Exorcising Philosophical Modernity

Cyril O’Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity

Philip John Paul Gonzales

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781498297127
  9781498297141
• eBook ISBN:
  9781498297134
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What should Christian discourse look like after philosophical modernity? In one manner or another the essays in this volume seek to confront and intellectually exorcise the prevailing elements of philosophical modernity, which are inherently transgressive disfigurations and refigurations of the Christian story of creation, sin, and redemption. To enact these various forms and styles of Christian intellectual exorcism the essays in this volume make appeal to, and converse with, the magisterial corpus of Cyril O'Regan. The themes of the essays center around the gnostic return in modernity, apocalyptic theology, and the question of the bounds and borders of Christian orthodoxy. Along the way diverse figures are treated such as: Hegel, Shakespeare, von Balthasar, Przywara, Ricouer, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, and Kristeva. Exorcising Philosophical Modernity: Cyril O'Regan and Christian Discourse after Modernity is a veritable feast of post-modern Christian thought.

Apocalypse and the Land of Counterfeits

5

The Apocalypse of the Modern Soul

Cyril O’Regan’s Reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar

D. C. Schindler

The John Paul II Institute

Washington, DC

Hans Urs von Balthasar opens his first major publication, The Apocalypse of the German Soul (= Apokalypse), with the following powerful lines: “Apo-kalypsis means unveiling, which means in turn the same thing as making manifest [Offenbarung]: namely, revelatio. But it is the external that lies open; the internal remains veiled. This internal reality is the soul.”318 He goes on to explain, in the introduction, what we might call his methodological principles for this very unusual work, principles that place him outside any of the customary disciplinary boundaries. Although his understanding of the nature of his work was still somewhat raw in this first text and in need of maturation, it is nevertheless true that, as he said elsewhere, the beginning is determinative for everything that follows:319 Balthasar certainly deepened and expanded his point of origin, but in fact his work always sprung from this unique inter-disciplinary “space,” which has proven to be a decisive mark of his thought, and a point of difficulty for more conventional theologians. Balthasar receives Christianity, not simply as something revealed, but as revelation.

Given that it is distinctively characteristic of his work, however, one might be surprised at how little attention has been given to the peculiarity of Balthasar’s way of approaching God’s revelation in the reception of his theology, apart from incidental remarks on Balthasar’s penchant for literature, or his interest in the saints as theological sources. It is one of Cyril O’Regan’s great achievements to have foregrounded Balthasar’s “style” specifically as a theological theme.320 His branding of Balthasar as a paradigmatically “apocalyptic” theologian may seem, on first hearing, a rather eccentric appellation, but O’Regan shows, quite compellingly, not only that the term captures what is distinctive in Balthasar’s approach, but that it in fact gives expression to the very substance of his thought, which is what determines that approach. Even more, O’Regan shows that Balthasar’s apocalyptic is not a mere idiosyncrasy but represents instead an essentially Christian way of receiving and interpreting Christian faith. In making this essentially Christian character clear, finally, O’Regan brings to light (apo-kalypsis) the specifically Gnostic counterfeits to Christianity that populate the modern (and postmodern) era, as various abstractions of content from the concreteness of revelation. While “apocalyptic theology” may appear to be largely a “sideshow” in the contemporary scene, O’Regan makes a strong case, in his interpretation of Hans Urs von Balthasar, that all genuine Christian theology is ultimately apocalyptic, properly understood; he thus discovers a key that helps bring to light, not just the distinctiveness of Balthasar, but in fact the profound unity of the great Christian tradition, in all of its irreducible diversity.

In the following essay, we will first very briefly present Balthasar’s own articulation of his approach in Apokalypse, attempting to set into relief the uniqueness of his methodological principles. Then we will distill at greater length some of the basic features of Balthasar’s “style” such as O’Regan interprets it, above all in his most recent work The Anatomy of Misremembering. It will become clear how O’Regan’s characterizing of Balthasar as “apocalyptic” allows us to see an essential continuity between the early and later work, which might otherwise remain obscure. Catching sight of this continuity not only sheds light on the nature of Balthasar’s first trilogy, but at the same time it deepens our appreciation of his later work, especially the way in which it presents a fidelity to Christ that opens to a catholic vision of the whole of reality. Finally, we will see how Balthasar’s distinctive “style” sets into uncommonly sharp relief the shortcomings of the great modern pretension to such a “catholic” vision in G. W. F. Hegel. O’Regan doubtless will never be surpassed in the sophistication and breadth of his locating of Balthasar in terms of intellectual history, assessing the predecessors, rivals, and heirs of both Balthasar and his interlocutors. We will not pass judgment on any of this—which would lie quite beyond our competence—but will aim instead to distill the basic features of Balthasar’s “theological style,” as O’Regan has brought it to light.

I

Balthasar explains at the outset of Apokalypse that his unusual formulation, “apocalypse of the soul,” is “simply a concrete way of saying ‘eschatology.’”321 What he means by this term is the traditional branch of theology concerned with the “eschaton,” the “last things:” heaven and hell, man’s ultimate destination, final judgment, the nature of the “visio beatifica,” and so forth. But when Balthasar says his expression represents a “concrete” interpretation of the last things, there is much more going on here than a question of rhetorical presentation. As he goes on to explain, his approach in this book differs from traditional eschatology in a number of important respects. First of all, he means “eschatology” not only in its specifically religious sense, but also in a more general sense. While the word is typically used to indicate the study of representations of heaven and hell, the church’s doctrine concerning the afterworld, and the like, one may also interpret the word etymologically, and consider its sense, so to speak, “from below.” In this case, Balthasar explains, it indicates a study of what is ultimate, the most fundamental ground, the furthest horizon, the highest reference point, of meaning simply. It is this sense that governs Balthasar’s approach in this book. Now, in the etymological sense of the word, we may say that there is a certain “eschaton” in every academic discipline, which grounds that discipline in its distinctiveness and so defines its limits. But all of these “relative eschata,” as Balthasar puts it, point to what is “ultimate and absolute, just as every eschatology points back to a Logos of the eternal eschaton.”322 It may seem, at first, that ultimate meaning would be the business of philosophy, whose object, after all, is “being qua being,” extra qua non, and this judgment would in a certain respect be valid. But Balthasar proposes that there is a more proper approach to ultimate meaning, which in some sense coincides with philosophy, but not completely, and it is this approach that he adopts: “If we understand eschatology as ‘apocalypse of the soul,’ or in other words as a penetrating through to the most concrete reality of all . . . then such an eschatology will use philosophy as a means, without thus surrendering the other two realms that aim in a privileged way at the unveiling of the concrete: theology, as discourse concerning the absolutely unique God, who addresses himself only to this man, not to ‘essence’ [Wesen] or ‘existence’ [Existenz]—and art, insofar as it, too, has as its sole theme to show forth what is most universal precisely in the unrepeatable moment.”323

Note that Balthasar envisions, here, a kind of “meta-discipline,” which configures itself in the triad of philosophy, theology, and art (clearly invoking Hegel’s articulation of absolute spirit as art, religion, and philosophy: more on this anon).324 As we will see, one of the significant ways he deepens this point of origin as his thought matures is, most basically, to recognize that theology is not just a discourse that may be juxtaposed with the others, relative to a meta-discourse, but is rather itself the meta-discourse, which comprehends the others in a certain sense, but only as simultaneously liberating them into their own absolute integrity. Already in this early work, however, Balthasar reveals a concern not to render any of these finally obsolete, as Hegel could not avoid doing himself. Without getting into the details of Balthasar’s difference from Hegel just yet, the principal point we wish to highlight here is the emphasis Balthasar lays on the “allekonkreteste Wirklichkeit.”325 It is just this that prevents him from identifying escha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Ghosts of the Gnostic Present
• Apocalypse and the Land of Counterfeits