Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought
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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought

Jennifer Newsome Martin

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Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought

Jennifer Newsome Martin

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In Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought, Jennifer Newsome Martin offers the first systematic treatment and evaluation of the Swiss Catholic theologian's complex relation to modern speculative Russian religious philosophy. Her constructive analysis proceeds through Balthasar's critical reception of Vladimir Soloviev, Nicholai Berdyaev, and Sergei Bulgakov with respect to theological aesthetics, myth, eschatology, and Trinitarian discourse and examines how Balthasar adjudicates both the possibilities and the limits of theological appropriation, especially considering the degree to which these Russian thinkers have been influenced by German Idealism and Romanticism.

Martin argues that Balthasar's creative reception and modulation of the thought of these Russian philosophers is indicative of a broad speculative tendency in his work that deserves further attention. In this respect, Martin consciously challenges the prevailing view of Balthasar as a fundamentally conservative or nostalgic thinker. In her discussion of the relation between tradition and theological speculation, Martin also draws upon the understudied relation between Balthasar and F. W. J. Schelling, especially as Schelling's form of Idealism was passed down through the Russian thinkers. In doing so, she persuasively recasts Balthasar as an ecumenical, creatively anti-nostalgic theologian hospitable to the richness of contributions from extra-magisterial and non-Catholic sources.

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CHAPTER 1
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“DER SEELEN WUNDERLICHES BERGWERK”
On the Subterranean and the Speculative
Rainer Maria Rilke’s great mythological poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” from which this chapter’s title is drawn, conjures a ghostly scene of the abortive attempt to lead Eurydice through the liminal space between the underworld and the world of the living. As the myth goes, Orpheus cannot contain himself and casts a forbidden backward glance at the two “light-footed” travelers tracking him, and his beloved Eurydice must return with Hermes to Hades.1 The following conjugation of Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) with several, far from homogenous figures of the nineteenth-century Orthodox Christian “Russian school,” specifically Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), and Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), and their primary German Romantic interlocutor, F. W. J. Schelling (1775–1854), constitutes a subterranean excavation of its own, albeit with hopes of greater success.2
Resonant with Rilke’s poetic rendering of the Orpheus myth, this book is likewise an excavation requiring not only a certain degree of coaxing in order to draw out Balthasar’s un- or underacknowledged lines of pedigree from these theologians of the Russian diaspora, but also a delicacy in negotiating instances of the shadowy “in-between,” whether between form and content, finite and infinite, body and spirit, time and eternity, life and death, heaven and hell, fidelity to Christian tradition and robust engagement with modernity, and so on. Nor is it irrelevant that the dense symbolic image of the Bergwerk, or mine, with which Rilke opens his poem has a long literary heritage in German Romanticism (not least in Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s play Das Bergwerk zu Falun, or again in the tenth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies) invoking variously the darkness of the psychic unconscious, wisdom, sexuality, the knowledge of history, and the descent into the human soul.3 Finally, construing Balthasar as we hope to do, especially with respect to his interest in rehabilitating a sense of the suppleness and fluidity of tradition, in no small part by his commitment to a dual engagement with the Fathers and the Zeitgeist, demands a declared embargo on nostalgic antiquarianism and its death-dealing backward glance.
Though content-rich with respect to the thinkers of the Russian school as well as Schelling, the gravamen of this book is a study of and apologia for Balthasar’s own theological method, a task that perhaps ought to be held lightly in keeping with the Balthasarian ethos: “It is not our concern to get a secure place to stand, but rather to get sight of what cannot be securely grasped, and this must remain the event of Jesus Christ; woe to the Christian who would not stand daily speechless before this event! If this event truly is what the church believes, then it can be mastered through no methodology.”4 Acknowledging with Balthasar that theology ought to resist the mode of the “exact sciences” that could only feign to circumscribe its object, these chapters venture to characterize Balthasar’s method as constitutively orthodox, but thoroughly probative, phenomenological, literary-critical, aesthetic-hermeneutic, and—despite his perhaps unjustly earned reputation as arch-conservateur—quintessentially non-nostalgic. Balthasar may indeed be operating in a mode of retrieval, but he is a visionary, innovative theologian who is far from retrograde. He is decidedly not a simple repristinator of the Fathers. Acknowledging that the distinction has been somewhat overplayed, it is nevertheless crucial to note here that Balthasar aligns himself first with the Russian school of Soloviev and Bulgakov, which self-consciously engaged modern Western philosophy, rather than the Neopatristic school of Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky. The term Russian school traditionally designates one of the two major trends in Russian dogmatic theology prominent in the Paris Ă©migrĂ© community after the Russian Revolution, a mode of theology that, while heartily affirming traditional sources, also sensed a need to go beyond the Fathers in a robust engagement with modern Western philosophy. The other trend, the so-called Neopatristic approach exemplified perhaps best by Florovsky and Lossky, was more straightforwardly a patristic retrieval.5 It is thus the definitive burden of this exercise to demonstrate, as evidenced by critical excavation of the Schelling–Russian line, that Balthasar’s theological method is, rather like Origen’s, fundamentally daring and experimental, structurally hospitable to expressly nontheological categories, noncanonical sources, and modes of speculative thinking that probe but, under Balthasar’s scrupulous watch and sense of moderation, do not exceed the elastic boundaries of tradition.
This book proceeds by analysis that is both descriptive and constructive. That is to say, it considers not only Balthasar’s explicit mentions of Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov (which are not on balance numerous), but also constructively analyzes “anonymous” or “subterranean” instances of thematic, theological, and philosophical affinities, filiations, or repetitions, and assesses the principles according to which Balthasar adjudicates, allows, or excludes elements in them. This investigation into what is, for Balthasar, live or dead in the Russians takes place at the following sites of inquiry: (1) beauty and aesthetics, (2) freedom, theogony, myth, and evil, (3) thanatology and traditional eschatology from an anthropological point of view, and (4) apocalyptic Trinitarianism, or what Balthasar calls the “theocentric eschatological horizon.” While it might have been more straightforward to traverse seriatim the thought of each Russian thinker in relation to Balthasar, there are strong aesthetic and substantive grounds for this work’s thematic organization. The thought of Soloviev, Berdyaev, and Bulgakov is intricately related one to the other: quite simply, the method of analysis used here provides the most elegant means not only of presenting a thick cross section of inquiry, but also of indicating at least a provisional genealogy. Comparative studies often swerve too nearly toward overemphasis, either of affinity or difference. This study aims not simply to catalogue one or the other, but rather comprises an examination of how these modes of intersection are modulated, received, changed, corrected, and so on. The working assumption is that, especially for the later Balthasar, Berdyaev almost certainly is postmortem, Soloviev possesses only a relative vitality, and Bulgakov—whose presence in Balthasar’s theology is often undocumented but in some instances nearly isomorphic—remains fully viable.6
Despite the mining operations that may be required textually, the warrant to investigate the actual, cryptic, and potential dialogue between Balthasar and the thinkers of the Russian school is writ quite large. In a graceful little essay, “The Place of Theology,” Balthasar speaks to his preferred method of theological reflection in a manner that seems to cast his lot with the Russian school religious philosophers rather than the Neopatristics: “What is required [in theology] is neither an enthusiastic revival of something or other (for example, the ‘Fathers’), nor pure historical research, but rather a kind of Christian humanism that goes to the sources to find what is living and truly original (and not to a school of thought long since dried up) in a spirit of joy and freedom able to weigh the true value of things.”7 Indeed, Balthasar’s impressive command of Western philosophical and cultural tradition, along with a deep retrieval of the classical theological sources, has a strong analogue in the Russian school, which resuscitated Romanticism as the premier instance of modern intellectualism.8 Again, it is this shared broadmindedness in navigating between modern cultural and philosophical data and the ancient Christian tradition that brings Balthasar and the Russian school into natural dialogue, specifically with respect to their variously critical reception(s) of German Idealism and Romanticism.
RESISTING RATIONALISM: THE CONTEXT OF NEOSCHOLASTICISM
Balthasar’s provocative theological methodology, hospitable to engagement with not only nontheological but also non-Catholic sources, ought to be considered with reference to Neoscholasticism, which, according to Balthasar and other proponents of la nouvelle thĂ©ologie, was a distortion of the legitimate method of Thomas, characterized by brittleness, dry syllogisms, and a narrow intellectualism that employed an impoverished, reductive, “closed-circle” logic that diminished the glory and mystery of revelation to rationalistic categories.9 His almost visceral reaction against this Neoscholastic conceptual rationalism decries the tendency to proceed theologically through an appeal to neutral, abstracted categories rather than the existing biblical, liturgical, mystical, and sacramental data of the living tradition. His intervention is far from shy: “In the end, [the hyperbolic rationalism of Neoscholasticism] leads to Hegel’s God, who is without all mystery: behold the door to atheism.”10 The problem with Neoscholasticism was that it had lost the shining sense of glory and mystery, the “sensorium for the glory of Creation,” that had enlivened the patristics and the theology of the early and high Middle Ages.11
In his early study of theology, Balthasar found traditional Neoscholasticism arid and stultifying, not only personally—he described his study at this time as “languishing in the desert”12—but also with regard to the ways in which the glory and the mystery of divine revelation were depicted so dispassionately. Partially in reaction to this perceived aridity, Balthasar attempted to open up theology by a two-pronged recovery: first—influenced deeply by Henri de Lubac—by the patristic and medieval retrieval of figures such as Maximus the Confessor, Evagrius of Pontus, Bonaventure, Pseudo-Dionysius, and other mystical literature, and second—no doubt influenced at least in part by his early interest and training in German literature—by an appeal to sources that were not properly “theological,” namely art, literature, and theatrical drama. In fact, Balthasar considered certain novelists, playwrights, and poets to be valuable theological sources, equal in importance in their own right to the patristics and scholastics. Moreover, he considered the literature itself to be theological: for Balthasar, the transformative effects of the Incarnation enable the best of human culture to communicate a theological truth of being. In keeping with this twin recovery project, Balthasar completed monographs in patristics (on Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor) and literature (on Georges Bernanos, as well as translations of works by Charles PĂ©guy, Paul Claudel, and Pedro CalderĂłn de la Barca, among others). His lengthy theological trilogy of The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama, and Theo-Logic (Herrlichkeit, Theodramatik, and Theologik) corresponds respectively to the three transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth, making use of aesthetic categories and cultural sources of such integrative breadth that de Lubac referred to Balthasar as “perhaps the most cultivated [man] of his time.”13
Balthasar should thus be broadly landscaped as a certain type of nouvelle thĂ©ologie theologian, informed deeply not only by de Lubac, who provides an antidote to Neoscholasticism by rehabilitating the plurivision of a rediscovered patristic theology, but also by Erich Przywara, who deepens the concept of the analogia entis.14 Balthasar’s theological style, consonant with nouvelle thĂ©ologie thinkers and the proponents of the Catholic TĂŒbingen school who influenced them (Johann Adam Möhler’s Die Einheit in der Kirche in particular), insists that theological speculation and the tradition must be organically integrated.
BALTHASAR AND HIS CRITICS
This judgment of the felicitousness of Balthasar’s speculative theological method is by no means the universal opinion. Indeed, instances approaching hagiography notwithstanding, the general reception of Balthasar in the theological academy has been somewhat tepid, prompting Balthasar himself to lament, “So be it; if I have been cast aside as a hopeless conservative by the tribe of the left, then I now know what sort of dung-heap I have been dumped upon by the right.”15 Excavating the buried genealogy of Schelling and the Russians who read him helps to address a number of these issues in critical reception, and to pose and address questions of a more general and methodological nature. In this respect, then, this book functions in two ways: first, negatively, it intervenes in a number of common contemporary criticisms and (mis)interpretations of Balthasar, and second, it makes a number of positive claims about the nature of the Christian theological tradition and the tasks and methods of theology. Attention to the neglected Schelling–Russian line in Balthasar thus helps to contextualize and make sense of some of the seemingly strange theological claims that he makes—the passive descent into hell on Holy Saturday rooted in the notion of Ur-kenosis, for example, which he imports directly from Bulgakov—and also to construct an interpretation of the dynamic, elastic nature of tradition that encourages a creative theological method.
Reading Balthasar through an excavation of this particular Bergwerk, which in its depths has the Russian thinkers and, at even lower strata, Schelling and Jakob Böhme, suggests by what it unearths that certain criticisms of Balthasar’s work may be more superficial than not. First, construing Balthasar as a particular sort of speculative theologian certainly challenges the relatively common notion that Balthasar’s thought typifies a stodgy, backward-looking conservatism. The factors behind Balthasar’s reception in the Catholic theological academy as a “conservative,” “traditionalist,” “restorationist,” or “fideist” theologian have been rehearsed elsewhere.16 That reception is not surprising, given not only Balthasar’s stance on certain progressive causes, but also the fact that—even as late as his death in 1988—most of his longer, complex theological works (including the majority of the trilogy) remained untranslated while his shorter, controversial, sometimes patently acerbic pieces were available in English and thus more widely read. A close examination of the particular way he sifts through the often-mixed speculative contributions of these Russian thinkers, however, challenges...

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