Theological Aesthetics after von Balthasar

James Fodor, Stan Hawkins, Oleg V. Bychkov, James Fodor, Oleg V. Bychkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138259584
• eBook ISBN: 9781317011347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This collection of essays by distinguished authors explores the present-day field of theological aesthetics: from von Balthasar's contribution and parallel developments to correctives and alternatives to his approach. A tribute to von Balthasar's own project expands into a dialogue with ancient and medieval traditions in search of revelatory aesthetics. The contributors outline challenges to his approach (including Protestant perspectives) and introduce new ways of viewing the field of theological aesthetics, which ultimately opens up to the idea of concrete cultural contexts and practical human needs determining the use of the arts and aesthetic sensibilities in theology.

PART I
The Legacy of von BalthasarSection A
The Trilogy

Chapter 1

Hans Urs von Balthasar: Beauty as a Gateway to Love

Francesca Aran Murphy

Joseph Ratzinger notes that, although “Hans Urs von Balthasar built his magnum opus of theological aesthetics” on the “insight” that “Being overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction,” nonetheless, “his fundamental approach, which is actually the essential theme of the whole work, has not been widely accepted. Of course, this is not only and not … principally a problem for theology; rather, it is also a problem for pastoral ministry, which must arrange for people to encounter the beauty of faith.”1 The fact that von Balthasar’s “fundamental approach” has yet to bear fruit is partly the responsibility of von Balthasarians themselves, since we have all too often separated his aesthetics from his theology as a whole. Over the past few decades, ‘theological aesthetics’ has earned a place at the table of what Francis Martin once called “the religious studies business.” Quite literally ‘earned’: a friend remarked to me that his Dean told him he liked him teaching theological aesthetics because it covered two niche markets. The point of this paper is to indicate that von Balthasar had no interest at all in theological aesthetics for its own sake. He was neither concerned about the relation between artefacts and theology, nor determined to give capital ‘B’ Beauty a special place in theology. His trilogy begins with aesthetics because that enabled him to make it evident that love is the very heart of both God and the world. Hans Urs von Balthasar was hardly a philistine. Although his grasp of the distinction between England and Scotland may not be all that it might have been, von Balthasar is a brilliant interpreter of the great nineteenth-century British authors like Gerard Manley Hopkins and George MacDonald. His love of Mozart is well known. French literary criticism would be the poorer without his study of Georges Bernanos, with its sidelights on Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy. His readings of Homer, the Greek tragedians and Virgil make the fifth volume of The Glory of the Lord especially rewarding, as his interpretations of modern theatre do for the first volume of the Theo-Drama. His reflections on Beauty have deepened and renewed a tradition of thought about aesthetics which runs from Plotinus through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Hegel. But, as this paper argues, this wealth of insight can be misleading if it is taken as a contribution to ‘theological aesthetics.’ For von Balthasar, aesthetic experience is a gateway to an agapic theology.

1. An Historical Context for von Balthasar’s Work

There is a recipe for lemon cake which prescribes pronging the newly baked cake with a small fork, to make holes to pour the lemon juice and honey into. This tastes much nicer than lemon cake with lemon icing. Von Balthasar expects aesthetics to perforate theology, and not simply to ice it. What he is looking for is an overall perforation, so that the angle of beauty is present in however one approaches truth, goodness, and all else. He mentions three aspects of beauty dug up by modern Hellenophile aestheticians: appearance, or epiphania, production, or poiesis, and charis, or grace.2 Something is produced, it takes on a sensuous appearance to us, and its smile is the manifestation not merely of a charming Kore, but of divine grace. This aesthetic perforation cuts through von Balthasar’s trilogy, the theo-drama and theo-logic as much as The Glory of the Lord. It creates a structural analogy through which to grasp the quixotic content of the Christian creeds. Catholics from Augustine to Aquinas to the moderns have employed analogy as a way of speaking cogently about the Trinity. Von Balthasar is no different: his analogue is aesthetic.

A perforation is an angle on something, a way of framing a question. But in itself the structure is contentless: beauty is not the mixture which saturates the cake. Von Balthasar began his Theo-Logic by asking whether “love might not be the hidden ground underlying the transcendentals and their circumincessive relation.”3 In the 1940s, Karl Barth challenged von Balthasar to make Catholic theology speak about existence more existentially, that is, more Christocentrically. The last volumes of the Theo-Logic, written 30 years later affirm that “if the self-giving of the Father to the Son, and of both to the Spirit corresponds … to God’s intimate essence, this … can itself be … only love.”4 For von Balthasar, the ground of being is love. He turns aside from the debate between the (Catholic) defenders of the analogy of being and the (Barthian) proponents of an analogia fidei to speak of an analogy of love.

The opening pages of von Balthasar’s Truth of the World, published in 1947, enter the conversation between Neo-Scholasticism and the Nouvelle théologie, which was then in full spat. Von Balthasar’s introductory gambit, with remarks on the overlapping of nature and grace, and the impossibility of a real life separation between reason and faith,5 shows the hand of his teacher, Henri de Lubac. The book, which became the first volume of von Balthasar’s Theo-Logic, deprecates the totalizing ambitions of the human desire to know. The Neo-Thomism of the time was as much von Balthasar’s target as Hegel or German Idealism.

Such rationalistic versions of Thomism were disputed at the time by Etienne Gilson, who presented Thomas Aquinas as having created a Christian philosophy grounded in revealed knowledge of God. Gilson argued that Thomas’ metaphysics is realist because it is faith-based. In 1948, he published L’être et l’essence in which he contends that the separation of faith and reason in early modern Scholasticism lies behind Suarez’ rejection of the real distinction between essence and existence, which, in turn, is interlocked with the shift away from realism in the conceptualisms of Leibniz, Kant and Hegel. The issue between Gilson and his opponents was whether, as the Neo-Scholastics had it, philosophy should be a separate rational foundation for theology, beginning from reason and moving on to faith, thus keeping philosophy and theology distinct, or, as Gilson argued, the place of philosophy is within theology, for starting from faith and moving thence to philosophy enables one to think more cogently, more persuasively and, above all, more realistically. His opinion was that, so far as reason keeps its distance from faith, it is bound away from reasonability and realism, and toward rationalism and conceptualism. Standing outside and against that argument was Barth, who deprecated the rationalist foundationalism of Neo-Scholastic Thomism, without proposing, as Gilson did, that faith makes us better and more realistic philosophers.

At the time, Gilson’s allies tended to be Augustinians, like de Lubac, rather than Thomists. More recently, with this ancient debate clearly in view, the ‘Bonaventurian’ Joseph Ratzinger weighed in against both the Neo-Thomist and the Barthian alternatives: “It is my view,” he wrote in Truth and Tolerance, “that the neoscholastic rationalism that was trying to reconstruct the praeambula fidei, the approach to faith, with pure rational certainty, by means of rational argument that was strictly independent of faith, has failed; and it cannot be otherwise for any such attempts to do that kind of thing. Karl Barth was right when he rejected philosophy as a basis for faith that was independent of faith itself; for in that case, our faith would in the end be based on changing philosophical theories. Yet Barth was mistaken in declaring faith on that account to be a sheer paradox, which can only ever exist contrary to reason and quite independent of it. By no means the least important practical function of faith is to offer healing for the reason as reason, not to overpower it or to remain outside it, but in fact to bring it to itself again.”6 The Thomistic Gilson and the (on Ratzinger’s reading) Tertullianesque Barth have at least one thing in common, a focus on the unique existent. Barth’s Christocentrism comes down to an insistence that God’s action is particular, not general; Gilson’s existentialism comes down to an insistence upon the empirical existent whose reality precedes and supersedes all conceptual generalizations about capital ‘B’ Being.

In the one letter I have from him, von Balthasar stated that Gilson was his guide in interpreting Saint Thomas. He must have led him in much else, for the lineage of the conceptualist or ‘essentialist’ philosophers given in L’être et l’essence is expansively reproduced in the fifth volume of The Glory of the Lord.7 Truth of the World draws on beauty to open a case for the existential Thomist view of the priority of faith over reasoning, and for a de Lubacian omnipresence of grace.

a. Why Should Beginning from Beauty Help One See Theology is Founded in Faith?

The persistent negativity of early twentieth-century scholastic textbooks seems a probable source of von Balthasar’s comment that “Systems of thought that do nothing but polemically contrast their differences are dispiriting tokens of narrow-mindedness:” the alternative which he proposes to theological systems written against something is an aesthetic grounding in a “more encompassing totality.”8 Despite being avowedly ‘agin’ every modern philosopher since Descartes, NeoScholasticism was itself weighted toward intellectualism or conceptualism by dint of the foundational value that it set on rationality. Neo-Scholasticism practically made rationality a criterion for reality, rather than an upshot of it. Von Balthasar counters this intellectualist or conceptualist bias by claiming that “Beauty is the aspect of truth that cannot be fit into any definition.”9 Beauty gives truth its gravitational pull into reality because it doesn’t “fit” a logical schema. When we ask how things “signify” or mean, the analogy of the work of art is a barrier to an epistemology that translates individual existents into their general concepts, because an artistic gestalt is incommutably singular.10 As an incorrigibly unique and individual existent, it can’t be translated into a general concept, and then divorced from reality. Singular things produce images (or patterns of sense perception) that express something which von Balthasar calls “the whole.” What the image signifies is not another image or copy of itself, but something “unimaged:” if you ask “what makes an image signify,” you come down to its raw self-communication.11 Von Balthasar calls this “expression,” drawing on an aesthetic register to distinguish the image or “form of expression” from the power of expression. He is restating the “real distinction” between essence and existence in aesthetic terms. The “essence” would then be the intrinsic meaning of the art work, the “existence” its mysterious energy of expressiveness. The “whole” is being, and the “mysterious more” behind the expressive forms it creates is existence, giving “the urge to know” a “counterweight” which is “an indispensable component of the ethos of knowledge.”12 Knowledge is thus not merely the product of our conforming our mind to a reality but a “gift:” “because of beauty,” von Balthasar says, “truth is always intrinsically a matter of grace. Something of this grace surrounds every truth insofar as it is an original disclosure of being. It is lacking to purely logical truth, which has been … siphoned off from being … And … because there is eternally more in the depths of being and truth than we have grasped, faith has to be an immanent property of all knowing.”13

b. Evidence or Intuition?

Following the Augustinian de Lubac, von Balthasar aims to balance the claims of evidence, compilation and contemplation: the best way to “receive reality,” he says, is by a “reciprocal reflection” of “concept and intuition.”14 The paradigm for knowledge in Truth of the World is language: but is von Balthasar thinking of “reading the world like a book,” or is he imagining knowledge as connecting up with the Author’s personal exuberance? One side of von Balthasar’s real distinction are the signs or expressive forms—the ‘essences.’ The other side—the “power of expression” or “mysterious more” or ‘Being’—is a sort of personal exuberance....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• The Legacy of von Balthasar
• Von Balthasar: Some Criticisms
• Outside von Balthasar: The Spectrum of Theological Aestetics
• Index