27661593

Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Man and His Works
Author(s): Augustine Valkenburg

Source: The Furrow, Vol. 40, No. 9 (Sep., 1989), pp. 532-536
Published by: The Furrow
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Hans Urs von Balthasar
?the man and his works
Augustine Valkenburg
Early in the 60s, before the Swiss theologian became widely known
in the English-speaking world and certainly before I realized the
stature of the man, I wrote to him for permission to translate one
of his articles. Permission was graciously given, and the article was
subsequently printed in The Furrow.1 It was chastening to learn
later that Balthasar wrote some four hundred articles and was the
author of sixty books. Admittedly productiveness is not a yardstick
with which to measure a man's work, but it is permissible to
speculate about the quality in his writing that attracts readers.
Many of these who read of his passing on 26 June 1988 at the age
of eighty-three, two days before he was to be created cardinal, were
happy that at the end he had received this final recognition. It had
not been an easy passage.
Hans Urs von Balthasar was born in 1905 at Lucerne, that Swiss
city which is almost synonymous with Catholicism, a city of bells,
churches and religious frescoes. He received his early education
from the Benedictines at Engelberg then went on to Feldkirche, the
Jesuit college in Austria much frequented by young Swiss Catholics.
Humanistic studies - literature, art, philosophy - brought him to
Vienna and then to Berlin where he had as professor Romano
Guardini whom he claimed had a formative influence on him. At
Zurich in 1929 he presented and published his doctoral thesis on the
apocalyptic theme in nineteenth-century German literature. That
same year the prodigiously well-read young man in the literatures
of half-a-dozen languages entered the Society of Jesus.
His theological awakening happened only when he was sent to
the French Jesuits' house of studies at Lyon where Henri de Lubac
and Jean Dani?lou awaited him, both later to become cardinals of
the Roman Church. He was greatly influenced by de Lubac, and
was later to translate the Frenchman's works into German. After
ordination he edited the monthly Stimmen der Zeit at Munich, and
then in 1940 went to Basel as a chaplain to the university.
1. 'Why I Remain in the Church', March, 1972.
Augustine Valkenburg is an Irish Dominican priest. Address: St

Catherine's, Newry, Co. Down.
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR 533
He was not the only one interested in theology at Basel Univer

sity in these days. Karl Barth, having been deprived of his chair at
Bonn on account of his opposition to Nazism, returned to his native
country and was now professor of theology at the University of
Basel. Despite the religious difference there developed a bond of
understanding between the two theologians. In his book on Barth,2
the Catholic theologian had predictable reservations about the
treatment of nature, predestination and the Church, but acclaimed
the centrality of Christ in Barthian theology. On his part, Barth
asserted that this book was the most lucid critique available of his
Church Dogmatics. In 1940 also, Balthasar could observe across
the Swiss border the unfolding of the Third Reich, whose ideology
he believed to be a distorted form of Christian apocalyptic.
At Basel he met Adrienne von Speyr, a convert to Catholicism
and a visionary who was to write an ecstatic commentary on the
Gospel of St John as well as a selection of theological essays. The
meeting was to prove a turning point in his life. In 1950 he took
a decision which must have cost a great deal. He quitted the Society
to be the co-founder with Adrienne von Speyr of a secular institute
called the Community of John. She died in 1967 but her influence
on him was lifelong. These were the difficult years in which he
shared the lot of the exiled and the misunderstood. He ministered
as a diocesan priest under the bishop of Chur in eastern Switzerland
and became increasingly active in the apostolate of the printed
word. Soon he had published so much he was able to survive on
his earnings alone, and moved to Einsiedeln where he set up the
publishing house Johannes Verlag, named after Adrienne von
Speyr's preferred evangelist. Later he became co-founder of the
German edition of Communio. Although he was not invited to con
tribute to the preparatory work of the Council, there is hardly a
subject debated by Vatican II that does not find a treatment in
depth in his theological essays. Revelation, the Church, 'in the
same way that the Spirit calls the world to enter into the Church,
so he calls the Church to enter into the world.' He anticipates, as
it were, the voices that were raised in St Peter's for an adequate
statement on the Holy Spirit. However extended his reflections on
the Church, Balthasar rarely loses sight of her individual members.
Readers who feel his major works are beyond them will find
enlightenment and comfort in the shorter theological essays. They
will understand better for instance, why the Council decided to
include in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, the two
chapters on the universal call to holiness and on the externally
organized spiritual life.
Balthasars works are formidable in number and length. Any one
2. Karl Barth: Darstellung und Deutung seiner Theologie (K?ln, 1951).
534 THE FURROW
area of his publications would constitute a decent life's work for
a lesser man. Many of his books are historical studies or transla
tions or anthologies. In patristics, for instance, he wrote accounts
of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Irenaeus, making his own
translations and in each case giving new light to his subject. Would
not poor, misrepresented Origen be grateful to have this desire of
his heart retrieved for today's reader?
I want to be a man of the Church. I do not want to be called
by the name of some founder of a heresy, but by the name of
Christ, and to bear that name which is blessed on earth. It is
my desire, in deed as in spirit, both to be and to be called a
Christian.3
In literature he produced a major study of Bernanos, as well as the

greater part of Calderon's religious drama from the Spanish, and,
for good measure, the lyric poems and Le Soulier Satin of Claudel.
It is impossible to summarize the theological thought of
Balthasar. It can neither be termed old nor new; and it derives from
no school. The indispensable technicalities are there, whether in
criticism, or in dialectic, or in the relation of negative natural
theology to the knowledge of 'the face of Revelation which is given
to us in Christ'. Pascal's aphorism, to make Christ 'the centre
towards which all things tend', Balthasar took to himself. His
criticism of other Catholic theologians, acidulous at times, was
motivated by the feeling that their use of philosophical or scientific
terms could but dilute Christocentrism. For him, theology is 'a
mediation between faith and Revelation, in which the infinite when
fully expressed in the finite i.e. made accessible as man, can only
be apprehended by a convergent movement from the side of the
finite, that is a doing, obedient faith in the God-man'. This led him
to a favourite theme - prayer, and the equilibrium between action
and contemplation. 'All we can show our contemporaries of the
reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the
Church, our own selves. But it is impossible to present the con
templation of Jesus Christ and the Church in a convincing way
unless we ourselves participate in it. A person who has not loved
cannot say anything relevant about love; nor can a man speak
about the smallest spiritual problem unless he has genuinely
encountered the spiritual world'. Thoughtless imitation made him
impatient if not unfair. 'Europe is undergoing change. It's Chris
tian substance is being hollowed out by inroads of eastern medita
tion methods, to such an extent that in many monasteries,
meditation has become merely a technique of correct posture and
breathing control. Thus the Church and the world are being
3. Origen: Geist und Feuer (Salzburg, 1953).
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR 535
deprived of much-needed repentance and prayer'. During his visit

to the United States in 1978, Balthasar defended himself against the
charge of being biased against non-Christian religions. 'I said often
that God's free grace in Christ embraces all mankind. If men
humbly seek their God, this grace can be well received and even by
non-Christians. The missionary Church has found many traces of
Christ's grace among many peoples'.4
Balthasare Herrlichkeit, his most sustained theological work
upon which he laboured for years, is now translated into English
under the title The Glory of the Lord.5 The trilogy begins with a
consideration of the beautiful, pulchrum 'the forgotten
transcendental', an aspect of everything and anything, as impor
tant as verum, the true, and bonum, the good. The beautiful is the
radiance which a thing gives off simply because it is something,
because it exists. Is there an analogous way of speaking
theologically of God's Revelation using the category of the
beautiful? This is what Balthasar argues in Herrlichkeit.~Focused
on salvation history culminating in Jesus Christ as the concrete
form of God's self-revelation, he meditates upon what God's
beauty and glory really is. As presented in the New Testament
writings, the words, actions and sufferings of Jesus form an
aesthetic unity held together by unconditional love. Love is always
beautiful because it expresses the 'self-diffusiveness' of being, and
so is touched by being's radiance. But the unconditional,
gratuitous, sacrificial love of Jesus Christ expresses not just the
mystery of being, but the mystery of the source of being, the
transcendent communion of love which we call the Trinity. Thus
through Christ, the love which God is, is shown throughout the
world. This is the basic thought of the first volume of the trilogy,
in 658 pages. Only when we have perceived the glory of God in
Revelation are we fit to respond to the drama of Revelation through
committed action of our own. This is set out in the following
volumes. Representative figures, from the earlier period of Chris
tian theology, from Irenaeus, Denis through to Anselm and
Bonaventure, make up the second volume. A series of monographs
on later Christians forms the third volume. These are an unex
pected line-up of poets, saints and philosophers collected together
to illustrate a typology of the relationship between beauty and
Revelation - Dante, St John of the Cross, Pascal, Hamann,
Soloviev, Hopkins, P?guy. Wide-ranging and intuitive, these last
two volumes could well serve as an introduction to all the works of
Balthasar.
4. Communio, Spring 1978.
5. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (6 vols.) (Edinburgh and San
Francisco, 1982).
536 THE FURROW
Honours came at the end of his life, unsought and unexpected.
The International Paul VI Prize 'for promoting a sense of religion
in the world' was conferred on him in 1984 by Pope Paul II. The
Patriarch Athenagoras, recognizing in Balthasare works a pro
found ecumenical resonance, sent him a gift of the Gold Cross of
Mount Athos. The Faculty of Protestant Theology of Edinburgh
University asked him to accept an honorary doctorate, as did the
universities of M?nster and Washington.
Balthasar's nomination to be a cardinal was, of course, a per
sonal honour. But the great value of the Pope's gesture was to
point towards the work of this theologian, which itself points
unswervingly to the triune God revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Writing. Most students of theology think that writing means

writing down ideas, insights, or visions. They feel that they first
must have something to say before they can put it on paper. For
them, writing is little more than recording a pre-existent thought.
But with this approach, true writing is impossible. Writing is a pro
cess in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals
to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is
precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were
not aware before we started to write . . . Writing is like giving away
the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply
in the giving. Once we dare to 'give away' on paper the few
thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden
underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our
own riches.
?Henri NOUWEN, Seeds of Hope (Darton, Longman & Todd),
p. 77.

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Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Man and His Works

Author(s): Augustine Valkenburg

Augustine Valkenburg is an Irish Dominican priest. Address: St

He was not the only one interested in theology at Basel Univer

In literature he produced a major study of Bernanos, as well as the

deprived of much-needed repentance and prayer'. During his visit

Writing. Most students of theology think that writing means

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