Church of the Ever Greater God: The Ecclesiology of Erich Przywara

By Aaron Pidel, S.J.

In Church of the Ever Greater God, Aaron Pidel offers the first major English-language study of the ecclesiology of Erich Przywara, S.J., one of the most important Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. As Pidel shows, Przywara’s idea of analogia entis, or analogy of being, shaped his view of ecclesiology. According to this theory, every creature is made of various tensions or polarities in its being. Creatures flourish when these tensions are in equilibrium but transgress their creaturely limits when they absolutize one polarity over the other. Pidel demonstrates how Przywara used the concept of analogia entis to describe the structure and rhythm of the Catholic Church. In Przywara’s view, the Church, too, is essentially constituted by her tensions or polarities, and the members of the Church conform to that analogical tension to varying degrees of fidelity. Przywara claims that analogia entis not only describes the Church as she is but also can be used as a criterion for discerning the spiritual health of the Church by helping her to see where her equilibrium has become imbalanced. Pidel maintains that Przywara thought that the biggest risk to the Church’s analogical equilibrium in the last century was a de-emphasis of the typically Ignatian ideas of reverence for the Divine Majesty and missionary extraversion. Przywara’s vision of the Church is presented as a corrective to this one-sided imbalance. In drawing attention to Przywara’s metaphysically informed and deeply Ignatian ecclesiology, Pidel’s study will appeal not only to scholars of Przywara but also to all those who study ecclesiology and Catholic theology more broadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: May 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780268107796

Aaron Pidel, S.J.

Aaron Pidel, S.J., is an assistant professor in theology at Marquette University.

Book preview

Church of the Ever Greater God

CHURCH OF

THE EVER

GREATER GOD

The Ecclesiology of Erich Przywara

AARON PIDEL, S.J.

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932830

ISBN:978-0-268-10777-2 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10780-2 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10779-6 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

To my father, Jeff, and my mother, Mary,

who taught me both how to love and to fear the Lord

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction to Erich Przywara

CHAPTER 1

Analogia Entis as Creaturely Metaphysics:

Structure, Rhythm, Middle

CHAPTER 2

Analogia Entis and the Problem of Religion

CHAPTER 3

The Ignatian Type

CHAPTER 4

Ecclesial Discretion

CHAPTER 5

Apocalyptic Ressourcement and Nuptial Ecclesiology

CHAPTER 6

Przywara’s Kirche in Gegensätzen Today

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would naturally have been impossible without the help and mentorship of many people, at least some of whom should be named here. The first debt of gratitude goes to John Betz, whose interest in Przywara sparked my own and who directed my dissertation on Przywara’s ecclesiology. Likewise serving on the board of my dissertation and providing invaluable encouragement and insight were Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P., Peter Casarella, and Cyril O’Regan. I should also thank friends of mine from the University of Notre Dame—especially Michael Rubbelke and Mike Altenburger—who read individual chapters and provided constructive criticism and encouragement. For the way all the aforementioned assisted me in refining my thought, I am most grateful.

I would be equally remiss, however, if I neglected to thank the Society of Jesus both corporately and individually. The fact that Erich Przywara was a fellow Jesuit and an unabashed lover of the Ignatian charism was among the principal factors that drew me to study him. My Jesuit superiors over the years, moreover, have given me leisure to do the studies without which this project would have been impossible. I thank them for their confidence in me, which, from time to time, I have been tempted to think misplaced. I would like to thank the many individual Jesuits with whom I lived at Henri de Lubac House, who, more than any others, endured my obsessive tendency to talk through the difficulties and intricacies of Przywara’s analogia entis: Brian Dunkle, Brian Daley, Phil Ganir, Stephanus Hendrianto, Michael Magree, John Peck, and Joseph Riordan.

Finally, I would like to thank all those who helped me render this manuscript into a book. This includes the team at the University of Notre Dame, especially the anonymous reviewers and Stephen Little, who did much to demystify my first experience of book-length publication. It also includes my colleagues at Marquette University, especially Kenny Hoyt and Cecille Medina-Maldonado.

All the aforementioned deserve a great deal of praise for what is good in Church of the Ever Greater God. The only thing for which I can accept entire credit is the book’s remaining infelicities.

ABBREVIATIONS

This work has used standard abbreviations for frequently cited authors or frequently abbreviated titles. For economy, it has included separate sections on Augustinian, Dionysian, and Jesuit sources.

AUGUSTINE

All works of Augustine have been cited according to the Latin text and abbreviation system employed by the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense (CAG). Electronic edition. Edited by Cornelius Mayer.

Ciu. De civitate Dei

Conf. Confessiones

En. Ps. Enarrationes in Psalmos

Gn. litt. De Genesi ad litteram

Io. eu. tract. In Johannis evangelium tractatus

Perseu. De dono perseuerantiae

S. Sermones

Sol. Soliloquiorum libri duo

Vera rel. De vera religione

DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE

The Greek text and English translation of the writings of Dionysius have been taken from the following:

Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 1: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De divinis nominibus. Edited by B. R. Suchla. Patristische Texte und Studien 33. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990.

Corpus Dionysiacum, vol. 2: De coelesti hierarchia. De ecclesiastica hierarchia. De mystica theologia. Epistulae. Edited by Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter. Patristische Texte und Studien 36. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991.

Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Lubheid. Foreword, notes, and translation collaboration by Paul Rorem. Preface by René Roques. Introduction by Jaroslav Pelikan, Jean Leclercq, and Karlfried Froehlich. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1987.

The individual works are cited, whether in Greek or English, by the abbreviations employed in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works.

CH The Celestial Hierarchy

DN The Divine Names

EH The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy

MT The Mystical Theology

JESUIT SOURCES

Because Przywara often cites his Jesuit sources according to the pagination of the Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu but not according to the titles of Ignatius’s writings or the referencing conventions standard for each work, this work cites according to both.

Cons. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus .

Spanish text in MI III, 2.

English translation with paragraph numbers: The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus and Their Complementary Norms. Translated by George Ganss, S. J., et al. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996.

MI I Monumenta Ignatiana: Epistolae et Instructiones S. Ignatii . 12 vols. Madrid, 1903–11.

MI III Monumenta Ignatiana : Sancti Ignatii Constitutiones Societatis Iesu . 4 vols. Rome, 1934–38, 1948.

MI IV Monumenta Ignatiana : Scripta de Sancto Ignatio. 2 vols. Madrid: 1904, 1918.

Sp. Diary Spanish text from MI III, 1.

Paragraph numbers from Diario Espiritual, in Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola, transcription, introduction, and notes by Ignacio Iparraguirre, S. J., 318–86. Madrid: B. A. C., 1963.

Sp. Ex. Spiritual Exercises

English: The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Preface by Avery Dulles, S. J. Translated by Louis J. Puhl, S. J. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Spanish: Candido de Dalmases, S. J., ed., Ejercicios espirituales, in Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola, transcription, introduction, and notes by Ignacio Iparraguirre, S. J., 196–285. Madrid: B. A. C., 1963.

OTHER SOURCES

AA Apostolicam Actuositatem: Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity (1965). https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

AAS Acta Apostolicae Sedis

ADPSJ Archiv der Deutschen Provinz der Gesellschaft Jesu, Munich.

ARSI GS Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesus, Germania Superior, Rome.

DEC Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils . 2 vols. Edited by Giuseppe Alberigo, translated by Norman Tanner, S. J. New York: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990.

DH Denzinger, Heinrich. Compendium of Creeds, Definitions and Declarations on Matters of Faith and Morals . 43rd ed. Revised, enlarged, and in collaboration with Helmut Holping. Edited by Peter Hünnerman for the original bilingual edition; edited by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash for the English edition. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012.

DSp Dictionnaire de Spiritualité . 16 vols. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937–94.

DTC Dictionnaire de la Théologie Catholique . 33 vols. Edited by A. Vacant and E. Mangenot. Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1909–72.

EG Evangelii Gaudium : Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World . https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

GS Gaudium et Spes : Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965). https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

LG Lumen Gentium : Dogmatic Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (1965). https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

LThK² Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche . 2nd ed. 10 vols.

Edited by Josef Höfer and Karl Rahner. Freiburg: Herder, 1957–67.

LThK³ Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche . 3rd ed. 11 vols.

Edited by Walter Kasper. Freiburg: Herder, 1993–2001.

Mansi Sacrorum Concilorum nova et amplissima collectio. 53 vols. Edited by L. Petit and J.-B. Martin. Arnhem-Leipzig: Hubert Welter, 1901–27.

MC Mystici Corporis Christi (1943). Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII on the Mystical Body of Christ. https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

MD Mediator Dei (1947). Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XII on the Liturgy. https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

Met. Aristotle, Metaphysics. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited with introduction by Richard McKeon, translated by W. D. Ross, 682–926. New York: Random House, 1941.

NRSV Bible, New Revised Standard Version

Pascendi Pascendi dominici gregis (1907): Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius X on the Doctrines of the Modernists . https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

PL Patrologia Latina . Edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844–55.

RGG² Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart . 2nd ed. 6 vols. Edited by Hermann Gunkel. Tübingen: Mohr-Siehbeck, 1927–31.

SA Sacrorum antistitum (1910). Motu proprio Pii PP. X quo quaedam statuuntur leges ad modernismi periculum propulsandum . Available at the Vatican website.

ST Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae (Blackfriars ed.). 61 vols. Various translators. London and New York: Eyre and Spottiswoode and McGraw-Hill, 1963–80.

StZ Stimmen der Zeit

UUS Ut unum sint (1995). Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II on Commitment to Ecumenism . https://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html .

WA Luther, Martin. Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe) . 63 vols. Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–87.

ZAM Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik

Introduction to Erich Przywara

The present work on the ecclesiology of Erich Przywara, S. J. (1889–1972), is a project of retrieval. Like all retrievals, it draws attention to a figure significant for both the past and the present. Of Przywara’s stature in the Zwischenkriegszeit in Germany there can be little doubt. Some of the most influential theological and philosophical minds of Przywara’s generation regarded him with frank reverence and gratitude. His protégé Hans Urs von Balthasar describes his own programmatic work of ecclesial reform, Razing the Bastions, as an application of what he learned from him.¹ Balthasar never ceased to address Przywara in correspondence as dear master and friend² and went so far as to identify him as the "greatest spirit [Geist] he was ever permitted to meet."³ Given the intellectual endowments of the source, this is indeed high praise.

But Balthasar was far from Przywara’s only admirer. Karl Rahner too acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Przywara, singling out his writings on the Ignatian charism.⁴ He predicted, moreover, a future rediscovery of the value of his thought: Without being a Prophet, I feel compelled to say that we, the generation after him, as well as future generations, still have critical things to learn from him.⁵ Even such a towering figure as Karl Barth showed Przywara a respect that transcended their important confessional differences. After his first meeting with Przywara in 1929, Barth wrote to a friend that he had just sparred with the intellectual giant Goliath incarnate.⁶ Less than three years later, he would famously refer to the idea for which Przywara is best known, the analogy of being, as the invention of anti-Christ and the definitive reason for not becoming Catholic.⁷ Hence, even though Barth ultimately remained unpersuaded that Przywara’s analogia entis did justice to the biblical vision of God and creation, he nevertheless considered it the most sophisticated and intellectually compelling alternative to his own vision.

In between such fervent admiration and vehement rejection, of course, there stand the testimonies of many other figures for whom Przywara was an important—albeit less decisive—influence. To name one example among many, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, née Edith Stein, would speak of the late 1920s and early 1930s as a time of lively intellectual exchange with Przywara.⁸ He introduced her to the thought of Aquinas and Newman, and she introduced him to the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Stein’s obvious appreciation for Przywara corroborates the overall impression of Przywara as a mind—and even a mentor—of the first rank.

Despite the impressive body of testimony to Przywara’s past stature, the evidence for his ongoing relevance may seem at first glance rather thin. He is seldom the subject of scholarly debate among English-language theologians. This is perhaps because when Przywara wrote about the Church he wrote comparatively little about the questions that have come to preoccupy ecclesiologists in the years following Vatican II. He shows little interest in the historical variations within the Church’s authority structures, for instance, and seldom descends to the brass tacks of pastoral policy or liturgical ars celebrandi. Notwithstanding Przywara’s understandable tendency to speak to the issues of his own day rather than to those of ours, it would be shortsighted, I think, to presume he has nothing to teach us.

Przywara’s thought has a timeless dimension as well. The key to Przywara’s ongoing contemporaneity, I argue, lies in the method by which he undertook the task of differentiation and discernment entrusted to him as a Jesuit intellectual.⁹ To my knowledge, he gives the fullest account of his strategy for intellectual discernment in In und Gegen (1955).

Acknowledging his indebtedness to the Jesuit philosopher and psychologist Josef Fröbes, Przywara describes his way of thinking as an ongoing rhythm between two moments: in and against (gegen). In refers to the moment of intellectual sympathy: ‘to want to understand’ every author (however un-Christian or antireligious he may be) in pure objectivity (without pastoral or apologetic ulterior motives), ‘better than he understood himself.’ Against refers to the moment of critical distance (Auseinandersetzung) from this same author. Przywara typically undertakes this second moment by profiling an author’s positions against a universal horizon, that is, against the ultimate form of reality that he calls the analogia entis.¹⁰

It is this methodical rhythm of immersion and distanciation that gives Przywara’s thought the oft-noted qualities of timeliness and timelessness. Reinhold Schneider dubbed him the most modern theologian, both before and after the war.¹¹ The American philosopher James Collins likewise described Przywara’s work in philosophy of religion both as an indication of the role of Catholic thinkers in the general cultural movement and as a speculative achievement in its own right: His works taken in chronological order represent the organic growth of the author’s position as it evolved naturally and gradually through successive contact with past and contemporary currents of thought. His theoretical development is indissociable from these other philosophical movements and is to be understood in light of a fruitful examination of them.¹²

In Collins’s commentary especially, the in and against moments are both visible. Przywara plays a role within a general cultural movement. But his contact with past and contemporary currents of thought spurs a process of organic growth terminating in an original speculative achievement. Collins would concur, then, with the phenomenologist Peter Wust’s characterization of Przywara as the man who watches over the times, and who keeps watch above the times.¹³

These descriptions of Przywara as both in and above the currents of his times could apply mutatis mutandis to Przywara’s work as an ecclesiologist. On the one hand, Przywara’s thought unfolds in each ecclesiological current from the modernist crisis down to the preparatory phase of Vatican II. As Karl Neufeld would say of him, Przywara was always witnessing to a situation.¹⁴ In short, Przywara was, like Newman and Augustine, an occasional thinker. On the other hand, Przywara examines each newly formulated vision of Catholicism in light of its compatibility with the analogia entis, which he understands to be the most basic and comprehensive structure of creaturely existence. The conceptuality of the analogia entis gradually assumes new layers and complexity as Przywara encounters each new movement.

What we find at the end of this organic development, however, is not just a summary of positions, but Przywara’s own synthetic vision of the Church. Indeed, as I argue at length, Przywara’s analogy of being serves ultimately as the framework for an Ignatian ecclesiology.

This basic intuition that Przywara is in fact forging an ecclesiology both analogical and Ignatian structures this book at the level of each chapter and with respect to the sequence of chapters. Each chapter begins with a theological movement or event that furnishes the relevant interpretive background to a range of Przywara’s writings, then proceeds to show how Przywara brings his analogical sensibility—the analogia entis—to bear on the issue at hand. Finally, in order to show how Przywara both maintains and varies his theme, the exposition of each chapter (except the second) is ordered around three key dimensions of the analogy of being: structure, rhythm, and middle.

The sequence of chapters is both thematic and chronological. The first chapter treats chiefly Przywara’s writings on creaturely metaphysics up to and including his Analogia Entis (1932). Setting these writings against the backdrop of the condemnation of pantheism at Vatican I, I argue that the analogia entis represents a philosophical theology—that is, an account of the relationship of similarity-dissimilarity between Creator and creature—in the nonpartisan mode of an ecumenical council. In other words, just as ecumenical councils formulate their decisions in such a way as to avoid identifying the whole Church with any individual theologian or speculative school, so Przywara formulates the Creator relationship of the analogia entis in such a way as to prescind from the speculative differences separating theological personalities such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas. At the same time, just as ecumenical councils formulate their decisions concretely enough to exclude certain errors, so also the analogia entis articulates a creaturely metaphysics definite enough to exclude various shades of pantheism—especially the pantheism of German idealism. Formally, therefore, all authentically Catholic theologies evince an irreducible structure of similarity and dissimilarity between Creator and creature, as well as a rhythm of energetic exchange between God and creation. For only such a creaturely structure and rhythm maintains the middle, that is, the essentially unbridgeable interval between Creator and creature. Pantheistic thought, however much it may avail itself of Christian language, can be recognized by its transgression of this deeper structure and rhythm of creaturely existence.

The second chapter advances the argument by showing how the analogia entis provides a Catholic account not only of metaphysics but also of religious experience, both natural and supernatural. While drawing on more or less the same range of writings as the first chapter, it profiles them against a different background and exposits them from a different angle. In this case the relevant historical context becomes the era of antimodernist magisterium, beginning with the rejection of semirationalism at Vatican I and culminating in Pius X’s criticism of vital immanence, that is, the identification of God with the apex of the human spirit. Przywara develops from the analogia entis a philosophy of religion that is specific enough, on the one hand, to respect the teachings of Vatican I and the antimodernist magisterium, yet broad enough, on the other, to include such nonscholastic thinkers as J. H. Newman and Max Scheler—often suspected at that time of religious intuitionism. Przywara mounts his case by arguing that one best understands the distinction between two widely acknowledged polarities—religionmetaphysics and nature-grace—according to the model of relations of prevalence (Prävalenzverhältnisse). In other words, religion and metaphysics both track the same phenomenon, namely, God as refracted through creation. Religion, however, responds in a predominantly (but not exclusively) practical way, whereas metaphysics responds in a predominantly (but not exclusively) speculative way. Since religion remains at least implicitly cognitive, appeal to religious experience counts as something more than irrational emotivism.

Natural religion and supernatural religion are likewise, at least in the actual economy of salvation, joined according to a relationship of prevalence. On the one hand, since God has chosen not to limit grace to the precincts of the Catholic Church, there can be in fact no religious practice entirely untouched by grace. On the other hand, since God has chosen to redeem humanity as humans, the Catholic Church will include the dispositions of even natural religion in a healed and elevated mode. The all-important consequence is that speculative thought and religious practice, though always distinct, nevertheless compenetrate so thoroughly that one can see intelligible connections between religious traditions and the metaphysical systems they generate. The Catholic religion, which represents for Przywara the maximal supernatural elevation of natural religious traditions, generates the metaphysics of the analogia entis.

The third chapter applies Przywara’s prevalence model of religious practice and speculative thought to one regional variant within the Catholic religion: Przywara’s own Jesuit order, founded by St. Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556). Set against the backdrop of post–World War I controversies regarding the place of mysticism (as opposed to asceticism) in Jesuit life, this chapter shows how in the 1930s Przywara uses the analogy of being both to explain the irreducible pluralism of religious types and to evoke the distinctiveness of the Ignatian type. As Przywara sees it, genuinely Catholic religious types are united in their basic respect for analogical balance but are distinguished by their relative emphases on one or another pole of the certain perennial tensions. Though all Catholic religious currents will respect creation’s similarity and dissimilarity to God, for instance, the Ignatian type accentuates dissimilarity, contemplating God preferentially under the aspect of Divine Majesty. This emphasis with respect to the vertical axis of the analogia entis gives rise to a series of horizontal, apostolic preferences: active service in imitation of the self-emptying Christ, personalized governance according to the model of discretio caritatis, and attunement to the directives of the hierarchical Church. These distinctive Jesuit emphases effectively balance other charisms and paths within the Church, making the Church a field of irreducible tensions whose pluriformity points beyond itself to the inexhaustible riches of God. Making the Church transparent to the majesty of God is for Przywara the perennially Ignatian ecclesiological project.

The fourth and fifth chapters then work out in more detail Przywara’s Ignatian vision of the Church, distinguishing two stages of Przywara’s thought. The fourth chapter explores the principle of ecclesial discretion developed by Przywara in the early 1940s, showing how Przywara models the function of ecclesial authority on the function of an ideal Jesuit superior. Przywara argues that hierarchical authority, the Church of representative office, actually serves as the condition for the possibility of ordered pluralism, missionary outreach to the uncovenanted, and an enterprising laity. According to this model, the more the Church’s authority is seen to descend from God rather than to ascend from human ingenuity or majority consensus, the less various charisms and apostolates in the Church are seen to compete with each other. The Church from above, in other words, best accommodates pluralism—and even requires it. Przywara develops this Ignatian ecclesiology against the backdrop of the two models governing much of early twentieth-century ecclesiology: the so-called perfect-society ecclesiology descending from Vatican I and the so-called mystical-body ecclesiology popularized by the German Liturgical Movement. Przywara’s Jesuit ecclesiology of discretion aims to overcome the onesidedness of each position, reconciling their legitimate insights in a single, Ignatian and analogical model.

The fifth chapter observes something of a caesura in Przywara’s thought. In the closing years of World War II, the German Jesuit selfconsciously changes his approach to theology, undertaking what I call an apocalyptic ressourcement. Personal and national tragedy lead Przywara to conclude that God is permitting the collapse of the post-Tridentine Western Church in order to inaugurate a global and, indeed, cosmic Church. Aiming to cooperate with this divine initiative, Przywara adopts what he considers the more globally accessible medium of the nouvelle théologie: the primordial symbols of scripture, liturgy, and patristic preaching.

Ecclesiologically, the most significant consequence of this methodological shift is Przywara’s decision to recast his analogical vision of the Church in the biblical-symbolic categories of nuptiality and Marian typology. Despite this change in method and categories, I argue, Przywara continues to uphold the values that he formerly identified as distinctively Ignatian: reverence for the ever greater God, missionary outreach, and responsiveness to the unique pastoral needs of each age. Though the theme of the hierarchical Church is less prominent in Przywara’s writings from this period, the shift is best explained not as a repudiation of former positions but as a response to a new historical occasion.

With this later turn to a biblical and nuptial ecclesiology, we arrive at the end of Przywara’s original ecclesiological developments. After World War II, Przywara’s fragile mental health imposes on him a life of nearly eremitic seclusion, including separation from the normal community life of the Jesuit order. After many false starts, Przywara settles in the early 1950s at Murnau in the Bavarian countryside, where he resumes his intellectual vocation with the help of a caretaker named Sigrid Müller. During this period he also published many of the writings originally composed toward the end of World War II. The only major writing on the Church conceived after World War II, Kirche in Gegensätzen (1962), offers not so much new speculations as a prophetic synthesis of his ecclesiologies of discretion and nuptiality. Though written in anticipation of Vatican II, it nevertheless offers a nuanced answer to the question, often mooted in retrospect, What happened at Vatican II? With a view to sharpening the council’s discernment, Przywara outlines several perennial tensions in the Catholic Church whose competing values may vary in ascendancy from era to era. Przywara thus foresees in Vatican II not the birth of a new Church but the emergence of a new set of accents, or a new ecclesial type. Given the intellectual and spiritual currents clamoring for the council, however, Przywara suspects that the emergent ecclesial type will further suppress Ignatian emphases and, in turn, cloud the Church’s transparency to the Divine Majesty. Przywara thus combines Joseph Ratzinger’s insistence on the basic continuity of the Church’s identity across Vatican II with John O’Malley’s sensitivity to the significance of change in ecclesial style. Intriguingly, though Przywara clearly offers his work as an instrument for ecclesial discernment, his reclusive circumstances lead him to name not Ignatius but St. Anthony of the Desert as his spiritual forebear.¹⁵

This later identification with the tradition of desert monasticism should not obscure, however, the fil conducteur that connects the whole course of Przywara’s reflections on the Church: the analogia entis in its distinctively Ignatian configuration. Przywara’s assessments of currents within the Church always represent an attempt to help the Church maintain her analogical equilibrium and thus her attitude of Marian humility. Because Przywara saw the ecclesial currents of his age as hostile to Ignatius’s values, his attempts to restore analogical balance to the Church often involved a vindication of the Jesuit way of proceeding. In this way, the analogy of being serves as a framework for articulating an Ignatian ecclesiology.

At the same time, Przywara’s analogical and Ignatian ecclesiology clearly has a broader, apologetic aim. The analogy of being, it will be remembered, designates the middle differentiating God and creation: only when we perceive the unbridgeable interval between Creator and creature do we come to serve the God of majesty rather than our own idolatrous projections. Essentially, Przywara’s religious apologetic boils down to a dilemma: either idolatrous pantheism or the analogia entis. And because it is the Catholic Church who renders the analogia entis historically concrete, instantiating its structure and rhythm in her form of life, the dilemma is patient of a still more pointed formulation: either idolatrous pantheism or participation (whether explicitly or implicitly) in the Catholic Church. There is no third option.

Most provocative in Przywara’s either/or apologetic is its ability to advance a robust apologetic for the absoluteness of the Catholic Church without indulging in triumphalism. The Church remains absolute in the sense that she remains the only site positively willed by God for the gathering of all humanity in Christ. Yet God has established this site, Przywara would hasten to add, not as a repository of timeless formulas and rituals or as an uninterrupted parade of edifying saints and wise pastors, all of which might only serve to inflate the egos of the Church’s members. God has instead established the Church as a field of rippling tensions. One enters the Church, accordingly, to be stretched on the rack of her unmasterable polarities, to experience her permanence and her change, to wonder at her holiness in her Head and her sinfulness in her members. To persevere in such a Church in antitheses, in short, requires confronting and embracing one’s own relativity. If the Catholic Church is thus the Church of the ever greater God, she is so because she is a school of ever more abject creatureliness.

It is to this almost painful sensitivity to the majesty of God and to the Church’s role in conveying this majesty that Przywara’s admirers attribute his relevance for the present. In his " Laudatio auf Erich Przywara, Karl Rahner, reflecting on the state of theology after Vatican II, predicts, Future theology will still have much to learn from Przywara. Precisely his later writings have not been widely received. The average theology of today too, which thinks—often being altogether too quickly persuaded—that it has dedicated itself to the spirit of the Council, could benefit today and tomorrow from letting itself be terrified by the dark fire of Przywara’s theology."¹⁶ Balthasar too foresees that Przywara’s thought, after having served to stimulate the council, might now provide the key to its proper interpretation.

[Przywara] had long anticipated the opening of the Church to the world that came with the [Second Vatican] Council, but he also possessed the corrective that has not been applied in the way that the Council’s [teachings] have been inflected and broadly put into practice: namely, the elemental, downright Old Testament sense for the divinity of God, who is a consuming fire, a death-bringing sword, and a transporting love. Indeed, he alone possessed the language in which the word God could be heard without that touch of faint-heartedness that has led to the luke-warm chatter of the average theology of today. He lives like the mythical salamander in the fire: there, at the point where finite, creaturely being arises out of the infinite, where that indissoluble mystery holds sway that he baptized with the name analogia entis.¹⁷

Both Rahner and Balthasar, then, find in Przywara a stimulus to the Church of their own day and a corrective to the average theology of ours. Both identify Przywara’s thought as a remedy for the postconciliar obtuseness to the majesty of the ever greater God. But both ultimately omit to develop this line of thinking in detail, especially as it pertains to Przywara’s ecclesiology.

This book intends to develop precisely this line of thinking, showing how Przywara develops and deploys his analogia entis to help the Church become more fully what she can never altogether cease to be: the Church of the ever greater God.

CHAPTER 1

Analogia Entis as

Creaturely Metaphysics

Structure, Rhythm, Middle

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.¹ Isaiah Berlin once made this dark fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus the basis for a twofold division of human thought styles. The fox represents those thinkers who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, whereas the hedgehog represents those who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel—a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance.² Had Berlin been familiar with the thought of Erich Przywara, he would undoubtedly have numbered him among the hedgehogs. The analogia entis, Przywara’s signature idea, is in one sense a theory of everything, a flexible category whose structure and rhythm informs the whole of reality. Przywara’s method of demonstrating the analogia entis, moreover, corresponds to the universality of its subject matter. Przywara proceeds by highlighting the operation of analogy across the various levels and registers of creation, letting the case for the analogia entis rest more on its cumulative explanatory force than on a single, syllogistic demonstration. The comprehensiveness of the analogia entis poses a challenge in turn to the expositor, who often feels obliged to say everything in order to do justice to any aspect of Przywara’s thought yet knows that saying everything is saying nothing incisive.

For the sake of clarity, then, we do better to begin cutting a selective path through Przywara’s texts, interlocutors, and themes. With respect to texts, the present chapter