Explorations in Theology: Creator Spirit

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

In this third book, Balthasar presents various ways in which something of the Creator Spirit should be experienced through his manifestations: in the way in which he leads human persons to the living God ("Faith"), in the way in which he distinguishes the spirits of this time ("Crisis"), in the way in which he initiates into the mystery of the Incarnate One ("Night"), in the way in which he breathes through the finite structures of human life as that which is incomprehensibly open ("Breath"), and in the way in which he reveals himself as love ("Spirit").

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Aug 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781681491608

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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PREFACE

This third volume of Explorations in Theology circles around the theme of the Holy Spirit. The first volume was constructed around the center of the Word become man, and the second volume around the Church that becomes configured to him: each volume rounded the other off. The Holy Spirit is certainly, on the one hand, the Spirit who holds sway between Christ and the Church, so that many themes of the first two volumes find their organic further development in this volume; but he is also the Creator Spirit who goes forth from the unity of Christ and the Church (as from the eternal unity of Father and Son) and is thereby the opening-up of the unity in love between bride and bridegroom to something new, to the child, to the world of creation, and today this means also (indeed, precisely) to the non-Christian secular world. The Second Vatican Council made distinctions in its reflections on this process of opening-up and challenged Christians to do the same; here, the period after the Council is a period under the sign of the Holy Spirit. We experience every day the fact that such an opening-up can also signify danger for men who are sheltered within the Church, if they are suddenly to be confronted, without sufficient preparation, with all the secularity that bursts in broad floods through the opened dams into the Church; and this danger is certainly not decreasing. This is why some of the studies in the present volume have a new character; they seek to concentrate the Christian message, to indicate the center that cannot be abandoned, to make it secure and to give an introduction to it from all sides and from all the points on the periphery, in the school of the Spirit who does not carry out his task in the dispensation of salvation in any other way than by proceeding to interpret the message about the One who became man, was crucified and rose to ever-new generations in a creatively new form, and by schooling these generations in this message.

The Spirit interprets in endless variations the love of the Son for the Father, the love of the Father for the Son and the Father’s love through the Son for the world. He gives light; but who can look into his own light? One of the most difficult and rare things of all is a theology that permits the Holy Spirit himself to become the very theme of theology; such a theology will not be developed at all, or even aimed at in this book. In the section on Spirit, only fragments of a pneumatology will be offered; decisively important matters are missing. However, something of the Creator Spirit in his working should be experienced instead of this: in the way in which he leads men to the living God (Faith), in the way in which he distinguishes the spirits of this time (Crisis), in the way in which he initiates into the mystery of the Incarnate One (Night) and—this only in weak hints—in the way in which he breathes through the finite structures of human life as that which is incomprehensibly open (Breath). Everything remains only an indication, and every essay could be replaced by ten utterly different essays. It suffices if, out of this loosely bound bouquet, the wind that blows through can awaken the sensation of a fragrance of life to life (2 Cor 2:16).

ABBREVIATIONS

AA    The Apostolate of the Laity (Apostolicam actuositatem)

AG    The Church’s Missionary Activity (Ad gentes divinitus)

CD    The Pastoral Office of Bishops in the Church (Christus Dominus)

DH    Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae)

DV    Divine Revelation (Dei verbum)

GE    Christian Education (Gravissim urn educations)

GS    The Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes)

IM    The Means of Social Communication (Inter mirifica)

LG    The Church (Lumen Gentium)

NA    The Church’s Relations with Non-Christian Religions (Nostra aetate)

OE    The Catholic Oriental Churches (Orientalium ecclesiarum)

OT    The Training of Priests (Optatam totius)

PC    The Up-to-date Renewal of Religious Life (Perfectae caritatis)

PO    The Life and Ministry of Priests (Presbyterorum ordinis)

SC    The Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum concilium)

UR    Ecumenism (Unitatis redintegratio)

I

FAITH

MOVEMENT TOWARD GOD

From the human Thou to the divine "Thou"

The little child awakens to self-consciousness through being addressed by the love of his mother. This descent of the intellect to conscious self-possession is an act of simple fullness that can only in abstracto be analyzed into various aspects and phases. It is not in the least possible to make it comprehensible on the basis of the formal structure of the intellect: sensuous impressions that bring into play a categorical ordering constitution that in its turn would be a function of a dynamic capacity to affirm Being in absolute terms and to objectify the determinate and finite existing object that is present here. The interpretation of the mother’s smiling and of her whole gift of self is the answer, awakened by her, of love to love, when the I is addressed by the Thou; and precisely because it is understood in the very origin that the Thou of the mother is not the I of the child, but both centers move in the same ellipse of love, and because it is understood likewise in the very origin that this love is the highest good and is absolutely sufficient and that, a priori, nothing higher can be awaited beyond this, so that the fullness of reality is in principle enclosed in this I-Thou (as in paradise) and that everything that may be experienced later as disappointment, deficiency and yearning longing is only descended from this: for this reason, everything—I and Thou and the world—is lit up from this lightning flash of the origin with a ray so brilliant and whole that it also includes a disclosure of God. In the beginning was the word with which a loving Thou summons forth the I: in the act of hearing lies directly, antecedent to all reflection, the fact that one has been given the gift of the reply; the little child does not consider whether it will reply with love or nonlove to its mother’s inviting smile, for just as the sun entices forth green growth, so does love awaken love; it is in the movement toward the Thou that the I becomes aware of itself. By giving itself, it experiences: I give myself. By crossing over from itself into what is other than itself, into the open world that offers it space, it experiences its freedom, its knowledge, its being as spirit.

Since, however, the child in this process replies and responds to a directive that cannot in any way have come from within its own self—it would never occur to the child that it itself had produced the mother’s smile—the entire paradise of reality that unfolds around the I stands there as an incomprehensible miracle: it is not thanks to the gracious favor of the I that space and world exist, but thanks to the gracious favor of the Thou. And if the I is permitted to walk upon this ground of reality and to cross the distances to reach the other, this is due to an original favor bestowed on him, something for which, a priori, the I will never find the sufficient reason in himself. For if the I could discover this reason, then the Thou would not have addressed any summons at all, and all would be a dwelling of the I in itself, the ellipse would be a circle, the world and love and knowledge would collapse in an instant, being would be illusion, the contents giving fulfillment would be empty law, love would be at best an instinct, knowledge a mere function.

But where love summons the I into the state where it is permitted to answer, the I is affected in the core of its being and can reply only with its totality, its center, its fullness: it must collect together what is best in itself in order to respond to that summons. It comes into play at once as a totality. This state in which claim is laid to the totality belongs to the highest joy bestowed by love: since the summons by the mother is not addressed to something in the child but to the child itself beyond the sum of its qualities (which it can share with other children), precisely in reality the I of the child, it experiences at the same time that my I is loved, is lovable for my mother, and that my reply can lie only in the gift of this I—together with all that may belong to it, although it is not necessary at all to know the individual details of this. Small children throw themselves upon one’s lap like a round ball.

A subsequent process is necessary—and it is the parents’ task to begin this—in order to differentiate the initially indivisible love of the child into love for fellow human beings and love for the absolute, in order to introduce the direction of the child’s love to God. This happens most painlessly when the parents declare that they are themselves children of God and behave accordingly, turning to God together with their children, for then the unconditional love that flows between parents and children does not need to be tied down and demythologized to the limited worldly measure; rather, this can be the love that is the foundation and bears the love of parents and children and is now related explicitly to the absolute Thou. If this succeeds, then it remains possible even in relationships between human beings—for example, in marriage—for the unreserved commitment of the one to the other to be borne by common orientation to the mystery of absolute love. This highest realization is, however, an extreme achievement that is made wholly possible only within Christianity. But even here, at the outset, it remains important that we see that Christianity will be the only fully satisfactory unfolding of what has been implied in the first experience of Being on the part of the awakening human spirit: Being and love are coextensive.¹

This implicit experience can be had only by a being that is spirit in the kernel of its subjectivity, a being that carries out what Thomas Aquinas calls reflexio completa: the total taking possession of itself in the total transcending of itself to a Thou that is recognized as the other who loves. In the animal realm, approximations to both elements can exist, regulated by the natural instincts of self-preservation and of reproduction, but the pure performance of the intellectual-volitional act of the spirit is nowhere achieved; everything remains on the basis of the limited forces of pairing and procreation and does not take place in the open space of Being as such and thus in the free realm of mutual summoning to oneself, of choosing and of making the gift of oneself. Where the horizon of Being as a whole lies open for intellectual knowledge, the horizon of value or of the good or of love as a whole must also necessarily lie open,² no matter how many disappointments and deficiencies may veil the horizon of value, robbing the horizon of Being (which cannot be removed) of its character as love and consequently making it to appear as mere Being (esse nudum). But that which mostly does not stand revealed in actuality during the hard life is nevertheless continuously envisaged as the future horizon of healed and whole Being, which as a whole is to be affirmed and loved; thanks to his origin, man has a half-buried knowledge of this Being. Plato’s whole understanding of the historical spirit is based on this concept, which he expresses partly in intellectual terms and partly in terms of eros; his idea of the good is the sun of Being, which can be recognized by the dazzled eye of the spirit only in sudden moments (exaiphnēs).

If one keeps in view the original unity of Being and the good, of reality and love, then it is not sufficient to say that all knowledge in the world is determined by the constitutive and irremovable distinction between Being and the existent (esse and essentia, in the sense of Thomas and of Thomism); rather, the distinction now takes on a further fundamental meaning, viz., that of the distinction between the rational and ethical mastering of the strata of Being in the world, on the one hand, and the awareness, on the other hand, of a permission to exist that can never be mastered, never taken into one’s own possession, an awareness of the gracious favor that grants access and entry to the realm of Being as a whole. This awareness is joined to the primal experience that one has arrived at participation in the world-fellowship of beings by means of a summons coming from outside one’s own I. It is not through the perfection of one’s own power that one has entered this fellowship. It is not relevant here to note that the mother, from whom the summons came forth, was herself one who had been summoned (as the child later learns), and not she alone, but all the beings who are invited to take their place at the table of existence; this means only that each one of these beings once entered the room with the same faltering breath, even if it soon felt itself to be at home among the other beings. How is it that I come in here? An irremovable contingency attaches to the individual and initially distinguishes him from the generality; he cannot add this contingency to the contingency of all other beings in order to arrive at a general necessity that would balance them all with one another. He discovers in the depth of the heart of the others, too, the same fundamental orientation that exists in himself. Although this is, for each individual, necessarily his own question and astonishment, this is at the same time the common question and astonishment: Why does a world exist at all, rather than no world?

For the individual, the thought of the appalling contingency of the sexual process to which he owes his origin remains a wholesome admonition; this thought can scarcely be borne, and if it were to indicate the total cause of his existence in the world, it could lead the being that is begotten and born to cynicism and the loss of all hope. But even the one who has a living idea of God and can understand the kernel of his personality only as something coming from God, something that is directly created by God, will nevertheless reflect with scarcely concealed dread on the incomprehensible linking of God’s creative act to nature’s chance acts of generation. God did not will his existence unconditionally, so to speak, but bound his own act of creation in the light to such dark and blind cooperative causes. Seen from the perspective of the latter, it seems not inappropriate to speak of "being thrown [geworfen] into existence", since what is begotten and born of an animal is called its litter [Wurf]. Between generation and spirit there yawns in Being something like a geological fault of dizzying height; Soloviev (following other Platonists such as Gregory of Nyssa) constructed his system of ethics on this geological fault. It must not be interpreted demonically or tragically, but it must not be made harmless; it comes to light definitively in the face of death. The being that has been generated sexually is doomed from the outset to die; among purely natural beings, death must be accepted as the necessary counterpart of birth, but what does dying mean for a spiritual person who has his being directly from God and is directly orientated to God—and yet who does not know himself in any other way than as a fellow citizen of the world of nature?

And yet, out of this same puzzling point of departure, light is cast on a fundamental law of human existence. No matter how great may be the space in man occupied by matter, by what is vital and biological, no matter how intensely it may be controlled by static and evolutionary laws also, which give man his place in nature as a whole: nevertheless, with his spirit he has an immediate orientation to God, irrespective of the stage of personal development and of the development of the world at which the individual stands. And if, in the age of technology, the natural element in man is subordinated ever more strongly to his arbitrary manipulations—going as far as extreme forms that have already come threateningly close to us today³-this consolation remains to man here: for all its subspiritual dimension, the fundamental substructure of the spirit is penetrated by spirit in such a way both in its static regularity and in the mysterious (but undeniable) dynamic resoluteness of its evolution that man, as the free being endowed with reason that he is, does not have to feel that he is handed over to demonic forces: it is certain that he, this weak individual, did not present himself with this substructure whose final outcome he himself is, nor can humanity as a whole, which stands on the peak of evolution, have been its own efficient cause. Thus, behind what is apparently the alien element in nature—the element on which he himself is built and which governs him as far as his highest capacities—stands ultimately an eternal Spirit that is related to his own spirit; as spirit, he can only have an unmediated relationship to this Spirit, from which the process and the mediation of the world’s nature do not distance him in any serious way. He would not be able to see God as a natural being in the infinite cosmos unless he had already found him beforehand as a spiritual being: as his own origin in the love whose remembrance can never be wholly buried and which remains the secret or open horizon against which he must measure everything that is in the world. In this process, two things will happen: he will be able to arrange what is in the world into a certain ascending scale of approximation to the absolute measurement (in an evolutionary view of the world, there might exist a chance for this ascending scale to be ordered temporally also toward the point on the horizon of absolute salvation—Omega day), but he will also know at the same time that nothing in the world can, as such, bring him to the point of absolute love: rather, absolute love can only turn to him on its own initiative, in freedom. But although it is true that this cannot be compelled on the part of the world nature (grace cannot be postulated by nature), it is equally true that subspiritual nature can have its foundation only in the absolute Spirit (and thus in love), and this means that there is a promise inscribed on nature itself that this free fulfillment of all the world’s searching and all searching (eros) of existence for the definitive encounter with love—in short, salvation—will one day become a real event.

The event in which the spirit awoke to its being as I was the interpersonal experience of the Thou in the sheltering sphere of common human nature, indeed, more intimately still, in the sphere of the common flesh of mother and child. It seems to be the unity of nature that allows the play of love between the sheer otherness of the persons: for even where the mother pours forth her own living substance into the child, the child never becomes the mother, and the mother never becomes the child. The play of love of the persons—so it could appear—is a very high expression of nature’s fullness of life, which can set itself over against itself in its unity in order to seek itself, to find itself and to give new fertility to itself in its own womb. If this were so, then the ultimate act would consist in the free self-sacrifice made by the individual persons (in death) in order to be submerged in the all-embracing dimension of nature, of physis (the Being which rises up to become itself): persons, together with their personal love, would be transitory blossoms of a foundation that, in order to be love, takes on finite form in persons but then always takes these persons back into itself, since the blossom must fall in order to produce fruit. If this were to count seriously as an interpretation of Being, then one would have to accept the consequences: (1) interpersonal love would itself be the absolute and (quasi-)divine; but a love for God would not be possible, since God and man are not borne and sheltered by any common physis, so that a sheer setting in opposition of the Is would result and, thus, utter alienness; in terms of his essence, God would be acosmic, while man would be completely cosmic, and thus no love would come into being. (2) If love is a blossoming of nature, then it is only one mode of Being among others and not in the least the embodiment of Being itself. So there does exist in nature de facto also that which is opposed to love: the struggle of the species and of the individuals in each genus against each other, a struggle that is bitter, merciless and cruel; and one must either (with Nietzsche) praise precisely this cruelty in the will to attain power as the glory of absolute Being (The Great Song of Yes and Amen) or else acknowledge that the whole realm of nature cannot be absorbed into love (it is polemos emphulios, immanent civil war) and transcend it (Buddha, Plato) to seek the place where peace rules. But it will then be questionable whether personal love, which appears as one element in innerworldly Being, can find a place for itself in this act of transcendence. At the origin of human life lay a promise of love that seemed absolute. Has it the capacity to hold out until the promise is fulfilled?

Dialectic of the absolute "Thou"

The dialectic of the idea of God, as this unfolds in the religions and philosophies of humanity, is generated precisely from the point of departure that has been set forth here.

a. The first image of God, that of myth, could be described as the religious projection of the primal experience of loving common humanity, though undeniably interwoven (and not a little obscured) by the existential feelings that man has in face of the strangeness and the superior power of nature and of Being as a whole. If we strip this image of the characteristics that belong explicitly to the realm of nature—power, as this is encountered in a beast, in a storm, in the elements, in light, fire, darkness and in natural catastrophes, the attack of panic anxiety, reverence before what is all-embracing in every regard, reverence before procreation, birth and death, before one’s ancestors, who embody one’s own origin—there emerges in the kernel a mysterious, indefinable for me, behind which there must stand a Thou who can grant me favor, shelter and help, the grace that was promised in the first experience of childhood and could not be granted fully by one’s parents or indeed by fellow men at all. This God is understood (as was one’s mother) as a somebody, as one in a manner that is not the object of conscious reflection (one among possible others), just as the mother, the father, the friend and the member of one’s tribe are each one, among others who are not for me. My enemy will have his own god, and this god will, logically, be the enemy of my god. This fact that the god is for me—or, in the case of a tribe, a land or a kingdom, for us—is absolutely the most important quality of the god: he is a person, endowed with the power and freedom of a person, he turns his face toward man, and he is moved by the gift made by the man who needs him to make new proclamations of love, of protection, of his hearing of prayer. The reverence, the personal prayer and its confirmation through the personal sacrifice (as portrayal of the readiness to make renunciation in favor of the god) are a continuation of the act of responsive and self-giving love that the child makes to its mother. Even if there are countless names in the various peoples and periods for the god who helps in gracious love, the god is always this One, this special god who looks on me with favor and within whose sheltering protection I am kept safe and whole, and my prayer is heard. A marvelously clear late form of the living myth are the gods who protect the heroes in Homer: Odysseus’ goddess is Athene, in whom he places unconditional trust in a mutual love that is wholly asexual; he complains to her that he has never seen her on the long and dangerous journey of his wanderings (Od. 13:314f), and she assures him that she has never abandoned him, even in disaster (331). And since there is a personal god for each hero and for his clan, and thus the gods must be numerous and divided among themselves with respect to the interests of their proteges, Zeus emerges as the one who creates order and plans the whole of destiny; he listens to the causes supported by the gods and binds these together to a hidden plan of providence. Somewhere in the realm of the gods exists something like free omnipotence, but this is not permitted in the myth to call into question the for me, for us. The Egyptian Re is omnipotent, and yet he exists for Egypt. Among the gods of Babylon, the one who is being addressed in each particular instance appears as the one who is important and is superior to the others, in Hölderlin’s sense: Thou grantest to us, the sons of the loving earth, that we should celebrate all the feasts that have come into being, without counting the gods: there is always One for all (first draft of the Friedensfeier). To understand the Bible correctly, it is important to see that Yahweh does not introduce himself first and foremost as a god who corresponds to an abstract universal concept of deity but as the God for . . ., just as Israel, his chosen people, is a people for . . ., and that he thereby accepts rivalry with the other gods and emerges only in the course of a long history as the victor over all the others, as the one who is truly omnipotent and therefore proves the others to be nothings. This he does, not by refuting and demythologizing the concrete holy saga of the origin (i.e., the myth), but by fulfilling it from within and showing it to be universally valid in its concreteness.

b. Nevertheless, the mythical idea of God shows its own inherent finitude and is transcended by philosophy in a couple of resolute steps of thought. The primarily dualistic division of Being into an immortal world of the gods and a mortal world of men, as this is known to Pindar (Nem. 6, 1-7) and is still presupposed by the tragedians, reduces the divine in its power and freedom to an inappropriate finitude and keeps it dependent on something dark and ineffable that is antecedent to the split into two worlds (moira). In the essence of the divine lies, first, that it has nothing as its own foundation and is unconditioned (ab-solute) and is only in this way the foundation for the world. This absolute can indeed still be cause of all that exists in Plato as the idea of the good (Republic VI, 505 A) and the sun that casts its rays everywhere (ibid., 508 B), by towering above reality in sublimity and power (509 C), but it can no longer be conceived as personal love (except once again in the myth of the Timaeus, for example). Now, love falls more and more on the side of the man who yearns for God (Symposium) and of the world that is carried away through eros to the absolute and is kept in motion (Aristotle). Secondly, a further and very confusing idea follows with logical consistency: in principle, the absolute cannot have any opposite term to itself. The world is full of contrary pairs, and if the world is thought of as finite, it has its opposite term in God. But God himself has no opposite term: as Nicholas of Cusa will say with perfect logic, God is the Non-Aliud, that which is not other. Already for Heraclitus, the divine was that which rests still in change, at once embracing and transcending the contrary pairs. Plotinus perfects this by removing the One which knows no opposite term above the spirit that has its life in the tension between thinking and being thought, between loving and being loved between I and Thou. The One, source of all love and insight, cannot itself be a loving Thou. A final point is the necessary consequence of this: thirdly, the divine absolute which cannot cease to be the object and the goal of all of man’s religious striving, disappears into the realm of that which cannot be uttered that which lacks a Thou: it is that which is loved, that to which all goodness must be attributed, but since it remains severed impersonally from all dialogue between I and Thou it can be attained only by the one who leaves his personal being as a limitation behind him and penetrates through to that which is devoid of contraries. The mysticisms of various color in East and West meet one another at this point, but Karl Barth is not wrong to see the transition into atheism as something that necessarily happens on the subtle heights of philosophical mysticism. The absolute, devoid of content, becomes the logical form (Hegel), the law of process (Marx), and the whole emphasis falls back on the quasi-divine love between human beings (Feuerbach).

c. Humanity’s idea of god as a whole remains incapable of being brought to completion, since it cannot dispense with either of these starting points but is unable to construct the bridge that should span the gap between these two pillars of the bridge. Purely philosophical religion, especially as civil religion, cannot exist; it must make use at least on a secondary level of the mythical element, where alone prayer and sacrifice are possible; in this sense, Rome made concessions to the old cults of the gods (cf. Varro’s division of religion into the three categories of mythical, natural and social and Augustine’s criticism in the City of God IV, 4, 3); but it also was moved by political considerations to gather together the mythical cults of the conquered peoples and unite them in an artificial pantheon, about which Hegel delivered the following severe and clear judgment: the unity of power to which these shadowy gods refer is Rome, is the act of ruling.⁴ The renewed mythologization of the Plotinian philosophy by Porphyry and Iamblichus is likewise artificial: the forces of the one universe are personified, in order to be accessible to the cult, but the cult itself (especially in Egypt) has an extremely strong magical ingredient. On the other hand, the attempts to penetrate from a single mythical world system through to the breadth of philosophical universality—as this is undertaken in the fantastic world dramas of gnosticism and in the Hermetic writings—remain in their turn unnatural and lifeless, nothing more than the products of an imaginative capacity to make combinations, something that does indeed have a certain knowledge of the true concerns of religion but obscures this by diverting it into the realms of the sensational, the sectarian, often the libidinous and always the intellectual. The civil cult, however, is not based on personal love and the gift of one’s self but is largely a technique that accords with the divine fatum and in the sacrifices is an official payment for possible errors and for the maintenance of the favor of the numina. The figure of the pious Aeneas stands in isolation between these religious forms: he is the highest approximation to the genuine point from which religion flows, viz., existence as the vocation to a future work and total pliability (involving painful renunciations) in the hands of the gods; it is not for nothing that the Christian West set its religious poetry under the sign of Vergil.

It follows that one can start from the foundation of human personal existence in the call made by love and the answer made to love to formulate something like an a priori postulate for the form of religion. This postulate, however, cannot generate of itself a concrete sketch of this form, because a dialectic (between heart and reason) seems necessarily to dissolve continually every form that is given definite shape: the heart (Pascal) demands a God as Thou and an absolute love between both; but the reason forbids us to conceive of God as such a Thou, since he must be absolute (and therefore without needs) and transcends a priori every tension between opposite terms, so that he is to be understood at best as the anonymous totality of goodness that pours itself out without jealousy, but not as that which addresses us in personal terms and awakens us to personhood.

The God of Israel, with his first historical act of salvation, lays the basis of that unity, of the idea of God that man seeks in vain to grasp—indeed, man seeks in vain to grasp it even as a possible idea. God shows himself here to be the mighty and gracious one by going to seek a people (Dt 4:34) and choosing it (Dt 7:6); and in the act of addressing it and choosing and saving it (out of Egypt), he first of all creates and establishes this people as subject and partner On the side of Israel, there is no merit, no excellence (Dt 7:7; 8:17), and it becomes what it is through God’s address: the people for Yahweh. The reason for the election is unfathomable love (Dt 7:7, 9), which can be answered only by total, unlimited love (Dt 6:5). The core of the I becomes the core of a Thou. This event is unique, as David expresses it in astonishment: What other nation on earth is like your people Israel, whom God went to redeem to be his people . . . by driving out before his people a nation and its gods? (2 Sam 7:23). On the basis of the uniqueness of the event, the event of a total love without any preconditions, which as such reveals omnipotence (since God could just as well have chosen another people, for all belong to him and are as nothing before him, Is 40:17), the one who makes election shows himself to be the only one (Is 43:10-12): the absoluteness being. He is the actus purus amoris at that utterly original point at which man is raised into personal being through the pure dialogue of I and Thou; he fulfills what the mother can awaken only for an instant and, in any case, can do no more than promise, since she at once enters with her child into the equality of every We who stand in need of absolute love. The free powerfulness of the divine love that makes its unfathomable act of election encounters no opposition, if one is now to think of God in the philosophical sense as the one who is the absolutely existent (Wis 13:1), who as such loves all that exists (Wis 11:24) and created it in the tensions of opposite terms (Sir 33:14-15; 42:24), while he himself is exalted above every postulation of opposites and is the All (Sir 43:27). If this means that he has become the one who is always greater and can never be overtaken (43:28-32), indeed, the one whose traces are totally incapable of being followed (Job 28:13f.), this is not first of all because his absoluteness is incapable of being tied down by any concept but because the freedom of his love eludes all human grasping on an ever-higher level.

This, of course, generates of itself a new dialectic, born of the question how the finite creature will be able to endure an absolute love and love’s requirement. As far as the creature itself is concerned, it will fail, at precisely the most dangerous place, where the wound inflicted on the tenderness of unfathomable love, as it were, necessarily calls down on itself vengeance through rejection, being flung down from the mountain of God and being turned to ashes by the flames that come from God (Ezek 28:16,18). And yet, the dialectic between election and rejection remains a modality within the relationship of love itself, so that it becomes clear that one can never do other than speak dialectically of love in the biblical revelation: both in the indicative (God’s acts of election are without repentance) and also in the conditional, but still in such a way that every conditional clause (the two-sidedness of the covenant made at Sinai) rests on the one-sidedness of the covenant of election with Noah, with Abraham and ultimately in Jesus Christ. This dialectic must remain in force until the end of the New Covenant, indeed, until the end of the world, because the living God is just as much the infinitely individual and particular One as he is the absolutely universal One: he is the One who is, and there is no other (which is why every act of casting sidelong glances at other gods is forbidden, indeed, is the sin), and yet he is the unique One, exalted above all otherness.

There remains, however, one question that is unanswered by the method we have chosen here: How is love’s fellowship between God and man possible, given that the otherness of the persons is so great and finds no sheltering framework within the equality of one nature (as is the case between mother and child)? Is not such a relationship of love between those who belong to different species unnatural, precisely because there is no common nature? This leads us to the whole complex of the question about nature and grace, of knowledge of God and love of God through nature and through grace, in which alone the structure of the knowledge of God becomes truly clear.

Knowledge of God as nature and as grace

The child can be addressed by the mother and awakened to the personal act of knowing and answering thanks to the fact that it is her child, carried in the womb and brought to birth by her. The mother who encounters the child as one standing over against it and as a Thou is at the same time the source of the child, the womb from which it has come forth. The unknown sheltering and nourishing element, which ultimately gave the child its own independent existence, is now disclosed as that which summons the child into the love in which it takes responsibility for itself. And yet, the mother stands before her child as before an incomprehensible miracle: she has indeed received a seed and borne it to birth, but how is she to be responsible for the spirit-endowed, eternal person who looks out at her from the eyes of the new being? Her child belongs to her and yet is not her work but God’s work, so that the love she has for it and the love to which she summons it is likewise her own (mother-)love and yet not her own property but a kind of loan from the true possessor of all love. Thus the first encounter of the mother’s love and the child’s love has at the same time something definitive (as we have described it up to this point) and something provisional and representative (this must be considered, too, in what follows).

Just a space of time intervenes between the birth of the child and its first act as spirit (in which it returns thanks and answers the mother’s smile with its own smile of recognition), there is likewise a space between man’s being created by God and his awareness that he is the object of God’s gracious address; in this space, he is indeed already in a relationship to God (for he is God’s creature) but does not yet possess the fulfilled relationship for which he was created and born. We can call this antechamber and man’s relationship to God that takes place therein the space and the relationship of nature, and we can call the acts performed therein the acts of the natural knowledge of God and the natural love of God.

Man is brought forth into the world from God’s creative womb; not, of course, in one single act of sending forth, like a human birth, for God must continually accompany the finite being and hold it in existence, but nevertheless in an act that establishes man in his existence in the world and frees him for this (so that Barth is correct to reject the description of the conservatio as a creatio continua). As God’s likeness, man retains a sensitivity to the fact that he has been sent forth from the hand of God and to his origin in the eternal womb, but it is impossible for him to objectify this awareness of his origin, to annul his introduction into existence through a reversal (epistrophē) of the flow of his life and to return into the womb of his origin in order to know it and to embrace it. On the level of nature, Nicodemus is right: How can a man be in the event of being born when he is already old? For he cannot creep a second time into the womb of his mother, in order to experience once again what it is to be born! (Jn 3:4). Granted, therefore, that he is indeed born of the Creator God but not yet addressed by the God of love, what equipment does he then have in order to know God?

He has the primal knowledge of love, which has been described at the beginning of this essay, out of the act in which he has been awakened to become a knowing and loving spirit, the act in which love appears as the absolutum, in the dimension where as yet there is no distinction between divine and human love. One will note here in passing that the kernel of truth in three untenable theories about the knowledge of God lies hidden at this point: the theory of the congenital idea of God (Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy 3, 10; the idea is found down to the modern period), which in reality is nothing other than the awakening of the intellect to itself through the experience of being sheltered in Being (through love) as in the id quo maius cogitari nequit; further, the theory of traditionalism (Bonald, Bonnetty, DS 2751-56, 2811-14), according to which man comes to the knowledge of God only through tradition; and the opposite theory of ontologism (Gioberti, DS 2841-47), according to which the first object of knowledge is not the finite Being but the infinite, divine Being: but the common humanity, which the child experiences originally in its mother, does not bestow on the child an idea that it would not itself have in any way but rather awakens it to the fact that it is itself spirit (the dimension in which the horizon of Being and of love opens up to the child). This does not permit the child to look directly on God, but it does give it a genuine promise of absolute grace and love. This is, indeed, no vision of the essence of God, but it is something like a blazing-up of his presence: existence is lit up here by the light of God’s truth (Augustine), and the relationship with the fellow man is so radiant and warm through the light of God’s love (Bonaventure). The primal knowledge that man receives here is, however, only like a flash of lightning: even if the entire subsequent experience of the world looks from the outside like an addition (or synthesis), it remains in its most hidden reality a subtraction; it contains a fundamental disappointment, viz., that everything does not correspond to my first intuition (G. Siewerth), neither things nor human beings (and, ultimately, even my mother is one of these): all this is only world, not God, only things that exist, not Being. The essentiae are minted from the actus essendi, which never objectifies itself but rather humbles itself invisibly in humility (F. Ulrich) and presents itself as that which bears up everything. By the same token, the fact that one must exist in keeping with the laws of the world is a subtraction from the beatitude of the original permission to exist; all the necessities of human life and of subhuman nature are deficiencies vis-à-vis the original experience that Being means fullness, joy and freedom and that in this sense, as the genuine reversal of necessity, it demands and receives man’s unlimited assent.

Nevertheless, all things and relationships in the world point, by the very element of subtraction that they contain, to the common origin; God sets them free to exist in such a way that they offer themselves from all sides to be known as that which is not absolute, as things that are set in motion in their very being, caused by one another, unnecessary (first, second and third proofs of God in Thomas: S. Th. I, q. 2, a 3; C. G. 1, 13). And yet the things that all stand together in a common distance from the creative origin are so different from each other that, when they are measured from the starting point of the original intuition, they form stages and approximations (fourth proof), although in such a way that even the highest worldly stages (e.g., the love between human beings), despite all the satisfaction and fulfillment they mediate, never do more than point beyond themselves to the common origin. Again, in the highest, fulfilled relationship of man and woman, the divine (as the previously mentioned ontologism holds) can blaze forth and make itself present in the encounter between persons; this is the position held by Feuerbach and is already expressed in the well-known aria from the Magic Flute, Man and woman, man and woman / touch the Divinity; and in other peak achievements of art, of technology, of social and political work, of fidelity in friendship and in discipleship, etc., it is possible to experience the origin of all good as something that has drawn close. And yet the spirit has already left all this behind when it evaluates the finite: it bears along in its wake, in its memory, the origin that has become inaccessible and carries out its act of evaluation with a view to an ultimate goal that corresponds to this origin and cannot be objectified. This anticipation can take various forms: it can be the abandoning of all things for the sake of a proleptic eschatological dwelling in the absolute, as in Indian mysticism, in which the element of subtraction in the evaluation of all worldly existence determines the theoretical and practical conduct of the monk and the wise man; with a courage deserving our admiration, the absolute is preferred to the nonabsolute, and everything else is sold for the sake of the one precious pearl. But if, in the motion of the nonabsolute, the element of teleology should once move beyond individual things and relationships (Thomas’ fifth proof of God) to embrace the world’s being as a whole—in the theory of the evolution of the world—then the eschatological anticipation of the spirit and its proleptic dwelling with God can also take on the form of a flight forward along with the world (J. B. Metz), a carrying of things on their teleological path to God, although this does not lessen the severity and boldness of the anticipation or level down the fundamental distance between God and the world. It would be possible for the world to become directly God only if the world had already been divine at the outset of the evolution, or if perhaps God, in order to become himself, had become worldly (German Idealism). But such an idea completely dissolves the difference that is encountered in the primal experience of the spirit—the astonishment that one who is contingent is permitted to enter the realm of Being.

From what has been said, it follows that Thomas is correct not only to insist that the possibility of the natural knowledge of God is given with human nature but also to claim that a natural love for God above all else is based on nature (S. Th. I/II, q. 109, a. 3). The proof (at least potentially) for this thesis of Thomas is what we have seen as lived out proleptically in the decision of Indian monasticism and of many other forms of religion, which we have mentioned, to prefer the absolute to all else, even the highest and most evident values of the world. The proof can be adduced even where the explicit formulation of the idea of God appears to remain defective for a Christian reaction and judgment. The governing image in keeping with which Thomas proposes his thesis implies that the part (to the extent that it understands itself to be a part) prefers the good of the totality to its own good and is therefore capable of sacrificing itself for the good of the totality. Both individual ethics (cf. Alcestis and other dramas of Euripides) and political ethics (the classical parable of the limbs that sacrifice themselves for the boy) show that this requirement has continually been realized anew in the extrabiblical sphere. The experience in the world’s religion and ethics teaches that this law (which is left in a remarkable abstractness in Thomas) can hold good even where the original distinction between the absolute and the relative is realized in a very imperfect manner. It may be the case that a man has had the primal experience only in a heavy turbidity, or that the hardships of life have wiped out his memory of it so that it becomes unrecognizable; it may also be the case that the tendency of a whole age is willing to know the original distinction only in a much reduced and ungenuine form and brings strong pressure to bear in this way on the men of the age: nevertheless, men are capable of sacrificing all else, and even their own lives, for what they take to be absolute values. They are capable of seeing the totality in the future of mankind or even only in their fatherland that must be protected or in the success of flight in space, and of sacrificing everything for this good, beyond which they are unable to perceive any higher good. The primal experience of many men does not lead at all to a subsequent differentiation of the human and the divine Thou, because it does not occur to them that the child owes its existence to any creator other than its own parents or the whole play of biological generation. And precisely in an evolutionary world view, where the process of the totality appears to display a meaningfulness that far exceeds and overtakes the life of the individual, the self-sacrifice of the individual life—where this takes place in keeping with the meaning and the direction of the evolution—becomes (more than in earlier periods and elsewhere) an understandable surrogate for lacking knowledge and love of God. The totality, for love of which the part here surrenders itself, inherits something of the characteristics of the philosophical idea of God: the abstractness (since humanity does not appear to be dependent on this individual one of its members), the all-embracing quality (Non-Aliud) that removes humanity beyond all I-Thou relationships as the transcendent totality of these relationships and finally the namelessness for love of which the individual (who bears a name) is willing to give up his name and to sink into anonymity.

One must bear in mind that all this has been said in the hypothesis that presupposes that God, as mere Creator, has given man existence and set him free, without having addressed him personally in such an existence. In this hypothesis, mere common humanity takes the responsibility for the address, first as the summons of the mother, who must in a certain sense act as a substitute form for the address by God. But in a nonparadisal world order, it is precisely this summons that will largely fail: common humanity will in many cases be obscured by laziness, egoism, coldness of heart, injustice and cruelty and will often be almost destroyed. Many children are exposed, not physically, but morally; as people say, the warm nest is lacking, or, better, that which corresponds on the human level to this biological state of being cared for is lacking; the painstaking process of leading the child out from the warmth of the family into the coldness and indifference of the wider world is lacking; and if we add to these defective experiences of life the stunted forms of the idea of God—false images of God, prayer that was never learned or was disturbed, guilt feelings one cannot be rid of, disappointments from people who present themselves as pious and Christian, etc.—then it is not surprising that the relationship of man to his divine origin can often be totally broken and buried.

This is why the First Vatican Council, when making the statement that God, as the origin and goal of all things, can be known with certainty by the light of the human reason from created things (DS 3004), hedged this round with cautious clauses. Only when the personal address of God in his revelation in grace and Word is also given us is it possible for that which concerns God—which in itself would not be accessible to the human reason—can be known by all easily, certainly and without error in the concrete historical situation of humanity (DS 3005). With the can (posse) of the first statement, nothing more than a real possibility is formulated, i.e., the horizon of the human spirit in knowledge and will is so open that it formally includes the fact that it has itself been created and thus includes the idea of the Creator, but this horizon that is open to God can be distorted materially through insufficient and mistaken ideals that make the claim of absoluteness.⁵

If one takes the further step from the structure creature-nature that has been described to the ordering structure of grace (negatively, and therefore not clearly enough, expressed: super-nature), then both the clear dividing line and the continuity that nevertheless exists become simultaneously obvious. The mother who has brought her child into the world can expose it or give it away, or she can simply die: in this case, the personal address does not take place, or at least it does not come from her. And if,