Is Balthasar not implicitly claiming to be in a position to fit together the puzzle of all things, human and divine, while we creatures (especially postmodern intellectuals) all know that our reality cannot be comprehended in a systematic whole? Karen Kilby presents a cumulative argument, fitting together different elements in order to show that her critique is not targeting a peripheral aspect of Balthasar's theology, but rather the heart of it. In what follows I will question some of the building blocks in her argument in order to undo the massive character of her final judgment. She rightly points to certain ambiguities in Balthasar's work, but I do not agree that all elements should be interpreted in the direction of Kilby's diagnosis. I will argue that Balthasar's work contains the cure for its own disease.
Circle versus Fulfillment: Walking around the Statue
Kilby offers us a helpful range of critical questions that could be used to introduce not only Balthasar, but any theologian (think, for instance, of some of the stylistically akin authors of Radical Orthodoxy). How can theologians be so sure of what they claim to know? How do they present other voices and their own relation to them? What are the hidden presuppositions? What is their implied position?
Kilby provides the reader with a disclaimer, warning that Balthasar's oeuvre does not contain a classical theological argument but is rather an exercise in “novelistic theologizing” (114–15). “Novelist” is to be understood in the nineteenth-century sense of an author who has a perfect overview of the whole, full control of the story lines, and is omniscient about the novel's characters (even God). Kilby's advice is to listen to Balthasar's often original words and to explore his daring vision, but not to imitate his way of doing theology. But after finishing her (very) critical introduction, it is doubtful whether any student would still feel attracted to read Balthasar anyway. And if anyone would still dare to enter his theological world, how should one read him?
I would propose Balthasar's own metaphor: if you want to behold a statue, you cannot see the whole at once, you have to walk around it, to view it from different angles, discovering ever new aspects.Footnote 1 I would approach Balthasar's meandering writings as walks around the statue at the center, which is Christ. I appreciate Balthasar's way of presenting the variety of authors on whom he comments as many rays converging around the transcendent mystery of the Incarnate, which can never be contained in a system. Kilby, however, suspects that Balthasar's assumption that he is able to recognize all theological voices as rays around the center rests on the implicit presupposition that he himself is positioned above the scene, and thus able to see both the rays and the center of the radiating circle. This conclusion does not hold: just as one does not need to step out of our universe to gain the insight that the sun is the center around which the planets turn, so Balthasar does not need to transcend his fellow theologians by silently presuming a God's eye view.
I agree with Kilby that fulfillment—Balthasar's other central image to deal with theological diversity—is far more problematic, even if presenting one's own theology as the final integration of all the preceding ones is a common vice. However, I would not interpret the circle and fulfillment as mutually reinforcing tools used secretly to gain control of the discourse. Rather, I see them as rival procedures for organizing differences, where the circle counters the tendency toward illegitimate systematization. Problems occur, as Kilby's example of Balthasar's theology of the cross proves, when the circle is combined with the pattern of fulfillment and leads to an unwarranted claim of comprehensiveness.
Picture versus Play: Seeing the Form as Fragment
My proposal to exploit the inner friction between the central images of “circle” and “fulfillment” and propose a nonharmonizing interpretation might seem to be at odds with Balthasar's aesthetic approach. Kilby exposes his aesthetics as a particular nineteenth-century idealist if not German romantic framework, with both their reputations inclined toward a misplaced harmonizing search for the whole that negates differences and discontinuities. However, in Balthasar's own reading of the roots of the Western aesthetic tradition in The Glory of the Lord, he stresses the inner tension between the two aspects of beauty: form and splendor. He presents the visible form as disrupted by an irreducible difference:
This incomprehensible element is only a pointer, and remains so precisely in its fragility . . . since if we take hold of it too roughly, it escapes our grasp; it exists only as a breath of wind that has passed by; it does not remain long with one who thus receives its favour; it is more remembrance and promise than actual presence, more a spur to memory than a gift, offered to Tantalus and yet at once withdrawn from his grasp and, being thus inaccessible to “exact scientific method,” it can only be interpreted from the point of view of Being which embraces it. . . . It is, as Claudel says, the hook with which the angel draws the bleeding heart towards eternity.Footnote 2
So even in worldly beauty the experience of the whole is not a given that we could ever control, but rather reveals the form as fragment.
If Balthasar has an explicit criterion for judging aesthetic theories, it is his suspicion of unwarranted harmonization. This is, for instance, why he prefers Kant above Schiller and later idealist system-builders.Footnote 3 This emphasis on discontinuity, characteristic of his notion of worldly beauty, is even stronger in his understanding of divine glory, which is revealed in the “deformed Christ” (Bonaventure).Footnote 4 For instance, Balthasar criticizes Augustine for his “aesthetic theodicy,”Footnote 5 which explains suffering and evil as “black strokes” necessary to complete the whole color palette in the painting of creation, since Augustine presupposes a “contemplation of the world-totality from the vantage point of divine providence, which enables us to survey the ‘whole pattern of the mosaic floor.’”Footnote 6
My reaction to Kilby's chapter 3 (“The Picture and the Play”) would be to acknowledge, along with Ben Quash and Kilby, that Balthasar did not indeed succeed in developing his dramatic approach as consistently as possible, especially when giving the impression that he has a total overview of the play of God and history. However, his theological aesthetics with its emphasis on the fragmentary could at this point deliver a critical counterweight to this impression.Footnote 7 Therefore I think Kilby misses the mark when she characterizes Balthasar as the one “who has ‘already “seen the form,”’ who is already in possession, as it were, of this central aesthetic experience—an experience relating not to some particular insight or set of insights but quite simply revelation as a whole” (55; my emphasis). The link between seeing the form and possessing the aesthetically experienced revelation is not Balthasar's, but Kilby's. Balthasar rather emphasizes the opposite: (theological) aesthetics is all about becoming expropriated and decentered. In a footnote (55 n. 23), Kilby responds to this objection that precisely Balthasar's stress on his receptive poverty and passivity can be a rhetorical device to present himself as being a mere instrument of God, and as such implicitly identify his theology with God's own voice. In addition, the emphasis on mystery over against system could serve the purpose of rendering oneself immune from rational arguments. This is another helpful question: Does a theologian's gesture of humility not hide a surreptitious claim to authority?
Suffering Glorified?
Above I noted Balthasar citing the French writer Paul Claudel (1868–1955) on beauty: “the hook with which the angel draws the bleeding heart towards eternity.” Claudel, a major source of inspiration for Balthasar, seems to be “fundamentally blurring the distinction between love and loss, joy and suffering” (Kilby, 121). Kilby reproaches Balthasar for doing the same in his dramatic vision of the inner life of the Trinity in terms of eternal kenosis, self-giving, even self-annihilation. As such he would justify suffering in a “dramatic theodicy” and even, in Kilby's characterization, present the faithful's participation in Christ's suffering as pious sadomasochism.
On rereading passages in Theo-Drama, I noticed that in the chapter from which Kilby quotes, Balthasar himself insists that to live in Christ means to share in his suffering, death, and resurrection.Footnote 8 Rather than blurring the distinctions, he maintains a paradox that loses its consistency only when it is isolated from the larger whole of the drama of salvation, which involves the cross, death, and resurrection. Here Kilby's argument rests on a truncated representation of Balthasar's text. Moreover, she takes for granted that in the relationship between love and loss, joy and suffering, a clear distinction can always be maintained. To Balthasar's credit, his theological innovations resonate with the testimony of some major mystics of the last century (e.g., Edith Stein, Mother Teresa, Chiara Lubich) regarding their solidarity with the God-forsakenness of our age. Moreover, from both a feminist perspective and a liberation-theological one, Balthasar's radical kenotic theology has inspired a critical-constructive reception in search of resources to empower those who suffer.Footnote 9
Numquam duo, semper tres: Reading Balthasar as Spiritual ExercisesFootnote 10
Kilby's point relates not so much to specific claims about Trinity, suffering, or gender (in a chapter that indeed contains embarrassing quotes), but rather to the underlying methodological flaw: the manipulation of Balthasar's sources and his readers. In her conclusion Kilby suggests that Balthasar writes too much as a spiritual director, as such presuming an authority that must be uncritically followed. This is a helpful hint—the fact that Balthasar gave many retreats must have influenced his style. But Kilby overlooks what “spiritual director” means in the Jesuit tradition, which would have allowed a more charitable reading of some of Balthasar's features (e.g., indirection, the circle, the God's eye view).Footnote 11
In the Ignatian spiritual exercises, the director is not positioned as an authoritative guide above the person he serves. Ignatius explicitly asks the director not to intervene as a mediating instance between God and the person. The director's task is marked by indirectness, simply providing the person in retreat with text fragments on which to meditate, in order to create space where God can reveal himself directly from the transcendent center to the person. Another typical aspect of the exercises is that one is invited to enter with one's imagination into biblical stories and to identify with the characters. In some meditations one is even asked to imagine oneself viewing the mystery of the Incarnation from the perspective of the Trinity itself. Balthasar's God's-eye perspective is perhaps based less on extraordinary mystical experiences à la Adrienne von Speyr and more on traditional practices of Ignatian imaginative empathy.
At the moment, I myself happen to do the “spiritual exercises in daily life.” At one encounter my spiritual director told me that Ignatius recommends reading a spiritual book in addition to the exercises. Reading Balthasar is somehow analogous to those exercises. This was often the way I experienced reading Balthasar as a student: I did not see where he was going, but he made me think out of the box, about fragments no professor ever pointed at, opening my imagination for discernment. Maybe, then, this is the best advice to potential readers: never walk with him alone, always read him along with another voice.Footnote 12 Kilby herself has, among others, Karl Rahner at the back of her mind. In my case, I read the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno next to Balthasar, which made me more sensitive to the brokenness of all beauty.Footnote 13 On the contrary, those students and scholars who concentrate on Balthasar alone often lack any critical distance. Indeed there must be something alluring in Balthasar's authorial voice, and I am grateful to Kilby for having brought this to light.
