Theologians and Saints | Hans Urs von Balthasar | From "Explorations in Theology: The Word
Made Flesh" | IgnatiusInsight.com
Theologians and Saints | Hans Urs von Balthasar | From
Explorations in Theology, vol. 1: The Word Made Flesh
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/hub_theolsaints_nov07.asp
Editor's note: This selection from Explorations in Theology: The Word
Made Flesh is subtitled "Unity and Division" and is from the chapter
titled "Theology and Sanctity" (pp 181-86).
In the whole history of Catholic theology there is hardly anything
that is less noticed, yet more deserving of notice, than the fact that,
since the great period of Scholasticism, there have been few theologians
who were saints. We mean here by "theologian" one whose
office and vocation is to expound revelation in its fullness, and
therefore whose work centers on dogmatic theology. If we consider
the history of theology up to the time of the great Scholastics, we are
struck by the fact that the great saints, those who not only achieved
an exemplary purity of life, but who also had received from God a
definite mission in the Church, were, mostly, great theologians. They
were "pillars of the Church", by vocation channels of her life: their
own lives reproduced the fullness of the Church's teaching, and their
teaching the fullness of the Church's life.
This is the reason for their enduring influence: the faithful saw in
their lives an immediate expression of their teaching and a testimony
to its value, and so were made fully confident in the rightness of
teaching and acting. It also gave the teachers themselves the full
assurance that they were not deviating from the canon of revealed
truth; for the complete concept of truth, which the gospel offers
us, consists precisely in this living exposition of theory in practice
and of knowledge carried into action. "If you continue in my word
... you shall know the truth" (Jn 8:32). "He that seeks the glory
of him that sent me, he is true, and there is no injustice in him" (Jn
7:18). And even stronger: "He who says that he knows him, and
keeps not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him" (1
Jn 2:4). "He that loves not knows not God, for God is charity" (1 Jn
4:8).
From the standpoint of revelation, there is simply no real truth
which does not have to be incarnated in an act or in some action, so
that the incarnation of Christ is the criterion of all real truth (1 Jn
2:22;
4:2), and "walking in the truth" is the way the believer possesses the
truth (2 Jn 1-4; 3 Jn etc.). Since the Holy Spirit distributes offices
in the Church according to his will, and gives to some the grace to
be "teachers" (Eph 4:11; 1 Cor 12:29), for which he imparts the gift of
"knowledge in the Spirit" (1 Cor 12:8), the office of teacher will
consist in proclaiming and transmitting the truth of revelation, manifested in
the life of Christ, in such a way that the hearer can recognize it
through his "walking in the truth" and can thus verify it. For Christ,
the exemplar of the truth, who designates himself as the truth, is for
us the canon of truth only in that his existence manifests his essence,
which is to be the "image of God" (2 Cor 4:4). "I do always the things
that please him" (Jn 8:29).
It was by virtue of this unity of knowledge and life that the great
teachers of the Church were able, as was required by their special
office, to be true lights and pastors of the Church. For although the
pastoral office is numbered by Paul in association with that of teacher
(Eph 4:11), this does not mean that all pastors must be teachers,
though their office involves their sharing the work of transmitting
doctrine (2 Tim 2:24, etc.). Likewise, the great teachers are not
necessarily pastors, though, even if they are not bishops, they
participate in the pastoral office. It is not surprising, therefore, to
find that,
in the early centuries, the offices of teacher and of pastor (in the
sense
of Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12) were normally conjoined. Irenaeus,
Cyprian, Athanasius, the two Cyrus, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzen,
Gregory of Nyssa, Epiphanius, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Chrysostom,
Theodoret, Hilary, Ambrose, Augustine, Fulgentius, Isidore--all were
bishops, not to mention the two great popes, Leo and Gregory.
Among the great doctors, exceptions to this rule were the two
Alexandrians, Jerome, Maximus and John of Damascus; but these
representatives of the monastic and ascetical life bring out still more
clearly the union of doctrine and life. The same may be said, too, of
most of the bishops and teachers mentioned above, who were either
monks themselves or were closely associated with monasticism and
promoters of it.
In short, these pillars of the Church were complete personalities:
what they taught they lived with such directness, so naively, we
might say, that the subsequent separation of theology and spirituality
was quite unknown to them. It would not only be idle but contrary
to the very conceptions of the Fathers to attempt to divide their
works into those dealing with doctrine and those concerned with the
Christian life (spirituality). It is true that they wrote works of
controversy and apologetics; but these, fundamentally, do not constitute
a distinct branch, but served, at the time they appeared, as a spur
to the development of doctrine. When Irenaeus, Basil, Gregory of
Nazianzen or Augustine argue with their adversaries, they do not
operate in a forecourt of theology, but in its very center. The answers
they give express the fullness and depth of revelation in its central
teaching. When they speak of those "outside", their attitude is the
same as when they speak of those within, though to the former they
may have to explain certain things that are clear enough to the latter.
And when they explain the Christian life to those within, it is always
and exclusively in the form of an exposition of traditional doctrine.
One might perhaps allow a distinction between the commentaries
and homilies of Origen, the former being more speculative and the
latter more pastoral in interest; but if we look deeper, the distinction
vanishes; in both, Origen is concerned with expounding the word of
God, which is as much a word of life as a word of truth. One could,
of course, list a number of the works--chiefly shorter ones--of the
Fathers as being more practical in scope, which could be classified
under the heading "spirituality"; but, just as their works of
controversy are, at the same time, doctrinal and theological, so too are
those
which treat of the Christian life.
This notion of "theology and sanctity" is illuminatingly corroborated
and, as it were, canonized by that mysterious writer who, next
to Augustine, did most to form the theology of the Middle Ages, and
even of modern theology, namely the Areopagite. His
Ecclesiastical
Hierarchy (to which the Celestial Hierarchy forms little
more than an
"ideological superstructure") is framed throughout on an a priori
(which has become for us almost inconceivable) identification of
hierarchical office and personal holiness. Denis was a far too superior
mind for us to impute this action to a naive ignorance of the world; in
any case, we have the witness of many of his letters, especially the
celebrated one to Demophilus, which shows he was fully alive to the
actual defects in the Church. But Denis was of the opinion that we
can only grasp the structure of the Church and make it intelligible if
we start from what ought to be, what in fact is, when seen
in its
existence in Christ and in its direct constitution by Christ. The
degrees in the hierarchy must, therefore, be put on an identical
footing with the degrees of inner purification, illumination and
unification; to understand what the episcopal office really is,
we must
think of it as embodied in one who has reached perfection, who
possesses the fullness of contemplation, the highest degree of
initiation into the mysteries of God.
In the above-mentioned letter, Denis
does not shrink from the conclusion that only one who is himself a
"light of the world" can communicate what is sacred, can illuminate.
We are inclined to see, in this, the Donatist error, and not to take
sufficient account of the constant basic principle of his vision of the
Church. Denis, in fact, is not thinking of any purely subjective
perfection, but of the gospel image of perfection. And if any commentary
is needed, one only has to turn to Lallemant's invective against
priests and religious who, ignoring the Holy Spirit and vegetating at
the lowest stages of the Christian life, are powerless to communicate
the Spirit to others. Up to the time of Thomas, Denis' concept of the
structure of the Church and the hierarchy was the pattern, though
often after Thomas' time the clarifying distinction between
status
perfectionis and actual perfection (S Th II, II, 184, 4),
and his sober
estimate of the relations between the episcopal and religious states
(185, 3-8) were bound to come in. It is through the writings of Denis
that the de jure identification of bishop, saint and teacher of
the
Church was most effectively impressed on theology, and this has been
received as part of the gospel tradition.
The early medieval thinkers in the West, under the aegis of Augustine,
did not depart from this basic concept. Anselm, himself abbot, bishop
and doctor of the Church, knew no other canon of truth than the
unity of knowledge and life. The same may be said of Bede, Bernard
and Peter Damian. But as theology increasingly took on a "scholastic"
form, and Aristotelianism burst in like an elemental force, the naive
unity hitherto accepted was gravely shaken. No one would think of
denying that the gain in clarity, insight and mastery of the entire
field
was enormous. More resoundingly than in the time of the Fathers,
who, almost as a matter of course, achieved eminence in the schools of
antiquity, was the jubilation over the spolia Aegyptiorum
repeated.
The mood which fastened on Christian thinkers was like the intoxication
of victors after a battle, at the sight of booty far beyond their
expectations.
The booty in this case, however, was primarily philosophical, and
only indirectly theological. Philosophy began to emerge as a special
discipline alongside theology, with its own concept of philosophical
truth, which was perfectly correct in its own sphere, and could lay no
claim to the superior content of revealed truth. Adaequatio
intellectus
ad rem [conformity of the mind to reality]: this definition
envisaged,
primarily, only the theoretical side of truth. The intimate connection
was seen, and indeed emphasized, between the true and the good as
the transcendental properties of the one being, but it was looked at
more from the human standpoint, in the mutual presupposition of
intellect and will (S Th I, 16, 4 and ad 2), than in their
objective
mutual inclusion, or real identity.
Philosophy, as a doctrine of natural
being and excluding revelation, could not know that the highest
mode of interpreting that philosophical definition of truth must be a
trinitarian one, corresponding to the passages on truth in St. John
already cited. There was no danger of misconceiving supernatural
truth, so long as philosophical concepts were used as pointers to the
final truth which is supernatural and divine. These concepts, in being
taken up as part of the assumptio humanae naturae in Christ, lost
nothing of their content--just as Christ's humanity in its entirety
subsisted in the Logos--but yet, through this assumption, they must
be, as Scheeben says, "transfigured", and become, like Christ's
humanity,
wholly a function and expression of his divine person and truth.
But the Aristotelianism of the thirteenth century did not only
enlarge the basis of theology, it was itself the start of the modern
sciences of nature and mind as independent disciplines, and rightly so.
It gave birth to modern "secularism", and thereby introduced new
tensions and set new problems to the Christian. The great Scholastic
period of Albert, Bonaventure and Thomas was peculiarly fitted for
theology to irradiate and transfigure the self-subsisting science of
nature, raising it to the plane of the sacred, and so to impart to the
secular sciences a real Christian ethos, one affecting the whole out-
look of the scientific investigator.
But the work of transposing the concepts and methods of the
physical and mental sciences, and articulating them with theology,
was bound to become more and more difficult, and post-Scholastic
theology rarely applied itself to the task (in their own way, Nicholas
of Cusa, Leibniz and Baader did, but they were not taken up into
official theology). For the most part, it confined itself to using a
natural theology, antecedent to biblical theology, as a basis for a
rational exposition of the latter. Moreover this was not without its
dangers, especially when the philosophical propaedeutic came to be
considered a fixed and unalterable basis, whose concepts, without the
necessary transposition, were used as norms and criteria of the content
of faith, and therefore set in judgment over it. Teachers behaved as
though man knew from the outset, before he had been given revelation,
knew with some sort of finality what truth, goodness, being, light,
love and faith were. It was as though divine revelation on these
realities had to accommodate itself to these fixed philosophical
conceptual containers that admitted of no expansion. Nor was the actual
method of teaching calculated to lessen the danger.
On the contrary,
the student was, first of all, required to familiarize himself with the
concepts of philosophy and their content, before going on to their
application in theology; and he needed an almost superhuman vigilance
not to approach theology with preconceived concepts which
needed to be "strained" to the utmost. If those established on natural
grounds were to be raised to a higher plane and seen in the light of
biblical revelation, that was no task for the beginner; it needed the
highest degree of maturity, of genius allied with holiness. Albert,
Bonaventure, Thomas, perhaps even Scotus, achieved the task. They
did not allow their ultimate understanding of the truth to be disturbed
by the fullness of the irruption of philosophical truth; and so
the original conception of the teacher in the Church, who was by
inner necessity a saint, could once again be embodied in them.
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Hans
Urs von Balthasar (1905-88) was a Swiss theologian, considered to
one of the most important Catholic intellectuals and writers of the twentieth
century. Incredibly prolific and diverse, he wrote over one hundred books
and hundreds of articles. Read more
about his life and work in the Author's Pages section of IgnatiusInsight.com.
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