A Generous Symphony

Hans Urs von Balthasar's Literary Revelations

Christopher D. Denny

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781451487954
• eBook ISBN: 9781506418933
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the preeminent theologians of Roman Catholic theology in the modern era, constructed a theological world suffused by the literary, a vision carried across over 16 volumes of his magnum opus. A Generous Symphony offers a balanced appraisal of Balthasar's literary achievement and explicates Balthasar's literary criticism as a distinctive theology of revelation, which offers possibilities for understanding how divine presence may be manifested outside the canonical boundaries of Christian tradition. The structure of A Generous Symphony is a chronological presentation of the Balthasarian canon of imaginative literature, which allows readers to see how social and historical interests guide Balthasar's readings in the pre-Christian, medieval, and modern eras. While other books have examined the systematic theology of Balthasar, this book will examine the important question of how students of literature, like Balthasar, can be transformed into theologians by attending to the implicit presence of Christ in what Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "As kingfishers catch fire..." called "the ten thousand places." Balthasar's deep investment in the uniqueness of Christian revelation is underlined, while, at the same time, his aesthetic sympathies cause him to invest literature with 'quasi-sacramental' status.

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Post-Christendom

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The Rise of Promethean Salvation in German Romanticism

Post-Christendom is not a return to an Edenic era of pre-Christendom, just as postmodernity is not a return to a sociopolitical world reminiscent of pre-modernity. The collapse of medieval Catholicism unleashed a flood of cultural memories and aesthetic fragments that continued to manifest themselves in new and subterranean guises in European vernacular literature. Whereas the polytheistic pre-Christian Mediterranean world, however, was content to accept an irreducible ontological pluralism at the core of reality, the era of post-Christendom inherited Christianity’s logocentric ambition to explain the universe with reference to a single overarching principle.^[1] Christianity interprets the world as the manifestation of the Trinitarian God’s deliberate creative activity, and asserts that divine providence sustains creation in being. Various post-Christian interpretations of the cosmos posit different originating principles to explain the existence of the world in which we live. Such contrasting worldviews are irreconcilable with each other and are incapable of accepting other worldviews without adapting them in some manner to preserve intellectual and historical consistency. Thus, some early Christians sought to interpret the achievements of Greek philosophy as part of a supposed theft of knowledge from ancient Israel, or as a divinely planned preparation for the later acceptance of the gospel.^[2]

Philosophers and theologians use the word “reduction” to describe these strategies of circumscription in past and present intellectual history. For one such example of a reduction, one can note how at the end of his treatise On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, the thirteenth-century scholastic Bonaventure summarized his work: “[I]t is evident how the manifold wisdom of God, which is clearly revealed in sacred Scripture, lies hidden in all knowledge and in all nature. It is clear also how all divisions of knowledge are servants of theology, and it is for this reason that theology makes use of illustrations and terms pertaining to every branch of knowledge.”^[3] For Bonaventure, all knowing is subsumed within theology, which employs other disciplines as a means of articulating its own conclusions. In arguing for such an integration, Bonaventure attacked the positions of those of his colleagues at the University of Paris who, following what they understood to be the philosophy of Averroës (1126–98), assumed an irreducible pluralism of separated truths across intellectual disciplines, promoting a position that came to be known as the theory of “double truth.”^[4] For Bonaventure, the unity of human knowledge is a consequence of the unity of God, as the “Father of lights” is the single source from which all truth radiates. Because God is “hidden” in all things, all branches of knowledge are properly theological when viewed with respect to their ultimate divine frame of reference.^[5]

In the introduction to this book, I sketched the development of a sacralized conception of literature during the Romantic period, illustrated in the thought of Friedrich Schelling. I have also noted how Balthasar attempted to argue against philosophical reductions of literature, exemplified in Plato’s dialogues. In this chapter, I will delve into the masterworks of German Romantic literature that influenced Balthasar so powerfully, in order to explain Balthasar’s warning about the Siren-like potential of the Goethezeit as it attempted to reduce Christianity within its own literary creations. One of the major paradoxes of Balthasar’s intellectual world is that he, a self-described Germanist, identified Goethe’s works as his aesthetic and philosophical point of departure, but he also charged both Goethe and German Idealism with fostering an anthropocentric “Prometheus principle.” This principle attempts to reduce Christianity’s theocentric worldview to an anthropocentric framework, even as Goethe skillfully incorporates mythological themes into his dramas in such a way that this anthropocentrism is deflected and qualified.^[6]

A Camouflaged Anthropocentrism in Goethe’s Prometheus Fragment

With some philosophies of history, a dramatic framework suggests itself easily. In the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico described history as the unfolding of a recurring pattern transcending mere human intentions, one in which human civilization repeatedly reverts to poetic beginnings. Writing against the backdrop of World War I, Oswald Spengler depicted history as a series of self-contained tragedies culminating in the Faustian civilization of the West.^[7] But during Balthasar’s lifetime, these older philosophies of history were under assault from those that worked from a non-dramatic framework. Particularly influential in this development was the thinking of Balthasar’s colleague Karl Jaspers, who, like Balthasar and Karl Barth, had come to the University of Basel from Germany. Jaspers took up a post as professor of philosophy at Basel, which he held from 1948 to 1961. Jaspers’s 1949 book, The Origin and Goal of History, interprets the shift in humanity’s worldview from a mythical worldview to a philosophical one, during the period from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, as an “axial age.”^[8] Regardless of whether one applauds or denounces the anthropological effects of this shift (Balthasar finds cause for both reactions), this historical movement is a given that destroys a purely mythological and cyclic view of history. Humans and their logoi now are responsible for a demythologized world.

Yet, this logocentric move can be a dangerous one if it lurches into a rationalism that ignores the essential human ties to the body, to image, and to fantasy. Balthasar refers to this temptation as the “Promethean urge [Drang],” and he agrees with Karl Marx that such an attempted move away from the body toward spirit would alienate human beings from their very selves.^[9] Balthasar’s interest in Prometheus dated back to the 1930s. In the first volume of his Apocalypse of the German Soul trilogy, which was republished in 1947 with the simple title Prometheus, Balthasar examines how Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Hegel, Hölderlin, and Hebbel appropriate a “Prometheus Principle” in different ways within their works. According to Balthasar, these late-eighteenth- and early–nineteenth-century writers use Prometheus to promote an anthropology in which the human being stands as a middle point between God and the world.^[10] In the final volume of Apocalypse of the German Soul, which dealt with the religious implications of nineteenth-century German idealism from Goethe to Nietzsche, Balthasar attempts to turn the tables on Enlightenment historiography. “The ‘contradiction’ of the whole dialectic of idealism,” Balthasar writes, “like the ‘contradiction’ between nature and spirit, is mystically and in concrete terms the intersection of the beams. . . . Christ gives the world its form and its law, while he lives it in the cross, life the cross vividly squeezes out. Here also for that reason ‘Prometheus Bound’ and ‘Dionysus crucified’ find their enlightenment.”^[11]

Georges de Schrijver summarizes Apokalypse’s interpretation of Prometheus: “Prometheus is the symbol of the exaltation of the self: in affirming itself to itself, the transcendental subject ascends to the level o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Ded
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Theology of Literature as Christian Revelation
• A Literary-Historical Reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar and His Sources
• Pre-Christendom
• Christendom
• Post-Christendom
• Conclusion: Theological Appropriation of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Literary Criticism
• Works by Hans Urs von Balthasar
• Bibliography
• Index