Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Question of Tragedy in the Novels of Thomas Hardy

Kevin Taylor

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780567662590
• eBook ISBN: 9780567619563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What role do novels, drama, and tragedy play within Christian thought and living? The twentieth century Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar addressed these questions using tragic drama. For him, Christ was the true tragic hero of the world who exceeded all tragic literature and experience. Balthasar demonstrated how ancient, pre-Christian tragedy and Renaissance works contained important Christian concepts, but he critiqued modern novels as failing to be either truly tragic or Christian. By examining the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy on their own terms, we have an important counterpoint to Balthasar's argument that the novel is too prosaic for theological reflection. Hardy's novels are an apt pairing for examination and critique, as they are both classically and biblically influenced, as well as contemporary.The larger implication for Balthasar's theology is that his innovations in theological aesthetics and tragedy must be expanded in the light of modernity and the tragic novel.

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Balthasar and Tragedy

But it is Greek tragedy, and not Greek philosophy, with which the Christians primarily entered into dialogue, that forms the great, valid cypher of the Christ event, central to human history, by enclosing and transcending all previous cyphers within itself.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, volume 4

Tragedy informs Balthasar’s work in a vital way, though this fact has been largely under-appreciated in the scholarly literature on Balthasar. This is due, partly, to the fact that most examinations of his literary criticism focus on his aesthetics or dramatics as a whole, and not on the particular genre of tragedy. His unusual and innovative theological use of tragedy is often uncritically accepted within his larger ideas about literature, Christ, and drama. Additionally, tragedy is something that informs Balthasar’s work in the background, appearing in various places throughout his writings but rarely addressed directly. His style is meandering, so the topic of tragedy tends to appear in various places throughout his work.¹ This characteristic of Balthasar’s writing is evident in his treatment of tragedy; it was something integral to his work, yet scattered throughout and at times discussed obliquely. This chapter will trace Balthasar’s interest in tragedy through his various writings in order to understand why he prized it as something worthy of theological exploration. The next chapter will examine more closely his understanding of tragedy and what constituted its definition, as well as how he evaluated tragedy after the Greek classical era.

It is ironic that the important role of tragedy in Balthasar’s thought has been unappreciated by scholars, for he has given the most concentrated theological attention to tragedy except for Hegel.² Balthasar was greatly influenced by Hegel, so their similar interests in tragic drama should not be a surprise. Both thinkers were greatly concerned with aesthetics and art, and they placed tragic drama at the pinnacle of human art. Art was a vital way of understanding God, and it could also be a vehicle for divine revelation.

Balthasar’s extensive use of tragedy shows, in itself, its importance to his thought. He uses the concept of tragedy in multiple ways—as ontic and historical experience, as a genre, and as a philosophical concept—and he employs it throughout much of his theology. The word tragedy, it has been noted, carries three distinct meanings. It can be a human experience of sorrow and loss, such as an unfortunate incident or a catastrophe. The word tragedy also refers to a literary genre, as in the works by Aeschylus and Shakespeare. It can also be the philosophical and literary theory of how literary tragedies function, as well as their significance as a worldview and meaningful artistic expression. Balthasar does not directly reference these three meanings of tragedy, but he does work within all three areas. For example, a philosophical discussion about “the meaning of being” leads to results that are “tragic,” and a discussion of Hinduism is surprisingly followed by The Ring of the Nibelung, Aristotle, Hegel, and the temptation to fly from “the overwhelming weight of frightful, ineradicable tragedy.”³ Tragedians appear in all the volumes of the Glory of the Lord, except one,⁴ and all the volumes of the Theo-Drama.⁵ Tragedy as a concept occurs in most of the volumes of the Theo-Drama, conveyed in either existential⁶ or generic⁷ categories. Despite the difficulty of Balthasar’s scattered discussions on tragedy, his approach to the genre is consistent and discernible. The primary volumes that feature tragedy are volume one of the Theo-Drama, where Balthasar vaguely defines tragedy, and volume four of The Glory of the Lord, which examines tragedy in the ancient world. In addition, much of Balthasar’s thought on theology and tragedy is presented in a more systematic way in his essay, “Tragedy and Christian Faith” (1965), which appears in the third volume of Explorations in Theology.

Thus a vital thread in Balthasar’s theological aesthetics is tragedy, in its varied meanings—as an art form, as a theory, and as the human existential crisis. He consistently explores and references tragedy throughout his writings, often approaching theological issues and Biblical passages through a tragic lens. Balthasar has read deeply tragic literature and pondered its insights, and he has been greatly influenced by it. As Christian theology has borrowed from Greek philosophy, so Balthasar borrows and shapes his theology according to tragedy. This is not to argue that this is the only influence on Balthasar, or that it forms a sort of Ariadne’s thread to his work. Rather, it is to argue that tragedy forms a vital element of his thought, as he finds that it has a revelatory power regarding human existence and God. Yet, in the end, Balthasar’s particular approach to tragedy—that it must be dramatic in form and aristocratic in content—has serious and problematic ramifications for his theology, as the following chapters establish.

Tragedy’s revelatory nature

Balthasar is theologically interested in tragedy because it is deeply revelatory about the nature of the world. Plato also thought the Greek poets were powerfully insightful, and it is for this reason that Plato thought they should be exiled from his vision of the Republic. Balthasar, however, finds their acuity as something to be admired and even used theologically. The power of tragedy’s insights, in fact, leads him to make the rather surprising statement that it alone “forms the great, valid cypher of the Christ event” (GL4.101).⁸ Few commentators have picked up on the rather revolutionary nature of this claim.⁹ By examining Balthasar’s interest in tragic drama, we can discern three areas of tragedy that pique Balthasar’s theological interest: human existence as dramatic, the existential truths that tragedy reveals, and the participative distance of humanity from God.

The dramatic nature of existence

First, Balthasar approaches Being itself as inherently dramatic, as if the medieval transcendentals required the addition of drama. Drama is at the root of all of Balthasar’s thinking; “it is a basic Christian requirement that existence should represent itself dramatically” (TD1.22). At the center of Balthasar’s “theological triptych”—his aesthetics, dramatics, and logic—lies the five-volume Theo-Drama, where drama forms an extended metaphor for his theological development of the revelation of Christ.¹⁰ Drama as a mode of human existence, and theological reflection, is paramount; as Ben Quash summarizes, “[t]heology is done not outside or above the drama of Christian living, it is itself part of the drama.”¹¹ D. C. Schindler’s contention is that, for Balthasar, drama is more than a new metaphor or hermeneutics; “drama is the expression of the structure of Being.”¹² It is an approach to human existence that is relational to others and to the divine, along the lines of Buber’s “I-Thou” model.

Drama is such a deep category of being for Balthasar that it extends even into heaven and the Triune God. The infinite spaces, both within the Trinity and between God and humanity, highlight the fact that drama is part of Being. Our lives in God and in eternity must, therefore, somehow be dramatic. “All this goes to show that existence in God—who will remain for all eternity the ‘mystery laid bare in holiness’ (Goethe)—will be no less full of tension and drama than earthly existence will with its obscurities and its freedom of choice” (TD5.410). The dramatic nature of God as Trinity is, for Balthasar, evinced in Christ’s prayerful dialogue of forgiveness with the Father: “Father, forgive them,” to which the Father responds.¹³ Drama exists within the Father’s begetting of the Son, forming the basis of God’s dramatic relationship with Creation:

On the contrary, it is the drama of the “emptying” of the Father’s heart, in the generation of the Son, that contains and surpasses all possible drama between God and a world. For any world only has its place within that distinction between Father and Son that is maintained and bridged by the Holy Spirit. The drama of the Trinity lasts forever . . . (TD4.327)

Balthasar has established a deeply dramatic, nonstatic understanding of existence for both God and human beings,¹⁴ which tragic drama expresses well.

Tragedy’s existential truths

The second reason for tragedy’s power of insight (and thus theological usefulness) is that it reflects the existential reality of human life, where existence is open-ended and uncertain. Drama, like life and liturgy, is narratively temporal, lived in medias res, as Dante’s Divine Comedy begins.¹⁵ Drama is interested in the concrete individual who is freely part of a larger story, where life is “involving, particular, social, and anticipatory.”¹⁶ We take our place onstage dramatically in the world’s drama of history; “all the world’s a stage,” according to Shakespeare’s As You Like It (2.7.139). From such a perspective, human action and history are profoundly linear and unrepeatable, as drama’s performances—each one being different in performance and reception—make clear.¹⁷ Human actions, understood dramatically, have a larger significance and plot, especially in tragedy; as Balthasar boldly states, “Only tragedy equates the unattainable absolute Good with a concrete course of action . . .” (TD1.414). In its decisive moments, tragic time is especially “super-charged” and meaningful, Ben Quash argues.¹⁸ Drama provides a natural mode and corrective to theology.

For Balthasar, the genesis of tragedy is in the turbid reality of human existence. Existence is fraught with impasse, as the Attic tragedians reveal in what Balthasar sees as three primal, tragic conditions: humans are torn between their desire for an absolute Good in an evanescent world, are caught between conflicting ethical choices (as Orestes, Hamlet, and Antigone experience), and act within the pervasive guilt of sin that mars human actions (ET3.393–5). The third condition’s sense of a culpable yet inescapable guilt, Balthasar observes, profoundly hints at the theological understanding of sin. “Guilt is present, therefore; its existence is not denied; but it transcends the individual alone, without thereby excusing him fully” (ET3.395). The genius of Greek myth and the theater is this inevitability of guilt that adumbrates Christian sin. “Man needs once again to encounter the mystery of an incomprehensible but ever-present guilt in the relationship between heaven and earth” (TD1.435).

These are universal, existential realities, and they make drama universally understandable, since it reflects human life’s tensions and conflicts (TD1.17). “If, however, the state of brokenness is a fact of our experience . . . the essential lines of existence are not only incapable of being perfected but cross over one another and make existence a contradiction” (ET3.391–4). Drama’s potency is revealed in its ability to reflect, from a distance, these tragic existential conditions, inviting us to consider the existential reality of being human.

Anyone who knows anything about the theatre understands it as a projection of human existence onto a stage, interpreting to itself that existence which is beyond it. Since existence recognizes itself in this interpretation, it can (in a privileged moment) realize that it is playing a role in a larger play. (TD1.20)

Notable, however, is that Balthasar does not include the tragic sense of waste, of meaninglessness, of prosaic, ordinary suffering—the failures, loss of ideals, and grinding repetitions that characterize more modern forms of tragedy and the novel.

This perspective of tragic existential conditions is not unique to Balthasar. The need to explain tragedy’s universal comprehensibility, appeal, and continuing influence leads many theorists to develop similar approaches to tragedy.¹⁹ It is present in Hegel, for example, where life becomes col...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Balthasar and Tragedy
• 2 Balthasar’s Limited Conception of Tragedy
• 3 Balthasar’s Critique of the Novel and The Return of the Native
• 4 The Mayor of Casterbridge and Prosaic Reality
• 5 Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Its Narrator
• 6 Jude the Obscure and Ignoble Suffering
• Conclusion: The Place of the Tragic Novel within Balthasar’s Theology
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright