ever new ways, to absolute freedom”.
265 Balthasar quotes Chesterton, for whom, he writes, the insight that “God freely created the world and endowed
it with freedom”, formed the turning point in his conversion to Christianity – saying: “God has written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he has planned as perfect, but which necessarily had been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it”. Theo-Drama, Volume II, 190; Gilbert, K. Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy,’ in Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume I (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 281-2. See also McIntosh, ‘Christology,’ 35, where he describes Balthasar’s understanding of human sin (and its consequences) as follows: “Sin had deafened humanity to the calling of God”; humankind “no longer hears its true calling, no longer offers itself and the world into the loving hands of the Creator … the space, the ‘room’, which God has made for the creature to respond to divine life was either collapsed into idolatrous creaturely self- assertion or else distorted into an angry distance of fearful and bitter alienation”.
266 See Oakes, Pattern of Redemption, 251. See also Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 11 where he speaks of
sin as “a titanic rejection on man’s part” of God’s will; and his comprehensive discussion of ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ in
Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 160-201.
267 Cf. Balthasar, Theo-Drama, Volume III, 177; and especially then Theo-Drama, Volume IV, 183-191, where he
quotes a passage from Clive S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain (London: Collins, 1990), dealing with how sin enters the world drama.
“does not attain the goal God has set out for it”, ironically becomes an enslavement, a ‘prison of unwillingness’.268
When looking at the drama of the history of the world, and the drama of each of our own lives, it is indeed clear that there is a disparity between what we, as human beings, are called to do, and what we end up doing; between the roles that we are given to play, and the lives we ultimately lead.269 This disparity, Balthasar writes, is also often found in the actual theatre, where it is seen how the actor ignores, or even refuses to give him- or herself over to, his or her assigned role, thereby defying the intentions of the author. It is then amidst, and because of, this reality, Balthasar asserts, that God, as the author of the ‘drama of existence’, decided