The Century's Greatest Theologian

This beautifully produced book-the cost in copyright of reproducing so much of Eliot's poetry (alongside fragments from Virgil, Pascal, Goethe, Newman, Hopkins, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Chesterton) in the chapter headings must alone be staggering!-is the most distinguished contribution any Anglophone scholar has made to the study of the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Its author, Professor Edward Oakes, S.J. of New York University, appears to be possessed of all the qualities-a literary background in German studies, facility with the conceptual repertoire of philosophy and theology and an elegant prose style, which could equip him for doing justice to this figure whom I do not hesitate to say Church history will recognize as the twentieth century's outstanding Catholic thinker. Without any loss of nuance Oakes succeeds in rendering Balthasar's project intelligible to the uninitiated reader, rather than forcing him to jump the linguistic hurdles which make the consumption of so many articles on Balthasar unpalatable to all but the converted. This book, I predict, will win for Balthasar's theology a far wider audience than the devotees of Communio to which hitherto (at any rate in England) it has been restricted. This is, then, for Catholic theology a publishing event.

So what is it all about? Before the Second Vatican Council, Balthasar was known, if at all, as a somewhat eclectic writer who had written learnedly but to no very consistent purpose on a variety of authors and themes, from the Greek Fathers to modern Catholic novelists, from German philosophy to the Holy Trinity. Critical both of Neo-Scholasticism and of the inadequation to mission of a sometimes ossified Church structure, he evidently belonged, with such figures as Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, members of the Society of Jesus he himself had left, to that stable praised or stigmatized in the 1950s as "la nouvelle théologie."

But in the last thirty years of his life (he died in 1988, shortly before receiving the cardinalatial insignia from the pope), he published the most amazing trilogy of works-a theological aesthetics, a theological dramatics, and a theological logic, each in multiple volumes of which only the prolegomena to the logic was the product of his pre-maturity. His reputation underwent immediate revision: here was one of the greatest Catholic theologians of this, or any, century. At the same time, Balthasar's reaction to the runaway horse of the post-Conciliar "renewal" led him to become the prime mover in the founding of the theological journal Communio whose aim was to maintain the thrust of the best writing from before the Council over against the liberal-radical accommodation to world culture, in a spirit of hospitality to pluralism, represented by Communio's rival and predecessor, Concilium. It is the nexus of issues involved in this quarrel that makes many progressive theologians today suspicious of a too evident sympathy for Balthasarianism.

No book could better disarm so hostile a readership than Fr. Oakes' humane and civilized study. Taking his cue from a remark of Balthasar's about the early Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor, Oakes treats Balthasar's theology as a building constructed on constellations of pillars. Granted that no one study could encompass so complex, wide-ranging and polylogous an oeuvre, at least one may have a guided tour of the main features. Oakes proves himself a Cicerone of rare quality as he invites us not only to admire from without, but to enter.

Avoiding hermetic theological language, he stoops to technicality (with apologies to the reader) only in the crucial opening chapter, on the doctrine of analogy, and Balthasar's debt to the Polish-German metaphysician Erich Przywara. Though Balthasar's theology is much less determined by a subjacent philosophy than Rahner's-and more determined, correspondingly, by the content of revelation itself in its beauty (aesthetics), goodness (dramatics), and truth (logic), this many-vistaed approach road is nonetheless of crucial importance for Balthasar's work. Oakes stresses how Balthasar made the mystical turn Pryzwara gave to the idea of analogia entis his own, construing it as an invitation to ever-fuller self-surrender to God's ever-greater reality.

Oakes turns next to three of Balthasar's chief sources-and inspirations: Karl Barth, the Neo-Orthodox Protestant theologian whose theology Balthasar praised for its combination of passion with objectivity; a bevy of German philosophers and poets from Goethe to Heidegger-seen as sensitive barometers of the swift-changing climate of modern European civilization; and the Church Fathers, whose integration of theology and spirituality Balthasar set himself to reproduce. Oakes has his own perfectly legitimate ways of drawing out what is significant in Balthasar's use of these masters. Especially well argued and copiously illustrated from are a number of lesser known and still untranslated articles which afford Oakes the opportunity to bring new materials into the arena of discussion.

From his dialogue with Barth, Balthasar worked out his notion of the creature as God's "counterpart" (rather than contradiction), and, following from this, hit upon the key metaphor of fructification for what grace gives to a nature that is no mere passivity, but must open itself in response to God. From the literary monuments of German culture from the Enlightenment onwards, Balthasar drew the lesson, in Oakes' words that:

the refusal to make the (analogical) distinction between God and the world. . . results in either an attempt to effect a complete transfiguration of the world and a divinization of the earth (Marx) or a pure collapse into nothingness and nihilistic despair (Nietzsche).

The heart of this introduction, however, is its account of Balthasar's trilogy with its exhibition of the specifically Christian revealed and salvific self-manifestation of those three "transcendental"-that is, all-pervasive-features of reality at large: the beautiful, the good, and the true, in the form of the endless Glory, superlative Drama, and infinitely spacious Truth of the God of Bible and Tradition. As I am myself discovering, it is no easy matter to summarize this fifteen volume work, and, probably very sensibly, Oakes does not purport to do so. Instead he offers us-in the musical metaphor whose salience in Balthasar's work he does much to bring out-an overture where all the principal themes are sounded though not (inevitably) developed.

Three chapters on Herrlichkeit explain how a theology indebted to the beauty of God's self-revelation can heal the hypertrophied activism and desiccated academicism of modern theological culture (vol. I); how it must work to overcome the age-long disassociation of sensibility separating scientific from devotional theology (vols. II-III), and the treasury of Being from its human steward (vols. IV-V); how it will show the divine Icon, Jesus Christ, as the "absolute singularity" who both fulfills the Old Testament retroactively, and by the fullness of his form of life confers meaning proactively on ourselves (vols. VI-VII).

Theodramatik, with its five volumes to Herrlichkeit's seven also merits a trio of chapters-rightly, for it is the center of Balthasar's work. Theological aesthetics lays out the beauty shown forth in the art of God, but that art is essentially narrative in character. Hence only a theological dramatics, which explores the interplay of divine and human agency can do justice to the saving revelation whose truth-claims a theological logic, finally, will exhibit to our gaze.

Like Balthasar himself, Oakes sets out first, the dramatis personae the infinitely free God, and finitely free humanity, whose conflictual relations are to be mediated (the core of the doctrine of predestination) by the drama of Christ; secondly, the actual plot of theodrama, as Scripture attests it-and here Oakes makes much use of Balthasar's essay Mysterium Paschale for his account of the Descent of Christ into Hell, the key event to Balthasar's mind, of that "Big Bang" which was the divine reversal, in the Resurrection, of the collapsed state of divine-human relations as summed up in the Crucifixion; and thirdly, the human "Yes" to this divine initiative represented by our Lady and the Church.

Oakes weaves in threads from one or two of Balthasar's other writings on the Church to enrich the texture. Here we have an ecclesiology in which a true feminism, rooted in the all-encompassing mystery of Mary, sits happily with an authentic masculine portrayal of the primatial guardians symbolized in Peter, while office and action (Petrine once again) are never simply counterposed to the Johannine qualities of contemplation and love. Balthasar's fusion of soteriology and eschatology in volumes IV and V of Theodrama Oakes leaves largely to his conclusion where he must come to terms with the disputed question of Balthasar's universalism: Shall all be saved?

But first there is the little matter of the theological logic to be dealt with-in a relatively brief chapter which largely confines its discussion of these three volumes to their doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This is the only unsatisfactory portion of this splendid work, inasmuch as it does not really address the central issue of Theologik-how ever could divine Truth express itself (in the Incarnation of the Logos and the exegesis performed by the Spirit) in human truths? Still, we can be thankful for what Oakes does furnish: a measured exposition of Balthasar's daring theological discourse to the effect that not only is the divine essence freedom: the divine persons too are infinitely free vis-a-vis each other.

And if the mind of the Church must sift this claim, and the consequences Balthasar draws from it, the same is true of his version of the Last Things, fed as this was by the mystical experience of his collaboratrix, Adrienne von Speyr. It is a sign of Edward Oakes' mastery of his material that, in these controversial areas we feel neither that we are being stampeded into premature agreement with Balthasar nor offered some purely anodyne textbook account which would deprive his thought of its native urgency.

This last is yet more evidence, if any were needed, of how sure-footed this student of Balthasar is, and, in the terms of Oakes' preface and Balthasar's Epilog, how sure his guide through the "antechamber," across the "threshold," into the "cathedral" of Balthasarian theology.