A Theology of History

By Hans Urs von Balthasar

 

Man has long wrestled with the problem of finding meaning in history. It is not surprising that, as a Christian, Hans Urs von Balthasar finds the meaning of history in Christ, its center and Lord. What may surprise and stimulate us is the theological mastery with which von Balthasar traces the effects of Christ's lordship upon the daily life of the Christian.

In this book we have one of the indispensable sources for understanding Balthasar's Catholic Christocentrism. Here we find elaboration of the striking statement that Jesus Christ is "the Idea made concrete, personal, historical: universale concretum et personale"?which means that Christ is the universally valid in the here and now. Characteristic of von Balthasar, the book inspires spiritually as much as it informs theologically.

Von Balthasar follows Saint Irenaeus in viewing theology through the drama of history, and presents Jesus Christ as the norm by which all history?secular history as well as salvation history?ought to be interpreted. As God, Jesus is the universal norm for all humanity who stands outside of history; as man he became particular within history. By seeking to become one with him, our own history becomes meaningful, purposeful, and significant.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781681491257

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.

Book preview

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

THE TROUBLE WITH the first edition of this little sketch was that the title promised more than the book was meant to contain. It should really have been called the nucleus of a theology of history. It was only intended to be about the relation of Christ, as belonging christologically within time, to time in general, the time of human history, with the Church’s time mediating between them as the universalisation, accomplished by the Holy Spirit, of Christ’s temporal and at the same time archetypal existence. I landling it this way involved looking at the subject exclusively from above, not explicitly stating but rather taking for granted created things as the content which is given its form by the christological categories. This made it impossible to give an adequate treatment of the total view of a theology of history promised in the title, embracing both the orders of Creation and Redemption.

Without straining the framework of a brief outline, the second edition—by means of an introduction and a more detailed final chapter, as well as by various deepenings of the main body of the text—has attempted to establish a balance, so that the intersection of the two spheres and thus the whole form would become visible, or at least be indicated. I have not tried to do more than this; if on every page the questions introduced cry out for more thorough discussion (there is not even any full treatment of the scriptural evidence, the few quotations being scarcely more than indications), the author would like to reserve the right to return at some later date to individual aspects of the theme.

BASEL, CHRISTMAS 1958

INTRODUCTION

SINCE MAN FIRST BEGAN to philosophize he has sought to grasp things by distinguishing two elements: the factual, singular, sensible, concrete and contingent; and the necessary and universal (and, because universal, abstract), which has the validity of a law rising above the individual case and determining it. This scheme of thought is at the basis of Western philosophy and can be followed down throughout its history. It appears to correspond both to man’s way of knowing and to the structure of being (which for both Plato and Aristotle, and their successors, are intimately connected), but the mode of thought which it reflects is discursive rather than directly intuitive, and the mode of existence is one in which things are always phenomena of an essential structure rationally ordered and arranged according to genus and species.

The two elements can, of course, be differently emphasized. The emphasis can be placed on the (relatively) universal and necessary aspect in such a way that the factual, empirical element encountered in the sensible world is regarded simply as the point where the rationally ordered lines of being rather untidily intersect, so that it is the thinker’s job to unravel them and thus reduce them, wholly or in great part, to the essential. But the empirical tradition has always protested against this devaluation of the particular fact; for it, what is real is the unrepeatable, the concrete, the historical, and abstract laws of being spring from an inadequate attempt on the part of our limited powers of thought to cope with a factual world which we can never fully master.

There can, however, be no doubt that the rational systems—in both Greek and Christian tradition, and down to Kant and Hegel—have been accepted as the pillars of philosophy in its noblest sense, and as the more profound as well as higher form of philosophy; whereas empiricism, underestimating the power of abstraction and stopping short at the sensible facts, provides, superficially, the antithesis to this thesis but is in practice just something that is always there for real philosophy to overcome.

This evaluation is certainly tempting: nevertheless it overlooks certain features of thought and being which in the long run take their revenge. It is tempting because a deeper explanation of everything in the world of appearance always seems to lie in the world of essences: wisdom and experience can interpret the incomprehensible as presenting the hidden nature of a particular man or race, or of human nature itself, perhaps in conjunction with certain universal laws which govern the chance event. How stubborn that belief is may be seen from the astrological systems of ancient civilizations and their survival among the superstitious today. By comparison with this soothing reduction of fact to the laws of essence, the obstinate resistance of the historical fact seems not so much a positive contribution as an obstacle to thought.

The most grandiose attempt to master the realm of fact and history through reason was undertaken by Hegel; he interpreted the whole sequence and constellation of facts in nature and in human history as the manifestation of an all-embracing rational spirit, rational precisely in its factual manifestation. This may in one sense be regarded as the highest tribute of reason to the realm of fact and history, since the latter is then no longer mere phenomenon, outside the scope of law-giving reason, but a meaningful presentation of reason itself—which indeed requires this manifestation in order to be reason, so as to communicate itself to itself. But it may equally be regarded as the final devaluation of the historical, in that reason has finally disposed of it, leaving no room for genuine creativity or freedom in the person who acts. It was inevitable that one road at least should lead from Hegel to Marx. But that road offers no solution to our problem; for dialectical materialism does not involve taking empirical facts and events seriously, but on the contrary finally subjects them to a tyranny of mechanical processes governed by abstract laws, these merely taking the place of the old essences and their much freer system of teleological law.

Any attempt to interpret history as a whole, if it is not to succumb to gnostic myth, must posit some subject which works in and reveals itself in the whole of history and which is at the same time a being capable of providing general norms. This can only be either God himself—but he does not require history in order to communicate himself to himself—or man; but he, insofar as he is a free, acting subject, is always some one, particular individual who plainly cannot dominate history as a whole. It is true that there is a dialectic in man’s nature, the relation between the uniqueness of the concrete person and the universality of his essence as man. What makes this dialectic so confusing is that it is of the nature of essence to realize itself only and always in the particular here-and-now, and to be not even thinkable in any other way. This means that basically there can be nothing of the here-and-now uniqueness of an individual historical person which is not included in his essence if considered ontologically (a logical definition of an essence is always, because of its structure, so wide-meshed and imprecise that a great deal can slip through it). It was this dialectic which led Thomas Aquinas to speak of an individuatio ratione materiae (individuation in terms of matter) as the only way to solve the difficulty within the structure of being;¹ but it does in any case lead, when applied to history, to a highly mysterious concept of communication and communion, at the level of essence, between free persons whose metaphysical essence is identical, so that when we conceive of that essence in its historical realization it can only unfold in the form of a common destiny for all the persons who constitute it.

But any such common destiny of free persons in a communion of essence has got to be conceived, philosophically at any rate, in a democratic sense: each person, even the idiot and the still-born child, has exactly the same share in the metaphysical essence of man, however different the degree of development. Philosophically, at least, it can be asserted that the individual, with his personal reason and freedom, stands in solidarity with all men; that hence his decisions are never without repercussions upon the community, while no individual can raise himself above others to the point of domination without metaphysically endangering and deposing their humanity. For this reason it would be difficult to hold that speculative reason alone could ever arrive at the pre-eminence of Adam in relation to his descendants, and the dogma of original sin which depends on it. Reason could, at most, arrive at that incomplete interpretation beyond which many Protestant thinkers prefer not to go (tor example, Kierkegaard, Emil Brunner): that each man is Adam, and each has the same share in the original falling away from God, and in the common guilt. But it remains philosophically impossible for one human person, who as such is nothing other than one specimen of the human genus or species (the species whose dignity it is that all its members are unique persons)—it is impossible for one such person to be raised to a position of absolute dominance and hence, fundamentally, to become the centerpoint of all persons and their history; still less is it possible for him to raise himself to that position.

Thus while it would be possible to arrive by profound reflection at the negative aspect, guilt, in terms of the interaction of personal and social factors, if the positive aspect, redemption of the race, were at this level to be ascribed to a single person (a religious founder and deliverer), it could only be in the sense of his being a religious genius capable of discovering for the first time and pointing out to others a universal way of salvation which all can tread. Any such way could be historical only in an external sense: if it is really to have validity for all, to be a universal and valid way, its basis will have to be in essentiality: the essence of man, of destiny, of the cosmos as a whole.

The Absolutely Unique

This inviolable line of demarcation, while it has to be established and maintained by philosophical reflection, does at the same time inhibit the full play of the factual and historical pole in favor of the pole of universal essences. Nothing could break this barrier but a miracle undiscoverable and unguessable by philosophical thought: the existential union of God and man is one subject: a subject necessarily, as such, absolutely unique, because the human personality² is here, without any strain or breakage, assumed into the divine Person who incarnates and reveals himself in it. Hut this assumption into the personal inner life of God simply must not mean the removal of an individual from the sphere of his fellow-individuals (Elijah being snatched from among men in the fiery chariot, as it were): nor the translation of a normal human nature to a higher level of being: this would be something which the very fact of creation makes impossible; it would be the Arian heresy, contradicting precisely what it purports to establish—the redemption of ordinary, creaturely human nature.

Thus the raising of a man to the level of the unique, the only-begotten, calls for the yet deeper descent of God himself his humbling, his kenosis or emptying, right down to the binding of himself by entering into