My book is a little unusual, I think, partly because it really is, at the same time, both a strong critique of Balthasar and a strong appreciation. The dimension of appreciation does not come through very clearly from these reviews—understandably, of course, because the critique is the more provocative element. But it is worth underlining that I have tried to do three things: to bring out what an interesting and important theologian Balthasar is; to give readers at least some feel for the creativity, excitement, and possibility of his thought; and to indicate ways in which it opens up new avenues that others can fruitfully pursue.
I find Yves De Maeseneer's description of his encounters with Balthasar as a student very helpful and entirely consistent with my own appreciation of Balthasar. It seems right to me that if one reads Balthasar in a fragmentary way, not necessarily knowing (or being concerned with) where he is going, and if one reads him as one inspiration alongside others, then he can be tremendously helpful for “think[ing] out of the box,” expanding the imagination, opening new vistas.
And I agree also with Danielle Nussberger that if one reads some of Balthasar's discussions of the Trinity as “play,” they are indeed valuable, provoking thought and expanding theological imagination. His is (as I have tried to make clear) undoubtedly one of the most “vivid” theological styles in print. Similarly, I would agree, as Nussberger suggests, that if one approaches Balthasar in order to explore and experiment with the various tensions in his thought, stimulating theology can emerge, as I think for instance the work of Gerard Loughlin shows.Footnote 17 In both cases, though, it seems to me that one will be reading Balthasar not as he offers himself to be read, but at least to some degree against the grain.
To scholars of Balthasar the critical line of the book is of course much more noticeable than its appreciative side, because the critical line is so much at odds with the deference—even reverence—with which Balthasar is usually treated. I have for many years felt uneasy with Balthasar's theology, and it is an uneasiness not captured by a traditional critique of a particular aspect of his theology or of his relationship to one or another of his sources. So I have formulated my uneasiness in the elusive claim that Balthasar tends to presume a God's-eye point of view, that he has a proclivity to place himself silently above history, tradition, Scripture, and his readers. But how does one set out to establish such a broad and even vague claim? I was well aware in writing the book that at each stage it would not be hard to call my argument into question. One can ask, at every step, whether there is not a different and a more charitable way to read Balthasar, or else whether the particular case under consideration might not be the exception, an idiosyncratic excess into which Balthasar may occasionally fall. It is this awareness that leads to the dialectical character of my own argument, and to the anticipation of objections that Rodney Howsare finds so striking. And it is for this reason that I think my argument works—if it works at all—on a cumulative level. At every stage, it is true, one can ask, “But couldn't he perhaps be understood otherwise?” But I hope that the sheer consistency with which the overreaching tendency of Balthasar's thought manifests itself may persuade readers that I am not simply engaged in an unfriendly reading.
Of course it is only to be expected that not all will be so persuaded. Yves De Maeseneer's review seems to me a very temperate and balanced articulation of the view of one who is precisely not persuaded, though he may acknowledge a degree of truth on the edge of my arguments. At most stages, he thinks, Balthasar can be read more charitably—or at least as containing “the cure for his own disease”—and so De Maeseneer is unconvinced by the “building blocks” of my case. I do not think he in fact deals with the full force of my position at each stage of his rebuttal, but then he could hardly be expected to do so within a review of only a few pages. It seems to me, then, that if one is going to find my case unpersuasive, De Maeseneer's articulation of its unpersuasiveness is a good one. It is beyond the remit of a short response to explain why at each stage I am in turn not persuaded by his case. Ultimately, I think, readers of the book can be left to judge between us. On the qualities of a specifically Ignatian spiritual director he is of course right, and his comments suggest that I need to find a way to articulate how, if Balthasar's voice is at times that of a spiritual director, it is precisely not that of a spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition.Footnote 18
About Kevin Mongrain's review there is little that can be said, other than to warn the reader that at many points what he attributes to me is not what I actually say but what he judges me really to have meant. I never present myself as “aghast,” nor do I use adjectives such as “poisonous,” “hypnotizing,” “mesmerizing,” “bullying,” “wanton,” “deceptive,” or “manipulative,” nor write of “snake oil” or hustling readers. Furthermore, pace Mongrain, I do not present my own treatment as “polemical,” and I do not actually make the hypocritically suggestive use of Tina Beattie's criticisms in footnotes on pages 137 and 139 that he claims. I quote her judgment once with explicit approval and refer readers at one point to her psychoanalytic approach, without inserting into my text or footnotes any of the details that he attributes to me. Otherwise, it is perhaps worth saying that I do not accept—and I think many others would not accept—a presumption that we must either take Adrienne von Speyr to be a “fraud” or else afford her experiences full authority.
Rodney Howsare, after some very kind remarks, argues that I go wrong at a fundamental level because I am trapped in Kantian thought patterns and have not attended enough to Balthasar's option for Goethe/Aquinas over Kant. My Kantianism seems to lie, in his view, in a presumption that we have no genuine access to, no real knowledge of, the things in themselves. But I don't know that there is any evidence that this really is my position. My instinct is not that in general we cannot really know things, but that we cannot necessarily have a grasp on the whole of everything, all at once, of a kind that Balthasar seems in places to suppose.
Howsare's comments on the symphony metaphor are instructive here. I had suggested that even if truth is symphonic (as Balthasar tells us), we might be sitting so close to the drums, or catching such a limited section of the symphony, that we are in no position to appreciate the whole. Howsare objects that if that were the case, we would be unable to decide to sit elsewhere on the next visit, or to judge Salieri an inferior composer to Mozart. But that is in fact precisely our position in relation to the totality that Balthasar describes as a symphony: we are unable to step back from the world and God's dealings with it to assess it as a whole and judge it either better or worse than some other world that (some other?) God created and redeemed, and we are even unable to choose to be differently located within it than in fact we are. Mozart and Salieri and the changing of seats simply do not apply here.
I am grateful to Danielle Nussberger for the careful précis of the book with which she opens her review, and to all the reviewers for their trouble.
