Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner's Fundamental Option and Theological Aesthetics 0813231191, 9780813231198

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
A Note on Inclusive Language
Introduction
1. Rahner on Transcendental Freedom
Studying Schelling
Freedom in Hearer of the Word
Freedom and Symbol
Freedom Run Aground
2. Rahner on Penitential Freedom
Studying Penance
Penance Lectures
Reconciliation with the Church
The Matter of Penance
3. Rahner on Ignatian Freedom
Features of Ignatian Spirituality
Individual Decision
Loyalty to the Church
The Fundamental Option and the Two Standards
4. Rahner on Exposed Freedom
Context and Exposure in Rahner’s Theology of Freedom
Transcendental Freedom and the Concupiscent Remainder
Penitential Freedom and the Wordless Cry
Ignatian Freedom and Jesus’ Agonized Heart
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Freedom Made Manifest

Freedom Made Manifest R a h n e r’s F u n d a m e n ta l O p t i o n a n d Theological Aesthetics

Peter Joseph Frit z

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8132-3119-8

For Gideon and Beatrice, who keep me strong in faith (Hebrews 11:32–33) and bring me joy (1 John 3:2)

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments  ix List of Abbreviations  xv A Note on Inclusive Language  xvii

Introduction  1

1. Rahner on Transcendental Freedom  27

Studying Schelling  31 Freedom in Hearer of the Word  43 Freedom and Symbol  53 Freedom Run Aground  62



2. Rahner on Penitential Freedom  77

Studying Penance  80 Penance Lectures  90 Reconciliation with the Church  104 The Matter of Penance  117



3. Rahner on Ignatian Freedom  128

Features of Ignatian Spirituality  131 Individual Decision  141 Loyalty to the Church  154 The Fundamental Option and the Two Standards  166 vii



4. Rahner on Exposed Freedom  180

Context and Exposure in Rahner’s Theology of Freedom  185 Transcendental Freedom and the Concupiscent Remainder  198 Penitential Freedom and the Wordless Cry  211 Ignatian Freedom and Jesus’ Agonized Heart  224

Conclusion: Libertatis Splendor  236 Selected Bibliography  249 Index  267

viii   C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments

Ac kno w ledg m ents

Statements of gratitude such as this one tend to open by recognizing collegial and institutional support for a research project—the “work” milieu out of which a book arises. Eventually the statement funnels down to family, spouses, partners, parents, children, and so on. I shall begin, though, by thanking my wife, love, coparent, and life-partner, Rochelle Fritz. I commenced writing this book in the summer of 2015. My most vivid memories of writing include sundrenched (hot!) days spent with Rochelle in the yard outside our house in Slatersville, Rhode Island, I tapping at computer keys and/or perspiring on the two half-volumes of Rahner’s Sämtliche Werke 6, Rochelle studying for her clinical psychology licensing exam, both of us sitting in camp chairs. At the time, Rochelle was pregnant with our daughter, Beatrice, and with some trepidation we anticipated her arrival just sixteen months after her brother Gideon—who was just twenty-five months younger than our elder son, Zephaniah. The summer sun, along with our energetic children, somehow kept us going through bodily and mental fatigue. This book took two more summers and an autumn to complete, but that first summer with Rochelle I shall always associate most with this book’s composition. In keeping with the book’s subject matter, that summer and the academic year that followed were shot through with all the gritty reality of embodied life. And however harrowing it was, Rochelle, I am thankful I could share it with you. Now to the “work” context: thank you to my colleagues at the Colix

lege of the Holy Cross, my intellectual home since fall 2011, and the main scholarly community that sustained this book’s creation. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies—Alan Avery-Peck, Bill Clark, SJ, Caner Dagli, Gary DeAngelis, Matt Eggemeier, John Gavin, SJ, Robert Green, Karen Guth, Mary Hobgood, Caroline Johnson Hodge, Alice Laffey, Todd Lewis, Benny Liew, Joanne Pierce, Bill Reiser, SJ, Mary Roche, Ginny Ryan, and Mat Schmalz—most of whom read my prior writing on Rahner (though mercifully not this manuscript!) during my tenure and promotion review. Special thanks go to Cathi Goulet, who keeps our department running as smoothly as is superhumanly possible. For your kind, generous, and often effusive support for my scholarship and teaching—and, notably, for the life of which teaching and scholarship are only a part—colleagues, thank you. Thanks also to the staff of the Dean’s Office, especially Donna Hebert, Joanne Lovejoy, Ann MacGillivray, and Melissa Martone; to the Dean and Provost, Margaret Freije, for approving supplemental funding, provided by a gift of the Ardizzone family, for a junior research leave (fall 2013) during which I did preliminary research toward this book; to Provost Freije and President Philip Boroughs, SJ, for approving the sabbatical leave (2017–18) during which I completed the final manuscript; to the Jesuit community, especially Jim Corkery, SJ, Paul Harman, SJ, Jim Hayes, SJ, Mike Rogers, SJ, John Savard, SJ, Bill Woody, SJ, and Tom Worcester, SJ, who took active interest in my study of their fellow Jesuit Rahner; to colleagues in Philosophy, especially Joe Lawrence, who tutored me in Schelling; to colleagues in Visual Arts, especially Michael Beatty, Virginia Raguin, and Cristi Rinklin, who lent receptive ears to my developing ideas on aesthetics; to colleagues in English, especially Jim Kee, who read my first book and encouraged me to write more; and to colleagues in Environmental Services (especially Violeta Cika), Information Technology Services, and Graphic Arts, without whom my research and writing would be impossible. Teaching at Holy Cross allows me to test my intellect in conversation with some of the brightest young minds in the United States and from abroad. At Holy Cross, we faculty pride ourselves on our scholarship, x   A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

but even more on our teaching. Thanks especially to these students: Melissa Gryan, Claude Hanley, Anthony John, Ken Jordan, Marie Therese Kane, Pat Kerr, Katherine Manansala, Taylor Marek, Zach Minuto, Timothy Nowak, Jack Pappas, Stefanie Raymond, Chris Ryan, Lorena Sferlazza, Brooke Tranten, and Jessica Vozella. All of them, some now budding theologians, have positively influenced my scholarship; I am forever grateful. Beyond Holy Cross, many groups and individuals deserve thanks. Foremost are my colleagues in the Karl Rahner Society, particularly those with whom I served two three-year terms on the Steering Committee: Michael Canaris, Nancy Dallavalle, Mark Fischer, Richard Lennan, Rich Penaskovic, Heidi Russell, and Paulette Skiba. Thank you for your collegiality and lovely shared meals and for teaching me how to integrate scholarly rigor and Christian hospitality. I owe Mark, Richard, and Rich extraordinary debts of gratitude. Others in the KRS have welcomed, advised, and even at times gently admonished me, making this book much stronger than otherwise it would be. These include Jerry Farmer, Bob Masson, Leo O’Donovan, SJ, Joe Piccione, and my fellow Notre Dame alumni Brandon Peterson, Michael Rubbelke, and Ernesto Valiente. Thanks to Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen and Judith Wolfe, two reviewers of my first book, whose words helped enormously as I completed this one. Thanks as well to colleagues at the Universidad Católica Argentina, Cecilia Avenatti de Palumbo and Alejandro Bertolini, who, after having read my first book, invited me to Buenos Aires to present on Rahner at a theological aesthetics conference they organized. To Cecilia, Alejandro, Lucio Palumbo, Maria Clara Bingemer, Alex Villas Boas, Peter Casarella, and my other colleagues in Asociación Latinoamericana de Literatura y Teología (ALALITE), thank you for your fellowship and receptivity to my reading of Rahner’s theological aesthetics. Elsewhere (specifically, Paris), Emmanuel Falque has lent philosophical support to my reading of Rahner. I have called Holy Cross my recent intellectual home, and I can name the Catholic University of America Press the same way. Acquisitions editor John Martino kindly, patiently, and steadily guided me in this projA c k n o w l e d g m e n t s   xi

ect from my initial proposal, through some speed bumps in the writing process, to a carefully wrought final manuscript. I felt blessed to work with John’s predecessor, Jim Kruggel, and feel the same working with John. Thank you, John, for your keen eye, clever wit, quiet enthusiasm, magnanimous spirit, and strong Catholic voice. Thanks to the anonymous referees for incisive, sobering criticisms and glowing affirmations that improved the text immeasurably and provided me with strength to keep revising (and revising, and revising). Thank you to managing editor Theresa Walker, with whom I am grateful to collaborate again in bringing this book to production; her precision and intelligence have kept this book on a straight course. Thanks to Brian Roach, sales and marketing manager, for his enthusiastic, stylish, and always vigilant support. Thanks to the copy editor, Aldene Fredenburg, for wading through the book’s concupiscent complexity with grace. Thanks to editorial assistant Tanjam Jacobson for helping me turn tortured sentences into discernable thoughts. And thanks to director Trevor Lipscombe and the editorial board at the CUA Press for trusting me again to share my reading of Rahner. Before I thank more friends and family, I should note that earlier versions of some of the ideas in this book were published in two journal essays. In keeping with the permissions policies related to these essays, I cite them here: portions of chapter 1 had their genesis in “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity,” Theological Studies 75, no. 2 ( July 2014): 284–307, DOI: 10.1177/0040563914529897 (http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0040563914529897?journal Code=tsja); portions of chapter 2 were initially developed in “Placing Sin in Karl Rahner’s Theology,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (November 2015): 294–312, DOI: 10.1177/0021140015598582 (http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0021140015598582?journal Code=itqa). I am grateful to SAGE Publications for allowing me to reuse this material (in heavily revised form). A few friends I have not yet named deserve special recognition as companions on my intellectual journey: Steven Battin, Jennifer Martin, Andrew Prevot, Joél Schmidt, John Thiede, and Todd Walatka. Each of xii   A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

these people has prodded me into being a better theologian than otherwise I would have been, through high-level conversation, intellectual and moral challenge, and, most of all, their model lives as theologians and Catholics. I shall once again name Matt Eggemeier, who because of our work together both as teachers and scholars has affected my reading of Rahner as much as anyone else. As with my last book, he read every word of this one before it went to press, and it is much better for his editorial suggestions. Thanks to all of you. Last, I thank my teachers, now friends: Cyril O’Regan, Fr. Robert Imbelli, Larry Cunningham, Mary Doak, Matt Ashley, and Cathy Hilkert. My working at Holy Cross, thus our living in New England, has brought Rochelle and me far from home, even as we have cultivated a home away from home for our growing family in Rhode Island—this has been helped enormously by Connie and Emile Lepine, who have cared for our children better and taught them more than we could have anticipated, imagined, or hoped. Even from afar, we remain close to our families back in Ohio, Iowa, Kentucky, Illinois, and Wisconsin. I love you all, whether named here or not. My parents, Paula and Matt Fritz, my first teachers in faith, remain steadfast in their love, providing me through innumerable channels the sustenance I need to keep going, intellectually, spiritually, religiously, and physically. In one breath with them I must name my brother John (to my children, Uncle John, always grouped together with Grandma and Grandpa—as star of the show), whose growth and maturation I have observed with constant admiration from his infancy until, now, his young adulthood, where he exemplifies a fidelity and dedication all young Catholics should emulate. My in-laws, Dixie and Dick Rokusek, have supported me every step of the way, too. Emblematic of this is that, like my own parents, since receiving my first book, they have prominently displayed it in their home. I am sure this one will appear proudly alongside it. In November 2015, Dick passed away suddenly—a shock to our family beyond words. I am firmly confident that he still advocates for us in prayer, through Our Lady of Perpetual Help’s intercession, with greater proximity to God than even the Midwest can provide. Thanks to you all. A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s   xiii

I dedicated my first book to Rochelle and our first child, Zeph. This book I dedicate to our two children who arrived since the last book’s publication: Gideon Xavier and Beatrice Catherine. Gid and Bisi, as Mommy and I have parented you, I have learned more about freedom than Rahner or any theologian could teach. Our day-to-day life together shows me that freedom means a gradual gathering of seemingly disparate, always messy, never pristine fragments (diaper changes, messes on the floor, and tantrums [sometimes yours, sometimes mine], paired with cuddles on the couch, shared laughs and meals, playing in the yard) into steadfast, patient, decisive, radiant love. An artist once said, “Children are always beautiful.” I dedicate this book on theological aesthetics to you, Gid and Bisi, even if beauty is neither its first nor last word, because you have taught me what matters most: not the surface beauty that the artist had in mind, but the splendor that glows through the muddied density of the everyday.

xiv   A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Abbreviations

A bbre v i ations

The following is a list of abbreviations for the main works I consult in the book. I have forgone two conventions of scholarship in developing this list of abbreviations. First, I have based almost all of the abbreviations on the titles of English translations (ETs) of foreign-language works. Second, for works in Rahner’s Sämtliche Werke (SW), I have developed the abbreviation out of the individual work’s title, instead of the SW volume. The exception to this is Spirit in the World / Geist in Welt, which I have abbreviated as GW rather than SW, so as not to confuse it with the Sämtliche Werke. I have, in keeping with the best scholarship, cross-checked all ETs with the original language. To keep the text readerfriendly, I have cross-referenced the original language with the ET only in two cases: (1) where my point bears significantly on a linguistic difference between the original and the translation, and (2) where I have modified the existing ET. Works by Karl Rahner

AAH “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety”

DP1 De Paenitentia 1 (Historical-Dogmatic Lectures on Penance) DP2 De Paenitentia 2 (Dogmatic-Systematic Lectures on Penance) FCF Foundations of Christian Faith GW Spirit in the World / Geist in Welt HW Hearer of the Word / Hörer des Wortes

xv



ISDHJ “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Heart of Jesus” / “Ignatianische Frömmigkeit und Herz-Jesu-Verehrung” LER “The Logic of Existentiell Recognition in Ignatius Loyola” / “Die Logik der existentiellen Erkenntnis bei Ignatius von Loyola”

SE  Spiritual Exercises / Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch

SLG “Sin as a Loss of Grace in Early Church Literature” / “Sünde als Gnadenverlust in der frühkirchlichen Literatur”

SW  Sämtliche Werke (the appropriate volume number follows this abbreviation)

TCC “The Theological Concept of Concupiscence” / “Zum theologischen Begriff der Konkupiszenz”



TF “The Theology of Freedom” / “Theologie der Freiheit”



TS “The Theology of the Symbol” / “Zur Theologie des Symbols”

Works by Others FHS Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society GV Jennifer Beste, God and the Victim KRIS Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality KRTA Peter Joseph Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics ST Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

xvi   A b b r e v i at i o n s

A Note on I nc lusi v e L a ngua ge

Rahner, though he lived not long ago, was educated and worked in a culture very different from ours today. Not until near his life’s end did the question of inclusive language really, palpably, emerge in theological discourse as widely asked. Since I do not want to rewrite history to make it seem as if he would have used inclusive language if given the chance (this we cannot know, however much we may hope), I shall leave all quotations and titles untouched when they use gender-exclusive terms and formulations (e.g., the ubiquity of Mensch in Rahner’s writings). When I am explicating quotations from Rahner, I often keep some genderexclusive language if I feel that introducing gender-inclusive language would distort the sense of what he was saying. I have, though, when using my own voice, tried to employ gender-inclusive language as best as I know how.

xvii

Freedom Made Manifest

Introduction

Introduction

H o w c a n th e i n si g n i f i c a n t announce the eternal? This is a cru-

cial question for Christianity. If Christian faith centers on Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is seen in the New Testament as the fulfillment of the fourth Servant Song in Isaiah 53 (especially Is 53:1–3; cf. Mk 9:11– 12), then Christian faith hinges on the one of whom it is said, “He had no majestic bearing to catch our eye, / no beauty to draw us to him” (Is 53:2). The Christian paradox challenges this-worldly philosophy and this-worldly aesthetics (one could go on: politics, economics), which tend to prize majesty over insignificance, the momentous over the everyday. Christian hope consists in the lived conviction that the insignificant can announce the eternal. For Catholic Christianity in particular, as Simone Weil sublimely notes, the center of religion abides in a “little formless matter . . . a little piece of bread.”1 In a Galilean itinerant peasant who died in ignominy, in a tiny morsel of unleavened bread, and in the halting choices of everyday people—in the insignificant, without majestic bearing and attractive beauty—Christians can recognize announcements of the eternal Mystery of God. Karl Rahner’s theology of freedom constitutes a complex answer to my opening question. Over many texts, often through fragmentary gestures, he develops an account of how God’s eternal freedom, which expresses itself in a decision to create, to save, and thereby to selfcommunicate, becomes manifest through imperfect creations in need 1. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd, introduction by Leslie A. Fiedler (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1992), 199.

1

of salvation and enlivened by God’s self-communication. This manifestation of God’s freedom comes distinctively to light in human freedom, which is this book’s focus. A perfect image of Rahner’s theology of freedom, which Rahner briefly discusses in a late essay on theology and art, is Albrecht Dürer’s Feldhase, a watercolor and gouache drawing from 1502.2 Rahner describes this rendering in terms of the interplay between insignificance and announcement of the eternal.3 On the one hand, this depiction of a hare is unremarkable. It presents a faithful likeness of a common animal that sixteenth-century Germans would have seen every day. On the other hand, Dürer has noticed something more below—even along—the surface of this seemingly insignificant animal. He has observed it closely, discovering where and how to wash in shadows and highlights, where to hatch on each individual hair. The “historical peculiarity” of Dürer’s artistic activity evidences his (maybe even the hare’s) “longing for eternity.” Vivacity springs from this quotidian animal, announcing the eternal. God’s freedom in creation becomes manifest. Human freedom helped this to occur.4 We can marvel at Dürer’s genius, even majesty, in evoking life through paint and page. But this is not Rahner’s point, nor perhaps Dürer’s. The Feldhase represents Christian art, even the whole Christian ethos, by letting the eternal shine through where one might least expect it, in a hare with no stately bearing or beauty to draw us to him. Similarly, Christian freedom most often comes to light not in extraordinary triumphs of spirit or flights of sanctity, but in small choices and acts whereby common sinners, impeded on the path to holiness by concupiscence, or downtrodden people harmed by violence and deprivation travel a pilgrim journey gradually finding ways to say “yes” to God’s mer2. The drawing is housed at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, where Rahner could well have seen it in person. These days it is displayed only once a decade, along with a few other precious drawings by Dürer. 3. Karl Rahner, “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety,” hereafter AAH, in Theological Investigations, vol. 23, Final Writings, trans. Joseph Donceel and Hugh M. Riley (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 162–68. 4. Rahner writes, “I may understand Dürer’s hare as the most concrete aspect of a welldetermined insignificant human experience, but when I look at it with the eyes of an artist, I am beholding, if I may say so, the infinity and incomprehensibility of God”; AAH, 166.

2   I n t r o d u c t i o n

ciful offer of life. In these people—us—eternity flashes forth in time. Rahner’s theology of freedom has gained renewed interest in the last decade, and it is worth asking why.5 Perhaps it is that Rahner remains a “resource theologian,” even as writers like George Weigel and R. R. Reno have proclaimed his theology’s lack of a future.6 The complexity of Rahner’s theology of freedom may well promise a jumping-off point for Christian theological responses to the complicated difficulties relating to freedom today. Freedom is a much-misused term that has underwritten some of the most horrific economic policies and wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “Freedom”—always left as an abstract signifier—has been appealed to as justification for U.S. military campaigns all over the world, which have deprived countless people of anything recognizable as true freedom. “Freedom”—reduced to the minimal human capacity of choosing between which breakfast cereal to eat, which clothes to wear, or, for the wealthy among us, which stocks to buy—has been depleted into a legitimating emblem for efforts to expand markets to every aspect of life. “Freedom” has been emptied of all eternal significance. People no longer expect freedom to have anything to do with God, or God (if there is a God) to do anything with freedom. “Freedom” stands for a vague sense that people should “express themselves” (up to and including hate speech), but, again, this 5. See, for example, Susan Abraham, Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jennifer Beste, God and the Victim: Traumatic Intrusions on Grace and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Shannon Craigo-Snell, Silence, Love, and Death: Saying “Yes” in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 2008); Kathryn Reklis, “A Sense of the Tragic in a Christian Theology of Freedom,” Theological Studies 70, no. 1 (2009): 37–60; Ethna Regan, Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 63–99; Dennis W. Jowers, “The Conflict of Freedom and Concupiscence: A Difficulty for Karl Rahner’s Anthropology,” Heythrop Journal 53, no. 4 (2012): 624–36; Peter Joseph Fritz, “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity,” Theological Studies 75, no. 2 ( June 2014): 284–307. 6. The phrase “resource theologian” I take from Emmie Y. M. Ho-Tsui, Die Lehre von der Sünde bei Karl Rahner: Eine werkgenetische und systematische Erschließung [The Doctrine of Sin in Karl Rahner: A Developmental and Systematic Analysis] (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2011), 12. See also George Weigel, “The Century after Rahner,” Arlington Catholic Herald (February 10, 2000), http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=2604&CFID=10075451& CFTOKEN=32100032; R. R. Reno, “Rahner the Restorationist,” First Things (May 1, 2013), http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/rahner-the-restorationist.

I n t r o d u c t i o n   3

expression consists merely in momentary reference, never lasting substance. While theologians never cease to write of freedom, liberation, and related terms, the need persists for further hard thinking about freedom. Rahner can and should be our guide. For him it was a matter of course that “freedom” could not be discussed without addressing its eternal significance; that freedom without enduring substance was not freedom at all; that mercy, not violence, and lasting decision, not evanescent choice, characterized freedom. For these reasons, I have firm hope that this twentieth-century thinker can help to reorient our understanding of freedom in the twenty-first. Surely from the many recent studies that have returned to Rahner’s thinking on freedom, I am not alone in my hope. Working toward such a reorientation, this book aims to clarify Rahner’s insight into how the seemingly insignificant can announce the eternal, how imperfect human freedom can make manifest God’s perfect freedom. In order to do this, given Rahner’s characteristically difficult articulation of his insight, this book intends to untangle many of the difficulties of Rahner’s theology of freedom. It does so by examining sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom, with special focus on material that remains underapprehended and underconsulted. In addition to explicating sources, the book has two constructive aims. It enters into recent theological discussions regarding the fragility of human freedom and finds in Rahner a reliable resource for furthering such conversations, given his interest in the unmajestic, the everyday, and the seemingly insignificant. And it extends an ongoing conversation about the possibility, existence, and promise of a Rahnerian theological aesthetic: hence my opening language of announcement and expression and my initial exposition on Dürer’s hare.

Th eses a n d Pr eli m i n a ry D efi nitions This book defends four interlocking theses, while relying on two major terms (“freedom” and “aesthetic”). Here I introduce these components.

4   I n t r o d u c t i o n

Four Theses Let us consider the theses. First, for Rahner, freedom is a structure (ground) and a task (existence) whose comprehensive manifestation Rahner calls the “fundamental option,” which means an eternal decision made in time with respect to God’s personally tailored call to salvation.7 Obviously this thesis includes many terms that will need defining as the book proceeds. “Ground,” “existence,” and “manifestation” gain sharper definition in chapter 1. “Fundamental option,” while I shall define it soon in this introductory chapter, will not snap fully into focus until we have engaged all three of the major sources for Rahner’s theology of freedom. The issue of the relationship between time and eternity will also come gradually to light. The phrase “personally tailored call to salvation” will occupy our earnest attention in chapter 3. The basic thrust of this first thesis should not surprise readers of Rahner: that his theology of freedom centers on the fundamental option. The attendant details, though, will prove essential for proper understanding and will appear in a new light. The second thesis supports the first and accounts for the threefold treatment of Rahner’s sources to which I have already pointed. I argue that Rahner develops his distinctive theology of freedom primarily out of three sources: transcendental-idealist philosophy, penitential theology and practice, and Ignatian spirituality. The sources’ order of appearance should not imply any ranking or chronology. Instead, I have placed them as I have for systematic and heuristic reasons, with each source opening a cogent avenue for treating the source that succeeds it. The third thesis follows upon the second in that it expresses the main insights that the threefold examination of Rahner’s sources offers and points to the constructive upshot of this examination that I lay out in chapter 4. Consideration of the transcendental-idealist, penitential, and Ignatian aspects of Rahner’s theology of freedom reveals the fundamental option’s inflection by theologies of concupiscence, mercy, and 7. On freedom as a structure and a task, see Karl Rahner, “The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, Man in the Church, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 235–63. References for the “fundamental option” and “personally tailored call” will be provided in due course.

I n t r o d u c t i o n   5

forgiveness (especially as ecclesially mediated) and devotion to Jesus Christ. I suggest, on the one hand, that without awareness of these inflections, the meaning of Rahner’s fundamental option remains misunderstood at best and entirely unrecognized at worst. On the other hand, awareness of these inflections can be marshaled constructively to show how Rahner’s theology of freedom in general and theology of the fundamental option in particular can assist in theological reflection on freedom’s susceptibility to injury and trauma. The fourth thesis implicates this book in a slightly broader theological enterprise. I contend that Rahner’s theology of freedom is most adequately interpreted as a theological aesthetic of freedom, attentive to freedom’s depth dimension in the heart of each person, through which and out of which God’s free decision to self-reveal is expressed (or concealed, in a hardened sinner’s case). Much more will be said with regard to this depth dimension, its symbolic character, its affectivity, its relationship to human sensibility (aesthesis) and imagination, and other topics germane to aesthetics (see later for my understanding of “aesthetic”). For now suffice it to say that this book constitutes the next volume in the theological-aesthetic project I began with Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (2014). Now that I have laid out the theses, I must define the two main terms in the book, both of which are familiar, but which are defined and used here in ways somewhat at variance with conventional definitions and usage. The first is “freedom” and the second “aesthetic.” I define the latter at greater length here, as the former receives the lion’s share of attention throughout this book.

Term 1 : Freedom I take it that the normal understanding of “freedom” for an Englishspeaking audience is the classical liberal formulation of freedom as choice and, perhaps even more narrowly, freedom as choice in market exchanges. While Rahner uses the German word that is commonly rendered “choice” (Wahl) to describe freedom, when he writes of free6   I n t r o d u c t i o n

dom in a more technical and proper sense, he tends to use “decision” (Entscheidung). In this book, I privilege “decision,” understood as a fundamental election of one’s whole form of life, as predominant over choice, understood as everyday selections between objects or activities. Decision is the key to discerning what Rahner means by “freedom.” Rahner discusses something like the distinction I am drawing between decision and choice in his key essay on freedom, aptly titled, “The Theology of Freedom” (1965).8 He divides the competing options starkly: “Freedom . . . cannot be viewed in a Christian sense as an in-itself neutral capacity to do this or that in an arbitrary order and in a temporal series which would only be broken off from outside . . . but rather freedom is the capacity to declare oneself (sich . . . zu tun) once and for all, the capacity which opens from its essence outward onto the freely executed (getane) finality of the subject as such.”9 The first option is freedom of choice, which Rahner characterizes as neutral, arbitrary, and fragmentary; the second, freedom as decision, which is personal, definitive, and holistic. Even further, Rahner critiques “freedom of choice (Wahlfreiheit)” as a concept that “atomises freedom in its exercise and thus distributes it exclusively to the individual acts of man, which are held together only by a neutral, substantial selfhood of the subject who posits all of them, his capacities, and the external span of [his] life.”10 Such a view of freedom cannot be squared with the Christian witness, which holds that freedom is constitutive for salvation and damnation. A concept of freedom centered on decision, rather than choice, complies 8. I shall cite this essay both in English translation (ET) and German from the Sämtliche Werke (SW), given the essay’s importance to this book’s topic; Rahner, “The Theology of Freedom,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Boniface and Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), 178–96; Rahner, “Theologie der Freiheit,” in Theologische Anthropologie und Ekklesiologie, zweiter Teilband, Dogmatik nach dem Konzil [Theological Anthropology and Ecclesiology, 2nd half-vol., Dogmatics after the Council], Sämtliche Werke 22/2, ed. Albert Raffelt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2008), 91–112; hereafter TF, with cross-references between page numbers in the ET, then in German from the SW edition: e.g., TF 178/91. There are some differences in style between the ET, which follows the Theological Investigations version, and the German of the SW, because the SW includes material from subsequent published editions of the essay. These, however, do not affect my argument or citations. 9. TF 183/97, ET rev. 10. TF184/98, ET rev.

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with the Christian witness. Rahner adverts to ontological language to express this: “Freedom is first of all ‘freedom of being’ (Seinsfreiheit). It is not merely the quality of a sometimes-implemented act and its faculty, but a transcendental mark of human being itself.”11 This “freedom of being” is the means by which a person “orders himself as a whole in obtaining his finality before God.”12 In summary, freedom does not properly concern disparate actions or choices, nor the simple aggregate of these actions or choices, however obvious it is that we need to make numerous choices in our everyday lives and deploy a modality of freedom in order to do so. Instead, freedom means decision, an ultimate judgment on a life’s direction, a fundamental option.13 Freedom’s “ultimate (endgültige)” character means that it relates to the problematic of time and eternity. Rahner calls it “the capacity for the eternal (das Vermögen des Ewigen),” adding that “natural processes can be revised and redirected again and again; they are therefore only indifferent. The result of freedom is true and permanent necessity.”14 The idea of eternity provides a different way of looking at human life than tends to be commonplace in the modern world. Our lives could, in typical liberal thought, be regarded as “consisting of nothing but banalities.”15 Or even worse, they could, in neoliberal thought, be regarded merely as fleeting, utterly discrete moments of rising and falling investment values.16 But 11. TF 184/98, ET rev. 12. TF 186/100, ET rev. 13. TF 186/100. Rahner uses the French phrase “option fondamentale,” which may have derived from Rahner’s fellow Jesuit Piet Fransen, SJ (1913–83), who wrote in French and whom some credit with developing the idea of the fundamental option; see Thomas Kopfensteiner, “The Theory of the Fundamental Option and Moral Action” in Christian Ethics: An Introduction, ed. Bernard Hoose (New York: Continuum, 1998), 124, 132n1. 14. TF 186/100, ET rev. See also Rahner, “Eternity from Time: Skepticism in Regard to Eternal Life,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 19, Faith and Ministry, trans. Edward Quinn, ed. Paul Imhof, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 169–77. 15. Rahner, “Eternity from Time,” 177. 16. I have in mind something similar to what Kathryn Tanner has criticized in her 2016 Gifford Lectures regarding the momentary focus of financialized capitalism, where, as she rightly sees it, the temporality of human life is emptied of its past, future, and even present significance, as life (including freedom) is increasingly modeled after and disciplined by instantaneous financial transactions. In contemporary financialized capitalism, which dominates current global culture, there is simply no room for eternity—there may not even be room for time! At the time of this writing, Tanner’s Gifford Lectures are not yet published in written form but are available

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understanding human life as bearing the possibility of blossoming into eternity can give a heightened sense of dignity to even the most seemingly mediocre of lives. The Christian faith holds that this earthly life is “worthy of being definitive and forever.”17 This conviction arises from faith in the cross and the Resurrection of Christ. Through these loving actions, God “creates an eternity which is not made up out of time,” but transfigures time.18 Considering freedom as transpiring at the tipping point between time and eternity can help me to make a few essential points regarding Rahner’s theology of freedom. Rahner insists that the testimony of revelation (i.e., scripture) pronounces an “ultimate unobjectifiability (letzte Unobjektivierbarkeit) of freedom and free, concrete decision (Entscheidung).”19 By this he, following the Bible, means that freedom properly understood is not a matter of clear and distinct knowledge. It is not epistemic. It cannot be treated as an object in the same way that a coffee mug or hat can. It is not choice in the sense of rational calculation. It is a mystery, in the deep, rich sense that Rahner uses that term, as endlessly intelligible and inhabitable, yet never fully circumscribable.20 These clarifications will prove consequential with respect to objections that have been raised regarding Rahner’s theology of freedom, most notably from Jennifer Erin Beste.21 She contends that Rahner weds the freedom of the human subject to the human capacity for reason. Beste worries that Rahner’s epistemic determination of freedom cancels out the freedom of various groups of people, especially those with post-traumatic stress disorder, intellectual disabilities, and Alzheimer’s disease. According to Beste, for Rahner freedom means “effecting” a fundamental option, which means using one’s capacity of reason to proas online videos; see Tanner, “Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism,” 2016 Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, accessed October 11, 2017, at https://www.giffordlectures.org/ file/prof-kathryn-tanner-%E2%80%93-christianity-and-new-spirit-capitalism. 17. Rahner, “Eternity from Time,” 177. 18. Ibid. 19. TF 191/105. 20. See Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 36–73. 21. See Beste, God and the Victim.

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nounce a final, definitive “yes” or “no” to God. Beste interrogates what she takes to be a Rahnerian view of freedom as rationally “positing” a free decision. I read Rahner differently here. My aesthetic reading of Rahner—and I shall define “aesthetic” very soon—exonerates Rahner from the charge of epistemic or noetic overdetermination and illustrates the openness of his theology of freedom to the types of situations that critics like Beste believe he forecloses. Much of the task of this book, especially chapter 4, will be to explain this. The last point I should introduce here is the contention I make in chapter 3 that Rahner’s theology of freedom centers on a decision between Christ and Lucifer. In effect, the core of Rahner’s theology of freedom, the fundamental option, is a Christological idea, inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola. The fundamental option is inspired in large measure by Ignatius’s Two Standards meditation from the fourth day of the second week of the Exercises.22 During this meditation the exercitant is directed to imagine Christ and Lucifer as rival military commanders and to consider the commands each captain gives to his troops. The exercitant then prays successive colloquies with Mary, Jesus, and God the Father, asking to be received under Christ’s standard. Rahner’s fundamental option does not stem from an independent philosophical anthropology, however much Rahner dialogues with philosophy. The fundamental option is Christoform. The divergent possibilities for the fundamental option (“yes” or “no” to God) correspond to freedom subjected to Christ’s standard or to Lucifer’s.23

22. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss, SJ, et al., with a preface by John W. Padberg, SJ (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), 154–56, para. 136–48; Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch [Meditations on the Ignatian Exercises], in SW 13:37–265; ET: Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kenneth Baker, SJ (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), 157–64. 23. This is exemplified, for example, with Rahner’s (markedly Johannine) rendering of the eschatological implications of the decision at the heart of Christian life: “Christian existence . . . is a road of decision from darkness to light, according to which the situation of each one of us must be judged”; Rahner, Spiritual Exercises, 36.

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Term 2: Aesthetic It must be admitted at the outset that “aesthetic” and “theological aesthetic(s)” are not terms Rahner uses. Nevertheless, I have contended in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, and I continue to do so here, that Rahner has a theological aesthetic, even if of an unconventional sort. We have already seen that my definition of “freedom” grates somewhat against conventional definitions that derive from classical-modern-liberal discourses. Similarly, my definition of “aesthetic” also bears on classical modernity. If anything, my definition of “aesthetic” borrows heavily from aesthetics’ birth and first heyday and resists today’s narrowing of “aesthetic” to apply mostly or exclusively to art theory or theories of beauty. Prior to addressing this point, I should state plainly that this book and the one that precedes it are works of theological aesthetics as opposed to aesthetic theology. I draw upon Hans Urs von Balthasar’s distinction between these two and aim to respect the boundary.24 For Balthasar, aesthetic theology takes its primary cues from philosophical aesthetics, which includes philosophical accounts of taste, poetry, and fine arts. Theologians influenced by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Romantics exemplify this, and I would venture to guess that Balthasar would file under “aesthetic theology” various of today’s theologies of art or works styled as “theological aesthetics.” On the other side of the boundary, “theological aesthetics” takes its primary cues from God’s revelation. Balthasar considers at length the contribution of Matthias Scheeben, a theologian who greatly influenced Rahner. Notably, Balthasar depicts Scheeben as a theologian of the sublimity (Erhabenheit) of God’s glory that elevates (erhebt) the human person.25 One must notice in reading Balthasar that 24. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ, and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 79–117. Balthasar writes of the phrase “theological aesthetics,” “By this we mean a theology which does not primarily work with the extra-theological categories of a worldly philosophical aesthetics (above all poetry), but which develops its theory of beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuinely theological methods.” 25. Ibid., especially 105–10. Balthasar tells of how Scheeben replaces Romantic aesthetic theology with theological aesthetics by reframing aesthetics theologically and insisting that theology transfigures philosophy (105, 110). Scheeben intends to show that the “glories of grace” are “more sublime (erhaben) than natural beauty and dignity. For the creature, this substantial

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he does not define aesthetics primarily in terms of art and beauty (even if beauty is his “first word”), but in terms of glory and elevation, which set art and beauty firmly within the context of divine revelation. In Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, admittedly I defined “aesthetics” too thinly as “an account of the manifestation of being.”26 Nonetheless, I presented Rahner as a theologian of the sublime in a sense similar to Balthasar’s portrayal of Scheeben. In this book I aim to augment that picture. Given this theological context, I can now define the relationship between my definition of “aesthetic” and the eighteenth-century first heyday of aesthetics. Wherever one ranks Immanuel Kant among eighteenth-century aestheticians, indisputably he was and continues to be broadly influential. And certainly out of all the eighteenth-century aestheticians, Kant made the greatest impact on Rahner. While for various reasons I remain committed to setting Rahner at somewhat of a distance from Kant, it is important to acknowledge Rahner’s intellectual debts to Kant and to identify Kantian resonances in Rahner’s theology of which maybe even he was unaware. This is particularly true with regard to aesthetics. There are three permutations of “aesthetic” from Kant that could clarify what I mean by “aesthetic” or “aesthetics” and how I deem this meaning applicable to Rahner. First, Kant’s phrase “transcendental aesthetic” resonates with Rahner’s work, obviously Geist in Welt but also any of Rahner’s writings on embodiment and sensibility, including popular pieces like “Seeing and Hearing.”27 Put simply, “transcendental aesthetic” is a phrase Kant uses to express the ineluctable contribution of sensibility to human knowing. We need not consider the details of the transcendental aesthetic as Kant describes it in the Critique of Pure Reason (in terms of pure intuitions of space and time), nor how Rahner’s chapter on sensublimity (Erhabenheit) means an elevation (Erhebung) which is both ontological and experiential and aesthetic” (107, ET slightly modified). On Scheeben’s account, the Catholic faith “displays before us an immeasurably exalted elevation of our nature” (107, Balthasar’s emphasis). 26. Peter Joseph Fritz, Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 11, hereafter KRTA. 27. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 155–92; Rahner, “Seeing and Hearing,” in Everyday Faith, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 196–204.

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sibility in Geist in Welt creatively appropriates Kant’s description. But given our interest in the definition of “aesthetic,” it is worth noting that Kant develops his idea of the transcendental aesthetic out of a disagreement with Alexander Baumgarten, the philosopher who coined the term “aesthetic.” Kant disputes Baumgarten’s (and subsequent aestheticians’) intention to develop a science of taste, art, and beauty under the moniker “aesthetics,” demanding that philosophers recur instead to the etymological meaning of “aesthesis”: “sensation.”28 This allows Kant to distinguish between the “aesthetic” (things pertaining to sensibility) and the “noetic” (things pertaining to knowledge).29 Kant’s disagreement with Baumgarten can, in part, guide us. A Rahnerian theological aesthetic, which is always first and foremost focused on God’s self-revelation, aims to account for how God’s self-revelation arrives to human persons, who apprehend God’s revelation through their senses and not primarily noetically. Second, and in a different yet related key, Kant’s definition in the Critique of the Power of Judgment of “aesthetic judgment” bears on my definition of aesthetics.30 For Kant, a human judgment qualifies as “aesthetic” if it is “reflecting” rather than “determining”—that is, if this judgment apprehends appearances of objects without filing them under a concept.31 An aesthetic judgment is noncognitive, not aimed at knowledge. Aesthetic judgments express a human subject’s receptivity to the appearances of objects. As such, aesthetic judgments relate to the imagination. The imagination in Kant has two interwoven functions: it apprehends (receives) appearances without attempting to comprehend them (to assign appearances to concepts), and in the process it stretches forth toward the infinite.32 In its stretching forth, the imagination is expressive, as it gathers appearances to present them to the understanding. Here again we discover resonances with Rahner’s work, including 28. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 156. 29. Kant refers to the ancient distinction between “aistheta kai noeta.” 30. For Kant’s initial exposition of this idea in the first draft of the introduction, see Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 24–28. 31. Ibid., 26; see 15 for the initial formulation of the distinction in the first introduction. 32. Ibid., 25–26, 134. On apprehension v. comprehension in the first introduction, see 23.

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the “Metaphysics on the Basis of the Imagination” that comprises the final part of Geist in Welt.33 This metaphysics centers on the virtually unlimited breadth of the Vorgriff, which anticipates but never comprehensively grasps God’s infinite incomprehensibility. It is not far-fetched to detect resonances between Rahner’s Geist in Welt and Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, as Rahner studied this text in seminar with Heidegger in the summer semester of 1936.34 With this piece in place, we can add that Rahner’s “theological aesthetic” discloses the human person’s free, expressive stretching forth toward God’s ever-greater glory. Third, Kant distinguishes between two major kinds of aesthetic judgments: the beautiful and the sublime. I have already suggested that I regard Rahner as a theologian of the sublime. The language that Kant uses to describe sublime judgments persuades me that this is an instructive way to characterize Rahner. Kant explains that some experiences— including a serendipitous example, walking into St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—seize a spectator with “bewilderment” and “embarrassment” because of the judgment’s inadequacy for estimating the magnitude with which it is presented and the imagination’s inability to gather it coherently.35 Such experiences of bewildered judgment and imagination, he argues, are properly named “sublime.” Kant describes such experiences with three phrases incalculably appropriate to Rahner’s theology of freedom. Sublime experiences awaken a “feeling of a supersensible faculty” directed toward a “supersensible stratum” that is the site of a “supersensible vocation.”36 When faced with an inestimable (because so great) and uncontrollable (because so powerful) phenomenon, aesthetic judgment momentarily fails. But precisely as a person’s judgment fails, she comes to recognize her personal depth, which exceeds the sensible world in which ostensibly she lives and moves and has her being. 33. Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, SJ, foreword by Johannes B. Metz, introduction by Francis Fiorenza (New York: Continuum, 1969), 385–408; cf. Rahner, Geist in Welt, in Geist in Welt: Philosophische Schriften [Spirit in the World: Philosophical Writings], Sämtliche Werke, ed. Albert Raffelt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1996), 2:285–300, hereafter GW. 34. See Albert Raffelt, “Editionsbericht [Editor’s Report],” in Rahner, Geist in Welt: Philosophische Schriften, Sämtliche Werke, 2:xviii. 35. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 136. 36. Ibid., 134, 139, 141.

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Kant shies away from this supersensible dimension. He declares that the analytic of the sublime, in which this dimension comes briefly to light, is a mere appendix to the analytic of the beautiful. Judgments of beauty fit more neatly into his philosophical system, which grounds itself in the this-worldliness of the transcendental aesthetic.37 The supersensible dimension that repels Kant attracts Rahner. So too does the sublime. For Rahner, human freedom is rooted in a supersensible stratum (personal ground) that is the site of a supersensible vocation (God’s unique call to each person). The fundamental option, the center of Rahner’s theology of freedom, is a supersensible decision reached in a supersensible stratum in response to a supersensible vocation, though with none of these being severed from the sensibility they supervene. Human freedom walks by faith (“aesthetic” no. 3) and by sight (“aesthetic” nos. 1 and 2; cf. 2 Cor 5:7). This treatment of Kant has provided us with an optic for assessing what a Rahnerian theological aesthetic may be. In a manner similar to Scheeben’s theological transfiguration of Romantic aesthetic theology, Rahner elevates (erhebt) Kantian aesthetics (sensibility, imagination, and the sublime) into a theological aesthetic. Balthasar’s theological aesthetic emphasizes the “objective evidence” of God’s glory, while Rahner—though never a subjectivist—stresses the “subjective evidence” of human apprehension of God’s elevating sublimity. While Rahner constructs his theology of freedom largely as a theory of human subjectivity, a proper reading of his sources reveals that human subjectivity always already roots itself in God’s free, eternal decision to selfreveal salvifically. Human apprehension of this divine decision, which occurs through the varied modalities and situations of human life, gradually unfolds as a free decision in time to respond affirmatively or negatively to God’s self-communication. Human decision, in turn and insofar as it can, makes divine freedom manifest. Human freedom is “aesthetic” in that it apprehends God’s self-communication sensibly and bodily and expresses God’s self-communication as it stretches forth toward God’s greater glory and “sublime” in its failures (through fault, finitude, or in37. Ibid., 130.

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jury) to apprehend or express God’s self-communication, which reaches earthward to elevate finite and broken creatures through mercy. Lest this all sound individualistic, I must preliminarily alert the reader to the ecclesial dimension of a Rahnerian theological aesthetic. This aesthetic centers on a shared rapport among human persons with God’s sublimity, which outstrips finite subjects’ comprehension while mercifully, lovingly, and healingly buoying up their capacity for apprehension. This divine action founds a community commissioned to live mercy, love, and healing. Apprehension and expression of God’s free decision to self-communicate transpires in a whole form of life, or ethos. I use “ethos” to designate the same thing that Rahner’s collaborator and fellow Jesuit Otto Semmelroth called the “three-dimensional reality” of the church.38 For Rahner, the church’s extent in three dimensions (vertical, horizontal, and depth) provides a home for human freedom. With even more theological heft, Rahner teaches in an important 1953 essay (which accords with the best of mid-twentieth-century ecclesiology and anticipates Vatican II’s momentous sacramental ecclesiology in Lumen Gentium) that the church is “the tangible and original sacramental sign of the pneuma which is the freedom of our freedom.”39 The church is the arena for freedom made manifest and is itself freedom made manifest, inasmuch as it is a sacrament.40

Remarks on Art Before leaving this introduction to the term “aesthetic,” let us acknowledge again that Rahner’s theological aesthetic does not center primarily on art, and in this way it bears an essential similarity to (not difference from!) Balthasar’s. So too does Rahner’s aesthetic cohere with Kant’s. Kant spends numerous pages in the Critique of the Power of Judgment applying his critique to fine art. Even so, one must understand that this 38. Otto Semmelroth, SJ, Church and Sacrament, trans. Emily Schlossberger (Notre Dame, Ind.: Fides, 1960), 19–28. 39. Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, Man in the Church, trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1963), 96. 40. See ibid., 95–96.

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application follows from an “aesthetics” generated in Kant’s analysis of subjectivity and community. Rahner has something, though admittedly comparatively little, to say about art.41 In a way akin to Kant, his writings on music, poetry, and visual art are applications of Rahner’s theological-aesthetic understanding of subjectivity and freedom (divine, individual human, and ecclesial). To illustrate this theological aesthetic’s application, let us closely read his late essay “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety” (1982). Others have commented on it elsewhere, and I have mentioned it already, but I must offer my own interpretation, in a way tailored to this book’s subject matter.42 Rahner writes this piece for two reasons: (1) to combat a simplistic idea of theology as a set of words about God; and thus (2) to show how art and theology are related, even if most people might not see the connection, except in the obvious case that an artwork is a pious depiction of Jesus, Mary, or the saints. For Rahner, even when art is not specifically speaking (or writing) about God, it can still express God—make God’s freedom manifest.43 Theology and art are both modes of self-expression. Theology is how people express themselves when they are thinking about God, starting from divine revelation. Art, too, relates to divine revelation. For Rahner, God is self-expressive, since God “self-communicates.” God’s self41. In addition to the “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety” essay already cited, see Rahner, “Priest and Poet,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 294–317; Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), 357–67; Rahner, “The Theology of the Religious Meaning of Images,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 23, Final Writings, trans. Joseph Donceel, SJ, ed. Paul Imhof, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 149­–61; Rahner, “An Ordinary Song,” in Everyday Faith, 193–95. 42. Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen, “Karl Rahner: Toward a Theological Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner, ed. Declan Marmion and Mary Hines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 225–34; James Voiss, “Rahner, von Balthasar and the Question of Theological Aesthetics,” in Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner, ed. Mark Bosco and David Stagaman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 167–81; Brent Little, “Anthropology and Art in the Theology of Karl Rahner,” Heythrop Journal 52, no. 6 (November 2011): 939–51; and Susie Paulik Babka, Through the Dark Field: The Incarnation through an Aesthetics of Vulnerability (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2017). 43. For all the material in this paragraph, see AAH, 162.

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communication comes both from outside the world and from within the world, in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the activities of creatures. Artistic activity is a prime example of creaturely, innerworldly activity. When Rembrandt painted or Bruckner wrote a symphony, God selfrevealed through their creativity. So if theology expresses God’s revelation as interpreted by human beings, and if art expresses God’s revelation through creative activity, then theology and art are connected. In fact, art itself is a kind of theology.44 Even more deeply, art is a “road to original religious experience (ursprüngliche religiöse Erfahrung).” Art involves human receptivity, or apprehension. It is a special way for people to become attuned to their personal (supersensible) depths. A consideration of art by theology could open theology to consider what is most central to it. Theology informed by art would lead people into their mysterious depths, where they would find God.45 Having said all this, Rahner relates art to the analogia entis.46 If God created human experience, and if art expresses human experience, God’s being will appear by analogy in the human experience expressed in art. This is especially apparent when art treats the depths of human experience. The difficulty with today’s art, Rahner says, is that its depth dimension is hidden or rendered less recognizable (for Christians) by newer artists’ adoption of different symbols from traditional religious symbols to suggest the deep ground of human experience. But even so, Rahner stands convinced that both art and theology are religious not because of their objective content, but because of the subjective impulse behind them.47 This is a key point, especially given the ways I have defined “aesthetic.” Rahner says, “Genuine art is the result of a well determined historical event of human transcendentality.”48 Real art expresses, in time and space, the human drive to surpass limits (the imagination’s stretching 44. AAH, 163. 45. AAH, 163–64. 46. AAH, 164. 47. AAH, 164–65. 48. AAH, 166.

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forth toward the infinite). This is most interesting, Rahner suggests, when an artist does not use words. At this point Rahner provides the example of Dürer’s hare. This painting proves noteworthy because, even with its everyday subject matter, it makes manifest the human freedom to stretch forth beyond the sensible. Dürer surpasses normal limits of attention to detail, creatively deploying unlimited attention.49 If the Dürer example concerns creativity (expression), Rahner continues on the note of receptivity (apprehension), arguing that sense experience can be religious if we take the disposition of the whole person into account. If a person is deeply moved, for example, by a painting by Claude Monet, the depth of this reaction may qualify as religious, even if Monet’s painting depicts a seemingly nonreligious lily pad. Rahner calls this an example of “anonymous piety.”50 On the other side, a painting of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that seems religious because of its subject matter may not be religious at all (at the very least it would have little “spirit”), because it touches only the shallows of human experience. The last theme Rahner treats is the relationship between holy living and being an artist. Rahner declares, “We might defend the thesis that real saints are those who have developed all their human potentialities.”51 Rahner aims to open up the possibility that an artist who develops his humanity fully (his example is Goethe) could be a saint without being traditionally, religiously “saintly.” He ends with a question: “What is the relation between artistic talent and holiness?”52 Surely the relationship is not immediately straightforward, but it would have to be adjudicated, given what Rahner has said in the foregoing, along the intersecting lines of creative expression and deep apprehension of reality. The upshot of the essay is this: art presents us with concentrated examples of the comprehensive interplay between human capacities for apprehending and expressing the real. Thus “art” as considered by Rahner in this piece functions to instantiate the type of aesthetic I have identified, which involves sensibility, imagination, and sublimity. 49. AAH, 166. 50. AAH, 167. 51. AAH, 167. 52. AAH, 168.

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Rahner’s theological aesthetic considers how human persons, individually and together, apprehend God’s revelation and express this revelation in their pilgrimage in life. While art need not be reduced to complete parity with other activities of human life, just as assuredly it need not be promoted to the forefront of a theological aesthetic. Nor, I should add, does one need to foreground the word “beauty” to formulate a theological aesthetic. Instead, one must concern oneself with the analogical manifestation of God’s free decision to self-communicate in the worldly freedom (artistic or otherwise) of God’s creatures.

C h a pter O utli nes This book has four chapters. The first three examine the three sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom so as to aid our understanding of it. The fourth works constructively to show some ways that Rahner’s theology of freedom may apply to our contemporary context. Chapter 1, on Rahner’s dialogue with transcendental philosophy, begins with Rahner’s study with Martin Heidegger of Friedrich Schelling’s treatise on human freedom, which seems to have marked Rahner’s thinking on freedom, especially with regard to freedom’s arising from a personal “ground.” I identify Hearer of the Word as deeply resonant with Schelling’s thinking on freedom due to its complex theory of freedom as God’s eternal decision for self-revelation, which calls forth a decisive human response (which in Rahner’s later theology will be called the “fundamental option”). I then read “The Theology of the Symbol,” arguing that it provides a necessary theological complement to Hearer’s theory of freedom, deepening Rahner’s ontological or, better, aesthetic-sacramental thinking on manifestation. Chapter 1 ends by describing the chief difficulty of Rahner’s coordination of freedom and manifestation: the drag that material conditions exert on human freedom’s becoming manifest (as a fundamental option), thus making divine freedom manifest. This last passage on concupiscence becomes a natural transition point to chapter 2. Chapter 2, on Rahner’s penance studies, begins by elucidating Rahner as a scholar of the church fathers. The chapter continues by exposing 20   I n t r o d u c t i o n

Rahner’s dogmatic-historical lectures on penance. I detail the historical narrative Rahner tells about the development of penance, and I lay out the dogmatic-theological themes that he regards as most salient. Rising to the forefront is the theme of reconciliation with the church. Rahner aims to retrieve the early church’s sense that penitential actions necessarily included not just remediation of an individual’s sin before God but the healing of a breach between the sinner and the church. This retrieval has wider implications for individuals’ freedom within the church and the church’s freedom in the world. This is why during and after Vatican II Rahner promoted this idea’s timeliness. “The Matter of Penance” at the end of chapter 2 matches chapter 1’s treatment of concupiscence under “Freedom Run Aground” by considering the sinfulness of the church, a less popular theme that nevertheless has deep implications for a theology of freedom. This chapter’s chief contribution is to lend ecclesial thickness to Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option and thus to insist upon the ecclesial dimensionality of Rahner’s theology of God’s freedom made manifest in and through creation. Chapter 3 takes up the theme of decision precisely at the site where Rahner claims his theology of decision is rooted: in Ignatian spirituality. It outlines Rahner’s early and ongoing study of Ignatian sources. From Rahner’s interpretation of the constitutive features of Ignatian spirituality, including their organic connection to devotion to Jesus’ Sacred Heart (the same symbol foregrounded in Rahner’s article on symbol considered in chapter 1), I draw methodological principles for the rest of the chapter. I turn to the twin features of indifference and “the existential” in order to clarify what Rahner means by “individuality” or “individual subjectivity,” which is rooted in God’s concrete love for and call to each person, and which is recognizable through an aesthetic logic stemming from a Grundgefühl, or “basic feeling,” in one’s personal ground. “Loyalty to the Church,” patterned on the Ignatian idea of loyalty to the church, solidifies my claim that freedom for Rahner is an ecclesial-historical reality. Individual freedom is more sharply rendered once we consider ecclesial freedom and vice versa. In closing, I present a crucial piece on the rootedness of Rahner’s theology of the fundamental option in IgnaI n t r o d u c t i o n   21

tius’s meditation on the Two Standards of Christ and Lucifer. Given the function of sensibility and imagination in the Ignatian Exercises, including the Two Standards meditation, this chapter’s conclusion provides an opportunity to sum up the Rahnerian aesthetic of freedom that has been unveiled in the first three chapters. Chapter 4 uses the resources gathered in the first three chapters to answer the critique, opened by Johann Baptist Metz and continued by Jennifer Beste and others today, that Rahner’s theology of the fundamental option fails to account for freedom’s exposure to catastrophe and trauma. While this critique is substantive and largely substantiable, an aesthetic reading of Rahner’s theology of freedom reveals that it falls less to the critique than one might think. The chapter argues that, for Rahner, freedom begins as exposure, lives under conditions of exposure, becomes manifest in exposure. It traces the general theme of exposure in several of Rahner’s writings, then turns to how an aesthetic reading of the three sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom can specify this theme. Amplifying chapter 1’s consideration of the Schellingian resonance of Rahner’s theology of concupiscence, chapter 4 explains how Rahnerian freedom is always shadowed by an irresolvable remainder of vulnerability to being undone. Interpreting Rahner’s theology of penance through Metz’s suggestion, aided by analyses from Dorothee Soelle, I argue that Rahner’s theology incorporates a mysticism of suffering unto God that recasts penitential freedom as a fragile freedom of “the wordless cry.” And a return to Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality with the theme of exposure in mind gives us new eyes to see how Christ’s pierced, agonized Sacred Heart sheds light on the fundamental option’s operation (or frustration) under conditions of exposure. The chapter concludes that Rahner’s theology of exposed freedom still bears possibilities for addressing a broken world where, instead of human freedom being made manifest (and divine freedom in and through it), it is concealed, frustrated, injured, and sometimes all but obliterated.

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R a h n er a n d Fr eed o m No w Rahner continues to be a reference point for Catholic theology, but less and less. This is why Reno and Weigel can say—even if they do so for the wrong reasons—that the future of Catholic theology will not be Rahnerian. Perhaps adding fuel to their fire is the fact that when Rahner remains as a subject of study, he functions as a foil for new constructive theologies. Some uses of Rahner as a foil are more nearly appreciative. Exemplary here is the edited volume by Paul Crowley, Rahner beyond Rahner: A Great Theologian Encounters the Pacific Rim (2005), where a group of distinguished authors apply Rahner’s theological categories to geographical, cultural, religious, and other realities around the Pacific Rim, from California through Latin America and East Asia.53 The authors adjudicate Rahner’s potential for continued theological fruitfulness but are also up-front about the limits and drawbacks of his theological approach and concepts. Others are more mixed. A prime example is Susan Abraham’s Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment (2007). Rahner is generatively and occasionally generously used in this text to help Abraham retain theology as a viable discourse in the face of postcolonial theory’s allergy to it. Nevertheless, in substantial measure Abraham’s treatment of Rahner amounts to a victory for postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Ashis Nandy over him. From the standpoint of postcolonial theory, Rahner’s ideas appear outmoded, naïve, and disappointing.54 Abraham’s final assessment that the catholicity of Rahner’s theology and of postcolonial theory can be mutually enhancing is the strongest and most constructive suggestion in the book, and I take it very seriously.55 I also owe to her some of the rationale for this book’s structure, since she identifies three components of Rahner’s theology of freedom—“transcendental-metaphysical,” “existential-ethical,” and 53. Paul G. Crowley, SJ, ed., Rahner beyond Rahner: A Great Theologian Encounters the Pacific Rim (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). 54. Abraham, Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence, 13, 20, 25. 55. Ibid., 206.

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“mystical-spiritual,”56 which roughly correspond to the transcendental, penitential, and Ignatian triad of my chapters 1 through 3. But often it seems that Abraham asks too much of Rahner, and in her appeal to our contemporary context she loses sight of Rahner’s own context. For instance, with respect to social freedom she writes, In contemporary times, Rahner would not have been faced with an overwhelming atheism or secularization in society. Rather, he would face the fact that religious metaphysics reasserts itself in the form of competing identity claims resulting in deadly and violent conflict. In such an environment, he would have to expand and amplify the sort of historical metaphysics that he attempts to do to a much greater extent and show how they present important resources to counter violence in relation to religious, gendered, and national difference.57

No one could disagree with this. Rahner’s limitations, certainly with regard to our circumstances (which he did not experience), but even with respect to his own (the most obvious being the Holocaust, which he never adequately addressed), are obvious. But it remains for me a more open question than it seems for Abraham how much we should emphasize Rahner’s limitations over against his capacity for enhancing contemporary discourses like postcolonial theory. Constructive theologians like the authors in the Crowley volume, Abraham, Beste, and others, accomplish most when they focus less on his oversights and more on Rahner’s insights. It is true that in many respects his work seems painfully dated—at least if one tries to treat him as a twenty-first-century theologian, which he never was. Many of Rahner’s chief contributions to theology were made almost sixty years ago. The Second Vatican Council closed over fifty years ago. The rapidity of worldwide change in the past sixty years, it may seem, makes it necessary to argue strenuously for Rahner’s continued relevance, since he is now irrelevant. That is not the case I make here. Rahner is a classic theologian, as James Bacik argues in his masterful recent book on Rahner, Humble 56. Ibid., 13. 57. Ibid., 26.

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Confidence.58 It is worth clarifying what he taught and how our contemporary situation, marked by a diminished sense of freedom worldwide, looks in terms of his thought and how it may be resisted by his thought. We must learn to see ourselves in a Rahnerian mirror. While we revise Rahner, we should be willing to be revised by him. The dominant ethos in a broad swath of the world today is the neoliberal ethos, where freedom is rendered as entrepreneurial freedom to compete against others in the “free” market, where social-political freedom is the freedom to commandeer state power to serve business interests, and consequently, where most people (even those who succeed!) are robbed of the deeper freedom described in Rahner’s theology. Under neoliberalism, people may, arguably, be “free to choose,” but decreasingly are they free to decide.59 Even more, and here the contribution of this book is crucial, freedom under neoliberalism has become almost entirely a matter of aesthetics: of esteem, image, surface, creativity, selfexpression (although there is no stable “self ” doing the expressing), or, in short, brand appeal.60 While many portions of this book may seem woefully impractical and wildly out of touch with “the now,” I beg the reader’s forbearance. If we want a deep account of freedom and of aesthetics, sometimes we must endure thoughts and discourses we would otherwise avoid. With hope, we can evade the superficiality of the now. If at times, in light of the concerns set forth in chapter 4, this book seems to overbet on conscious, active freedom, this is not to exclude people based on differing levels of ability. No—it is a constructive theological-ecclesial response to a social-political reality bent on destroying human subjectivity and community. This response is formed out of a key Rahnerian insight: “In the church we can never simply passively await the future or predict it by means of rationalistic computa58. James Bacik, Humble Confidence: Spiritual and Pastoral Guidance from Rahner (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2014). 59. The phrase “free to choose” as a hallmark of neoliberalism was popularized by the titan of neoliberal theory, economist Milton Friedman; see his popular work, coauthored with his wife, the economist Rose Friedman: Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt, 1980). 60. The best, though advanced, introduction to freedom under neoliberalism is Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone, 2015).

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tions, since the future remains entrusted to our freedom, responsibility, and action.”61 And the posing of this response as a work of theological aesthetics (not a noetic enterprise) should, I hope, be revelatory. To today’s destructive ethos, the most dynamic, the most daunting, the most sublime response is the pinnacle of the virtues and the keystone of aesthetics: love. 61. Rahner, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart Today” in TI 23:120.

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Rahner on Transcendental Freedom

1

Rahner on Transcendental Freedom

N o w o r d i n R a h n e r ’s l e x i c o n has been more contested than “transcendental.” To paraphrase John 21:25, no footnote in the world could contain the titles of all the works that have been written on the subject. This first of three chapters on the sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom centers on the word “transcendental,” inasmuch as this is a watchword for German Idealism and inasmuch as, for many critics of Rahner, “German Idealism” stands as a cipher for Rahner’s alleged relinquishing of authentically Christian commitments in favor of an “anonymous,” humanistic conception of freedom. I respond specifically to a charge that has haunted Rahner from Hans Urs von Balthasar’s 1939 review of Geist in Welt up through contemporary texts like Ethna Regan’s Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights (2010): his transcendental method loses hold of reality precisely where it counts. For Balthasar, Rahner is seduced by German Idealism (specifically Joseph Maréchal’s “reading of Kant in the direction of Fichte”) into relinquishing the danger of Christian existence.1 For Regan, who is markedly more 1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Rezension: K. Rahner, Geist in Welt, und J. B. Lotz, Sein und Welt” [Review: K. Rahner, Spirit in World, and J. B. Lotz, Being and World], Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 63 (1939): 371–79; Balthasar, The Moment of Christian Witness, trans. Richard Beckley (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), especially 146–47.

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positive on Rahner, his “kind of idealism” breaks down when faced with the question of what might “damage” the human transcendental capacity for God (this is a renewal of Johann Baptist Metz’s famous critique of Rahner—see chapter 4).2 For Balthasar, Rahner’s engagement with German Idealism leads him to sacrifice a robust confession of Christian faith, which would include, if necessary, being willing to die as a martyr for Christ. For Regan, as for Metz, Rahner’s idealism risks losing a robust commitment to love of neighbor, which must hear the cries of the victims of history and address their suffering. In short, Rahner’s idealism, which would seem to incline toward anonymity rather than Christoformity—especially in the rather abstract formulation of the fundamental option as a “yes” or “no” to God—would inhibit understanding of and expression of distinctively Christian freedom. Though this chapter may not completely allay the concerns of Balthasarians or appreciative critics from Regan’s side, it aims to map the terrain of Rahner’s view of transcendental freedom differently, with such concerns as a starting point. It does so by examining an as-yetunconsidered interlocutor of Rahner’s: Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), a noted, tremendously complex—and always aesthetically engaged— German Idealist. I do so understanding the risks involved. As I admit later in the chapter, Schelling’s commitment to traditional Christianity was tenuous at best, and he never professed Catholicism. It would seem, then, that by associating Rahner with Schelling I would grant the Balthasarian criticism that Rahner opts in his theology of freedom for a marginal-at-best Christianity. Instead, I claim that Rahner’s association with Schelling works not so much by direct influence as by resonance. By this I mean, among other things, that Schelling’s particular version of German Idealism helps us to sound out a properly Rahnerian view of freedom, and in doing so, Schelling’s aesthetic idealism helps us to identify the sacramental-symbolic cast and, we shall see, material complexity of Rahner’s theology of freedom. Rather than proceeding directly to an account of Rahner’s constructive approach to transcendental freedom (i.e., a direct exegesis of Rahnerian texts), I deem it fitting, even neces2. Regan, Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights, 3, 77, 80.

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sary, to bring in Schelling as an interlocutor to sound out as-yet-unheard resonances (an aesthetic approach). Rahner’s seemingly pedestrian study of concupiscence, for example, comes to sound tremendously and fruitfully different if played in a Schellingian key. Again, I shall be circumspect about claiming Schelling’s influence on Rahner, since Rahner never identifies it. Still there are at least two reasons for pursuing a Rahner-Schelling dialogue. During the final semester of his doctoral studies in philosophy at Freiburg, Rahner studied a key text of Schelling’s with Heidegger, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), the freedom essay.3 Also, Schelling’s philosophy, especially from the period during which he wrote the freedom essay, presents a way to elucidate Rahner’s ideas on transcendental freedom that addresses critiques like Balthasar’s and Regan’s. If Rahner’s “idealistic” views on freedom bear Schellingian resonances,4 then they avoid the straightforward idealism Balthasar fears and the disregard for history’s “underside” that Regan laments. Four points on Schelling are immediately germane at this point: (1) Schelling’s philosophy of freedom is unique among the German Idealists in the way that he resists autonomous subjectivity and renders the close relationship between freedom’s transcendentality and materiality (or categoriality); (2) Schelling’s philosophy of freedom has a uniquely aesthetic cast, in the sense that it is sharply attuned to preconscious or precognitive experience; (3) The increasing centrality of God in Schelling’s thought from 1809 forward constitutively forms his view of 3. F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856–61), 7:336–416; ET: Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2006). On Rahner’s courses with Heidegger, see Thomas Sheehan, Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987)—a list of courses is given on 5; and Thomas F. O’Meara, OP, trans., “Johannes B. Lotz, SJ, and Martin Heidegger in Conversation: A Translation of Lotz’s Im Gespräch,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2010): 125–31; and Karl Rahner, Geist in Welt: Philosophische Schriften, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2, ed. Albert Raffelt (hereafter SW 2) (Freiburg in B.: Herder, 1996), xvii–xviii. 4. I began establishing such resonances in Fritz, “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity,” hereafter “Original Plural Unity.” Some points from that essay are incorporated here, though in heavily revised form.

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freedom as having to do with eternity’s manifestation within time and space; and (4) This last point means to suggest that for Schelling, against the thin conceptions of freedom operative in today’s world to which I referred in the book’s introduction (especially under neoliberalism), where “freedom” refers to mere epiphenomenal choice between alternative objects like lattes, brooms, and stocks, freedom has eternal heft. For Schelling, freedom is decisive. Whether or not Rahner cites Schelling directly, I argue here that Rahner seems to have imbibed, or at least substantially agreed with, these Schellingian strategies and attunements for reframing human freedom as something other than rational selfdetermination and instead as something that expresses God’s decision to self-manifest through creation and salvation.5 The chapter has four major divisions. First, I briefly describe how Rahner has been contextualized in the scholarly literature with respect to German Idealism, then I revise this picture in terms of the history of Rahner’s encounter with Schelling’s thought in Heidegger’s lecture course on the freedom essay. Second, I examine the theme of freedom in Hearer of the Word (1941) and draw out its Schellingian resonances, especially regarding the theme of God’s freedom to self-reveal.6 Third, I link Hearer of the Word to Rahner’s 1959 symbol essay to show a common concern between the two texts with the manifestation of God’s freedom and, consequently, the interaction of divine and human freedom in embodied life.7 Fourth, I discuss Rahner’s studies on concupiscence 5. Cf. Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87–104. 6. Rahner, Hörer des Wortes: Schriften zur Religionsphilosophie und zur Grundlegung der Theologie [Hearer of the Word; Writings on Philosophy of Religion and Laying the Foundation for Theology], in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, ed. Albert Raffelt [SW 4] (Freiburg: Herder, 1997), 4:2–281; Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, trans. Joseph Donceel, ed. Andrew Tallon (New York: Continuum, 1994). For this work, I will follow the convention I employed for citation in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics: HW, followed by the English translation page number, a slash, and the German page number, e.g., HW 38/76. Also, I will refer to the first edition only, which in SW 4 is displayed on the even-numbered pages. 7. Rahner, “Zur Theologie des Symbols,” in Leiblichkeit der Gnade: Schriften zur Sakramentenlehre [The Corporeality of Grace: Writings on Sacramental Doctrine], Sämtliche Werke, vol. 18, ed. Wendelin Knoch and Tobias Trappe (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 423–57; “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, More Recent Writings [TI 4], trans. Kevin

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in conjunction with the Schellingian idea of “ground” to show that for Rahner human “transcendental” freedom must always contend with the “friction” of historical reality. I argue that, despite what his critics fear, Rahner’s theology of freedom accounts amply for freedom’s susceptibility to running aground (i.e., its endangeredness), and it does so precisely as a theological aesthetic of freedom—that is, an account of freedom as real-symbolic, with all the difficulties material symbols implicate.

Studyi n g Schelli ng As I observed in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics,8 it is worth considering what Rahner may have taken from his courses with Heidegger beyond learning how to ask counterintuitive questions of classic texts. “Studying Schelling” considers the final course Rahner took with Heidegger on Schelling’s brief, challenging essay on human freedom. Discovering how Schelling (may have) entered Rahner’s thinking opens a trajectory for reconceiving the philosophical source of Rahner’s theology of freedom, thereby discovering the possibility of establishing his theology of freedom’s aesthetic character. I beg the reader’s forbearance, as this part proves maximally philosophical and may seem an indulgent detour. It is not, though. I pursue this line of exposition in order to display one aspect of Rahner’s theology of freedom’s intellectual richness, which will be complemented in subsequent chapters by its ecclesial depth (his penitential theology) and spiritual fecundity (his Ignatian theology). The reader will find that I devote roughly equal space and attention to all three of these aspects, in the hope that the insight of Rahner’s theology of freedom made manifest— God’s eternal decision to self-communicate expressed within worldly limits—will shine through the limits of my words.

Smyth (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon Press, 1966), 221–52, hereafter TS (with cross-references to the SW pagination). 8. KRTA 5.

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Rahner among the German Idealists This chapter’s introduction adduced Balthasar and Regan as two (very different) examples of scholars who call into question Rahner’s “idealism,” spanning the time from the beginning of Rahner’s writing career through the present day, three decades after Rahner’s death. Balthasar is perhaps most important here, as he suggests a direct genealogical relationship between Rahner and German Idealism, though it would seem that Regan does not disagree with him. Balthasar is not unique in this respect. In English-language scholarship, for instance, Rahner’s Geist in Welt was explicated thoroughly in terms of its relation to the philosophical problematic set up by Kant and pursued by German Idealists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831).9 Rahner has been compared multiple other times with Hegel, and a recent chapter in German has renewed such inquiry.10 Vincent Holzer has recently argued “that Rahner’s conception of the ‘transcendental’ is closer to Fichte’s life philosophy” than to the philosophies of the other German Idealists.11 While there is something compelling about Holzer’s case, I shall argue that the connection to Schelling is more persuasive, and perhaps even more straightforwardly substantiable. Rahner studied Schelling, and not Fichte.12 Thomas O’Meara stands alone among English-language commentators in making an explicit, if understated link between Rahner and Schelling. O’Meara is exceptionally suited to do so, since he published 9. Francis Fiorenza, “Karl Rahner and the Kantian Problematic,” introduction to Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, SJ (New York: Continuum, 1994), xix–xlv. 10. Thomas Pearl, “Dialectical Panentheism: On the Hegelian Character of Rahner’s Key Christological Writings,” Irish Theological Quarterly 42, no. 2 (1975): 119–37; Dennis M. Bradley, “Rahner’s Spirit in the World: Aquinas or Hegel?,” Thomist 41, no. 2 (1977): 167–99; Winfried Corduan, “Hegel in Rahner: A Study in Philosophical Hermeneutics,” Harvard Theological Review 71, nos. 3/4 (1978): 285–98; Josef Schmidt, “Gott als Geheimnis—Rahner und Hegel” [God as Mystery—Rahner and Hegel], in Die philosophischen Quellen der Theologie Karl Rahners [The Philosophical Sources of Karl Rahner’s Theology], Quaestiones Disputatae 213, ed. Harald Schöndorf (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), 179–96. 11. Vincent Holzer, “Philosophy with(in) Theology: Rahner’s Philosophy of Religion,” Heythrop Journal 55, no. 4 (2014): 584–98. To be precise, Holzer is connecting Rahner to Fichte via French phenomenologist Michel Henry. This does not change anything about my argument. 12. Karen Kilby corroborates that Rahner claimed never to have read Fichte; Kilby, Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 14.

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an important book on the influence of Schelling in early nineteenthcentury German Catholic theology,13 and thus he can detect Schelling’s continued (if underground) impact on German Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. O’Meara narrates his experience hearing Rahner lecture in 1964 on topics that would eventually be expanded into a full course of study and then published as Foundations of Christian Faith (1976). Speaking of that work, O’Meara draws the connection to Schelling: “The course and book bore the subtitle, ‘An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity,’ and the ‘idea’ of Christianity recalled great thinkers of the nineteenth century like F. W. J. Schelling, J. S. Drey, and F. A. Staudenmaier” (the latter two were Catholic theologians who adapted Schelling’s insights for theological use).14 Perhaps more important, if more implicit, is a suggestion that can be inferred from the work of Stephen Fields in Being as Symbol (2000).15 Amid the dazzling assortment of Rahner’s sources treated in this rich book are the polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and the Catholic Tübingen theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838). Fields suggests that Möhler adapts Goethe’s theory of symbol for Catholic theology, and through various channels Rahner joins this trajectory as he develops his own theology of symbol.16 We shall not consider Rahner’s theology of symbol in this chapter until “Freedom and Symbol,” but Fields’s suggestion is important at this point because he contends that the Goethe-Möhler-Rahner relation sets Rahner up to steer a middle course between Kant and Hegel. Schelling has traditionally been portrayed as doing just this. 13. Thomas O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982). 14. Thomas O’Meara, God in the World: A Guide to Karl Rahner’s Theology (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007), 5. It should be noted that later in this book O’Meara acknowledges that the great Schelling scholar Xavier Tilliette noted some influence of Schelling’s Christology on Rahner (91n15). O’Meara cites Tilliette, La Christologie idéaliste [Idealist Christology] (Paris: Desclée, 1986), 217–21. See Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Crossroad, 1978), 4–5, which explicitly references Schelling, Staudenmaier, and Drey. 15. Stephen M. Fields, SJ, Being as Symbol: On the Origins and Development of Karl Rahner’s Metaphysics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2000). 16. See especially ibid., 90.

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It must be added that Fields’s proposal assists us, since his book is a work of theological aesthetics, and the Goethe-Möhler-Rahner connection is a key piece in establishing Rahner’s aesthetic credentials. Fields’s focus regarding the points I am exegeting is Rahner’s theology of language. While I wish to establish Rahner’s positioning among the German Idealists with respect to freedom, Fields’s focus on language is not far from my focus, and it helps me precisely to achieve my goal. Möhler and Rahner position themselves against Kant by insisting upon the ontological, as opposed to merely regulative, constitution of language and reason.17 For Möhler and Rahner, language and reason can transcend Kant’s distinction between phenomena (what appears in the world) and noumena (“things in themselves” that are impossible to experience in the world). For Kant, language about God can never be constitutive, since God (as eternal, invisible) falls outside conditions of the possibility of worldly experience. “God” is an idea of reason necessary for moral thought.18 For the same reasons, God cannot be expressed in any proper way through symbols (doctrines, sacraments). Möhler and Rahner sternly dispute this. On the other side, against Hegel, Möhler and Rahner insist that language and reason cannot exhaust the content of things in themselves. If Kant strictly enforces the distinction between phenomena and noumena, Hegel constructs a logic ordered toward the ultimate collapse of this distinction.19 If for Kant, we are bound completely to empirical experience, for Hegel empirical experience can fall away once one attains noumenal ideas. By contrast with Hegel, Möhler maintains that “the knowledge of infinite Being is permanently confined to symbolic expression.”20 Rahner concurs. For him, language is always “embodied thought.”21 Near the beginning of a chapter called “Schelling’s Ontology of Freedom,” contemporary philosopher Markus Gabriel presents a fascinating 17. Ibid., 90–91. 18. See ibid., 85. 19. Ibid., 87–91. 20. Ibid., 91. 21. Fields, “Rahner and the Symbolism of Language,” Philosophy and Theology 15, no. 2 (2003): 171.

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set of Schellingian ideas that cohere with my exposition of Fields on Kant, Hegel, Möhler, and Rahner.22 Schelling notices that for Kant freedom is the paradigmatic example of a “noumenon” or “thing-in-itself.” Kant contends that all we can know about a thing is what appears to us (phenomenon), not what the thing is in itself (noumenon). On strict Kantian logic, freedom cannot be known because, strictly speaking, freedom never appears as itself. Schelling interprets this Kantian logic in a radical way: “If every appearance is an appearance of the noumenal, freedom has to lie at the ground of all appearances.”23 Instead of seeing freedom as merely an example of a noumenon, Schelling understands freedom to be constitutive of the noumenal realm in general. This means that the appearance of things in themselves is a matter of freedom. Each phenomenon is freedom made manifest. Here is the connection: Rahner’s ontological view of language, and more generally of symbol, is a matter of freedom made manifest. Schelling unfolds his insight into freedom and appearances through a theory of predication,24 which has both linguistic and ontological valences. Similarly, Rahner’s theory of symbol places him on the threshold of an ontology of freedom or, better, a theological aesthetic centered on freedom. Such a theological aesthetic bears Schellingian resonances, which developed in part out of Rahner’s study with Heidegger.

Heidegger’s Schelling Course While we cannot be sure exactly what Rahner heard during Heidegger’s course on Schelling during the summer semester of 1936, we can extrapolate with some confidence from the 1971 published text.25 At the very 22. Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 60. 23. Ibid., 60. 24. This unfolding, in both Schelling and Heidegger, is the subject of the bulk of Gabriel’s chapter. 25. Martin Heidegger, Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), Gesamtausgabe II, Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919–1944, Bd. 42, ed. I. Schüßler (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988); ET (of the original, 1971 edition): Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985).

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least we can get an idea of the interpretation of Schelling to which Rahner was exposed and identify points to which he was likely to respond. Heidegger’s chief aims for the Schelling lectures are consistent with his other courses of the mid-1930s. He uses Schelling’s text as a path toward discovering the central question of philosophy: being.26 Schelling’s strange focus on evil becomes a window into “more primordial” thinking than was hitherto possible.27 This leads Heidegger to characterize Schelling’s freedom essay as a possible point of exit from ontotheological metaphysics (“a foundation-shattering transformation of the question”), even if Schelling himself failed to make this exit.28 Heidegger reads Schelling as identifying the concept of freedom with the “center of Being as a whole.”29 Even Hegel did not understand this point from Schelling, thinking that freedom was a “single” concept among many, and not the center of philosophy.30 For Schelling, freedom is the “fact” or “feeling” from which philosophy arises, rather than a topic to be defined a posteriori.31 In the freedom essay, Schelling inaugurates his attempt to refound all philosophy on freedom by constructing a “system of freedom.”32 In order to explain the idiosyncrasy of this phrase, Heidegger narrates an extended history of “system” in philosophy. Even though premodern philosophies like Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Thomas Aquinas’s may seem systematic, they were not occupied with systems. A concern with “system” emerges only with modern philosophy’s obsession with “the self-certainty of thinking.”33 The situation is exacerbated with the advent of German Idealism after Kant. The German Idealists’ introduction of the idea of “intellectual intuition of the Absolute” makes “system” possible in the proper sense: a comprehensive grasp on being and beings.34 26. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 9. 27. Ibid., 96. 28. Ibid., 61, 161–62. 29. Ibid., 20. 30. Ibid., 13, 20. 31. Ibid., 14–16, 20, 49. 32. Ibid., 21. 33. Ibid., 29–31. 34. Ibid., 47–48.

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The modern pretension to system as comprehensive grasping seems to rule out freedom; everything is cognized as part of a necessary structure of knowledge. Heidegger points out that Schelling’s questioning after the “system of freedom” appears problematic, given this background. Rather than straightforwardly advancing the project of rational self-certainty, Schelling accesses a stratum of the relation between humans and beings deeper than cognition.35 He does so by elucidating a “higher opposition” than the opposition between nature and spirit that drove metaphysical dialectics from Descartes and Spinoza through Kant.36 Schelling’s higher opposition is between necessity and freedom. With this opposition, Heidegger contends, Schelling presents “nature [as] not something absolutely spirit-less and, above all, freedom [as] not something absolutely nature-less.”37 Heidegger explains the momentousness of this reformulation: “With this line of questioning, freedom slips out of the opposition to nature. The opposition into which freedom now comes is generally lifted out of the level of nature . . . up to the relational realm of man and God.”38 A philosophical system should be patterned on interacting freedoms rather than on intellection, freedom rather than noetic mastery of nature. So goes the argument of the first third of Heidegger’s lectures, which cover Schelling’s introduction. Then Heidegger indulges in an extended throat-clearing. Heidegger engages Schelling’s opening remarks on what was then a recent controversy in Germany over pantheism.39 The lectures regain intensity as Heidegger exposits Schelling’s main thesis, that “the real and vital conception of freedom is that it is a possibility of good and evil” (as opposed to simply of good).40 Heidegger sees this definition as a major contribution: “Evil itself determines the new beginning in metaphysics.”41 Prior attempts at system treated evil as nonexistent, 35. Ibid., 52–53. 36. Ibid., 59–60. See Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 4. 37. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 60. 38. Ibid., 61. 39. Ibid., 62–96. 40. Ibid., 97. Cf. Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 23. 41. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 97. This reference to the “new beginning” is consonant with Heidegger’s secret project during this time, the Contributions to Philosophy, which attempts

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non-good, and thus unsystematizable.42 Schelling breaks system itself by foregrounding the very topic with which system was unable to deal.43 Evil fits with Schelling’s refashioning of system in terms of a “higher opposition.” Instead of a rational subject opposing itself to nature, freedom “must be understood as independence in opposition to God.”44 Schelling explains the possibility for such independence by making a distinction between “ground” and “existence.” “Ground” refers to the nonrational substratum of a being, and “existence” means “what reveals itself.”45 This helps Schelling characterize God as a “becoming God,” whose ground and existence are unified in a primordial striving, between which can arise separation and discord and from which comes creation.46 This last point is particularly important, as it brings Heidegger to reflect on God’s self-revelation. Heidegger quotes Schelling’s saying that a being “can only be revealed in its opposite.”47 God must reveal to not-God, or a human being: “Man must be in order for God to be revealed. What is God without man? . . . Man must be in order for the God to ‘exist.’ ”48 The possibility of God’s existence is bound up with the possibility of human freedom, which Schelling has already established is the possibility for good and evil—or, as Heidegger reduces it, the possibility for evil. The ground for evil is, according to Schelling, “in God’s innermost center” and “is thus something positive in the highest sense.”49 Evil is the principium individuationis (principle of individuation) for creatures in general and humans in particular.50 Contrary to German Idealism’s view that the determinato work out a new beginning for philosophy after the collapse of metaphysics; see Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). 42. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 101. 43. Hence Heidegger’s exclamation that Schelling’s treatise “shatters Hegel’s Logic before it was even published!”; ibid., 97, original emphasis. 44. Ibid., 62. 45. Ibid., 107. 46. Ibid., 109, 114, 118. 47. Ibid., 119. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. This discussion begins on ibid., 131, and comes to fruition, after some interruptions, on 142–43.

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tion of the free individual occurs through the good only, for Schelling human freedom is “decidedness for good and evil, or the decidedness for evil and good.”51 In order for a human being truly to be, and thus for God truly to exist, the human being must decide, in the sense of freely affirming as necessary the original, dual possibility of his essence: good and evil.52 It is at roughly this point, Heidegger teaches, that Schelling’s essay breaks down. Having defined freedom and related it to necessity, he must return to the question of system.53 In making this return, he relinquishes his advances over conventional Western thinking and resumes the German Idealist project of clarifying the Absolute as the unifying factor of system.54 Schelling did not make the logical next step: to recognize “that the essence of all Being is finitude and only what exists finitely has the privilege and the pain of standing in Being as such and experiencing what is true as beings.”55 This is Heidegger’s project. He demands, in effect, that Schelling be a thinker of finitude, as Heidegger was. His closing remarks recast Schelling’s reflection on the interplay of divine and human freedom in terms reminiscent of Being and Time.56 Such comments would have sounded commonplace for Rahner, as he was familiar with texts of Heidegger’s like Being and Time, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and “What Is Metaphysics?,” all of which argue for a philosophy of finitude. But Heidegger concludes with a Schellingian pronouncement that must have rung in Rahner’s ears: “Man . . . he alone must be the one through whom the God can reveal himself at all, if he reveals himself.”57 The theme of revelation—of God ’s selfrevelation—returns, just in time. 51. Ibid., 156. 52. Ibid., 154–55. 53. Ibid., 158. 54. Ibid., 161. 55. Ibid., 162. 56. Ibid., 164: “Man is not an object of observation placed before us which we then drape with little everyday feelings. Rather, man is experienced in the insight into the abysses and the heights of Being, in regard to the terrible element of the godhead, the lifedread of all creatures, the sadness of all created creators, the malice of evil and the will of love.” 57. Ibid.

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Rahner’s Schellingianism? We cannot with any hard historical evidence guarantee that Rahner listened to all of Heidegger’s words, nor that he read all of Schelling’s. Nonetheless, while assuming some good faith on Rahner’s part, I can suggest some possible insights he may have taken away from Heidegger’s course and his reading of Schelling’s freedom essay. Heidegger’s lectures are equally interesting for what they include and what they leave out. With respect to what Heidegger includes, several Schellingian ideas appear as ripe for Rahnerian appropriation: the central ontological status of freedom, the idea of a “higher opposition” than nature versus spirit, the notion of competing divine and human freedoms, freedom as a principle of individuation, and a nonrational ground at the base of existence. The question of God’s self-revelation is a hinge between what Heidegger includes and excludes. Heidegger leaves out or explains away the manifest theological content of Schelling’s essay. Two pages late in Heidegger’s lectures illustrate this. Schelling equates evil with sin.58 Heidegger notes that “sin” demands a theological definition, and philosophy is not equipped to provide this. Schelling presents his reader with a problem: has Schelling slipped into the territory of Christian dogmatics, or is he “secularizing” dogmatics? Heidegger avers that neither alternative captures Schelling’s project, since it “intermingles” a secularized idea of sin and a Christianized idea of evil.59 Heidegger proposes to work through this intermingling to interpret Schelling’s discussion of evil and sin “with regard to the essence and the truth of Being.”60 He admits that his interpretation is one-sided, and evidently this is for Schelling’s benefit, so that critics will not dismiss his freedom essay as “false theologizing.”61 Whether or not Schelling needs defending on this latter count is not of much interest. The one-sidedness of Heidegger’s interpretation is. Rahner must have noticed, had he read Schelling’s text, that the ontological reading offered by Heidegger willfully ignores much of the matrix 58. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 145; Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 34. 59. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 145. 60. Ibid., 146. 61. Ibid.

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out of which the text came. Schelling’s philosophy of freedom cannot be disentangled (even for apologetic reasons) from his overt interest in Christology, Reformation and post-Reformation battles over predestination, and eschatology, where 1 Corinthians 15:20–28 features prominently.62 Granted, much of the theological content of the freedom essay is self-consciously heterodox, firmly marked by the seventeenth-century shoemaker-turned-mystic Jacob Boehme (1575–1624).63 And—perhaps in favor of Heidegger’s one-sided philosophical interpretation—Schelling’s experimentation with heterodox variants of Christianity turns by the end of the essay to an endorsement of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–81) liberal-rationalist thesis “that the development of revealed truths into truths of reason is simply necessary, if the human race is to be helped thereby.”64 Truths of faith are, presumably, incomprehensible and must be clarified by philosophy to sustain free, moral living. For all this complexity, though, it is undeniable that the freedom essay has rich theological overtones that must have captivated the young Rahner, who would within a year be appointed to a chair of fundamental theology. The very same intermeshing of theology and philosophy that drives Heidegger to a one-sided interpretation could just as well lead to a more variegated view, where philosophy and theology would be open to one another. This variegated view is the type Rahner took. I shall defend this claim with reference to Hearer of the Word and “The Theology of the Symbol.” These works show Schellingian resonances. As a preliminary example from Schelling’s side, consider these words: 62. E.g., Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 44–46 (Christology); 51–53 (predestination); 67–68 (eschatology). 63. See Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy, Hagiography, Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 197–209, for a spirited rehearsal of the scholarly controversy over the Schelling-Boehme relation and for her own forensic argument for Schelling’s knowledge and use of Boehme’s thought. The classic work on this topic is Robert F. Brown, The Later Philosophy of Schelling: The Influence of Boehme on the Works of 1809–1815 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1977). See also Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, “Introductory Note,” in Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 81, which shows that, for Love and Schmidt, Schelling’s dependence on Boehme is quite patent. The essential work on Boehme’s Gnosticism is Cyril J. O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2002). 64. Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 74.

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The procession of things from God is a self-revelation of God. But God can only reveal himself to himself in what is like him, in free beings acting on their own, for whose Being there is no ground other than God but who are as God is. He speaks, and they are there.65

Schelling proceeds to indicate that this likeness to God is a “derived absoluteness or divinity” that is “the central concept of philosophy as a whole.”66 We are back, then, to Heidegger’s insight that Schelling makes freedom central to all philosophy. Now we have placed this insight in a new register. Central to philosophy is, to use Gabriel’s phrase, the freedom at the ground of all appearances. This freedom is divine. This freedom is made manifest in free beings—in this case human beings. This freedom is derived: like God’s, but different in such a way that God may be revealed not just in it, but to it. Much of Schelling’s phrasing puts him at quite a distance from Rahner, who is committed to full-throated orthodoxy (thus not, for example, a self-becoming God). But a passage like the previous one, and like the following one, has undeniable Rahnerian resonance: “Man stands on the threshold; whatever he chooses, it will be his act: but he cannot remain undecided because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all can remain ambiguous in creation.”67 Even further: “Only man himself can decide. But this decision cannot occur within time. . . . The act, whereby his life is determined in time, does not itself belong to time but rather to eternity.”68 In Schelling, Rahner has a kindred spirit. It may be coincidence or common sources that account for their convergence. But it is equally safe to say that from this philosopher, Rahner learned much regarding how to think about freedom’s prerogative to appear.

65. Ibid., 18. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 41. 68. Ibid., 51.

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Fr eedo m i n H e a r er of th e Wor d Andrew Tallon calls Hearer of the Word the “sine qua non of Rahner studies.”69 This estimation fits especially well with our search after the sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom. Hearer of the Word is habitually treated by Tallon and others as complementary to Geist in Welt, since it adds the themes of freedom and love to Geist in Welt’s metaphysics of knowledge.70 If pushed, I would dispute this claim—there is quite a bit of freedom in Geist in Welt, even if love remains a muted theme, and quite a lot of knowledge in Hearer of the Word. Nonetheless, conventional wisdom regarding the two works holds that Hearer of the Word undoubtedly foregrounds the theme of freedom throughout. The God accessible through metaphysics, something like Schelling’s God, is identified as “the one who is free and unknown.”71 This God is one of two pivotal ideas in the book. The other is the “free listener.”72 Here I will describe the theme of freedom in Hearer of the Word with respect to these two ideas and to Rahner’s discursive resistance against German Idealism.

Hearer of the Word and German Idealism The work eventually published as Hörer des Wortes (1941) began as a summer lecture series Rahner delivered at Salzburg in 1937, as he made the transition from his abortive doctoral studies in philosophy and successful doctoral studies in theology to a teaching post at Innsbruck.73 While these lectures were proximate both in time and content to Geist 69. Andrew Tallon, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Rahner, Hearer of the Word, trans. Joseph Donceel, ed. Andrew Tallon (New York: Continuum, 1994), xix. 70. Tallon’s 1974 essay, which on its first page describes this complementary relationship, is an essential work in the English-language reception of Hörer des Wortes: Tallon, “Spirit, Freedom, History: Karl Rahner’s Hörer des Wortes (Hearers of the Word),” Thomist 38, no. 4 (1974): 908–36. Tallon’s essay is most interesting as a biting critique of the first English translation of Hörer des Wortes. 71. HW 8/24, 65–73/124–40. 72. HW 75–89/140–64. 73. William Dych, SJ, Karl Rahner, Outstanding Christian Thinkers (New York: Continuum, 2000), 7.

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in Welt (first completed in spring 1936, published 1939), they must be understood as more than an accessible digest of the philosophical viewpoint of Geist in Welt. In many respects the lectures are more inviting than Geist in Welt (they are briefer, and Rahner provides helpful summaries at the beginning of each lecture). But they are just as, if not more, demanding in their ambitious, direct resistance to multiple discourses that present problems for Catholic doctrine and practice.74 Among these discourses one emerges to the fore: German Idealism. Over the next several paragraphs I shall trace Rahner’s resistance to German Idealism in the first eight chapters of Hörer des Wortes. We must begin with Rahner’s two key theses: (1) Being is luminious (gelichtet), meaning that “the nature of being is to know and to be known in an original unity”; (2) Human nature is spirit, meaning that it “is absolute openness for all being.”75 Rahner contends with respect to the first that we must “take care of a possible misunderstanding that may affect this statement and that has in fact affected it in the metaphysics of German idealism.”76 With regard to the second, Rahner writes, “It seems to imply the basic idea of the philosophy of religion of German idealism, which . . . the Vatican Council [1869–70] has formulated as follows: ‘humanity can and must by itself through constant progress reach the possession of all truth and goodness.’ ”77 In both cases Rahner works to distance his theses from being mistaken as espousals of German Idealism, especially Hegel’s. Later Rahner summarizes the question he is pursuing: “Why does the absolute transcendence of the spirit as the a priori opening up of a space for revelation, combined with the pure luminosity of pure being, not from the start render superfluous any possible revelation?”78 The Hearer of the Word lectures were accompanied by a shorter public lecture at the Salzburger Hochschulwochen, a series of talks organized 74. Rahner details these in chapter 2, “A Few Related Problems,” HW 11–22/28–50. The three related problems are standard (neo-Scholastic) Catholic fundamental theology, Christian philosophy, and Protestant philosophy of religion. 75. HW 28/60. 76. HW 30/64. 77. HW 57/110. 78. HW 64/122.

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by the Benedictine order in German-speaking countries.79 Rahner’s contribution was titled “Religionphilosophie und Theologie,” and is reproduced in Sämtliche Werke, volume 4. During the lecture Rahner indicates the same “aporia” about his theses of the luminosity of being and the absolute openness of human spirit, and he briefly refers to three typical examples “in which it appears ‘solved’ in an unchristian way.”80 We shall treat the first only. The first example is the “basic stance (Grundhaltung) of German Idealism, where God ultimately becomes [God] immanently as a mere dialectical unity of infinite striving and the movement of ‘infinite’ human spirit.”81 Rahner treats this as a faulty assumption that, if carefully examined, can be treated as a problem that resolves itself. For “the real infinity of God, before which and toward which the human person is always open, cannot be the dialectical unity of infinite being in infinite becoming of finite spirit.”82 Thus Rahner rejects a fundamental German Idealist assumption about God. He offers in its place a different starting point. In Hearer of the Word, he makes a substantive case for it.83 His case has two major components. First, Rahner seeks a notion of being that preserves the constructive insight of German Idealism’s “panentheistic thesis” regarding the original unity of knowing and being without having anything “in common with any kind of pantheism or idealism” (understood as a system inimical to Christian teachings on God and the human person).84 Rahner finds such a notion of being in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who understands being as a “fluctuating concept” whose luminosity is not univocal, but a matter of degree.85 79. This is an ongoing series, founded in 1931, interrupted by the Nazis from 1939 to 1945, and reestablished from 1945 to the present. For more information, see http://www.salzburger -hochschulwochen.at. Raffelt briefly introduces Rahner’s participation in the Salzburger Hochschulwochen on SW 4, xvii–xviii. 80. Rahner, “Religionsphilosophie und Theologie” [Philosophy of Religion and Theology], in SW 4:288, my translation. 81. Ibid., 288. 82. Ibid. 83. This is so even if Rahner modestly admits that the main ideas of German Idealism can truly be opposed only if one considers all the other ideas deduced from them and that he can in the span of a lecture series offer no such thoroughgoing analysis; HW 35/70–72. 84. HW 35–36/72. 85. HW 38/76.

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Rahner uses the phrase “analogy of being,” which he borrows from his fellow Jesuit and philosophical mentor Erich Przywara (1889–1972).86 This gradated view of being implicates freedom (not just knowledge), in particular when Rahner, interpreting Thomas’s Summa contra Gentiles IV.11, describes being in terms of activity ordered toward self-possession (Selbstbesitz). He states, “Now this self-possession implies a double stage: an outward expansion, an extraposition of its own essence out of its own ground, an emanation—and a taking-back-again, a reintegration of this essence that has stepped out of its ground and stands as it were revealed.”87 Rahner defines “emanation” and “reintegration” in terms of free activity, rather than a necessary process of knowing, as in Hegel. This means that being’s self-expression and self-possession are a matter of freedom. These two activities make manifest the freedom at the ground of all appearances. In keeping with his insight into being’s analogical character, Rahner observes that purely material beings make their ground manifest but cannot complete this manifestation by reintegrating it. Human persons can perform both activities, thus “we ‘perceive’ and ‘understand’ ourselves.”88 Still the human person is not “absolute consciousness,” but “finite spirit.”89 This is plainly apparent in the human person’s need to ask questions. One who inquires does not know everything, and therefore 86. “The Analogy of Being” is the title of chapter 4 of HW. This is the title of a titanic 1932 work by Przywara that had wide-ranging influence on an entire generation of German theologians, Catholic and Protestant, Rahner included. Rahner admits this in Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965–1982, ed. Hubert Biallowons and Paul Imhof (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 14. The 1962 edition of Przywara’s work has recently been translated; see Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics; Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2014). Rahner and Przywara have been treated together on the topic of freedom, but this topic cannot be considered here. See Julio Terán Dutari, “Zur philosophisch-theologischen Auffassung der Freiheit bei K. Rahner und E. Przywara” [On the Philosophical-Theological Conception of Freedom in K. Rahner and E. Przywara], in Wagnis Theologie: Erfahrungen mit der Theologie Karl Rahners [The Theological Venture: Experiences with Karl Rahner’s Theology], ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg: Herder, 1979), 284–98. 87. HW 38–39/76: “Selbstbesitz aber besagt eine doppelte Phase: ein Ausströmen, ein Heraussetzen seines eigenen Wesens aus seinem eigenen Grund, eine emanatio, und ein Insichzurücknehmen dieses aus seinem Grund herausgestellten, gleichsam geoffenbarten Wesens.” 88. HW 39/78. 89. HW 40/78–80.

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is not everything. Nevertheless, Rahner teaches that human spirit is absolute openness for being. Second, Rahner must avoid the Hegelian temptation to cancel revelation or make it a simple propaedeutic to philosophy (which in turn prepares for absolute knowledge).90 Rahner’s metaphysical-anthropological statement leads to the question of “why, despite and in its luminosity, pure being is that which is utterly concealed” (and thus in need of being revealed).91 Placed back in an anthropological register, why would a (human) being absolutely open to being still be barred from being? Rahner’s preliminary answer amounts basically to this: the explanation lies not in a de facto condition of human knowledge (we do not yet know God fully, or infinite spirit does not yet recognize itself in finite spirit, à la Hegel), but in a principled metaphysical understanding of God’s freedom. He contends, “It is not enough for us to know that God is more than what we have hitherto grasped of God in our human knowledge. . . . We must also know that God may speak and may refrain from speaking.”92 God’s freedom to be silent or to self-reveal is the condition for the possibility of human persons’ absolute openness to being. Rahner’s argumentation becomes almost impossibly intricate at this point. In order to articulate philosophically God’s freedom to self-reveal or not, Rahner produces a complex transcendental analysis.93 He begins with two points: (1) in order to think or act, a human person must affirm her own existence; and (2) this existence can be recognized as contingent, inasmuch as (Rahner cites Heidegger) human existence appears to us as “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), or being placed in a situation that we did not produce and that could in principle function without us. Putting (1) and (2) together, every human thought or action affirms as necessary something that is contingent. Necessity and contingency, though, are polar opposites. There is something peculiar about human existence. While it is possible for it not to be, nevertheless it is still unavoidable for the one who experiences it. Rahner calls this the “necessity of a con90. Hegel is named as an opponent on HW 56/108. 91. HW 58/112. 92. HW 64/124. 93. The next several sentences summarize HW 67–69/128–32.

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scious relation to the non-necessary” (Notwendigkeit eines wissenden Verhältnisses zum Nicht-Notwendigen).94 Rahner also uses the word “absolute” to describe this relation. He stipulates that affirming something absolutely is an act of will prior to knowledge. He locates this act of will in the ground of human existence.95 Relying on his prior account of being as analogical, Rahner explains that this act of will is the “ratification” or “reenactment” (Nachvollzug) “of a free absolute positing of something that is not necessary” (einer freien Absolutsetzung des Nichtnotwendigen).96 The precognitive, free act of affirming one’s own existence is also an affirmation of one’s being created and, in turn, an affirmation of “the universal ground of all beings” (Grund im allgemeinen alles Seienden).97 For Rahner’s Thomistic metaphysics, this ultimate ground is God, who freely wills the existence of finite reality, creation.

Rahner as Post-Hegelian and as Thomist The title of this section I adapt from an article by the Schellingian philosopher Joseph Lawrence: “Schelling as Post-Hegelian and as Aristotelian.”98 Lawrence argues that Schelling “deliberately and successfully thought ‘further’ than Hegel,” and that Schelling did this not by being “post-metaphysical” or claiming to transcend the Western philosophical tradition, but by recapitulating and being instructed by Aristotle.99 Lawrence makes this claim starting from the central discovery of Schelling’s late philosophy (i.e., after the freedom essay): “The principle of absolute transcendence, the source of freedom in both divine creation and human history, while manifesting itself in its self-surrender to the imma94. HW 68/130. 95. HW 68/130: “In the ground of human existence we discover within the primordial transcendence toward being the (necessary) act of the will.” Original German: “Im Grunde des Daseins geschieht . . . inmitten der ersten Transzendenz auf das Sein die (notwendige) Tat des Willens.” 96. HW 69/130. 97. HW 70/132. 98. Joseph P. Lawrence, “Schelling as Post-Hegelian and as Aristotelian,” International Philosophical Quarterly 26, no. 4 (1986): 315–30. 99. Ibid., 315.

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nence of self-reflective reason, does so only incompletely: reason is always limited by the unfathomable nature of its own origin.”100 For Hegel the unfathomable origin is missing. The principle of thinking for Hegel is the general concept of being, and the goal of philosophy is to grasp being fully in a universally comprehensible science.101 For Schelling, the “incomprehensible basis of reality” may never be dissolved: “Reason can never fully grasp the ground of its own existence.”102 Lawrence continues, “Being is thus restored in its fundamental meaning as mystery, as that which according to Aristotle has always, still does, and always will baffle us.”103 Schelling moves beyond Hegel by affirming mystery. Probably the best example of Schelling’s preservation of mystery occurs in the following famous statement from late in the freedom essay: “In the divine understanding there is a system; yet God himself is not a system, but rather a life.”104 Let us consider an analogous passage in Hearer of the Word, which could gloss Schelling’s words: “We know that our being is carried by the free power of pure being. It follows that we do not stand before pure being . . . as if it were a lifeless ideal which, always at rest, must be always available to our grasp; we stand before it as before a subject of free disposition.”105 Rahner and Schelling will disagree on the particulars that follow from these similar testimonies to divine life over against lifeless, graspable ideals. Schelling’s quotation leads to strange speculation about what constitutes divine life, while Rahner speaks more conventionally of human knowledge of the luminous divine Creator. Nonetheless, they firmly agree on the fact that mystery is personal. This conviction entails that one regard being differently from Hegel, who understands being first and ultimately in terms of logic. To regard God as a “life” or as a “subject of free disposition” (einem freien Selbstmächtigen) means to admit that logic/reason has as its condition 100. Ibid., 316. 101. Ibid., 320–21. 102. Ibid., 322. 103. Ibid. 104. Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 62. 105. HW 70/132.

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something other than reason. Lawrence writes, “Schelling shares with Aristotle the realization that reason, the form which unfolds being into the unity of its absolute disclosure, has unreason as the necessary condition of its development. This—and not the ratio—is what Schelling means by ground.”106 Schelling criticizes Hegel because he must posit a free decision in order for his dialectic to proceed from the concept to concreteness in nature, but as Schelling says, “A mere concept cannot make a decision.”107 Only someone living and personal can decide. Again, the case is slightly different for Schelling than for Rahner. His Thomism preserves the Aristotelian insight, but with wariness toward any danger of irrationalism. Rahner avers that it follows from Thomistic ontology, where being involves convertibility between the true and the good, “that willing is not merely an inner aspect of knowing; it is also at the same time a transcendental determination of being, one that proceeds in a certain sense beyond knowing.”108 This claim sets the stage for Rahner to claim the primacy of love over purely cognitive logic. For the latter (which Hegel employs), free being remains dark. By the former, free being is revealed, while remaining mystery: “Only in the logic of love does logic reach the understanding of free being.”109 The logic of love finds its sustaining ground in the creative activity of God, “the inscrutable mystery [mysterium inperscrutabile] whose way cannot be investigated and whose decisions cannot be probed.”110 Both Rahner and Schelling dismiss a model of reason that ignores being’s incomprehensible origin because they wish to preserve free life: human freedom, even the freedom of all creation. As we already observed while treating Heidegger’s course, Schelling resists the common tendency among German Idealists to characterize freedom as the possibility of the good only. He defines freedom as freedom for good and for evil to render freedom in its manifold possibilities. It is significant that Heidegger reads evil as a principium individuationis in Schelling’s 106. Lawrence, “Schelling as Post-Hegelian and as Aristotelian,” 325. 107. Ibid. 108. HW 77/144. 109. HW 81/150. 110. HW 72/138.

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freedom essay. This is largely true, though it is true also for the good, and Heidegger does not mention this. Schelling’s post-Hegelian and Aristotelian philosophy, as Lawrence defines it, consists most importantly in a “metaphysical pluralism that lets thinking respond to the unique form of being embodied in every individual entity—and that precludes the subordination of such a form to a unified system of being as such.”111 Such pluralism ensures beings’ free self-expression and resonates deeply with Rahner’s guiding insight into human subjectivity in chapter 8 of Hearer of the Word, the “free listener.” The freedom of the subject consists in this: “We construct, above the true order of love, which we always implicitly affirm, our own order of love. We know and act according to our self-chosen order, according to what we ourselves have freely decided.”112 These ideas also encapsulate a certain kind of metaphysical pluralism, centered on the freedom to “become good or evil.”113 Lawrence names one more related way that Schelling outstrips Hegel: while Hegel is usually read as “more profoundly historical” than Schelling, in fact the latter provides a more compelling account of the historicity of being. Hegel’s exclusive commitment to reason ends in nihilism, since reason ultimately cancels its own subsistence for the sake of absolute knowledge. Schelling’s more capacious view of reason—which never cancels out its ground—and his commitment to freedom—which always includes the future—avoids any Hegelian “end of history.”114 This last thought primes us to study the topic of history, which is central for part IV of Hearer of the Word.

Transcendental Freedom and History Rahner argues, “Every philosophy of religion is basically nothing but an attempt to say where humanity should wait for an encounter with God.”115 This “where” should be left virtually unrestricted since, up to 111. Lawrence, “Schelling as Post-Hegelian and as Aristotelian,” 326. 112. HW 86/158. 113. HW 86/158, ET modified. 114. Lawrence, “Schelling as Post-Hegelian and as Aristotelian,” 325. 115. HW 91/166.

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this point, Rahner has maintained that the “listener” for God’s revelation is absolutely open to being. But in chapter 9, Rahner clarifies his definition. Human spirit is a “historical being.”116 This follows, Rahner contends, from the fact that human spirit involves freedom. History is a “free, undeducible happening.”117 God’s revelation, which happens by divine decision, is historical. If the human listener is to apprehend this revelation somehow, she must be historically attuned. Rahner further refines this point by indicating that the listener’s historicity must be understood in terms of its own peculiar way of knowing and being. Human being, in a way different from angels, is receptive.118 This insight sends Rahner into a chapter on the materiality of human being. This and the chapter that follows are essential for understanding what “transcendental” freedom means for Rahner. It is not freedom divorced from materiality, but freedom expressed through materiality. “We are not,” Rahner observes, “put into a spatiotemporal world after having first been made into human beings. We are not simply put on a spatiotemporal stage to set out our lives. Spatiotemporality is our inner makeup, and belongs properly to us as human.”119 The “we” here is significant, too, because for Rahner human persons never exist as isolated individuals, since our spatiotemporal matrix is always already populated by others: “We are actually human only in a humanity” (Der Mensch ist nur in einer Menschheit wirklich).120 History in the human sense is the expansion of the “activity of freedom . . . in a world.”121 It is the manifestation of “uniqueness and unforeseeability,” of the free self-realization of “self-subsisting personalities . . . through a multiplicity of such personalities.”122 Freedom is always embedded in history. More precisely, it transpires as history. Whether Rahner articulates “history” or “historicity” to the liking of theologians who believe they do better does not matter 116. HW 94/172. 117. HW 94/174. 118. HW 96–97/178, 113–14/202–4. For more on the differences between humans and angels, see KRTA 111–20. 119. HW 112/200. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. 122. HW 112/202.

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so much as the fact that for Rahner, “transcendental” freedom is never transhistorical, ahistorical, ideal, or invulnerable. Rahner’s direct engagement with the theme of freedom and with German Idealism is lost for two chapters as he becomes preoccupied with the metaphysics of knowledge, recapitulating much of Geist in Welt. But as Hearer of the Word closes, Rahner offers one last critical comment: “Every kind of rationalism, as an attempt to lift human existence above history, must be rejected as inhuman and therefore also as lacking due respect for the human spirit.”123 One could add that one cannot dissolve human existence into its history, as Hegel finally does (hence Lawrence’s accusation of Hegel’s nihilism). Instead, human existence is rooted in a ground: its created materiality. The material conditions for human existence are, at the final step of Rahner’s philosophy of religion, where he turns toward theology, the arena for the appearance of the freedom that produced them, viz., God’s freedom. And human freedom, in its material conditioning, is for Rahner a privileged site for this possible appearance of divine freedom.124 What this appearance will be Rahner leaves open, except that this revelation will not cancel out humanity and its freedom under historical-material conditions.

Fr eedo m a nd Sym bol Hearer of the Word treats God’s self-manifestation as a possibility, but not actuality. In order to transition to God’s actual appearance, we must move in Rahner’s corpus from Hearer of the Word to “The Theology of the Symbol.” While the latter work is overtly theological and seems unconcerned with German Idealism (and with Schelling), the metaphysics that it discusses and incorporates fits very well with the material we have just considered. Thus we may treat it under the auspices of “Rahner on Transcendental Freedom.” Here I first link Hearer of the Word and “The Theology of the Symbol,” then I expound upon its particular theory of manifestation, which unfolds into a theological aesthetic, and finish with 123. HW 138/248. 124. Ibid.: “Now the appearance which is in itself the most spiritual is humanity itself. Hence we are the appearance which, by itself, can be the fullest appearance for being as such.”

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“The Body and Freedom,” on embodiment and freedom in the essay. Here we discover how lessons Rahner learned from his complex contestation with German Idealism become conjugated theologically, thus moving us closer to understanding his theological aesthetic of God’s freedom made manifest in and through creation.

Linking Hearer and the Symbol Hearer of the Word is a work of Wissenschaftstheorie, meaning that it defines the relationship between philosophy of religion and theology. For the most part, it constructs a philosophy of religion, which can be open to theology, but cannot propose a theology of its own. He parses things this way in order to offer an alternative to the neo-Scholastic model of philosophy as a preparation for the gospel; to contemporary German Protestant philosophies of religion, which either equate or entirely disengage philosophy and theology (as God’s “yes” or “no” to humanity); and, of course, to German Idealism, which in its most virulent, Hegelian form reverses the order and makes theology an eventually canceled preparation for philosophy. If Hearer of the Word presents a philosophy of religion open to theology, “The Theology of the Symbol” is an appropriate complement to it. This theological essay is open in the opposite direction to philosophy. It incorporates metaphysical insights, or on my reading, aesthetic insights into God’s freedom to appear. Since I have just invoked my engagement with theological aesthetics, which perhaps up to now in this chapter has been inconspicuous, it would be helpful to consult another theologian exercised by similar questions. A few years ago James Voiss published a chapter on theological aesthetics in Rahner, set against the backdrop of Balthasar’s dominant paradigm.125 Much of the chapter is an apologia on Rahner’s behalf in response to Balthasarian critiques. Two apologetic passages suit our concerns particularly well. 125. James Voiss, SJ, “Rahner, von Balthasar, and the Question of Theological Aesthetics,” in Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner, ed. Mark Bosco, SJ, and David Stagaman, SJ (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 167–81.

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First, Voiss’s defense of Rahner against a Balthasarian charge that Rahner does not “see the [Christ-]form” and thus allows his theology to come unglued from what should be its Christic center, relates directly to the symbol essay: Rahner’s “The Theology of the Symbol,” a watershed essay in the Rahner corpus, makes explicit the ontological necessity of holding together the expressive form and that which it expresses. Far from postulating the expendability of form, Rahner theologizes from the affirmation of its indispensability. His writings on symbolic reality express in theoretical terms conclusions derived from penetrating reflection on the form of revealed data such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, as well as on fundamental Christian convictions about the sacraments.126

Second, despite this initial defense, Voiss communicates anxiety he shares with Balthasar over the “transcendental philosophical apparatus” that Rahner uses in his theology.127 In concert with recent scholarship on Rahner, which deemphasizes the “transcendental philosophical” aspect of his work, Voiss proposes that a theological-aesthetic reading of Rahner should begin “from the assumption that Rahner’s experience of faith—his spirituality—is the font from which his theology flows (the philosophical concepts providing channels of expression).”128 Thus in his effort to extricate Rahner from Balthasarian critiques, Voiss raises and answers my own question: what are the sources of Rahner’s theology? If Rahner “sees the form,” as Voiss believes he does, this is because transcendental philosophy is not a source, but a “means of expression.” This is a fair assessment, but less apt than it would first seem. Voiss’s demotion of Rahner’s “philosophical apparatus” can be revealed as problematic by the principles of Rahner’s “The Theology of the Symbol.” This is not just because Rahner liberally utilizes his version of transcendental philosophy in “The Theology of the Symbol,” but also because this transcendental reflection proves generative (as a source) and not just expressive (as an appearance of a deeper Christic-spiritual kernel). 126. Ibid., 176. 127. Ibid., 178. 128. Ibid.

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Rahner’s theology of the symbol is itself the symbol of the philosophical perspective he offers in Hearer of the Word. It is not a symbol of philosophy only, but an undeniable symbolic relationship (whose parameters I shall describe later) obtained between the theology of the symbol and the transcendental philosophy. I am suggesting that in order for Rahner to qualify as a theological aesthetician, he need not follow Balthasarian or other imperatives. Hearer of the Word’s “philosophical apparatus” is a source for Rahner’s theology of the symbol. That is not to say it is the only source, but that it cannot be dismissed as a source, unless we are willing fatally to obscure Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. With this provocation in place, let us read “The Theology of the Symbol” in order to discover how Hearer of the Word’s philosophy of religion becomes symbolically actualized.

Metaphysics and Manifestation The symbol essay begins with the theme of devotion to Jesus’ Sacred Heart.129 Rahner offers his reflections, as he says later on, as a “preparation for a theology of devotion to the heart of Jesus.”130 The structure of the text indicates that the Sacred Heart is the appearance of the freedom that lies at the ground of appearances (namely, God’s freedom, which decides from all eternity to self-communicate through creation and salvation). Rahner exposits six propositions related to a theological metaphysics of the symbol. I see them as organized into three pairs. The first pair speaks to reality as a whole. It concerns (1) being’s necessary self-expressiveness and (2) symbolic being as self-realization (Selbstvollzug) in another.131 The second pair insists upon (3) theology’s general need for the concept of the symbol as a “key concept” (Schlüsselbegriff ) (4) to make sense of God’s saving action.132 The third pair describes the symbolic relationship 129. TS 221–23/423–24; see also 249–52/454–57. 130. TS 246/451. 131. TS 224/426, 234/435. 132. TS 245/450.

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between the human soul (5) and body (6).133 Here I explicate at greatest length the first proposition, with concise related comments on the second, third, and fourth propositions. In “The Body and Freedom” I will treat the fifth and sixth. The axiom of Rahner’s theology of symbol is that “being” is expressive and/or expressed. This axiom is readily discoverable philosophically in the condition of finitude: a finite thing is “not absolutely ‘simple,’ ” not self-sufficient or self-sustaining. It needs “another” to be the medium of its expression, and it usually (if not always) serves as the medium for another’s self-expression. Thus a single finite being is multiple.134 The axiom is theologically discoverable in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.135 According to this doctrine, the one God is “multiple,” three-in-one. Intra-trinitarian plurality helps make sense of creaturely finitude.136 Given that a trinitarian God creates each finite being, finitude can be seen positively, not just privatively. The Trinity’s “plurality . . . does not imply imperfection and weakness and limitation of being (Seins-), but the highest fullness of unity and collected power of a being (eines Seienden).”137 A being is, Rahner continues, “plural in its unity.”138 This unity, in turn, reflects the trinitarian unity, which Rahner describes in terms reminiscent of Schelling: “It cannot be an empty and dead identity.”139 Rahner defends these ideas on Thomistic grounds. He first relates Thomistic philosophy to the longer tradition from the ancient Greeks forward, distilling out of their discussions of eidos and morphe the principle, “This essential ground is there for itself and for others precisely through its appearance (Diese Wesensgrund ist gerade durch seine 133. TS 247/453. 134. TS 226–27/427–28. 135. Conversely, Rahner argues when defending the second pair of propositions that the theology of symbol is essential for understanding key Christian doctrines like the Trinity and Christology (along with theology of the image, sacraments, and eschatology); see TS 235– 45/435–51. 136. This is an extension of the traditional idea of the vestigia trinitatis, or the footprints of God in creation, to which Rahner alludes in TS 227/428 (“einer Theologie der ‘Spuren’ und ‘Abbilder’ der innertrinitarischen Pluralität”). 137. TS 227/428, ET rev. 138. TS 227/428. 139. TS 227/429, ET rev.

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Erscheinung für sich selbst und für andere da).”140 For Thomas, there are various forms of the “self-realization” of the essence through its appearance (recall my brief discussion of metaphysical pluralism in Thomas and Aristotle). In an arcane yet fascinating passage, Rahner treats Thomas’s idea of “resultance.”141 This passage provides a résumé of ideas that Rahner analyzes at length in Geist in Welt regarding the “ontology of innerworldly efficient causality.”142 The benefit here is that Rahner places the same ideas under the rubric of the symbol. In effect, he argues that an individual being symbolizes itself. Thomas’s concept of resultance means that the substantial essence of a being produces its own accidents, which result from the essence’s self-realization. Rahner explains, “St. Thomas does not merely think of a finite being as a reality simply complete, constituted by God in its essence and faculties” (where “faculties” means “accidents” or “properties of the essence’s appearance”).143 Instead, Thomas “knows a self-building of the total essence.”144 While Rahner does not invoke the term “freedom,” it is clearly implicated with this idea of self-building (Selbstaufbau), especially when he claims, “The substantial ground emanates into its properties and comes only in this way to its own possibility.”145 Even within a single being a plural relationship appears between an essence that expands out of a (presumably propertyless) ground into an existent with manifold properties. With this Thomistic concept Rahner articulates being’s self-expressiveness and concludes his unfolding of the first metaphysical principle of his theology of symbol. He then inverts this axiom to arrive at a proper definition of the symbol: “The symbol strictly speaking (Realsymbol) is the self-realization of a being, which belongs to the constitution of its essence, in the other.”146 This definition prepares Rahner for a discussion of 140. TS 231/432, ET entirely rev. 141. TS 232–34 /433–35. 142. GW 330–66. See Fritz, “Karl Rahner, Friedrich Schelling, and Original Plural Unity,” 294–96. 143. TS 232/433. The explanation of “faculties” is mine. 144. TS 233, 434, ET modified. 145. TS 233/434, ET completely rev.: “Der substanzielle Grund geht aus in seine Fähigkeiten und kommt so erst eigentlich zu seiner eigenen Möglichkeit.” 146. TS 234/435, ET rev.

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the Logos as the expression of the Father and the Logos’s self-realization in the flesh of Christ. This is not the place for extended commentary on symbolic Christology. I wish to point out one thing only: Rahner roots his general ontology, or aesthetic of symbolic manifestation, in God’s free decision to self-reveal in Jesus Christ. Rahner describes the incarnate Word as “the expressive ex-istence (Da-sein) of what (or rather, who) God in free grace wished to be with respect to the world, and indeed so that this bearing of God, because expressed this way, can no longer be taken back, but is and remains final and unsurpassable.”147 With this statement, two remarkable things happen. First, Rahner fully makes the transition from speaking about the possibility of freedom’s appearance to describing its actuality (freedom made manifest). Second, Rahner describes this actuality Christologically: the incarnate Word is the highest instantiation of freedom made manifest. God’s decision to self-reveal in Jesus Christ is irreversible, final, and unsurpassable. These are the characteristics of true freedom. Rahner brings this discussion of freedom and manifestation full circle as he returns in the essay’s closing pages to the topic of devotion to the heart of Jesus. Rahner contends that theologians who balk at referring to the Sacred Heart as a “symbol” misunderstand symbolic manifestation. The word “symbol” need not be avoided, because no symbol is a mere symbol, but “the reality, set by the symbolized as an inner moment of itself, which reveals and makes known the symbolized, and as the concrete existence of the symbolized is itself filled with it.”148 The bodily heart of Jesus and Jesus’ spiritual love are inseparable profiles of a unified symbol that makes manifest—because it is filled with—the decision of all decisions, the freedom of all freedom, precisely as it appears.

The Body and Freedom Arriving at the end of the symbol essay in this way, I have bypassed its important contributions to theological anthropology, which have com147. TS 237/437, ET completely rev. 148. TS 251/456, ET entirely rev.

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manded the most attention in English-language literature.149 In a brief discussion of body and soul, Rahner encapsulates a distinctive characteristic of his theological aesthetic: freedom’s character as, all at once, corporeal and corporate. Rahner expounds the Thomistic thesis “that the soul is the substantial form of the body.”150 Unique in this conception of the relationship between soul and body is the view that the human body does not have its own “previous reality” that is then “formed” by the soul. Instead, the human person is composed “of a soul and materia prima.”151 To be precise, “the body is nothing else than the actuality of the soul itself in the ‘other’ of materia prima.”152 One must take care not to misinterpret Rahner as denigrating the body (now reduced to prime matter) in favor of the soul (which uses prime matter to come to fruition). Just as there is no preexistent body, there is no preexistent soul—so at least temporally there is no hierarchy between them, and it would be rather difficult to determine (at least in the case of the human person) a strict ranking between the soul and body. The advantage of the Thomistic thesis that the body is the soul actualized through prime matter lies in its rendering of the symbolic unity of body and soul. The body is not foreign to the soul, nor vice versa. The two function in an original plural unity; one cannot live without the other. The freedom of the soul to self-express or self-realize is moot if not for the potentiality of prime matter and, consequently, freedom’s embodied manifestation. Rahner specifies these considerations on the body as symbol of the soul further: “The individual parts of the body are more than merely quantitatively added pieces of the whole body; they are rather in a peculiar way always such parts that they also deal with the whole in themselves, although this may be true of the individual parts in varying degrees.”153 With this he unpacks the Thomistic teaching that the “soul is 149. Emblematic of this approach is James J. Buckley, “On Being a Symbol: An Appraisal of Karl Rahner,” Theological Studies 40, no. 3 (1979): 453–73. 150. TS 246/452. 151. TS 247/452. 152. TS 247/452. 153. TS 247/453, ET entirely rev.

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fully present in each part of the body.”154 This teaching is corroborated by medical science’s inquiry into the “whole man,” whether with respect to outlying conditions like psychogenic illnesses or more common phenomena like localized illnesses that nevertheless ail and affect the whole person. Likewise, there is further confirmation of this in scripture, with Paul’s famous passage on the many parts and one body of the Corinthian Christian community (1 Cor 12:12–26). Obviously, there are differences in parts of the body with respect to their symbolic intensity—the gall bladder, for instance, is less compelling than the hand or mouth. But Rahner’s point is that the parts of the body are not mere quantitative, material pieces. Instead, they are expressions of plural-yet-unified personal life. If we take seriously Rahner’s allusion to 1 Corinthians 12, we can stipulate that anything Rahner says about the individual human body applies to the wider Body of Christ (the church), other human communities, or even the wider corporate reality of creation. The human body expresses the freedom of the human soul, with all the clarifications included previously. The corporate reality of the church and of creation expresses both human freedom and divine freedom (and likely other freedoms that are, from our human perspective, less accessible). Or, viewed from the other side, human and divine freedom express themselves through the corporate reality of the church and creation. Rahner sums up the thrust of this corporate reality, which we could also call the “Christian ethos,” at the end of the symbol essay: Reality and its appearance in the flesh are forever one in Christianity, unconfused and inseparable. The reality of the divine self-communication creates for itself its divine immediacy, which it makes present in the symbol, the notseparating-mediated but immediately one, since the true symbol is really united with the symbolized, which does not divide as it mediates but unifies immediately, because the true symbol is united with the symbolized by realizing it as its own self-realization.155 154. TS 248/453. 155. TS 252/457, ET completely revised: “Wirklichkeit und ihre Erscheinung im Fleisch sind eben im Christentum unvermischt, und untrennbar für immer eins. Die Wirklichkeit der göttlichen Selbstmitteilung schafft sich gerade dadurch ihre göttliche Unmittelbarkeit, daß sie

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The reality of divine self-communication, which happens by God’s free initiative, as we know from Hearer of the Word, relates to its appearance, the symbol, as the freedom that is made manifest. The symbol itself is freedom made manifest. The Christian ethos is a living space for freedom made manifest. The soul is expressionless without the body, and the body is pure potentiality without the soul. The disembodied soul and unsouled body are mere theoretical possibilities. Something similar goes for human freedom. If it is not embodied—if it is not made manifest through actual, lived freedom—it is not freedom at all. It is a mere theoretical possibility. And, based on Rahner’s teaching that reality and its appearance in the flesh are inseparable, we can push even further and say that divine freedom, as attested by Christian faith, is a mere theoretical possibility unless it is embodied. Thus we return to the Schellingian statement that God is revealed in the human only. This is not a prodigal overstatement or callous anthropocentrism, but a call to human readers, who can respond in nothing other than a human way. If we take Schelling seriously, and if we take Rahner seriously, we must actualize freedom—our own and God’s— lest we conceal it and inhibit its manifestation. This is a transcendental claim, or at least one accessible through transcendental analysis. But it is no less concrete.

Fr eedo m Run Agro und The problem with Rahner’s transcendental method and its transcendentally accessed claims lies in what we might call its “smoothness of expression.” To borrow a metaphor from classical physics, Rahner’s theology, however concrete, often presupposes a friction-free environment. While this may be appropriate for the divine decision to self-reveal that Rahner details in Hearer of the Word (I am unsure how one would adjudicate sich im Symbol gegenwärtig setzt, das nicht trennend vermittelt, sondern unmittelbar eint, weil das eigentliche Symbol mit dem Symbolisierten dadurch real geeint ist, daß dieses jenes als seinen eigenen Selbstvollzug setzt.”

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this), it seems less so when it comes to created “self-determination” and “self-realization.” Critics can rightly harbor reservations about Rahner’s descriptions of self-determination, self-realization, and self-expression inasmuch as they appear to occur without drag, without distortion, without bumps in the road. In “The Theology of the Symbol,” for instance, the body’s symbolic expression of the soul is never treated as a complicated proposition, but as straightforward or automatic. The “smoothness of expression” critique would seem most true of the pinnacle of Rahner’s transcendental claims about human freedom: the fundamental option, where it seems that a person could, irrespective of material-historical conditions, make a full, conscious, definitive, and permanent decision about the whole of her life. Here I argue that the “transcendental” in Rahner does not sustain such worries, especially as regards human freedom. I make this argument by highlighting two of Rahner’s articles on concupiscence.156 This is somewhat at the prompting of Dennis Jowers’s recent, perceptive article on concupiscence as a “difficulty” for Rahner’s anthropology.157 While concupiscence is an understated theme in Rahner’s writings on freedom, taking this theme seriously can make sense of problems and slippages in his theology of freedom, particularly as regards the transcendental capacity of human persons to self-determine. Beyond this, I shall recur to Schelling’s freedom essay, particularly the distinction between ground and existence, to clarify how concupiscence may function in Rahner’s theology of freedom. This will facilitate an aesthetic reading of freedom that will prepare for dimensions of the constructive work of this book’s chapter 4, which I pursue in the interest of showing how Rahner can set some guidelines for a Christian life of freedom made manifest.

156. Rahner, “The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, God, Christ, Mary, and Grace [TI 1], trans. Cornelius Ernst, OP (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon, 1961), 347–82, hereafter TCC; Rahner, “Brief Theological Observations on the ‘State of Fallen Nature,’ ” in Theological Investigations, vol. 19, Faith and Ministry [TI 19], trans. Edward Quinn, ed. Paul Imhof, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 39–53. 157. Jowers, “Conflict of Freedom and Concupiscence.”

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Concupiscence We should begin with a classic Rahnerian formulation of the fundamental option, which Jowers regards as the problematic counterpart to concupiscence. This one comes from the 1953 essay “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment”: Freedom is always the self-fulfillment of the objectively choosing man in view of a total achievement, a total disposal of existence before God. It must certainly be remembered for this that in many cases each envisaged total project of existence, one’s own total self-understanding, the “option fondamentale,” remains empty and objectively unfulfilled. It must be remembered that not every individual act of freedom has the same actual depth and radical nature of self-disposition. It must be realized that, although every individual act of freedom intends to venture a total and final disposal of oneself, each of them always surrenders itself into the whole of the one and complete act of freedom of the one human, temporally finite life precisely because each of them is accomplished within the horizon of the whole of existence and receives its weight and proportion from this.158

I quoted this passage at length to illustrate the somewhat frustrating reality of Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option. Frustrating because he makes a total claim, but in a diffuse or borderline contradictory way. Freedom is total, final self-disposal, but in temporal, finite life it goes largely unenacted. Freedom is an achievement, but in large part unachievable. Most individual free acts are empty and refer in some mysterious way to the “horizon of the whole of existence.” It is no wonder that academic theologians have seized upon Rahner’s theology of freedom as “impossible,” or at best beleaguered by “difficulties.” The key to parsing the “difficulties” of Rahner’s theology of freedom is, as Jowers correctly reasons, his thinking on concupiscence. Unfortunately, as Jowers also points out, this Rahnerian theme has been underdiscussed. Included in the first volume of Theological Investigations is a detailed, heavily annotated article on concupiscence. It was initially published in 158. Rahner, “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment within the View of Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, Concerning Vatican II [TI 6], trans. Karl H. and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon, 1969), 203.

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1941, the same year as Hörer des Wortes, as “Zum theologischen Begriff der Konkupiszenz,” in Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie.159 Not long after, fellow Jesuit J. P. Kenny published a two-part study of Rahner on concupiscence.160 I say this only to indicate that this area of Rahner’s theology has been of interest in English-language scholarship for a long time, if in a very quiet way. This quiet is a wonder (or a problem), because the 1941 article is just as revolutionary in its critical revision of the neo-Scholastic concepts as are more famous Rahnerian articles on Mystery, God, the sacraments, and so on. In addition, the article is a substantial intervention in the nature-grace debate that would come to dominate the European theological scene in the decade to come.161 I am most interested in something that the concupiscence article does not intend to be, but is: a generative study for Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. Manualist theology in the early 1940s, to put things slightly more simply than Rahner does, takes concupiscence to be a quality of the “sensitive” part of humanity (or a human person) that tends toward evil. Rahner finds problematic this conflation and reduction of the different dimensions of concupiscence. He does so on the grounds of his understanding of the “plurality of human powers”—that is, sensitive and spiritual powers, which he developed in Geist in Welt.162 In terms similar to those we have considered with respect to the later theology of the symbol, Rahner insists that the sharp neo-Scholastic division between sensibility and spirit is illegitimate when applied to humans. This calls into question any conception of concupiscence as arising purely from sense. Rahner adds two essential thoughts: (1) “Just as there exists a sensitive spontaneous act of desire, so too there is at least as much an involuntary spiritual act of striving (Strebeakt) prior to man’s free personal 159. Rahner, “Zum theologischen Begriff der Konkupiszenz,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 65, no. 1 (1941): 61–80; republished in Rahner, Der Mensch in der Schöpfung [Man in Creation], Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Heinz Neufeld (Freiburg: Herder, 1998), 8:3–32. I shall cross-reference the ET with the SW pagination. 160. J. P. Kenny, SJ, “The Problem of Concupiscence: A Recent Theory of Professor Karl Rahner,” Australasian Catholic Record 29, no. 4 (1952): 290–304; 30, no. 1 (1953): 23–32. 161. See especially TCC 374–82/25–32. 162. TCC 352/7; see 352n7/7n7, which references Geist in Welt.

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decision.”163 And (2), lest the spiritual be let off the hook with respect to evil: “In reality there is just as much danger from the Luciferian heights of the spirit as from the dark depths of the merely sensitive.”164 Concupiscence, to sum up the main insight, is a reality affecting the whole person, sensitive and spiritual, whether neutrally or in the direction of evil. Rahner follows his critique by constructively defining concupiscence in its broad, narrower, and narrowest (theological) senses. The broad and narrow definitions of concupiscence pertain to desire. The broad definition is roughly equal with the Scholastic category of appetite: a “conscious reactive posture” toward a value.165 The narrower definition concerns how an act of appetite “forms the necessary presupposition of man’s personal free decision,” thus it would refer to a “free” act that falls short of a full deployment of freedom in the strict sense (i.e., as a definitive, permanent decision).166 The proper definition of concupiscence, at least for Rahner’s purposes in the article, is “man’s spontaneous desire (das spontane Begehren des Menschen), insofar as it precedes his free decision and persists against it (und gegen diese beharrt).”167 This proper definition demands close consideration. Rahner reminds his reader that free decision is “obviously a spiritual act.” But he makes sure in the next sentence to clarify that “this spirituality must not be conceived of as though it were a purely ‘spiritual’ act. For such an act does not exist in man.”168 This is a crucial statement, and one that seems ignored by critics of Rahner’s “idealism” with regard to freedom. When Rahner speaks of specifically human freedom, he never conceives of it as purely spiritual, and thus it is never uninhibited by the “resistant” quality of concupiscence. Rahner does not make this obvious in many of his writings, and he could have done better to make himself understood. For him, Geist in Welt is clarification enough, with its insistence upon the peculiar human way of knowing (the possible 163. TCC 353/8, ET slightly modified. 164. TCC 354/9, ET slightly modified. 165. TCC 358/12, ET modified. 166. TCC 359/13. 167. TCC 360/14, emphasis original, ET modified. 168. TCC 360/14, emphasis original.

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intellect), which never proceeds as active intellection unrelated to or unconditioned by sensation.169 With this we can infer that for Rahner concupiscence is not a purely negative reality directed toward evil, but instead a resistant reality—friction in the process of decision. Thus Rahner will say a few pages later that the tendency of human freedom toward complete disposal of the operative subject “never completely succeeds in making its way.” He continues, “There always remains in the nature of things a tension between what man is as a simply available being (einfach vorhandenes Wesen) (as ‘nature’) and what he wants to make of himself by his free decision (as ‘person’): a tension between what he is simply passively and what he actively posits himself as and wishes to understand himself to be.” Rahner finishes the thought: “The ‘person’ never absorbs its ‘nature’ without remainder (Die ‘Person’ holt ihre ‘Natur’ nie restlos ein).”170 Concupiscence is this impossibility of full absorption of nature by person. Rahner’s theology of human freedom does not operate in a friction-free environment, and certainly not without remainder (restlos). This last word, remainder (Rest), provides an opening back toward Schelling, for whom this is a very important term. But before we make this transition, it is worth noting what Rahner does not mean when he points to the impossibility of person absorbing nature “restlos.” He does not mean precisely what Jowers seems to think he means: that external-environmental factors preclude the full activity of human freedom.171 Instead, he means that internal resistance is the main inhibitor. This is important because Rahner maintains that concupiscence is not an occasional or accidental factor in human existence, but a constitutive feature, at least on this side of death and the eschaton.

169. See KRTA 75–77. 170. TCC 362/16, ET modified. 171. Jowers, “Conflict of Freedom and Concupiscence,” 630: “Rahner appears to hold . . . that, by continually modifying the human being’s spiritual-material nature, the world without the human being renders it impossible for one’s person irreversibly to master her nature before her history of freedom’s cessation.”

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The Indivisible Remainder Though Jowers and Mario Farrugia point to Heidegger as an appropriate interlocutor for Rahner’s thinking on concupiscence, I propose Schelling.172 My suggestion turns on Schelling’s distinction in the freedom essay between ground and existence, which is roughly the same distinction that Rahner employs between nature and person. Schelling makes this distinction in an attempt to make sense of how God can be the self-revealing Creator of a creation that includes the possibility of good and evil. The distinction helps him narrate this dual possibility without ascribing responsibility for evil directly to God. The possibility for good and for evil is displaced into the ground of God’s existence (which in turn is the ground for the world’s existence—or God’s decision to create). I have chosen my verbs carefully in the last two sentences (“make sense” and “narrate”) because Schelling believes the possibility of evil cannot be explained fully. The idea of ground also signifies this impossibility of full explanation (this is the point at which Heidegger sees Schelling as destroying Hegel’s logic). “Ground” stands for the unruliness that shadows existence’s order and that reason cannot fully penetrate.173 Rahner means roughly this by “nature.” To shore up this link between Rahner and Schelling, I must reproduce the famous passage in which Schelling expresses many of the thoughts I just recounted: This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder (der nie aufgehende Rest), that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground. . . . Without 172. If, for instance, Rahner is “between Aquinas and Heidegger” in his thinking on concupiscence, as Farrugia’s title has it, Rahner leans more toward Aquinas, where Schelling (qua Aristotelian) would be a mediating presence; Mario Farrugia, “Karl Rahner on Concupiscence: Between Aquinas and Heidegger,” Gregorianum 86, no. 2 (2005): 330–56. Jowers suggests in a footnote that Rahner glosses his distinction of nature and person with the pairing Vorhandenheit and Existenz understood as Heidegger uses them in Being and Time. Since these are common words, it is just as likely that Heidegger is not exerting influence here; see Jowers, “The Conflict of Freedom and Concupiscence,” 634n12, commenting on TCC 362n15. I could concede, I suppose, that Schelling is read with Heideggerian eyes. 173. Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 29.

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this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance.174

Later on Schelling will relate the ground and its “reality” to the inertia in matter. Against G. W. Leibniz, who sees matter’s inertia purely negatively, Schelling argues, “It is to be noted that inertia itself cannot be thought of as mere deprivation, but actually as something positive, namely as expression of the internal selfhood of the body, the force whereby it seeks to assert its independence.”175 He succeeds this remark with a further observation that metaphysical finitude must not be equated with evil. This constellation of points from the freedom essay finds many counterpoints in Rahner’s concupiscence article. I contend that for Rahner, concupiscence is the Schellingian “indivisible remainder.” Rahner calls it “the hardness and impenetrability of nature (die Härte und Undurchdringlichkeit der Natur),” “an undissolved remainder of nature (ungelöster Rest von Natur),” and nature’s “gravity and impenetrability (Schwere und Undurchdringlichkeit).”176 He gives the practical example of a person who blushes while lying. Here the “flesh” (which is a spiritual-sensitive reality) refuses to follow the “spirit” (a bad free choice).177 These are the qualities of “nature” that the “person” can never absorb “restlos.” Rahner also resonates with Schelling’s distancing of human finitude from evil. Concupiscence is best thought of as a “property arising from the nature of the spiritual-material and finite creature” that “may not be simply qualified without further consideration as ‘evil.’ ”178 Even further, it is “a retarding factor for good as much as for evil acts of freedom.”179 Concupiscence is a condition of finitude. This condition is opposed to “the absolute freedom of the infinite Being.”180 If we really hold Rahner to his word regarding the fundamental option, which must be the definitive and final decision of the whole per174. Ibid. 175. Ibid., 38. 176. TCC 366/18, 368/20, 375/26. 177. TCC 366/18, and the long footnote 366n18/18n17. 178. TCC 375/26. 179. TCC 375/26, ET revised. 180. TCC 366/19.

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son, it seems that the human person would have to transcend her finite, concupiscent conditions and share in the life of the infinite being (God). But to hold Rahner strictly to these words would ignore the qualifications he provides, and it would be to commit the error of German Idealism that Schelling aims to rectify: namely, to attempt to comprehend human freedom fully; to try to divide the indivisible remainder. There is no viable reason to ignore Rahner’s cautions and to make him say what he wishes not to say. He can place in tension statements regarding the fullness of human decision for good or evil and the friction represented by words like these: “Man becomes absorbed without remainder neither in good nor in evil.”181 Rahner’s thought is not unassailable in general, but on this point, it is.

Rereading Self-Determination Aesthetically Gregory Brett puts it best when he describes the constructive result of Rahner’s 1941 concupiscence article: “Rahner’s revision of the traditional concept of concupiscence enables him to describe the fragility and vulnerability of human powers, even the capacity for agency, love and spirituality. Contrary to most post-Enlightenment anthropology, Rahner maintains that there are no wholly, autonomous, human agents above and beyond the determinations of a nature.”182 Brett provides the positive side to the critical warning I just issued. Not only must Rahner not be understood as contradicting himself, but he must be seen as making a major contribution to our theological understanding of the peculiarity of human freedom: it is directed toward the infinite, incapable of reaching the infinite, but able to love precisely in (not despite) this fragile condition. Rahner is much-celebrated and much-reviled for his “turn to the subject.” It is sometimes assumed that when he turns to the subject he turns to an autonomous, self-determining, cognitive subject. Such a sub181. TCC 369/21, ET revised. 182. Gregory Brett, The Theological Notion of the Human Person: A Conversation between the Theology of Karl Rahner and the Philosophy of John Macmurray (New York: Peter Lang, 2013), 82.

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ject would pretend to absolute mastery of the person over nature. Brett’s comment rejects this assumption. I contend, building on his point, that the concupiscence article shows us that a full Rahnerian consideration of human freedom reveals it to be not autonomous self-determination, but “collection” (Sammlung). I shall define this term soon, but first I shall indicate its wider significance: Rahner’s model for understanding human freedom comes not primarily from modern philosophers like Kant and Hegel, but from the mystical-ascetical tradition extending from Augustine through German mystics like Johannes Tauler (sources that were a boon for Schelling’s freedom essay), and even before that, from scripture. This becomes clear late in the concupiscence article, with a seemingly glancing yet actually vital reference: German mysticism often names as its ideal “deep,” “collected” man, the man, that is, whose whole activity is a remainderless expression of his innermost center and his innermost life-decision, and who therefore also remains “collected” in this innermost center without being dispersed in anything foreign to this decision. That man never quite possesses completely this collected intensity of his whole life in the ultimate deed of his inmost being, which is actually what concupiscentia in the theological sense means, the index of his finitude and his worldedness (his sensible-spiritual essence). This rupture of man within himself will probably often be the occasion for his destruction, but—who knows— perhaps still more often the occasion of his salvation, because it also prevents him from being evil without remainder.183

Rahner refers in related writings on sin and guilt to “the German mystics.”184 He used to tease his students with a short piece he wrote “in the 183. TCC 374/25–26, ET revised: “Die deutsche Mystik nannte oft als ihr Ideal den ‘innigen,’ ‘gesammelten’ Menschen, den Menschen also, bei dem sein ganzes Tun restlos Ausdruck der innersten Mitte des Menschen und seiner innersten Lebensentscheidung ist und der darum auch in dieser innersten Mitte ohne Zerstreuung in ein dieser Entscheidung Fremdes ‘gesammelt’ bleibt. Daß der Mensch diese gesammelte Innigkeit seines ganzen Lebens in der letzten Tat seines innersten Wesens nie ganz besitzt, das ist es eigentlich, was Konkupiszenz im theologischen Sinne besagt, ist Index seiner Endlichkeit und seiner Weltlichkeit (seines sinnlichgeistigen Wesens). Diese Entzweiung des Menschen in sich selbst wird ihm wohl oft Anlaß zu seinem Verderben, aber—wer weiß—veilleicht noch öfter Anlaß zu seinem Heil, weil sie ihn auch daran hindert, restlos böse zu sein.” 184. See, for example, Rahner, “Guilt and Its Remission: The Borderland between Theology

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style of Johannes Tauler,” trying to get them to guess who was its author. The topic was concupiscence.185 His views on human freedom in general and its concupiscent condition in particular are formed by this tradition and its idea of the “collected” person. The idea relates to the view of the human person that pervades Augustine’s Confessions: that our condition in this world is one of scattering. Freedom would mean gathering what is scattered back together. Concupiscence would be the internal resistance that precludes this gathering. But the good news, which Rahner includes at the end of the quotation, is that concupiscence can also prevent the exacerbation of our state of dispersal into a state of damnation. The scriptural source for Rahner’s ideas on freedom and concupiscence is clearer in the later essay “Brief Observations on the ‘State of Fallen Nature,’ ” an essential reading that faces head-on the contradiction between freedom’s need for “smooth expression” and concupiscent resistance to it. Rahner writes, “In biblical terms, we have the ability and obligation to love God with our whole heart, and yet we do not succeed in this.”186 This is the first commandment, as Jesus teaches (Mk 12:30; Mt 22:37; Lk 10:27; cf. Dt 6:5, 10:12, 30:6). A “collected” person or person “of the heart” would be able to follow this commandment to the letter. But as we have seen, such a person is “ideal,” and in real (concupiscent) life the absolute claim of the first commandment can be experienced only under the sign of contradiction (Rahner obliquely refers to Romans 7).187 Thus if Rahner appears to contradict his own teaching on freedom, scripture does, too. Rahner’s teaching on freedom includes an indivisible remainder, which he develops out of his reading of scripture and the AugustinianGerman mystical tradition. One could even say that, from the side of the human person (the creature), the theology of freedom centers on this indivisible, concupiscent remainder. Concupiscence cannot be explained and Psychotherapy” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, Man in the Church [TI 2], trans. Karl H. Kruger (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon, 1963), 265–81. 185. Rahner, “A Spiritual Discourse on Desire and Concupiscence in the Style of Master Johannes Tauler,” in Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, ed. Philip Endean, SJ (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2004), 50–53. 186. Rahner, “State of Fallen Nature,” 49, emphasis original. 187. See ibid., 48, 52.

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theoretically, nor can it be resolved smoothly into morality or ethics. Concupiscence, as an indivisible remainder, is a matter of aesthetics, a theological path well-suited to the paradox of freedom we have been exposing. To explain what I mean, I should briefly review this chapter’s material and show how it resonates with a Rahnerian essay on poetry. We have been considering how transcendental philosophy, locked in a relationship of resistance to German Idealism, serves as a source for Rahner’s theology of freedom and the fundamental option. We discovered, by examining the Wissenschaftstheorie of Hearer of the Word, set against the background of Schelling’s idealism, that the center of Rahner’s theology of freedom in general is God’s free decision to speak, to break God’s silence, to self-communicate through creation and salvation. We saw that, theologically, this free decision is fruitfully considered through an account of symbolic manifestation, where God’s free decision and consequent creative action comes to concrete, created existence in material symbols, paradigmatically the God-man, Jesus Christ, who in turn is symbolized by his Sacred Heart. And here we have learned something of how a distinctively human creative response, or ex-istence, of God’s decision to self-communicate occurs as a fundamental option by a concupiscent creature. That is, God’s freedom becomes manifest in each human person, paradoxically, in a definitive and incomplete decision. If we began this chapter’s consideration of Rahner with Hearer of the Word, it makes sense to end it with a later, yet apposite essay on the word, specifically, the poetic word. “Poetry and the Christian” (1960), in which a distinctively Rahnerian theological aesthetic comes to light, considers, as does Hearer of the Word, the human person who receives words.188 Rahner contends that the word of poetry and the word of scripture mutually enhance the human person’s capacity for receiving them. These two types of words share the chief similarity of bringing the human person radically face to face with who he is, and thus to the brink of eternity189—that is, to the point of the fundamental option. And not only are these two types of words mutually enhancing. According to 188. Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian,” 364. 189. Ibid., 363.

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Rahner, “The poetic is a prerequisite for Christianity”; receptiveness to poetry, it seems, conditions receptiveness to scripture and even to the Word made flesh.190 Such a statement could easily invite objection. One could easily (and rightly) counter Rahner’s statement by insisting that poetic connoisseurship cannot be the gateway to true Christianity. Rahner recognizes this, too, and acknowledges that Christians clearly vary in their “artistic endowments.”191 True Christianity, and theological aesthetics as reflection upon it, does not hinge on one’s familiarity with Goethe, Hölderlin, or Rilke (in fact, tellingly, Rahner never names a specific poet or cites any verse in “Poetry and the Christian”). The issue of aesthetics is not poetry or art generally, but human receptivity to being brought by symbols (of which poetic words are examples) to encounter the loving mystery that these symbols express. A theological aesthetic of freedom gives an account of at least two things: (1) the silent ground (God) who freely decides to speak, and in this decision, exists as the freedom of appearances (words are a mode of appearance), and (2) the human person, who through words (especially powerful ones like poetic words) comes to recognize the groundedness of appearances in an incomprehensible, unnamable, inaudible, invisible freedom, and on the basis of this recognition to decide whether to be gripped by this mysterious freedom or to deny it and to grasp onto (and be enslaved by) the “individual things one hears.”192 Concupiscence, the indivisible remainder, is best understood on this background, especially point 2, since concupiscence is a human reality. Concupiscence is that spontaneous resistance within us to recognizing and responding with a decision to the freedom at the ground of appearances; it is our tendency to become absorbed in the appearances themselves. Humanity’s concupiscent condition contrasts with what Rahner presents as true hearing: “All true hearers of the word are really listening to the inmost depths of every word, to know if it becomes suddenly the word of eternal love by

190. Ibid. 191. Ibid. 192. See ibid., 359.

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the very fact that it expresses man and his world.”193 Rahner’s discussion of “true hearing” and the poetic word—an aesthetic enterprise— prompts me to suggest an aesthetic reading of concupiscence. The reader should recall the threefold definition of “aesthetic” in the introduction. “Concupiscence” signifies the tendency to mishear words (“aesthetic” as sensibility), to misjudge words (“aesthetic” judgment), and to imagine too narrowly by failing to relate to the supersensible dimension out of which words arise (“aesthetic” as sublime judgment). Or to put things more generally, “concupiscence” means the human inclination to misapprehend sensible appearances, to misrecognize our supersensible vocation, and thereby to conceal the manifestation of divine freedom. Concupiscence is, Jowers is right, the difficulty of Rahner’s theology of freedom if we read it as a theology of smooth self-determination. But also, given our aesthetic definition, concupiscence helps us to discover how to read Rahner’s theology of freedom as a theological aesthetic of a finite self whose determination is always incomplete, until its heart rests in God. A footnote in the 1941 concupiscence article, which has proven so pivotal for this first chapter, can help us to transition to the next. In this note, Rahner softens his contention that the free decision of the human person involves “exhaustiveness (Restlosigkeit)” as regards nature: An exhaustiveness would be explicable, which is and always must be essentially relative in the finite entity, because otherwise neither the phenomenon of repentance nor that of the experience of its free decision as an inner misfortune and an inner condemnation would be metaphysically possible. Looked at metaphysically, repentance is only possible where man’s immoral free decision has not the power so exhaustively to impress evil upon his being that no starting-point for a new decision remains from which a fresh restructuring of the human person could occur.194

The reference to repentance is very important as we shift from this chapter on the “transcendental” to the next, on penance. Rahner’s idea of 193. Ibid., 362. 194. TCC 367n20/19n19, ET rev.

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freedom as “collection” into the transcendent calling to love God with one’s whole heart has to be conjoined with his theology of penance and conversion. Decision is never simple, never frictionless, never ideal, and this is good news. It is gospel. In the end human freedom is not up to the self-determining subject, but to the God who decided from eternity to self-reveal in grace and mercy.195 195. Here I allude to Rahner, “Poetry and the Christian,” 362.

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Rahner on Penitential Freedom

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Rahner on Penitential Freedom

Dorothe a S at tler states something that Rahner’s supporters and critics alike would find surprising: “The theme of penance occupied Rahner’s theological thinking from the earliest days until the end.”1 Sattler notes that Rahner’s theology studies at Valkenburg (1929–33) involved intensive reading on the history of the sacrament of penance.2 Herbert Vorgrimler elaborates this point: “As a theological student [Rahner] made a thorough study of the history of Christian penance through the standard literature of the time” as a test case for how neo-Scholastic theology could be expanded.3 He continued such reading throughout his philosophical studies at Freiburg (1934–36), resulting in the 1936 publication of “Sünde als Gnadenverlust in der Frühkirchlichen Literatur” (ET: “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature”),4 the same year that Rahner completed Geist in Welt 1. Dorothea Sattler, “Editionsbericht” [Editor’s Report], in Mensch und Sünde: Schriften zur Geschichte und Theologie der Buße [Man and Sin: Writings on the History and Theology of Penance], Sämtliche Werke, vol. 11, ed. Dorothea Sattler (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), xiv, my translation. 2. Ibid. 3. Herbert Vorgrimler, Understanding Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Life and Thought, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 57. 4. See Rahner, “Sünde als Gnadenverlust in der frühkirchlichen Literatur,” in SW 11:3–42; ET: “Sin as the Loss of Grace in Early Church Literature,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 15,

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and the year before he delivered the lectures later published as Hörer des Wortes. Near the end of his life, Rahner still reflected on penance in the 1980 essay “Warum man trotzdem beichten soll” (ET: “The Status of the Sacrament of Reconciliation”).5 Many other publications on penance filled the years in between. Emmie Ho-Tsui adds a significant detail in this respect, particularly in response to readers of Rahner who regard him as insufficiently engaged with history: Rahner begins to lecture on penance at Pullach in 1945 in direct response to the catastrophes of World War II.6 The writings on penance are extensive, spanning over 1,500 pages in the Sämtliche Werke. English-language readers may be familiar with volume 15 of Theological Investigations, which collects studies on the history of penance that Rahner produced between 1936 and 1973.7 In a more pastoral vein, readers may be familiar with Rahner’s brief 1974 book Allow Yourself to Be Forgiven: Penance Today.8 Most popular has been Rahner’s programmatic essay “Forgotten Truths about the Sacrament of Penance” (1953).9 Less familiar, since they were available almost exclusively to Rahner’s students until only a few years ago, but more remarkable, are the weighty lectures on penance to which I referred already, which Rahner delivered several times between 1945 and 1960.10 Penance in the Early Church [TI 15], trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1982), 23–54, hereafter SLG. 5. Rahner, “The Status of the Sacrament of Reconciliation,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 23, Final Writings [TI 23], trans. Joseph Donceel, ed. Paul Imhof (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 205–18. 6. Ho-Tsui, Die Lehre von der Sünde, 31: “Die Zerstörungen und Schäden des Krieges prägten seine [Rahners] Theologie und er las zum ersten Mal die Vorlesungen zum Bußsakrament.” 7. The volume was released as Schriften zur Theologie 11 in 1973 and translated as TI 15 in 1982; Rahner and Karl Heinz Neufeld, eds., Frühe Bußgeschichte in Einzeluntersuchung: Schriften zur Theologie 11 (Zürich: Benziger, 1973); ET: TI 15. 8. Rahner, Allow Yourself to Be Forgiven: Penance Today, trans. Salvator Attanasio (Denville, N.J.: Dimension, 1975). This book extends a chapter Rahner included in a volume of meditations on the seven sacraments: Rahner, Die siebenfältige Gabe: Über die Sakramente der Kirche, in SW 18:307–18; ET: Meditations on the Sacraments, trans. Salvator Attanasio, James M. Quigley, SJ, and Dorothy White (New York: Seabury, 1977), 42–59. 9. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths about the Sacrament of Penance,” in TI 2:135–74. 10. Sattler, “Vorwort,” in SW 6/1:xvi.

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It is likely that Rahner would have continued lecturing on penance had he not been sent as a peritus to the Second Vatican Council and then assumed Romano Guardini’s philosophy of religion chair at Munich (1964). This chapter argues that Rahner’s penance studies are an essential source for his theology of freedom; his articulation of the fundamental option comes out of them, as does his conviction that Christian freedom is inseparable from ecclesial-sacramental life. Investigating the penance studies can help us to develop more layers to the realism of Rahner’s theology of freedom, which we began to explore in “Freedom Run Aground,” in chapter 1. The reality of human life involves sin, which for Rahner is always a breach of community as much as an individual indiscretion. Specifically, Christian realism adds that, as well as acknowledging the realities of broken lives and communities, we hope for reconciliation. These dimensions comprise what I call “penitential holism,” whose articulation I take to be Rahner’s systematic theological contribution to discussions on penance. Furthermore, his articulation of this penitential holism augments the complexity of his theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest. In Rahner’s writings on penance, he specifies God’s decision to self-communicate through creation and salvation as a comprehensive manifestation of mercy, which elevates even the lowliest and most broken of sinners heavenward, and which impels Christian living of mercy, which, paradoxically, makes God’s merciful freedom manifest all the more. This chapter covers four main topics: Rahner’s early study on sin as a loss of grace; his historical and dogmatic lectures on penance; the patristic idea of reconciliation with the church that Rahner aimed to revive in his lectures and his ecclesiology; and Thomas Aquinas’s ideas on the “matter” (paired with the “form”) of penance. In discussing these topics, I work to detect and to present Rahner’s penitential holism, which, I contend, is crystallized in his idea of the fundamental option. Thus I elucidate further the theological aesthetic of freedom for which this penitential holism is a source.

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Studyi n g Pen a nce Declan Marmion has argued that the history of Rahner interpretation may have looked different had Aszese und Mystik (1939) been privileged as highly as Geist in Welt.11 This was a work by the French Jesuit Marcel Viller (1880–1952) on asceticism and spirituality in the early Christian period that Rahner translated into German and expanded.12 Marmion’s point is that, particularly in English-language scholarship, Rahner has been studied almost exclusively through the lens of his transcendental philosophy and its transformation of neo-Scholastic theology. Rahner’s contribution as a ressourcement theologian tends to be underplayed, to distortive effect. He becomes a representative of a progressive theological camp dedicated to aggiornamento, set opposite a ressourcement camp represented by Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and others. Certainly, Rahner’s study of transcendental philosophy is important for him as he begins his lifelong theological endeavor. But one must recognize that Rahner studied and interpreted transcendental philosophy from the place he took up within a long tradition, stretching back to the early church, of ecclesial reflection on Christian living. His intensive study of the history and theology of penance, along with his own participation in the penitential practices of the Catholic Church, assisted his own reflection on Christian life as involving sin, conversion, and forgiveness as ecclesial expressions of God’s free gift of mercy. Here I aim to indicate preliminarily how Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option arises from his ecclesial reflection.

11. Declan Marmion, A Spirituality of Everyday Faith: A Theological Investigation of the Notion of Spirituality in Karl Rahner (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998) 52–53; Marcel Viller, SJ, and Karl Rahner, Aszese und Mystik in der Väterzeit [Asceticism and Mysticism in the Patristic Era], in Spiritualität und Theologie der Kirchenväter [The Spirituality and Theology of the Church Fathers], Sämtliche Werke 3, ed. Andreas R. Batlogg, Eduard Farrugia, and KarlHeinz Neufeld, index by Jeanne Schlösser (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), 123–390. 12. Viller, La Spiritualité des premiers siècles chrétiens [The Spirituality of the First Christian Centuries] (Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1930).

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Patristic Studies In 1977, Giles Harry Pater completed a dissertation at the University of Notre Dame on Rahner’s penance studies.13 This study did not receive much attention, was never published as a book, and did not have the advantage of hindsight and distance in time to synthesize the significance of the studies and their use of the fathers for Rahner’s theology. Two decades later, in somewhat of an aside, George Vass recommends the penance studies to readers as an indication that Rahner rooted his systematic studies in careful study of the history of the church and its dogma. Vass summarizes the systematic purpose behind these studies: “He intends to show that the sacrament of penance refers to the reconciliation of the sinner with the Church, and was not regarded even by these ancient authors as a magic parole transmitting divine forgiveness without any mediation of the believing community.”14 This is a remarkable, if parenthetical insight on which I elaborate later in “Reconciliation with the Church.” But even here I shall start insisting on this point: Rahner’s study of, teaching about, and writing on penance lend a distinctively ecclesial-sacramental cast to his theology of freedom that must be taken into account in order for us to understand it properly. Thankfully, in recent years appreciation has grown regarding Rahner’s ties to the ressourcement movement and, consequently, regarding the ecclesial embeddedness of his theology. Emblematic of this is the work of Brandon Peterson, whose article “Karl Rahner on Patristic Theology and Spirituality” helpfully complexifies the one-sided narrative of Rahner as solely an aggiornamento theologian.15 Peterson foregrounds Rahner’s theological dissertation and helpfully summarizes the key role the writings of the fathers, including Ignatius of Antioch, the Shepherd of Hermas, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, the writers of early martyrologies, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and 13. Giles Harry Pater, “Karl Rahner’s Historico-Theological Studies on Penance: The Retrieval of Forgotten Truth” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1977). 14. George Vass, A Pattern of Doctrines, part 1, God and Christ, vol. 3, Understanding Karl Rahner (London: Sheed and Ward, 1996), 2. 15. Brandon Peterson, “Karl Rahner on Patristic Theology and Spirituality,” Philosophy and Theology 27, no. 2 (2015): 499–512.

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many others played in Rahner’s theological education at Valkenburg and beyond. German-language commentators have worked in earnest to reclaim the ressourcement valence, and consequently the ecclesial breadth, of Rahner’s theological vision. Karl Neufeld published an article soon after the publication of Schriften zur Theologie 11 in which he observes, “Other important elements of [Rahner’s] work, foremost its philosophical element, the concrete form of his thinking on grace, its pastoral interest and the rich spiritual stimulus, gripped the attention of theologians so much that Rahner’s historical-theological approach [to problems of Christian penance in the early church] were nearly forgotten.”16 Neufeld uses the metaphor of a “germ” or “shoot”(Keim) for the historical-theological studies of penance, saying that Rahner’s later, diverse, “branching (verzweigende)” theology was originally present in this germ. The later work, therefore, “may not be fully understood if one knows nothing of ” the penance studies.17 Neufeld’s metaphor resonates with the previous chapter’s discussion of the Schellingian concepts of ground and existence. In order to apprehend the “existence” of Rahner’s theology of freedom, one must see his early penance studies as at the very least essential elements in his theology’s “ground.”18 16. Karl H. Neufeld, SJ, “Fortschritt durch Umkehr: Zu Karl Rahners bußgeschichtlichen Arbeiten” [Progress through Conversion: On Karl Rahner’s Works on the History of Penance], Stimmen der Zeit 99, no. 4 (1974): 275. Translations from this article are mine. 17. Ibid., 275. 18. In concert with Neufeld, Marlies Mügge argues throughout her article on Rahner’s penance studies that he used his historical inquiry into the church fathers as a springboard for his later ecclesiology; Mügge, “Entwicklung und theologischer Kontext der Bußtheologie Karl Rahners” [The Development and Theological Context of Karl Rahner’s Theology of Penance], in Wagnis Theologie (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1979), 435–50. It makes sense that Mügge would take this tack, as she completed her dissertation under Rahner on reconciliation with the church and the ecclesiological aspect of the sacrament of penance: Mügge, “Reconciliatio cum Ecclesia: Eine dogmengeschichtliche Untersuchung über den ekklesiologischen Aspekt des Bußsakraments” [Reconciliatio cum Ecclesia (Reconciliation with the Church): A DogmaticHistorical Investigation into the Ecclesiological Aspect of the Sacrament of Penance] (Ph.D. diss., Westfälischen-Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 1974). Similarly, Paul Rulands tells how Rahner worked out an early form of the supernatural existential in a study on Origen’s teachings on penance (1950); Rulands, “Umkehr als Gnade Christi: Zum Verhältnis von Gnaden- und Bußtheologie und deren Christusformatiertheit im Frühwerk Karl Rahners” [Conversion as the Grace of Christ: On the Relationship between the Theologies of Grace and Penance and

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Neufeld’s insights relate to my constructive aim in this book: continuing the project I began in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics of discovering Rahner’s distinctive theological aesthetic. Part of this project has consisted in enriching our understanding of Rahner’s “anthropological turn” in theology. Neufeld’s 1974 article specifically disputes criticisms directed against Rahner’s “anthropologically turned theology.”19 He declares that the “penitential spirit (Bußgesinnung)” of Rahner’s theology, which stems from the studies on patristic penitential writings, answers any such accusations. For most critics, Rahner’s anthropological turn proves problematic because it one-sidedly portrays the human person as recipient of grace. This error on the side of the holiness of the human person is borne out most palpably in Rahner’s idea of the “anonymous Christian.” For Neufeld, though, this one-sidedness comes not from Rahner, but from his critics, who miss that the “substantial unity in Rahner’s theology and philosophy” is opened by the idea of “sin as loss of grace.”20 Rahner’s theological anthropology must be seen as including a substantial account of penitential subjectivity, where the recipient of God’s grace (or to put things more aesthetically, a “hearer of the word”) stands in constant need of conversion. God’s grace becomes effective—manifest—to and through sinners undertaking a turn away from sin and toward God within a community engaged in the same process of conversion. The “anthropological turn,” then, should be seen not simply as a reconfiguration of theology in humankind’s image. Rather, it should be seen as a complex theological response to the phenomenon of anthropological turning, where the human person attempts to turn toward God, who has turned toward the human person (who is beleaguered by sin and, of course, concupiscence) in grace and mercy. Rahner begins to gather ingredients for this multifaceted conception of human subjectivity in the article to which Neufeld alludes, the 1936 historical-theological piece on “sin as loss of grace.” Their Christoformity in Karl Rahner’s Early Works], in Was den Glauben in Bewegung bringt: Fundamentaltheologie in der Spur Jesu Christi, Festschrift für K. H. Neufeld [What Faith Sets into Motion: Fundamental Theology on the Track of Jesus Christ] (Freiburg: Herder, 2004), 89–91. 19. Neufeld, “Fortschritt durch Umkehr,” 280–81. 20. Ibid., 281.

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Sin as Loss of Grace Let us closely read “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature,” which Rahner first published in Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie and republished (in a form edited by Neufeld) in Schriften zur Theologie 11 (1973).21 The current section is purely expository. In “The Fundamental Option’s Beginning” I will argue certain conclusions that follow from my exposition, which are indebted to but more focused than Neufeld’s expressed conviction that sin as loss of grace unifies the whole of Rahner’s theology and philosophy. The article concerns the development of dogma. Rahner inquires into the historical origins of the “Catholic notion of the essence of serious sin.”22 Rahner observes, “The personally culpable loss of sanctifying grace is the specific mark of serious sin which the justified person commits.” While this idea is assumed by Catholic treatises on dogma, Rahner notices that it amounts to little more than an assumption, in that it is defended “with very flimsy arguments from Scripture and the Fathers of the Church.” Rahner does not dispute the teaching, but wishes to shore it up through better exegetical and historical argumentation. Rahner commences by differentiating among three approaches to considering the effects of serious sin. Rahner appeals for such differentiation against the common tendency of textbooks in dogmatic theology to lump together biblical and patristic statements regarding sin without regard for their varying emphases and nuances.23 With this, the textbooks define all serious sin according to loss of sanctifying grace. As Rahner reads the historical evidence, such a case cannot be made. The 21. Rahner, “Sünde als Gnadenverlust in der frühkirchlichen Literatur,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 60 (1936): 471–510; citation to SW edition given. Sattler reports in her editorial notes in the Sämtliche Werke edition that there are many differences in language and content between the original and the Schriften zur Theologie (Theological Investigations) versions; Sattler, “Editorische Anmerkungen” [Editorial Remarks], SW 11:589–91. With her notes in mind I shall read and cite the Theological Investigations version, since that is more widely accessible. Many of the differences occur in the footnotes, as Rahner and Neufeld add bibliography and exhort the reader to keep in mind the historical context behind Rahner’s original writing of this and other studies in TI 15. Other changes between the editions strike me as merely lexical. 22. SLG 23. All quotations in this paragraph come from this page. 23. For this and the next few sentences, see SLG 24.

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idea of sin as loss of grace develops over time and as a result of ecclesial debates and conflicts. Rahner identifies in the New Testament and early patristic literature three models for thinking about the effects of sin: juridical-ethical, eschatological, and from the viewpoint of grace.24 These three models are closely linked, but it is important to distinguish them to show how contemporary thinking on sin had its genesis in the living ecclesial tradition of the first through the third centuries. Rahner begins making such a distinction by considering teachings on serious sin from the New Testament. The juridical-ethical and eschatological viewpoints on sin predominate throughout, from Jesus’ own teachings to Paul’s letters and the Johannine corpus.25 Evidence for an approach to sin from the standpoint of grace is relatively scanty and indirect. Seeming evidence in Paul, where neo-Scholastic theologies of sin and grace start, is not about grace. Romans 11:16–24 is about the messianic kingdom; 1 Corinthians 9:27 and 1 Corinthians 10:12, which envision Paul’s individual “fall” or similar disqualifications for other Christians from the kingdom, remain either under the juridical-ethical or the eschatological rubric. Galatians 5:4, which seems to imply a “fall from grace” for one who attempts to find justice through the law, is more about the wider economy of salvation than the loss of grace.26 Beyond Paul, Hebrews 6 comes very close to a teaching on loss of interior grace, but concerns more nearly metanoia and the possibility of return from apostasy.27 Hebrews 10:29, on behaving proudly toward one on whom God’s spirit has been poured, remains in an ethical register, as does Hebrews 12:15 on failing to receive God’s favor.28 Numerous passages treat death as the consequence of sin, but none explicitly teaches sin as loss of grace—not even 1 John 3, on being a child of God or of the devil.29 Finally, Jesus’ parables about the prodigal son’s “new garment” (Lk 15:22) and the wedding guests’ “festal robes” (Mt 22:12) and similar images are, 24. SLG 24–25. 25. SLG 27. 26. SLG 28–29. 27. SLG 30. 28. SLG 31. 29. SLG 32.

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in context, inflected juridically-ethically or eschatologically. Rahner observes that for New Testament authors, the idea of sin as a loss of grace had not yet become thematic; “for the teaching of the loss of grace to be believed consciously, clearly, and explicitly at least a further impulse from outside was still necessary.”30 This impulse would arrive in the late second century. Rahner’s careful consideration of early second-century texts like the First Letter of Clement, Ignatius of Antioch’s letters, the Didache, the Letter of Barnabus, and the Letter of Polycarp comes up empty with respect to sin as loss of grace. This follows from Rahner’s strict hermeneutical principle: “General and vague phrases can justifiably be understood in a precise sense only if the idea in question occurs clearly in at least one other place in the same author.” Only then can one ascertain the teaching of sin as a “loss of interior grace.”31 But in the later second century arrives the outside impulse that precipitates the explicit teaching on sin and the loss of sanctifying grace: Gnostic teachings on the “pneuma,” or divine “seed,” which cannot be lost through immoral behavior.32 The response comes in 2 Clement: “The preacher warns against sin with reference to its eschatological consequences. But—and this is what is new—between sin and what it finally entails, hell, an immediate effect of sin is mentioned: the loss of baptismal grace for the Christian. . . . The person who sins does not ‘keep’ the ‘seal,’ does not preserve baptism safe and sound.”33 The Shepherd of Hermas uses similar language regarding the “seal,” which may be recovered by penance.34 Even further, “Sin ‘expels’ the Spirit which dwells within man. It ‘injures’ the Holy Spirit and brings it about that it ‘abandons’ man.”35 Thus there is a clear development in Christian teachings on sin, originally instigated by Gnostic debates, but continued into the third century with further schisms.36 Though indirect evidence of the idea of sin as a loss of grace precedes 30. SLG 28. 31. SLG 36. 32. SLG 40. 33. SLG 38. 34. SLG 38. 35. SLG 39. 36. SLG 41.

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Tertullian, it is really with him that the idea moves beyond exhortation into theology proper.37 Famously, Tertullian converted from Catholicism to Montanism, the rigorist community that among other things taught no possibility of penance after baptism. In order to defend this teaching, both as a Catholic and as a Montanist (Rahner downplays the distinction for Tertullian’s theology), Tertullian had to presuppose the possibility of losing baptismal grace.38 He defends various aspects of this teaching throughout his texts on baptism and penance. The idea of sin as loss of grace does the most work for Tertullian as he develops his view of “capital” or “unforgiveable” sins.39 Rahner summarizes Tertullian’s reasoning: “According to Tertullian, man is redeemed by Christ’s unrepeatable suffering on the cross. This redemptive offering is appropriated by man at baptism which, however, he is able to receive only once. If a man has lost the gift of baptism, he has no further means—at least, no sacramental means of the institutional Church—of regaining baptismal grace.”40 Rahner does not specify which sins are unforgiveable (and which “venial” or “light”) for Tertullian. More to the point is the effect of sins. Serious sins, whatever they may be, entail a loss of grace.41 Tertullian teaches this in order to emphasize the change of life necessary for someone who becomes Christian. While Tertullian and the Montanist movement died off, his acceptance of the idea of sin as loss of grace and his division between two groups of sins became part of the ongoing tradition in the third century through Cyprian, Origen, and the Didascalia Apostolorum.42 Rahner goes into a little detail on each, but ends with a sweeping conclusion regarding the development of the teaching on sin as loss of grace: Everywhere the concern is expressed to preserve what man has received in baptism. Everywhere is expressed the Christian conviction that God’s free mercy lifts man to the mysterious participation in the divine nature and the divine 37. SLG 42. 38. SLG 45. 39. SLG 47. 40. SLG 47. 41. SLG 51. 42. SLG 52–53.

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life. This participation transcends human comprehension. Nevertheless, man has to safeguard it by a way of life which corresponds to his call to share in the life of God.43

This particular outpost of ancient dogma has wide-ranging implications. It covers the whole of Christian life, the whole expanse of the Christian ethos. Rahner highlights the “free mercy of God,” the gift of divinization that comes with it (see 2 Pt 1:4), and the human role in upholding this mercy and this gift—freely.

The Fundamental Option’s Beginning There is a way of reading the genesis of Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option (or freedom more generally) as lying in profligate idealism, a philosophical framework snapped awkwardly onto theology, ignoring not just the vicissitudes of materiality, but also ecclesial-theological convictions about sin. Overemphasis on Rahner’s early transcendentalphilosophical works can lead to such an impression. This is precisely the kind of reading I reject here. Rahner’s fundamental option started not in the frictionless environment of idealism (not that a faithful reading of his transcendental works would find this “frictionlessness”), but in careful study of the early church’s actuality, what early Christians thought about holy living, and how one may turn away from the sustaining ground of holy life. I should now point to a statement Rahner wrote thirty-seven years after he published “Sin as Loss of Grace.” In the preface of Theological Investigations 15 he offers a rationale for introducing a volume on the history of dogma into a series of “systematic” studies: I am suspected by many people of being only a speculative theologian who ahistorically speculates skyward (ungeschichtlich losspekuliert) and in certain circumstances seeks to resolve the difficulties in understanding the Church’s magisterial statements through a purely speculative interpretation of such statements. But I am, of course, positive that genuine Catholic theology always must work exegetically as well as with the history of dogma and theology, even if it 43. SLG 53.

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must be left to the free choice of the individual theologian whether he wishes in a small individual project to work “speculatively” or “historically.”44

Rahner admits here that he has often taken the speculative option and implies that he was justified in doing so, given the collaborative nature of theology (there are, for good reason, different specializations). But he reminds his readers that the speculative option was not made without expertise in exegesis and history of dogma. I shall add to Rahner’s rejoinder. The fundamental option as a later Rahnerian formulation could be presented as betraying his careful early historical work in “Sin as Loss of Grace” in favor of speculative idealism. But a different take is equally possible, and more plausible: the fundamental option, though not articulated until 1950s (see “Concupiscence,” in chapter 1), was prepared for in the article on loss of grace in the mid-1930s. This claim is not only plausible, but also illuminative. The fundamental option is a statement in other words of the early Christian conviction that freedom properly used safeguards God’s free gift of mercy, while freedom ill-used threatens to lose this grace. Or, put in aesthetic terms, the fundamental option crystallizes in a phrase the Christian belief that God’s free decision to create, to save, and to self-communicate is made manifest (glorified) through holy living, and the same decision is concealed by sin. The 1936 exegetical-historical article on sin as loss of grace emblematizes the same operation that Rahner performs in his “speculative” works. Rahner sets up the discussion with neo-Scholastic parameters, where “sin as loss of grace” is assumed as the model for understanding the consequences of sin, especially mortal/serious sin. Rahner leaves this point undisputed, but in some measure goes beyond it. He uses biblical and historical texts to revive the robust spirit behind matter-of-fact teachings, the messy history behind neat theses, the developing ecclesial life behind settled dogma. Rahner rediscovers the early church’s vigorous faith in the free mercy of God, precisely with this primacy given to God’s freedom, an equal concern that Christians know the task they are assuming when they are baptized: a life of safeguarding and showing 44. Rahner, “Vorwort,” SW 11:398.

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forth what God has freely given or of squandering and concealing it. Rahner’s fundamental option, the teaching that freedom comes down in the end to a “yes” or “no” to God’s free self-communication, may as well have been expressed in the 1936 article. Rahner stood upon its threshold. For this reason, we must call into question Ron Highfield’s objections in a 1995 article against Rahner’s fundamental option. Highfield protests against Rahner’s argument for “the possibility of the Christian doctrine of sin as a free and definitive ‘no’ to the true God.”45 Were the fundamental option an unreasonable idealist thesis Rahner fabricated without regard for the Bible or Christian traditions, this would be a formidable challenge. But if Highfield wishes to contest Rahner on this count, he would have not only to marshal the authority of Karl Barth (who lurks behind his article), but he would have to resist the Catholic Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, and surely others. Rahner’s thesis that freedom entails the possibility of a “no” is a traditional, ressourcement, ecclesial contention. The point is that the fundamental option’s beginning, so the beginning of a central pillar of Rahner’s mature theology of freedom, occurs in an early study on baptismal grace and penance. The fundamental option’s beginning coincides, furthermore, with Rahner’s narration of the history of penance, which would occupy him for a decade and a half after World War II.

Pen a n c e Lec tur es Rahner taught three different courses on a rotating cycle during his time at Innsbruck: on grace, creation, and penance.46 While all of these courses could be interesting for illuminating Rahner’s theology of freedom, here I shall follow Karl Neufeld in foregrounding the lectures on penance. I do this not only at Neufeld’s suggestion, but also for system45. Ron Highfield, “The Freedom to Say ‘No’? Karl Rahner’s Doctrine of Sin,” Theological Studies 56, no. 3 (1995) 485–505; see Highfield, Barth and Rahner in Dialogue: Toward an Ecumenical Understanding of Sin and Evil (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); see also Peter Phan, “Is Karl Rahner’s Doctrine of Sin Orthodox?,” Philosophy and Theology 9 (1995): 223–36. 46. On this teaching, see Neufeld, “Editionsbericht,” in SW 8:xv.

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atic theological reasons germane to Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. I contend that through their rich historical narrative and their careful rendering of the dogmatic content of penance, Rahner’s lectures present a holistic view of the sacrament that powerfully presents it as exemplifying divine, ecclesial, and human freedom made manifest.47 Penitential theology is, as I have already begun to argue, an essential source for and dimension of Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest. The historical and dogmatic lectures on penance are particularly notable because they help to establish that, for Rahner, freedom is not an individualist reality, but a communal one. If, for Christian theology and practice, the human person makes God’s freedom manifest, this individual manifestation is never private; it coinheres with communal (sacramental-symbolic-public) manifestation. A brief orienting map could be helpful before we embark on this discussion. The historical narrative of penance’s development is the first division of his lectures, accompanied in the second division by dogmatic lectures. I treat the former division in “Historical Lectures,” the latter in “Dogmatic Lectures,” followed by “Systematic Contribution: Penitential Holism,” on the largely ecclesiological contribution of Rahner’s penance lectures.

Historical Lectures At the opening of chapter 7 of the historical lectures, Rahner reflects on the importance of historical study for dogmatic knowledge.48 He indicates that it is useful through historical study to clarify what is regarded with certainty “de iure divino” [according to the divine law] as belonging to the sacrament of penance and what therefore also can never have 47. Although I recognize Rahner’s penance lectures developed over time in at least four different versions, in what follows I read their content synchronically, as now published in volume 6 of the Sämtliche Werke. On synchronic vs. diachronic reading, see Sattler, “Editionsbericht,” in SW 6/1:xxvi–xxvii. 48. Rahner, De paenitentia I, Dogmatische Vorlesungen zum Bußsakrament [De paenitentia I, Dogmatic Lectures on the Sacrament of Penance], Sämtliche Werke 6, part 1, ed. Dorothea Sattler (Freiburg: Herder, 2007), 79–87, emphasis in original, hereafter DP1; translations are mine.

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been completely missing in the whole church [Gesamtkirche], and conversely, what in our present form of penance cannot be demonstrated with certainty as such and what therefore must have been present only but already in the early church, when this can be demonstrated a posteriori from the sources.49

Rahner suggests that penance has certain characteristics that carry throughout history, but these must be sifted out from the genuine historical differences between twentieth-century and early-church theologies and practices of penance. Rahner gives concrete examples of demonstrable historical facts that twentieth-century apologetics and dogmatics disregard when describing the “essence” of the sacrament. Serious sin was defined more narrowly and viewed as rarer in the early church compared with the modern church.50 The possibility of extrasacramental (außersakramentale) forgiveness for sins was more widely recognized and practiced in the early church than the modern church.51 Sacramental remission of serious sin was not always specifically required for reception of the Eucharist.52 Likewise, the church’s thinking with regard to its duty to give absolution for sins in each individual case, the form of absolution, and the use of private or public penance demonstrably changed.53 Rahner’s interest here is not pedantic or historicist. Instead, he wishes to remind Catholics that they should not wonder at the historical variability of the church’s life, and thus, however uncanny this variability must be, they should consider it part of their ecclesial home.54 The historical narrative is told in five passes, moving from biblical texts related to what will later evolve into the sacrament of penance to the initial institution of penance in the second century; third century developments, including the first heresies about penance, incipient “mass Christianity (Massenchristentum),” and lapses from the faith, all of which necessitated a “more detailed treatment of ecclesial penance”; the 49. DP1:79. 50. DP1:80–81. 51. DP1:81. 52. DP1:82. 53. DP1:83–86. 54. DP1:84, 86.

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“high patristic” age of the fourth and fifth centuries, during which the teachings and practices of the second and third centuries blossom; and a wide-ranging overview of the history of penitential theology and practice from the late patristic through the early medieval period.55 While Rahner equivocates somewhat as to whether this entire period can be filed under a single heading, he insists that all in all, this is the period during which the patristic practice of public penance disintegrates and is replaced by the private penance that became customary thereafter.56 He stops his historical narrative in the twelfth century because during this century, “Scholastic systematic theology on the sacrament of penance begins, which, since it received its sanction through the church’s Magisterium especially in the Council of Trent, is ours [today] in all its essential features.”57 Further consideration of penance is left to the dogmatic lectures. Several features of the lectures prove essential in their relation to our search for the sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom. Rahner’s treatment of biblical material corroborates in many ways my claim that for Rahner, freedom is not a purely individual affair.58 The focus throughout is scriptural accounts of the holy community God founds, first with Israel, then with the church, and how sin offends against this holy community.59 Rahner emphasizes the power to forgive that comes with the church’s holiness, as this power is laid down by Christ (Mt 16:19, 18:18; Jn 20:21–23).60 Notable is Rahner’s presentation of the church as the “historical appearance of the Holy Spirit of Christ”: the church may bind and loose sins as Jesus charges it to do, because the church makes manifest the freedom of Christ’s Spirit.61 Many of these biblical ideas continue in the practice and theology of the second century. Penance developed as a juridical-ecclesiastical act 55. DP1:19–77, 79–113, 115–81 (quoted material from 13), 183–240, 241–302. 56. DP1:13. 57. DP1:13–14. 58. See DP1:68, where Rahner argues that in the New Testament, setting oneself against the church in sin is not a “private matter (Privatangelegenheit).” 59. E.g., DP1:20, 28, 31, 44. 60. DP1:44–66. 61. DP1:28.

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handled publicly, not in the modern sense of a sacrament transpiring in the “forum externum” of the official church, but in the sense of sacramental “visibility.”62 Lest the reference to “public” be misunderstood, Rahner clarifies that “a ‘private’ sacramental penance beside this . . . ‘public’ penance for this time [second century] not only is not detectable, but also is not even possible.”63 What is possible, though, is the excommunication of an individual from the church as part of a public process that closes with reconciliation with the church.64 Remarkable for our particular reading of the historical lectures are Rahner’s findings regarding these twin themes of private penance and reconciliation with the church. This pairing of the individual and the ecclesial is, as I shall argue, essential to the systematic contribution of Rahner’s penance lectures. Treatments of both Cyprian and Origen discourage what Rahner deems a false search after private penance in the third century.65 Though Cyprian’s writings evidence variability in the practice of penance, it is always considered one penance, with no regard for the modern distinction between public and private.66 And while it seems that Origen holds out the possibility for private forgiveness of sins by a priest without public excommunication, Rahner is not persuaded that a private form of the sacrament is really provable from Origen’s writings.67 Reconciliation with the church or pax cum ecclesia, on the other hand, clearly is understood by third-century Christians to be “an inner moment of the sacrament itself.”68 Two distinct aspects of the sacrament of penance characterize the fourth and fifth centuries: its normal public form, which remains largely unchanged from the third century, and special public forms that open the question of whether circumstances forced the emergence of a new, 62. DP1:111. 63. DP1:111, emphasis original. 64. DP1:110. 65. See also DP1:178–79. 66. DP1:153–55. See Rahner, “The Penitential Teaching of Cyprian of Carthage,” in TI 15:177–78, 215–18, 220–22. 67. DP1:167. See Rahner, “Penitential Teaching of Origen,” in TI 15:325–28. 68. DP1:178.

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private form.69 Chapter 20 of the historical lectures, which treats the latter aspect, is crucial.70 Rahner marshals four types of historical evidence that might seem to point to limit-cases of penance that establish incipient private forms: penance of the dying, reconciliation of heretics, clerical penance, and “correptio secreta,” a nonpublic censure for sins attested in Augustine’s writings. Each of these cases involves the suspension of some element of penitential practice: initial excommunication (heretics), time in the order of penitents (clergy), or reconciliation with the church (the dying). But even after weighing this evidence, Rahner concludes, “The proper form for administering the sacrament of penance in the ancient church is—and indeed this alone—‘public’ penance. Beside it stands no established form of private penance set up along the same lines.”71 While in certain cases in retrospect it may seem as if ancient church practice is hardly distinguishable from the modern variety, another story follows from attention to the historical record without imposing modern categories. Thus Rahner prepares to tell how private penance arose in the early Middle Ages. By the end of the seventh century, special forms of public penance and new forms of private penance emerged (for example, in some Spanish churches, where it functioned as a bypass for public penance), and so began “a new chapter in the history of penance.”72 Surely the public form of penance lived on in the sixth and seventh centuries, even adding new forms of monastic (or quasi-monastic) and cloistered lives of “conversion.”73 The decisive innovation in the history of penance comes in the penitential handbooks of the Celtic and English churches, which introduce repeatable penance for minor sins that does not carry the lifelong consequences of the public, one-time form of penance from the early church.74 Penitential writings from the schools of Columban and Theodore of Canterbury center the process of penance 69. DP1:188. 70. DP1:209–25. 71. DP1:225. 72. DP1:252. 73. For these new forms, see DP1:267–74. 74. DP1:278–79.

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on priestly intercession for the forgiveness of the penitent’s sins.75 This leads to an omission of penance’s publicness, including official excommunication, and thus obscures the reconciliation with the church that was so evident in the earlier form.76 This new system of private penance spreads to the European continent through the missionary efforts of Columban and others and, despite challenges during the Carolingian reforms of the early ninth century, comes in subsequent centuries to predominate in penitential practice.77 Rahner concludes the historical lectures with a sense of loss and gain. With private penance’s rise in prominence, the “ecclesiological side of sin” withdraws from Christians’ everyday consciousness. They lose sight of sin as an “injustice against the holy church as Christ’s body,” and of how sacramental forgiveness of sin involves reconciliation with the church.78 Also diminished is recognition of the necessity of repentance from sins after baptism and a dwindling appreciation for the liturgical form of the mystery of forgiveness.79 He has a sense of gain, though, in that inquiry into the history of penance provides an opportunity: it affords “deeper theological knowledge of the essence of this mystery of Christ” and, by implication, an opportunity to retrieve what has been lost.80

Dogmatic Lectures That the dogmatic lectures take up in earnest the charge of recuperating lost consciousness with respect to penance (and, consequently, freedom) becomes evident very early, with this profoundly holistic statement: “Christian life as a whole is a life of penance, and only some of the actions of this penitential life under certain conditions enter into intimate union with the activity of the social, visible, sanctifying church, 75. DP1:282. 76. DP1:282. 77. DP1:284–85, 287–88, 294. 78. DP1:302. 79. DP1:302. 80. DP1:302.

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that constitutes the sacrament.”81 Lest this sound as if Rahner means to displace the official sacrament, we must understand him properly. He responds to the progressive narrowing of the sacrament’s circle of significance since the twelfth century. He wishes to retrieve the embeddedness of the sacrament in the whole of Christian life, the whole of the Christian ethos, the whole ambit of Christian freedom, which is ineluctably an ecclesial reality. While the dogmatic lectures follow a form largely prescribed by neo-Scholastic methodology (thesis; state of the question; objections from opponents; evidence from the Magisterium, scripture, the fathers, and medieval theologians; and ratio theologica, or a short theological commentary), they attempt and in part carry through this retrieval. The dogmatic lectures’ outline is threefold. Part 1 considers penance as a personal act of the human person.82 Part 2 discusses penance as a sacramental act of the church.83 Part 3 examines the effects of the sacrament of penance.84 As with the historical lectures, I shall briefly expound these parts, centering my exposition on points germane to freedom. Part 1 defends four theses, regarding repentance as a virtue; the necessity of repentance for salvation; contritio caritate perfecta (perfect repentance) as reconciling the human person with God; and attritio (imperfect repentance) as a useful, honest, and salutary act, if one imperfect for full justification. These are traditional topoi in neo-Scholastic treatises on penance, and Rahner treats them as such. But in at least two places in part 1, Rahner provides markers to indicate that he is thinking beyond standard categories. As he presents the status quaestionis for thesis 1, he reminds his hearers not to forget amid the analysis of repentance (i.e., breaking it down into its constituent parts) that it is “the coincidence of 81. Rahner, De Paenitentia Tractatus Dogmaticus [Dogmatic Treatise on Penance], in De Paenitentia II, Dogmatische Vorlesungen zum Bußsakrament, Sämtliche Werke 6, part 2, ed. Dorothea Sattler (Freiburg: Herder, 2009), 16 (hereafter DP2). Rahner’s dogmatic lectures were composed and delivered in Latin. Sattler has provided a German translation in a parallel column with the Latin text. My translations are from the Latin but aided (sometimes significantly) by Sattler’s German translations. 82. DP2:3–223. 83. DP2:224–583. 84. DP2:586–682.

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a threefold mystery: the (natural) mystery of created freedom in general, the mystery of a creature that this freedom is abused against the Creator, and the mystery of the change of such a culpable decision, which concerns the free, total, and definitive stand of the person over against himself.”85 The injunction “not to forget” this threefold mystery is telling, since it implies that standard modes of analysis forget precisely this. The implication is that this forgetting leads to a lack of the kind of holism Rahner deems constitutive of early church theology and practice. A similar intervention occurs during Rahner’s explanation of repentance as a supernatural act.86 Amid many suggestions of how theology can learn lessons from history in composing the treatise on penance as a virtue, Rahner states, “One must naturally investigate the . . . question of repentance (especially attritio) in conjunction with intellectual and spiritual (geistigen und geistlichen) life so that the atomizing of acts (Atomisierung der Akte) . . . can be better overcome.”87 This statement is followed by a list in which Rahner suggests dimensions of human experience that one could take into account for a less “atomistic” view. Near the end of this list Rahner advocates applying a “fully worked out (ausgearbeite) ontology of freedom.” This would include a carefully rendered relationship between freedom as “original (ursprünglich—in the sense of Grund that we discussed in chapter 1)” and as materially lived (“objectified”). Also it would have to clarify the “unity and multiplicity of the act(s) of freedom of the person in the totality of a realization of existence (in der Ganzheit des einen Daseinsvollzuges).”88 In this way theology would consider, and not only as “marginal questions (Randfragen),” issues upon which the Scholastic manuals (Schulbüchern) remain largely silent.89 This would lead not only to a better understanding of contrition, but to a more adequate placement of penance within the whole of Christian theology and life. The detailed plan of part 2 has three main sections, pertaining to 85. DP2:22. 86. DP2:68–71. This interjection, like many others in the lectures, appears in German only. 87. DP2:70. 88. DP2:71. 89. DP2:71.

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the existence, range, and essence of penance—that is, how it is distinct from baptism, what its extent is, and who administers the sacrament (a priest) through a certain matter (acts of the penitent) and in a certain form (priestly absolution).90 Here Rahner is less daring in his suggestions regarding method and content, except for in a few excurses, one of which I will leave until “Systematic Contribution: Penitential Holism” to interpret.91 He also takes a strong stand in theses 11–14 on the side of Thomas Aquinas, who taught that the acts of the penitent are the “matter” of penance.92 This idea will receive extended commentary nearer to this chapter’s end. One passage is especially worth noting for how it contests a dominant theological paradigm of Rahner’s day. It occurs in the ratio theologica section where he exposits a thesis regarding the requirement to confess all post-baptismal sins. Rahner reminds his audience that guilt is “a deeper phenomenon than appears [in] the common model of abstract moral theology.”93 Guilt concerns the deepest stratum of the person. With this awareness, theologians could see repentance anew: “Repentance is . . . a very mysterious process of ‘disowning oneself,’ a ‘disavowal’ of what one is . . . in one’s final personal depths, so much so that it is not easy to say how this is even possible.”94 This in turn reveals freedom’s true meaning, which comes out in the phenomenon of “not being able to repent (Nichtbereuenkönnens).” The one who is unable to repent shows the seriousness of freedom: it is not “always being able to be otherwise.”95 As I have said from the start of this book, freedom is not about arbitrary choice, but permanent decision. This means that conversion is difficult and must be sustained by divine mercy and aided by the historically perceptible sign of God’s mercy, the church. Part 3, the briefest portion of the dogmatic lectures, covers much of 90. DP2:237. 91. There are other fascinating passages that do not quite fit our project here. For example, under thesis 10, Rahner presents rich reflections on penance as a “signum rememorativum” of the Passion of Christ, which merits close attention; DP2:432–36. 92. DP2:438–555. 93. DP2:389. 94. DP2:389. 95. DP2:389.

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the same ground as the discussions that precede it, but from a different angle: the effects of penance. The most substantial sections are the opening two, which cover the topics of reconciliation with the church and sacramental grace, respectively.96 The rest of the lectures develop positions on varied traditional topics regarding penance’s effects: remission of venial sins, the nonreturn of remitted sins, the elimination of temporal punishment as an effect of penance, and the revival of personal merits that were destroyed by sin.97 Rahner treats reconciliation with the church as a true effect of sacrament as such (effectus verus sacramenti ut talis), and in fact as res et sacramentum, “the mediating effect of the sacrament between the sacramental sign (‘sacramentum’) and [its] ultimate effect . . . (‘res sacramenti’) (intermedius effectus sacramenti inter sacramenti signum (‘sacramentum’) et effectum ultimum . . . (‘res sacramenti’).”98 This fundamental effect logically precedes the other effects.99 Rahner supports this point by arguing from the “new condition of the sinner,” formerly (after baptism) a holy member of the holy church, “over against the church.”100 This condition is also one of enmity against Christ and the church as Bride and Body of Christ. Rahner defines this enmity in terms resonant with our project of a theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest: each serious sin separates the sinner from the church, “not insofar as she is only a perceptible community, but insofar as this perceptibility really must be a manifestation and witness of the sanctifying influence that the church effectively exercises.”101 Serious sin disrupts the work of the church as symbol, as making manifest God’s free decision to save. It follows that reconciliation with the church restores this symbolic work. The section on sacramental grace as an effect of penance relies entirely on Thomas Aquinas’s theology of sacramental grace. Rahner finds Thomas’s sacramental theology advantageous because of its emphasis 96. DP2:587–626, 627–33. 97. DP2:633–36, 636–38, 638–58, 659–82. 98. DP2:609, 592. 99. DP2:586. 100. DP2:604. 101. DP2:605–6.

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on human cooperation in the process of salvation that the sacraments effect.102 Human freedom is ineluctably involved in the sacramental sign. For penance, this is plainly true. Rahner observes, “Sacramental grace . . . is the grace given so that the purpose of the sacrament may be obtained. The true purpose of the sacrament of penance is the full annihilation of sin, spiritual health of mind. . . . It is patent that such an effect of this sacramental grace depends greatly on the subjective cooperation of the human person, who, consenting to this grace, gradually acquires the whole effect of this sacrament.”103 We shall return later in this chapter to Rahner’s foregrounding of human acts in the sacrament of penance, when we shall consider the “matter” of penance in Thomas, in parallel with the concupiscent freedom discussed in chapter 1. But for now we must close this overview of the lectures on penance with a discussion on their systematic contribution.

Systematic Contribution: Penitential Holism The general introduction of De Paenitentia includes an extended discussion of the “systematic place” of the sacrament of penance. While these lectures were in large measure a product of Rahner’s required teaching duties, I deem them an important part of his corpus that makes a serious contribution to his systematic theology, in particular with regard to freedom. I call this contribution “penitential holism.” On the first page of the lectures Rahner makes sweeping claims about penance’s place in theology and Christian life: “The sacrament of penance is an event in which God and the human person meet each other: the human person as sinner, God as redeeming and sanctifying love. Such an encounter . . . belongs to the innermost essence of Christianity in general.” And he adds, “In [penance] occurs again and again the existence of Christ as the incarnate reign of the redeeming and sanctifying love of God in a single instance of an individual human life and its metanoia. As so often happens in theology, so also it happens here: an 102. DP2:631–32. 103. DP2:632–33.

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individual treatise recapitulates the whole of theology.”104 To translate these words ever so slightly into my lexicon: penance is central to theology and Christian life because it concerns the engagement of human and divine freedom and the making manifest of this encounter of freedom in a symbol. This symbol, in turn, expresses the whole of the catholic ethos. Rahner makes these claims against the tide of the theology of penance since the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1150), which for good, though ultimately ineffective, reasons filed all seven sacraments under one viewpoint.105 Eventually the focus of Scholastic theology on the commonality of the sacraments as rites instituted by Christ lost the sense of their being signs “under which the ‘yes’ of the human person to God is given historical and social visibility.”106 Scholastic theology up through the middle of the twentieth century lacks a proper account of the sacraments as “events of the living out of Christian life (Ereignisse des christlichen Lebensvollzugs),” with the consequent danger that teaching on the sacraments becomes “unexistentiell” and theological morality “unsacramental.”107 In effect, Rahner argues that the theology of penance must be revised with the question of freedom at its center. Thus Rahner proposes a twofold systematic placement of the sacrament of penance, within the treatises on the church and theological anthropology. The ecclesiological placement makes sense if one understands the church, as Rahner believes one should, as the “total sacrament (Gesamtsakrament)” (later we shall see him call the church “primal sacrament [Ursakrament]” and “basic sacrament [Grundsakrament]”), whose sacramental reality is made up by the seven sacraments. In turn, one should view these seven sacraments as events “in which the human person encounters in concrete and decisive moments in her individual life the abiding salvific will of God in Jesus Christ, perceptible in the 104. DP1:3. 105. DP1:4–5. 106. DP1:5. 107. DP1:5. “Existentiell” means, basically, something lived-out or lived-through (i.e., put into existence in a certain situation). This spelling is distinct from “existential,” which means a condition for living that may or may not be actualized at any given point. “Existentiell” in effect designates the lived actualization of an “existential.” The designation “unexistentiell” suggests a lifeless ideal.

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church.”108 Penance exemplifies this perceptibility of God’s saving freedom made manifest in the church. The anthropological placement complements the ecclesiological because the “saved person” is “never only the member of a community, not even the most sublime community of the church.”109 Instead, in the sacraments the individual acts in relation to God and the individual’s personal acts must be properly treated by theology. Theological anthropology is the right locus for such treatment. Rahner advises in particular, in language reminiscent of our discussion of him and Schelling, that a theology of the sacraments in general and penance in particular must relate the sacraments to the “Grundakte of Christian life.”110 These acts out of one’s personal ground, which Rahner identifies as faith, hope, and love, must be examined so theology may best articulate penance’s connection to the whole of Christianity. Rahner augments this advice with an outline for a theological anthropology aimed at describing the Christian life in such a way that all seven sacraments find an appropriate location. He locates penance under the heading “The Struggle of the Christian with Sin.”111 This topos leaves requisite space for the theologian to consider penance within the individual’s living out of Christian existence, evading the wooden categories of and strict division of labor between sacramental and moral theology. In this way Rahner advocates a new formal structure for theologizing about penance. This is a contribution in itself. But the pivotal text, if an unlikely one, for Rahner’s systematic contribution in the penance lectures is a long excursus he places under thesis 6 in part 2 of the dogmatic lectures: “The power of the keys [of Peter] concerns itself directly with sins.”112 The excursus considers patristic, early and high Scholastic, Thomistic, and Scotistic positions on the sacramental efficaciousness of penance. Even in all its variety, the excursus has two clear centers of interest: the patristic idea of penance as reconcil108. DP1:5. 109. DP1:5. 110. DP1:6. 111. DP1:7. 112. DP2:264 (thesis), 267–315 (excursus).

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iation with the church and Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on “poenitentia interior” and the outward acts of the penitent as “materia” of the sacrament of penance.113 Though the excursus is offered as a set of historical side comments, its systematic intent is obvious. Rahner raises the patristic notion of reconciliation with the church as a corrective for many ills of modern penitential theology (misalignment with scripture, formalism regarding grace, detachment from the doctrine of the church, lack of recognition of the ecclesiological aspect of sin). He recommends the concepts from Thomas’s theology of justification as a way to grasp what modern penitential theology (and even patristic theology) seems unable to grasp: the “unity of the subjective act of the human person and the act of God and the church in the sacrament of penance.”114 Rahner suggests that the patristic and Thomistic ideas could be seen together, yielding a holistic view of the sacramental, reconciliatory, personal, ecclesial, and divine power of penance.115 Rahner implements his own plan somewhat in part 3 of the dogmatic lectures, especially with the substantial section on reconciliation with the church as “res et sacramentum” of penance, but he stops short of fulfilling it. I take Rahner’s suggestion in “Reconciliation with the Church” and “The Matter of Penance.” I consult Rahner on reconciliation with the church—the ecclesiological dimension of penance—and on Thomas Aquinas and the “matter” of penance—the anthropological dimension of penance—taking them together to garner a holistic view of penance. All the while I aim to detail Rahner’s systematic contribution regarding penitential freedom.

R ec o n c i li ati on w ith the Church Reconciliation with the church is not, according to Rahner, just one of penance’s effects, but it consolidates these effects. Likewise it is a proving ground for the systematic contribution of Rahner’s penance lectures. I aim to show how his interest in this theme extends beyond his postwar 113. DP2:269–71, 300–304. 114. DP2:271, 311. 115. DP2:315.

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teaching on the sacraments. It features prominently in his ecclesiology before, during, and after the Second Vatican Council. This doctrine helps Rahner to specify the ecclesiological significance of penance and consequently the social-communal contours of human freedom. I shall defend these claims in “Reconciliation with the Ursakrament” and “Postconciliar Ecclesiology.” With “The Church and Mercy,” I move beyond the historical-exegetical tenor of much of this chapter and sketch, with reference to Pope Francis, how Rahner’s retrieval of penance as reconciliation with the church can pose an ecclesiological challenge, recalling the church to the mission of mercy implied by its constitutive ethos.

Reconciliation with the Ursakrament Already in a 1940 review of church historian Bernhard Poschmann’s book Paenitentia Secunda (1940), thus five years prior to beginning his teaching on penance, Rahner shows interest in the theme of reconciliation with the church.116 He notes that Poschmann takes up the opinion of the Spanish Carmelite theologian Bartholomew F. Xiberta that “pax cum ecclesia is ‘res et sacramentum’ of the divine forgiveness and conferral of grace” in the sacrament of penance.117 Rahner aligns Poschmann’s formulation “peace with the church” with Xiberta’s (at that time) controversial teaching on reconciliation with the church as an essential dimension of the sacrament of penance. His interest in Poschmann and Xiberta and this idea of peace/reconciliation with the church will continue for decades, even after Vatican II. In the years leading up to Vatican II, Rahner conjoined his rediscovery of the idea of reconciliation with the church with a sacramental 116. Rahner, “Rezension: Bernhard Poschmann: Paenitentia secunda,” in SW 11:569–70; Bernhard Poschmann, Paenitentia secunda: Die kirchliche Buße im ältesten Christentum bis Cyprian und Origenes [Paenitentia secunda (Second Penance): Ecclesial Penance in the Oldest Christianity up to Cyprian and Origen] (Bonn: Hanstein Verlag, 1940). 117. Rahner, “Rezension: Poschmann,” SW 11:570. David W. Fagerberg helpfully describes res et sacramentum as the “human dimension” of the sacrament, which lies between the sacramental sign (in private penance, for instance, the words and gestures shared between a penitent and a priest in confession) and the divine action (conferral of grace); see Fagerberg, “Rahner on the Importance of Reconciliation in the Sacrament of Penance,” Pro Ecclesia 5, no. 3 (1996): 349–51.

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ecclesiology he had developed throughout the 1950s in conversation with his brother Hugo, Otto Semmelroth, and others.118 Most pertinent here is a 1958 chapter Rahner contributed to a Festschrift for the Felizian Rauch publishing house in Innsbruck, aptly titled, “Der Ekklesiologische Aspekt der Sakramente (The Ecclesiological Aspect of the Sacraments).”119 The title alone is significant, but even more so when paired with Rahner’s invocation of the church as “primal sacrament (Ursakrament)” and his explanation of the ecclesiological meaning of penance specifically. Rahner opens by recognizing that theologians and faithful alike are unclear on the relationship between the church and the sacraments. “Each knows,” he discerns, “that the church has the authority to administer the sacraments, since the sacraments are established by Christ and their management has been entrusted by their founder to the church.”120 The problem with this understanding is that it reduces the relationship between the sacraments and the church to the relationship between supplies and a supplier (Verwalterin), thus depicting the church as merely “the supplier of the means of grace toward individual salvation.”121 In order to clarify and to deepen the faithful’s understanding of the relationship between the church and the sacraments, Rahner proposes thinking of the church as the “church of the sacraments,” where the interpretation of the essence of the church proceeds from the sacraments, and of the individual sacraments as instances of the self-realization of the church.122 In effect, Rahner recommends articulating this relationship using the conceptual tools he was developing at this time in his theology 118. See especially Otto Semmelroth, SJ, Die Kirche als Ursakrament [The Church as Primal Sacrament] (Frankfurt: Knecht Verlag, 1953), as well as Hugo Rahner, Maria und die Kirche: Zehn Kapitel über das geistliche Leben [Mary and the Church: Ten Chapters on the Spiritual Life] (Innsbruck: Marianischer Verlag, 1951). 119. Karl Rahner, “Der ekklesiologische Aspekt der Sakramente,” in SW 18:351–75. There was a slightly earlier (1955) version of this chapter, but given the title of the 1958 piece, it is more germane to my argument. See Rahner, “Kirche und Sakramente: Zur theologischen Grundlegung einer Kirchen- und Sakramentenfrömmigkeit” [Church and Sacrament: On Laying the Theological Foundation for Ecclesial and Sacramental Piety], Geist und Leben 28, no. 6 (1955): 434–53. 120. Rahner, “Ekklesiologische Aspekt,” SW 18:351. 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid.

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of the symbol. The church and the sacraments are symbolic realities: the church self-realizes in the sacraments, which in turn constitute the essence of the church. To apprehend this symbolic reading of the relationship adequately, one must clarify one’s conception of the church. While acknowledging the indispensability of the institutional-hierarchical-organizationaldispensary dimension of the church, Rahner deems more essential the designation “people of God,” which holds a wider sway that can incorporate the church’s institutional, juridical, or dispensary profiles.123 The people of God are formed by the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, who died sacrificially on the cross and unified God and creature in the hypostatic union, thus effecting the eschatological victory of God’s mercy.124 Thus one can say that this people of God or “the church is now the instantiation (Fortsetzung), the present abiding of this eschatological real presence of the victorious and definitive divine will of grace established in the world in Christ.”125 Rahner continues, “As such an abiding of Christ in the world the church is actually the primal sacrament (Ursakrament), the point of origin (Ursprungspunkt) of the sacraments in the common sense of the word.”126 This does not mean that the church is a logical origin of the sacraments from which these seven signs of God’s sanctifying activity can be deduced, as neo-Scholastic method tended to prescribe.127 It means that the living sign of the church self-realizes in other signs. This accords with Rahner’s theology of the symbol, with its central thesis that beings are multiple and self-express by means of other beings. It also helps to solve the systematic difficulties Rahner identified in his penance lectures regarding the relationship between personal and ecclesial action in the sacraments. Furthermore, this teaching on the Ursakrament lets us say, à la Schelling, that the sacraments of the church do not comprise a system, but a life. 123. Ibid., 18:352. 124. Ibid., 18:352–53. 125. Ibid., 18:355. 126. Ibid., 18:355, and later on the same page: “Seen proceeding from Christ, the church is the announcement of the presence of his grace, and seen from the standpoint of the sacraments, the primal sacrament.” 127. Ibid., 18:358.

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Penance’s ecclesiological aspect hinges on the interpretation of Matthew 16 and 18, two classic scriptural texts (along with John 20) about the church’s power of “binding” and “loosing” sins.128 These texts concern the “manner of the conflict between the holy community of Jesus with a sinning member of this community.”129 The church’s duty, as a living sign of God’s grace, is to reject the sinner’s sin while releasing the sinner from this sin. With regard to “binding,” the church “must react against [serious] sins, through which the member of the community not only positions himself in contradiction to God, but also to the church of Jesus, where this (in its members and their holiness) must be the primal-sacramental (ursakramentale) sign of the victorious grace of God.”130 And with regard to “loosing,” the church lifts the “ban on earth and in heaven” by restoring the sinner to “peace with the church (Kir­ chen­frieden).” This takes care of the binding on earth. God responds in kind in heaven: “God considers [the sinner] really again in the full sense a member of that community, which the Son has gathered on earth for heaven as those who belong to him, who he has gathered as the beloved of his Father, who will inherit the Kingdom.”131 Rahner summarizes his drift: “Sin itself has an ecclesiological aspect. Reconciliation through the church is also reconciliation with the church. The pax cum Ecclesia is ‘sacramentum et res’ of reconciliation with God.”132 This is all relatively clear: the ecclesiological aspect of penance relates to the church’s Christ-given mission of binding and loosing sins, which in turn relates to the patristic notion of reconciliation with the church that Rahner began to retrieve in the penance lectures. But there is more. Rahner observes that the ecclesiological aspect of penance “deepens and widens” if one thinks of “the Thomistic teaching . . . that the acts of the repentant, confessing penitent before the church belong to the matter of the sacramental sign.”133 The sinner constitutes 128. Ibid., 18:367. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 18:367–68. 132. Ibid., 18:368. 133. Ibid.

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the self-realization of the church as the “repentant church of the sinner, who always wets the feet of Christ with her tears and hears him say, ‘I also will not condemn you.’ ”134 We shall treat in the “The Matter of Penance” this Thomistic teaching regarding the matter of penance, so I shall leave these words without comment. Still, it was worth noting Rahner’s pairing of this topic with reconciliation with the church. The upshot of Rahner’s presentation of the ecclesiological aspect of penance is this: in penance the church “self-realizes as the abiding sacrament of the mercy of God in the world.”135 We shall unpack this idea in “A Staggering Liturgy . . . a Shattering Truth.” For now we must see how Rahner incorporates penance as reconciliation with the church into his ecclesiology after Vatican II.

Postconciliar Ecclesiology It is no secret that Rahner, along with other so-called progressive theologians, believed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council that this ecclesial event posed a serious challenge to prior official theology. While the Council circumspectly avoided theological and doctrinal novelties, it likewise eschewed merely restating and officially codifying the neo-Scholastic theology that came to dominate Roman theology since Pope Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879).136 The Council raised themes untreated by official theology, which were thus left out of the catechisms that formed everyday awareness and practice of the faith. “In this respect,” Rahner observes, “the Council provides theology with significant tasks and topics, and it implies the obligation of extending and—consequently—restructuring to a considerable degree the whole thematic compass of theology in many areas and aspects.”137 Since, to Rahner’s mind, Vatican II was “a Council in which all the themes discussed were 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Rahner, “The Second Vatican Council’s Challenge to Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 9, Writings of 1965–67 [TI 9], trans. Graham Harrison (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 3–4. 137. Ibid., 4–5.

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ecclesiological ones; which concentrated upon ecclesiology as no previous Council had ever done,” it stands to reason that the extending and restructuring would center on ecclesiology.138 When Rahner seeks a first example to illustrate Vatican II’s challenge to theology, he locates one related to penance. It appears in Lumen gentium 11: “Those who approach the sacrament of penance obtain pardon from the mercy of God for the offense committed against him and are at the same time reconciled with the church, which they have wounded by their sins, and which by charity, example, and prayer seeks for their conversion.”139 He observes, “In no textbook or dogma or catechism of the recent past can one find any reference to the fact that the sacrament of penance is itself—among other things—a ‘reconciliation with the Church’; and although this truth is in accordance with the plainest original tradition, it plays no part in the lives of contemporary Christians.”140 Rahner moves quickly away from this point, treating it as a mere example of the Council’s breaking of neo-Scholastic monolithism. But another article, “Penance as an Additional Act of Reconciliation with the Church” (1967), states matters more enthusiastically.141 Rahner deems it an “astonishing enactment” that the Council declares, “in the sacrament of penance an additional reconciliation of the sinner takes place with the Church herself.”142 In doing so, the Council agrees with Xiberta’s much-maligned thesis regarding reconciliation with the church in the sacrament of penance. Incidentally, prior to the Council a host of theologians who would become leading lights for the Council took Xiberta’s side: Henri de Lubac, Edward Schillebeeckx, Joseph Ratzinger, and Yves Congar among them.143 Even so, this thesis was otherwise 138. Rahner, “The New Image of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, Writings of 1965–1967 [TI 10], trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1973), TI4. 139. Vatican Council II, Lumen gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, November 24, 1964, no. 11; Vatican Council II, Presbyterorum Ordinis: Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, December 7, 1965, no. 5. 140. Rahner, “Second Vatican Council’s Challenge,” 4, emphasis in original. 141. Rahner, “Penance as an Additional Act of Reconciliation with the Church” in TI 10:125–49. 142. TI 10:125. 143. TI 10:128.

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unfashionable until its adoption in Lumen Gentium 11 and Presbyterorum Ordinis 5. There are two remarkable things about this adoption, Rahner goes on to argue: “It teaches that all sins have an ecclesiological aspect, all ‘wound’ the Church,” and “the whole Church participates in [the] exercise” of forgiving sins through penance.144 Rahner calls the reader’s attention to the context in which reconciliation with the church was mentioned in Lumen Gentium (this instance is formative for the one in Presbyterorum Ordinis). It occurs as the document speaks of “the ‘priestly’ functions of the people of God.”145 Rahner reports that the authors of the text decided early on to include all the sacraments in this discussion of priestly functions. It was only natural, in fact, “impossible,” to do this without recurring to “reconciliation with the church.”146 Rahner notes that the Council documents leave open many theological questions (especially regarding the distinction between forgiveness of venial and mortal sins), but all in all the contribution is clear: the documents refocus the relationship between penance and the church as the “holy people of God, as a covenant of grace, as the Body of Christ vivified by the spirit,” rather than as a juridical dispensary of occasional forgiveness to penitent individuals.147 Rahner adds to his exegesis of Lumen gentium 11 a précis of the historical narrative about how reconciliation with the church remained a theological mainstay all the way up to Trent but was then gradually forgotten.148 He ends in dramatic fashion: “Because the general conception of the Church as a means of grace receded into the background of man’s conscious thought the ecclesiological aspect of the sacrament of penance could no longer remain clear to him either. Yet it belongs so essentially to the dogmatic tradition taken as a whole, and even to the teaching of scripture itself that theology has the duty explicitly to advert to it once more. In the Council this has been achieved.”149 144. TI 10:130–32, emphasis in the original. 145. TI 10:129. 146. TI 10:129. 147. TI 10:131. 148. TI 10:132–47. 149. TI 10:148–49.

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A very late (1982) lecture of Rahner’s reflected on some of Vatican II’s invitations for future dogmatic thinking. He concluded it with a series of questions regarding tasks for systematic theology. Among them is this one: “What is implied by the fact that, contrary to the opinion of almost all theologians after the Council of Trent, the Council sees in the sacrament of penance a reconciliation with the Church as well?”150 It seems that Rahner offered a preliminary answer to this question eight years earlier, in a postconciliar meditation on penance in the popular book Die siebenfältige Gabe (The Sevenfold Gift): The grace of God that offers all holiness and forgiveness has . . . its history in space and time, and this concrete, spatio-temporal, forgiving word of God toward humanity has its highest point and has found final irrevocability in Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen one, in him who lovingly entered into solidarity with sinners and for us in the final act of his faith, hope, and love amid the darkness of his death, in which he experienced the darkness of our guilt, accepted for us God’s word of forgiveness. This divine word of forgiveness in Jesus Christ, in whom the absoluteness of this word has become both historical and irrevocable, remains at present in the community of those who believe in this forgiveness, in the church. The church is the basic sacrament (Grundsakrament) of this word of God’s forgiveness.151

The reference to the church as “Grundsakrament” is crucial. The church as Grundsakrament is the basic ecclesiological position of Vatican II. Rahner glosses this idea with reference to penance, reminding his readers that the divine gift mediated by the church as Grundsakrament is a gift of forgiveness. The Council’s decision to go against the post-Tridentine tide and affirm penance as an additional act of reconciliation with the church means that the church is now seen as freedom made manifest. This means concretely that God’s free, holy word of forgiveness in Jesus Christ is made manifest in the believing community of people forgiven 150. Rahner, “Forgotten Dogmatic Initiatives of the Second Vatican Council,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 22, Humane Society and the Church of Tomorrow [TI 22], trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 105. 151. SW 18:314, my translation. Compare the existing ET: Rahner, Meditations on the Sacraments, 52.

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by this word, who are reconciled to each other through this forgiving word and thus are rendered a holy people.

The Church and Mercy Let us bring these insights forward, further into the postconciliar period than Rahner himself lived. In doing so we unfold Rahner’s suggestion that through penance the church self-expresses as a sacrament of God’s mercy. We begin with Sattler’s portrayal of the status quaestionis on penance at the beginning of the twenty-first century.152 “At present,” she states, “the theology of penance leads a rather shadowy existence, despite, in comparison with the time during which Rahner taught, an overwhelmingly heightened awareness of the abysses of human sin.”153 Sattler means that advances in critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminist and critical race theories, and various other social theories related to poverty and violence have foregrounded the devastation visited upon the world by human wickedness. Theologies of liberation have made important contributions in this vein. But even so, the theology of penance has been placed forcefully on the back burner. Sattler continues, proposing why this might be the case: “Two movements appear to be simultaneous: the growing societal attentiveness to the necessity of a conversation about the phenomenon of evil and its aftereffects, and the still persistent skepticism over whether the church is the place where the things pertinent to this question are to be spoken of.”154 The theology of penance, given its inextricability from the church, easily falls under the knife of this skepticism. Perhaps Sattler has Michel Foucault in mind, especially his History of Sexuality (1976) and “Technologies of the Self ” (1982).155 Penance is, for Foucault, only helpful in 152. I gave similar attention to the material in this and the following few paragraphs in Fritz, “Placing Sin in Karl Rahner’s Theology,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80, no. 4 (2015): 294–312. 153. Sattler, “Editionsbericht,” in De paenitentia II, SW 6/2: xxviii. Translations are mine. 154. Ibid., xxix. 155. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 58–67; Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 39–49.

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thinking through problems of our world insofar as it presages modern instruments of control. Foucault is the late modern theorist who comes closest to negotiating with penance—and it is noteworthy that he focuses on virtually the same material Rahner does—but he is at best neutral in his estimation of it. He is symptomatic of wider trends. This is not to dismiss “secular” concerns. Sattler contends that theology owes an answer to people who inquire, “What ‘added value’ over and above an act of existential reconciliation in the interpersonal realm will it have for a person if this event is considered and celebrated before the face of God in an ecclesial context?”156 Already in Rahner’s day penance was becoming inscrutable to many faithful people. Today the particular instantiation of the Catholic ethos that sustained the practice of frequent confession in Rahner’s day has all but collapsed in the North Atlantic world. In an age almost completely unfamiliar with the sacrament, the onus is on theologians and catechists to articulate what sort of reconciliation occurs in penance and to make some kind of case for why late modern people should care. This task affects not just the theology of one sacrament, but the entirety of theology and ecclesial life—the whole Catholic ethos. One very important contemporary teacher of theology seems to have noticed this: Pope Francis. Among the many extraordinary accomplishments in his pontificate, perhaps his reframing of the church’s self-understanding has been the most crucial. The title of a published book of Francis’s speeches, homilies, and papers sums up his ecclesiological outlook: The Church of Mercy.157 From his occasional statements to his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium (2013), his encyclical, Laudato Si’ (2015), and, most importantly, the documents preceding and succeeding the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy, Misericordiae Vultus (2015) and Misericordia et Misera (2016), Francis presents a view of the church entirely consonant with the one mapped out by Rahner in his penance studies. He regards the church as rejecting sin, including the 156. Sattler, “Editionsbericht,” DP2: xxix. 157. Pope Francis, The Church of Mercy: A Vision for the Church (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2014).

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sins of the church itself, and in response offering divine mercy, which is given through the church by the activity of God’s grace. Like Rahner, Francis places great stock in conversion, beginning with the church itself.158 If we want to discover the contemporary significance of Rahner’s penance studies, we should look to Francis as someone who keeps ideas like Rahner’s current. Francis’s remark that he sees the church as “a field hospital after a battle” has drawn great attention.159 What has commanded less attention is the context of this quotable comment. Francis makes it at the beginning of an extended discussion of merciful ministry, where he speaks of his dream that clergy will work as pastors, accompanying and healing the wounds of their flocks. His first example of this merciful ministry is the work of confessors. He criticizes rigorist and lax confessors alike, for “neither of them really takes responsibility for the person.”160 He continues the same discussion in Evangelii Gaudium: “I want to remind priests that the confessional must not be a torture chamber but rather an encounter with the Lord’s mercy which spurs us on to do our best.”161 And in Misericordiae Vultus, “Confessors are called to be a sign of the primacy of mercy always, everywhere, and in every situation, no matter what.”162 By refocusing the ministry of confession, Francis aims to recenter the self-understanding of the church on mercy. On a wider plane, Francis speaks of a way that a Christian spirituality of reconciliation can help to remedy today’s ecological crisis.163 The merciless ethos of contemporary capitalism has led to a dire global situation that demands radical ecological conversion. Francis quotes 158. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World (November 24, 2013), 26. The more proximate source in this paragraph is Pope Paul VI, but his words are ones congruent with Rahner’s demand for ecclesial conversion. 159. Antonio Spadaro, SJ, and Pope Francis, SJ, “A Big Heart Open to God,” America, September 30, 2013, accessed September 30, 2014, http://americamagazine.org/pope-interview. 160. Ibid. 161. Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, no. 44. All references for this document and Laudato Si’ are to paragraph numbers. 162. Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus: Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy (April 11, 2015), 17. 163. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Encyclical Letter (May 24, 2015), 217–19.

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his fellow bishops: “The Australian bishops spoke of the importance of such conversion for achieving reconciliation with creation: ‘To achieve such reconciliation, we must examine our lives and acknowledge the ways in which we have harmed God’s creation through our actions and our failure to act.’ ”164 Notable here is how much penitential language shapes the Australian bishops’ diction: examination of life, actions, and failures to act (what we have done and failed to do). Francis adds that this conversion cannot be simply individual, but must occur in a social matrix: “Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds,” and “The ecological conversion needed to bring about lasting change is also a community conversion.”165 Here is, perhaps, a development beyond Rahner’s insight into reconciliation with the church: ecological sins in particular remind us that sins break communion between sinners and all other creatures, so reconciliation with creation is required. The church, as a community of conversion and a community of mercy, can help to effect such reconciliation. Francis suggests late in Laudato Si’ that the Eucharist can direct “us to be stewards of all creation.”166 If penance, as he noted in Evangelii Gaudium, can spur us to be our best, then it stands to reason that penance could energize stewardship of creation, too. As he closes his discussion of the ecclesiological aspect of penance, Rahner says that in the sacrament of penance, the church “herself selfrealizes as the abiding sacrament of God’s mercy in the world.”167 Our brief discussion of Pope Francis should be an impetus to unfold this Rahnerian insight further. The church’s ministry of forgiving sins is a good—perhaps the prime—starting point for considering its mission of mercy, but if the church is really going to make manifest God’s free gift of mercy, the conversation cannot stop here.

164. Ibid., 218. 165. Ibid., 219. 166. Ibid., 236. 167. Rahner, “Ekklesiologische Aspekt der Sakramente,” 368.

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Th e M at ter of Pen a nce Central to Rahner’s most noted individual essay on penance, “Forgotten Truths Concerning the Sacrament of Penance,” is a technical and evidently uninteresting section on “the matter of penance” in Thomas Aquinas’s sacramental theology.168 Anticipating that his readers will believe this section abstruse and unworthy of their attention, Rahner insists upon the importance of Thomas’s views on this point and expounds on it at length. He contends that Thomas’s answers to questions regarding the “matter” that is “formed” in the sacrament of penance have implications for theology and Christian life extending far beyond their apparent banality. We know from Rahner’s dogmatic lectures on penance that he suggests that Thomas’s rendering of the “matter” of penance, combined with the patristic notion of reconciliation with the church, could yield a major systematic theological synthesis, pertinent not just to penitential theology but the theology of freedom more widely. Here I aim to show that the truth embedded in Thomas’s theses regarding the “matter” of penance sums up the significance of Rahner’s penance studies for his theology of freedom. As with “Freedom Run Aground” in chapter 1, this discussion also intends to indicate the complexity (as opposed to smooth expression) of Rahner’s theology of freedom, which could appear as a simple binary (an unadulterated decision of “yes” or “no” toward God). Rahner’s phrase “the liturgy of the Church of sinners,” which occurs during his explanation of the “forgotten truth” of the matter of penance, expresses this complexity perfectly and will help us to reprise constructively, toward a theological aesthetic of freedom, the material this chapter has gathered.169

Thomas on the “Matter” of Penance Rahner cites several articles from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae III, q. 84, q. 86, and q. 89 as evidence for something interesting afoot in Thom168. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths,” 153–62. For a slightly longer and even more involved treatment of this topic, see DP2:447–53. 169. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths,” 160.

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as’s treatise on penance.170 We shall let Thomas speak first, and then study the interpretation Rahner gives to his words. Thomas defines a sacrament as “a sign of a holy thing inasmuch as it sanctifies people.”171 As a sign, a sacrament is composed of form and matter (“words” and “things”).172 While these definitions apply quite easily to baptism—a washing accompanied with prescribed words that signifies the sanctifying action of God and that inwardly justifies the person baptized—they do not seem to pertain to penance.173 It proves more difficult to parse the “sign” of penance into form and matter, especially because no “things” are employed, so no “matter” can be identified.174 Thomas’s solution to this problem is what so captivates Rahner. Thomas contends in his opening article on penance (III, q. 84, a. 1), in keeping with his definition of sacraments in general, that something holy and sanctifying is signified in penance. “It is manifest,” Thomas writes, “that in penance something is done so that something holy is signified both on the part of the penitent sinner, and on the part of the absolving priest, because the penitent sinner, by what he does and says, shows his heart to have renounced sin, and likewise the priest, by what he says and does regarding the penitent, signifies the work of God who forgives his sins.”175 He then distinguishes the sacraments according to the “sensible things” they employ, categorizing penance with matrimony as sacraments whose effects correspond to human actions.176 In these sacraments, the “matter” is a human act. Finishing this thought, Thomas uses the simile of medicine. In the case of baptism, the water is like medicine applied externally (a salve or plaster), whereas the acts of the penitent are like exercises undertaken by a patient to improve her health. Answering the next objection within the same article, Thomas introduces another fascinating wrinkle. Because of the peculiar nature of the “matter” of penance, this “matter” proceeds from “internal inspiration,” 170. Ibid., 155n29. 171. ST III, q. 60, a. 2. corpus, ad 3. 172. ST III, q. 60, a. 6, ad 2. 173. On baptism, see ST III, q. 66, a.1, sed contra and corpus. 174. ST III, q. 84, a. 1, arg. 1. 175. ST III, q. 84, a. 1, corpus. 176. ST III, q. 84, a. 1, ad 1.

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rather than from an external application of some “thing” by a minister of the church. This is true even if the priest’s words of absolution are the “form” of the sacrament.177 The matter’s internal provenance means that the sacrament occurs “by God operating inwardly.”178 This particular sacrament signifies in a privileged way God’s saving action through the human person. Thus penance is a powerful symbol of the cooperation of divine and human freedom. The next article proves noteworthy, too, as it continues the discussion of the “matter” of penance. Thomas identifies two different aspects of matter: proximate and remote. The proximate matter consists in the sinner’s acts of penitence. But there is more: the sins of the penitent also figure into the matter of the sacrament, but as remote matter, “not to be approved,” as with the acts of penitence, “but to be detested, and destroyed.”179 The matter of the sacrament concerns both the action of sanctification and what is transformed in the process. The “thing” of penance is multifaceted and holistic, taking into account the breadth of human freedom. Thomas expounds upon this holistic point of view, with greater attention to the interaction of God’s grace with the human acts that constitute the matter of penance, two questions later (III, q. 86). Thomas inquires about the way in which forgiveness of guilt is an effect of penance: “Whether the removal of sin is an effect of penance as a virtue or as a sacrament?”180 It is important to understand the distinction Thomas employs; it concerns the interaction of God’s grace and human freedom. The first objection makes clear what the rub is. It states that penance as a virtue (i.e., as a principle for human action) would not seem to be the cause of forgiveness of sin, since the remission of guilt is the effect of operating grace.181 According to the objection, God’s freedom (expressed as forgiving grace) is the sole cause of forgiveness of sins and remission of guilt, so to treat the virtue of penance as a cause of the same would be a mistake. Thomas’s idea of human actions as the matter of 177. ST III, q. 84, a. 3, sed contra and corpus. 178. ST III, q. 84, a. 1, ad 2. 179. ST III, q. 84, a. 2, corpus. 180. ST III, q. 86, a. 6. 181. ST III, q. 86, a. 6, arg. 1.

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the sacrament of penance goes against the mindset of this objection. He combines this thought with others from his article on justification in the treatise on grace (Summa I-II), chief among them that “no one comes to the Father through justifying grace without a movement of the free will (motu liberi arbitrii).”182 Thomas answers the first objection: “These human acts are there as the effects of operating grace, produced at the same time as the remission of guilt. Consequently the forgiveness of sin does not occur without an act of the virtue of penance, although it is the effect of operating grace.”183 The fact that human acts in the sacrament are effects of grace does not diminish their worth or power, given their contemporaneity with the forgiveness of sin caused by divine grace. Again Thomas argues that penance symbolizes the cooperation of divine and human freedom. He continues and closes this train of thought in III, q. 89, as he opens an article dedicated to the recovery of virtue through penance. Once more an objection asserts God’s exclusive power over against human freedom. Since penance consists in acts of the penitent and virtues are caused by God’s grace alone (on the authority of Augustine), virtues cannot be restored by penance.184 Relying on his argumentation regarding the causality of grace from III, q. 86, Thomas counters this and the other objections by maintaining the link between the infusion of divine grace and the human virtue of penance. The latter “causes” the restoration of other virtues inasmuch as it is an effect of divine grace.185 As in the earlier article, the virtue of penance, including the “first act of the penitent, contrition,” is not diminished for being an effect, but proceeds with the power of divine grace.186 So we have it that for Thomas the acts of an individual penitent are the matter of the sacrament of penance without which the sacrament would signify nothing and would yield incomplete effects. While from an ecclesiastical point of view the “form” of priestly absolution is positively 182. ST I-II, q. 113, a. 3, sed contra. 183. ST III, q. 86, a. 6, ad 1. 184. ST III, q. 89, a. 1, arg. 2. 185. ST III, q. 89, a. 1, corpus and ad 1. 186. ST III, q. 89, a. 1, ad 2.

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crucial, from the standpoint of grace, the acts of the penitent (particularly inward repentance or contrition) are, perhaps, just as decisive.187

Rahner on Thomas’s Forgotten Truth Rahner believes that, taken together, the passages we have just examined present an essential and forgotten truth about the sacraments in general and penance in particular. He does not chastise the later tradition for forgetting the truth of the matter of penance in Thomas, since Thomas himself does not seem adequately aware of what truth he holds. Thomas’s theology of the sacraments is too exclusively tied to the priest’s “official functionary” role to take into account the points on freedom that he elucidates.188 More specifically, Rahner avers that Thomas’s theology of the sacraments (thus of penance) could be strengthened were it to explicate the connection between the sacraments and the “exhibitive force” of the Word of God.189 Said otherwise, Rahner sees Thomas on the brink of a major aesthetic discovery regarding the theology of God’s free self-manifestation and consequently the individual penitent’s vital role in this self-expression. A retrieval of Thomas on the matter of penance could reveal this discovery. Following perhaps Thomas himself, but certainly Duns Scotus, modern theology and church practice have minimized the sacramental resonance of the role of the penitent.190 This view renders the penitent utterly passive. It contributes to a general sense among the faithful of the arbitrariness of personal acts of penance and to confusion as to how God’s grace corresponds (if at all) to penitential acts. The Thomistic thesis, by contrast, acknowledges the agency of the penitent. Rather than being a merely passive recipient of the church’s proclamation of forgiveness, the penitent cooperates with this “forgiving answer of the church,” 187. ST III, q. 86, a. 6, sed contra: “Now forgiveness of sin can come from God without the sacrament of penance, but not without the virtue of penance” (see ST III, q. 84, a. 5, ad 3, on Christ’s forgiveness of the woman caught in adultery from Jn 8:1–11). 188. Cf. Rahner, “Introductory Observations on Thomas Aquinas’ Theology of the Sacraments in General,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14, Questions in the Church, the Church in the World [TI 14], trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1976), 152. 189. Ibid. 190. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths,” 157–58.

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and the two together become “the sign of the effective presence of God’s forgiving grace.”191 Rahner argues that while for Thomas the priestly absolution is “the decisive element as regards the causal effect,” the penitent’s acts “are the more important element [for the] sign-function.”192 They concern the sacramental sign’s exhibitive force. While Thomas gives little proof for his teaching on the matter of penance, Rahner believes it “was inspired by [Thomas’s] deep theological instinct which urges him to let the personal and sacramental moments in the process of justification permeate one another as intimately as possible.”193 Thomas shares this instinct with the church fathers. This has particularly weighty bearing on the sacrament of penance as distinguished from the sacrament of baptism. Like the fathers, Thomas sees these two sacraments as properly distinct and refuses to base this distinction in the purely external and juridical phenomenon of punishment for temporal sins (baptism does not remit this punishment, but penance does). Instead, like the fathers, Thomas recognizes that the difference between the sacraments “can lie only in the fact that in contrast to baptism, subjective penance, done before and in the Church, is itself an intrinsic co-constitutive element of the sacramental happening and hence of positing of the sacramental sign.”194 The distinction obtains through the acts of the penitent, cooperating with the exhibitive force of God’s Word and cooperating with the church’s word of forgiveness. In this potent sign we have a confluence of three freedoms (divine, ecclesial, individual), the same confluence, viewed from a different angle, that the fathers taught in the doctrine of penance as reconciliation with the church. The interesting historical irony surrounding this question of the matter of penance is that Thomas was far more influential in his designation of priestly absolution as the form of the sacrament, which was an innovation upon the fathers. This, for the first time, gave absolution previously unafforded theological backing.195 This thesis prepared for the dominance 191. Ibid., 160. 192. Ibid., 156. 193. Ibid. 194. Ibid., 158. 195. Ibid., 155.

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in penitential theology of priestly absolution from Scotus forward. For Rahner, though, the “matter” side of the “form-matter” distinction must be retrieved. He writes in his 1973 summary of the history of penance, “The theological progress attained in the thirteenth century is . . . quite clear and established for the future, although this was at the cost of a proper appreciation of the role of the person in the theology of grace and the sacraments. Following in the footsteps of Thomas Aquinas, theology today ought to rediscover this appreciation.”196 Rahner most thoroughly follows in Thomas’s footsteps in “Considerations on the Personal Realization of the Sacramental Event” (1970), in which he develops the idea of a “Copernican turn” (“kopernikanische Wende”) in sacramental theology.197 But for now let us stick closer to the text we have been explicating. Rahner attempts late in his discussion on Thomas and the matter of penance to unfold Thomas’s “forgotten truth” slightly less abstractly: In a sacred process of mystery, he himself—the sinner, that is—provides God’s pressing will of forgiveness in the Church with its matter in which this forgiveness becomes concrete and thus effective in this particular sinner. He who has ratified the black godlessness of the world by his guilt and has increased it in his own person, is permitted to prepare the means himself by which the invisible grace of God comes to shine out even in a concrete historical manner.198

In his brief lecture from 1972 on Thomas’s treatise on the sacraments (ST III, q. 60–65), Rahner links Thomas’s sacramental theology with his own theology of the symbol.199 He recalls his theology of the symbol to remind his reader that for himself and Thomas alike, the “causality” proper to the sacraments “belongs to these signs as radical acts of selfrealization on the part of the Church as being of her very nature (as sign) the eschatological primal sacrament [Ursakrament].”200 The “process of mystery” discussed previously is this radical ecclesiastical act of self196. Rahner, “History of Penance,” in TI 15:16. 197. Rahner, “Überlegungen zum personalen Vollzug des sakramentalen Geschehens,” in SW 18:458–76; ET: “Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14, Questions in the Church: The Church in the World, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1976), 161–84. 198. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths,” 159–60. 199. Rahner, “Thomas Aquinas’ Theology of the Sacraments in General,” 153. 200. Ibid., emphasis in original, ET modified.

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realization. The interesting twist here is that it is not the “holy” church leading the “process of mystery” or free act of self-realization. In the sacrament of penance, the sinner embodies the church’s freedom; the repentant sinner becomes God’s forgiving freedom made manifest. The repentant sinner becomes a Realsymbol of God’s forgiving will. This is an idea worth pursuing a bit further, as we conclude our process of discovering Rahner’s penance studies as a source for his theology of freedom.

A Staggering Liturgy . . . a Shattering Truth Rahner admires Thomas’s synthesis regarding penance so much because Thomas harmonized various strands of his contemporary tradition, but also because he found an artful way of working the best teachings of the church fathers into his theology of penance. Thus Thomas preserved an essential dimension of the Christian theology of freedom: that it had been hammered out in controversies over penance, over the church’s reaction toward sinners, over the church’s mercy toward sinners, even to the presence of sinners in the church. Rahner’s close studies of penance, which began with his reading of the fathers at Valkenburg, challenge any facile teaching on the holiness of the church, but in doing so express the hope that the church itself, as the sinful church, can act along with the grace of Christ to work freely toward its salvation. With two fascinating studies, almost twenty years apart, Rahner augments his theology of freedom by honing in on the church’s sinfulness. Richard Lennan notes that Rahner consistently maintained from his early writings through his later ones that ecclesiology must take into account the sinfulness of the church. The church is made holy, Rahner argues in essays from 1947 and 1965, by God’s saving grace, not by its own hypostatic virtue. Lennan explains, “The efficacy of this grace was not to be seen in the Church becoming immune to sin, but rather in the fact that the individuals and the Church as a whole sought God’s mercy to free them from their sinful state.”201 Rahner’s explanation of Thomas on the 201. Richard Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 152.

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matter of penance corroborates Lennan’s claims and adds a pithy phrase that I have taken as half of this section’s title: “If the carrying out of sacraments is ‘liturgy’ in the proper sense of the word, then the confessing sinner celebrates a part of the Church’s liturgy and does not merely receive the effect of someone else’s liturgical action. In him, too, the Church acts and executes her liturgy. A staggering liturgy this, the liturgy of the Church of sinners.”202 It is staggering that a church that claims for itself God-given holiness also—and openly—celebrates liturgical actions that reveal precisely that the church does not yet fully live out this holiness. The staggering liturgy of sinners sums up the paradox of Christian freedom, the paradox that Rahner’s multidimensional theology of freedom preserves: that Christians, individually and as a church, both make manifest and conceal God’s free decision to create and to save—and they make God’s freedom manifest by working together to overcome what conceals it. Let us briefly read Rahner’s 1947 essay “The Church of Sinners” and his 1965 essay “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II.”203 With these pieces we will return in earnest to our discussion of a theological aesthetic of freedom, which in Rahner’s case is finely attuned to freedom’s paradoxes. Near the beginning of “The Church of Sinners,” Rahner makes certain that the reader understands that this essay is not about anthropological experience of the church’s failings. Instead, it concerns the church’s selfwitness to her sinfulness and her proclamation that anyone who denies her sinfulness is a heretic.204 In order to be more complete and more realistic, thus avoiding any idealism regarding the church, ecclesiology must be willing to admit the sinfulness not just of the church’s members (as private individuals), but of the church herself. Rahner avers, “If she is something real, and if her members are sinners and as sinners remain members, then she herself is sinful. Then the sins of her children are a blot and a blemish on the holy mystical Body of Christ itself. The Church is a sinful Church: this is a truth of faith, not an elementary fact of experience. 202. Ibid., 160. 203. Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” in TI 6:253–69; Rahner, “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” in TI 6:270–93. 204. Rahner, “Church of Sinners,” 255–56.

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And it is a shattering truth.”205 With this phrase we have the second half of this section’s title. The “shattering truth” of the church’s sinfulness complements the “staggering liturgy,” wherein the holy church reconciles her sinful members to herself and to God. The concern, again, is realism: this shattering truth keeps the concept of church from evaporating into “the abstract ideal of an invisible Church.”206 This shattering truth treats the church as a body. As a body, the church is a symbol. Its holiness is the Holy Spirit’s freedom made manifest: “In this holiness—not in sin—we are given ‘phenotypically’ the inner glory which constitutes the permanent heritage out of which [the church’s] whole character is fashioned.”207 Sin, on the other hand, is an illness of the body (an “exogenetic illness”) and an interruption of its symbolic activity.208 Rahner writes, paraphrasing Paul, “No one can sin in order to allow God’s grace to appear more abundantly and more clearly (cf. Rom 3:5, 6:1) . . . therefore the Church is not sinful in order that God’s grace might be revealed more abundantly; sin remains in her a reality which contradicts her nature; but her holiness is the manifestation of her essential being.”209 Sin is freedom concealed; holiness, freedom made manifest; and the church’s concrete life presents together the proper and the ill functioning of this manifestation. Rahner advocates awareness of this mixed manifestation in “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” which finds that Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen gentium, gives only fragmentary evidence of such awareness.210 Promise lies in Lumen gentium’s conceptual framework of the pilgrim church, which implies that the “Church does not only stand over against [sinners] like an institute of salvation which, while remaining itself quite untouched, regrets that its care did not have more success, but must regard these sinners as part of herself, as her members,” and that the church is affected by the sins of 205. Ibid., 260. 206. Ibid., 261. 207. Ibid., 263. 208. Ibid. 209. Ibid., 263–64. 210. See Rahner, “Sinful Church,” 279–81.

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these members.211 Likewise, when the church is said to be semper purificanda, unless one applies an arbitrary hermeneutic, this indicates that the church is “the subject of sin and guilt.”212 It is somewhat of a drawback that the Constitution includes no explicit consideration of how the church can be at the same time sinful and holy.213 But Rahner believes such an explanation is not far off, so long as the church recognizes itself as the church of sinners and of its need for cleansing and penance.214 This recognition would make it intelligible why the church is the holy church: God’s grace operates through it as it self-actualizes while fleeing from its sinful state.215 This is why the insistence on the “subjective” holiness—and sinfulness—of the church means so much. The “matter” of penance as Thomas conceives of it could apply not just to individuals, but to the church as penitential subject, exercising penitential freedom. What, after all this, is freedom? The God-given capacity for a creature—individual or corporate, even sinners—to participate in the divine action, decided from eternity, of drawing all creation into the divine life through the acts of this creation. Any other freedom is derivative from this freedom, and much of what we tend to call “freedom,” especially consumer and financial choices, is not freedom at all. The only freedom worth calling by that name is the cooperative manifestation in time and history of the divine decision to redeem, save, and reconcile. Rahner’s penance studies teach us precisely this. And in doing so, they help us to understand freedom aesthetically—as real and embodied, as manifestation (or concealment), as symbol. And they renew our understanding of the fundamental option. We can now see it, in the case of a “yes” to God, as symbolizing the acts (i.e., existence) of a pilgrim subject who, traveling a path of conversion in and with the pilgrim church, makes God’s freedom less hidden and more manifest. 211. Ibid., 284. 212. Ibid., 285. 213. Ibid., 288. 214. Ibid., 291–92. 215. Ibid., 292.

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Rahner on Ignatian Freedom

3

Rahner on Ignatian Freedom

W hether R a hner hi mself or his close associate Karl Neufeld wrote

it, one would be unwise to ignore the fourth footnote in the essay “The Freedom of the Sick, Theologically Considered” (1974). It reads, “For the idea of decision as fundamental option, the author is indebted to Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. His theological work has been continually influenced by the desire to work out the theological implications of the spiritual stimulus he has found there, and to make that stimulus fruitful theologically.”1 The footnote appears in a passage about personal liberty’s material conditions, a topic that has been of interest to us since chapter 1. For this chapter, we must attend to the link between liberty’s material conditions and Ignatian spirituality. Rahner is this note’s author, and it conveys something essential about his theology of the fundamental option: Ignatian spirituality is a major font from which it flows. Our inquiry here will be far more tightly circumscribed than prior treatments of Rahner and Ignatius, from Avery Dulles’s early essay on Rahner and Ignatian spirituality through classic works like Klaus Fisch1. Karl Rahner, “The Liberty of the Sick, Theologically Considered,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 17, Jesus, Man, and the Church [TI 17], trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 103n4.

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er’s Der Mensch als Geheimnis, Arno Zahlauer’s Karl Rahner und sein “produktives Vorbild” Ignatius von Loyola, the more recent work of Andreas Batlogg on Rahner and the mysteries of Christ’s life, and the highly influential book of Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality.2 I do not attempt to evaluate the correctness of Rahner’s interpretation of Ignatius. Nor do I attempt any sort of exhaustive survey of Rahner’s writings on Ignatius, the Jesuits, and Jesuit life (Ordensleben).3 I try to focus as singularly as possible on how Rahner translates into theology the ideas on freedom that seem to lie at the heart of the spiritual praxis Ignatius recommends in the Exercises.4 More specifically, I elucidate the components Rahner gathers from Ignatius (or from his interpretation of Ignatius) for a theology of decision marked by a distinctively aesthetic bent. The chapter starts with “Features of Ignatian Spirituality,” which includes both content and methodological principles. It briefly tells of 2. Avery Dulles, SJ, “Ignatian Experience as Reflected in the Spiritual Theology of Karl Rahner,” Philippine Studies 13, no. 3 ( July 1965): 471–91; Klaus P. Fischer, Der Mensch als Geheimnis: Die Anthropologie Karl Rahners, Mit einem Brief von Karl Rahner [Man as Mystery: Karl Rahner’s Anthropology, with a Letter from Karl Rahner] (Freiburg: Herder, 1974); Arno Zahlauer, Karl Rahner und sein “produktives Vorbild” Ignatius von Loyola [Karl Rahner and His “Productive Model” Ignatius of Loyola] (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1996) (translations are mine); Andreas R. Batlogg, Die Mysterien des Lebens Jesu bei Karl Rahner: Zugang zum Christusglauben [The Mysteries of Jesus’ Life in Karl Rahner: Entering into the Christian Faith] (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 2001); Philip Endean, Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), hereafter KRIS. 3. For readers interested in approximating such a survey, volumes 13 and 25 of the Sämtliche Werke are required reading; Rahner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 13, Ignatianischer Geist: Schriften zu den Exerzitien und zur Spiritualität der Ordensgründers [Ignatian Spirit: Writings on the Exercises and the Spirituality of the Society’s Founder], ed. Andreas R. Battlogg, Johannes Herzgsell, and Stefan Kiechle (Freiburg: Herder, 2006); Rahner, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 25, Erneuerung des Ordenslebens: Zeugnis für Kirche und Welt [Renewing the Society’s Life: Witness for the Church and the World], ed. Andreas R. Batlogg (Freiburg: Herder, 2008). 4. I have in mind Rahner’s comments in the foreword to the book in which appeared his “Rede des Ignatius von Loyola an einen Jesuiten von heute” [Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Jesuit of Today]. Rahner states that when he writes in the voice of Ignatius, his words should be understood as a “translation,” rather than an objective analysis of Ignatius in his historical context; see Rahner, “Vorwort: Paul Imhof—Helmuth Niels Loose—Karl Rahner: Ignatius von Loyola,” in SW 25:297–98. There exist at least three English translations of the “Rede” (in part or as a whole), but the best ET, done by J. Matthew Ashley, is as yet unpublished. When I refer to this text, the translations are mine, instructed by Ashley’s. The “Rede” is published in SW 25:299–329.

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Rahner’s early study of Ignatian sources with his brother Hugo, then moves forward to the 1955 conferences called “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” which exhibit Rahner’s distinctive take on the features of Ignatian spirituality.5 His layout of the features helps structure the next two divisions, “Individual Decision” and “Loyalty to the Church.” “Individual Decision” concerns the closely paired features of indifference and what Rahner calls the “existential,” with prime emphasis on the long “epistemological”—though I shall call it “ontologicalaesthetic”—essay “The Logic of Existentiell Recognition in Ignatius Loyola.”6 This reading establishes an Ignatian, theological-aesthetic view of Rahner on individual subjectivity. “Loyalty to the Church” occupies itself with the third feature of Ignatian spirituality, reinforcing much of the work of chapter 1 on symbol and chapter 2 on the church as sacrament and generating a deeper vision of freedom’s ecclesial expression. “The Fundamental Option and the Two Standards” adds an essential component to my analysis of the fundamental option. It relates the fundamental option to Ignatius’s meditation on the Two Standards, from the fourth day of the second week of the Exercises. I come to characterize the fundamental option as a decision between Christ and Lucifer and consequently a manifestation of or concealment of God’s eternal decision to create, to save, and thereby to self-communicate. By the end we will have found that Rahner’s Ignatian theology of freedom (particularly the fundamental option) is Christologically dense—centered on the Sacred Heart—and, as a result, engaged with how individual and ecclesial 5. Rahner, “Ignatianische Frömmigkeit und Herz-Jesu-Verehrung,” in SW 13:451–66; ET: “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Heart of Jesus,” in Christian in the Market Place, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), 119–46. The English translation is fairly faithful to the original, but still I shall cross-reference as I execute a close reading of the text. I shall cite as follows: ISDHJ English page no. / German page no; e.g., ISDHJ 119/451. 6. Rahner, “Die Logik der existentiellen Erkenntnis bei Ignatius von Loyola,” in Kirche in den Herausforderungen der Zeit: Studien zur Ekklesiologie und zur kirchlichen Existenz [The Church and the Challenges of the Age: Studies on Ecclesiology and Ecclesial Existence], Sämtliche Werke, vol. 10, ed. Josef Heislbetz and Albert Raffelt (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 368–420; ET: “The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola,” in The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae 12, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 84–170. I follow the same convention for citation for this piece as for ISDHJ, abbreviating the piece as LER. In many cases I modify the ET, indicating where as I go.

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freedom intertwine and, precisely as ineluctably intertwined, appear in their rich distinctness. That, in effect, is the chapter’s thesis. And as this chapter completes our consideration of the sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom, we shall have gathered the ingredients for recognizing how, for Rahner, human freedom consists in a finite expression of God’s freedom, or in each case an incomplete, seemingly insignificant, usually unstately, but nevertheless sublime instance of freedom made manifest.

Fe atur es of I gn ati a n Spi r itua lit y Rahner never claimed to be a scholar specializing in Ignatius; precisely the opposite. In his foreword to a coauthored volume on Ignatius with Paul Imhof and Helmuth Loose (1978), Rahner casts himself as Herder Press’s third choice, and probably a distant one, for writing a contribution on Ignatius.7 Ahead of him would have stood, had they been alive, Rahner’s brother Hugo and his friend Burkhart Schneider. These two Jesuit church historians were, in the third quarter of the twentieth century, the leading German-language experts on Ignatius. By contrast with them, he implies, Karl Rahner was a hobbyist. But Rahner studied Ignatius in earnest early on. He kept up on recent historical scholarship on Ignatius by reading the works of his brother, students of his brother, like Schneider, and other texts in Spanish and French.8 I shall have a bit to say about this in what follows, so as to provide some symmetry with the first two chapters, which opened with Rahner’s early studies of Schelling and the church fathers. Then I pursue my main objective: establishing the principles that structure the rest of the chapter. Out of Rahner’s early study, he develops a distinctive theological perspective on Ignatius that richly informs his theology of freedom, 7. Rahner, “Vorwort,” in SW 25:297. 8. A somewhat incidental illustration of this occurs in Rahner’s essay “A New Task for Fundamental Theology,” in which he provides a brief schematic overview of recent scholarship on Ignatius following the publication of the Monumenta Ignatiana; see Rahner, “Reflections on a New Task for Fundamental Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology [TI 16], trans. David Morland (New York: Seabury, 1979), 161n6.

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regarding both individuals and the church as expressions of God’s free decision to save in Christ and the Spirit. This perspective on freedom centers on what Rahner understands to be the three most important features of Ignatian spirituality: indifference, the “existential,” and loyalty to the church.

Early Study of Ignatius In 1922, the year that Rahner entered the Jesuits, his brother Hugo produced a catalogue of primary sources relevant to historical study of the Society.9 Karl worked further on this catalogue with Hugo during the 1920s, and by 1935 they had translated into German an address by Jerónimo Nadal, SJ (1507–80) on prayer.10 From the 1920s through the end of his career, and in earnest from 1935, Hugo devoted himself to close and careful study of numerous recently available Ignatian and early Jesuit sources, such as the Monumenta Ignatiana (four series, 1903–55), the critical edition Fontes Narrativi de Sancto Ignatio (three vols., 1943–60), and sets of letters from Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Nadal, Francis Borgia, and others (1890s forward). Because of this new encounter with Ignatian sources, many of which were previously unavailable or forgotten, Hugo argued in the preface of his compendium of Ignatius’s letters to women, “Only now is it possible to present Ignatius as he truly was.”11 By “Ignatius as he truly was,” Hugo means Ignatius the person who actually lived and breathed, not the ethereal Baroque saint, not the “hero.”12 Historical scholarship could show that Ignatius’s “living, everyday holiness” was remarkable enough. Though Karl would not always remain as closely tied as he once was to Hugo’s historical work on Ignatius and the 9. KRIS 68. 10. Hugo Rahner and Karl Rahner, “Über die Gnade des Gebetes in der Gesellschaft Jesu, nach P. Hieronymus Nadal S.J.” [On the Grace of Prayer in the Society of Jesus, by Fr. Jerónimo Nadal, SJ], in Frühe spirituelle Texte und Studien: Grundlagen im Orden [Early Spiritual Texts and Studies: Fundamentals in the Society], Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, ed. Karl Kardinal Lehmann and Albert Raffelt (Freiburg: Herder, 2014), 174–86. 11. Hugo Rahner, Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women, trans. Kathleen Pond and S. A. H. Weetman (New York: Herder and Herder, 1960), xv. 12. Ibid., 3.

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first Jesuits, he remained serious about the retrieval of Ignatius, following his brother’s lead. For this reason Andreas Batlogg credits Karl, along with Hugo, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Gaston Fessard, with making exemplary strides toward promoting the twentieth-century rediscovery of the Jesuit founders.13 Philip Endean’s account of the Rahner brothers’ work on Nadal proves pivotal for our interpretation of Rahner. Endean suggests that the Rahner brothers’ study of Nadal’s address on prayer and other Jesuit sources may have helped contribute to a new Jesuit self-understanding that took hold. “By the middle of the twentieth century,” Endean writes, “ ‘contemplative in action’ had become a Jesuit slogan; official documents were describing the Jesuit as ‘a man called by his vocation to be a contemplative in action,’ and Jesuit prayer as in line with a special grace given to Ignatius, whereby ‘he found God in every thing, every word, and every deed.’ ”14 While Endean acknowledges that “contemplative in action” may be just as much a phrase foisted upon Nadal’s text as gathered from it, the fact is that the Rahner brothers, along with many other Jesuit commentators in the first half of the twentieth century, claimed to have found this phrase in Nadal’s work. From this the Rahner brothers and many of their fellow Jesuits reasoned that for Nadal and his close companion Ignatius, one may find God in activity, particularly action on behalf of the least among us.15 Relating Karl Rahner’s theology to insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Endean contends that “Ignatian spirituality, as mediated through Nadal’s formulae [especially in actione contemplativus], may have stimulated [the following] realization in Rahner: openness to the transcendent God does not preclude human activity, but indeed demands it.”16 This means that Rahner’s early study of the Ignatian sources led him to a theology of freedom made manifest—in action. 13. Andreas Batlogg, “Interpreter of Ignatius Loyola: In Conversation with Fr. Andreas Batlogg, SJ, Munich,” in Encounters with Karl Rahner: Remembrances of Rahner by Those Who Knew Him, ed. Andreas R. Batlogg and Melvin E. Michalski, trans., ed. Barbara G. Turner (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 2009), 294–95. 14. KRIS 73. Endean quotes from a compendium of documents from the 31st and 32nd General Congregations of the Society of Jesus (1967 and 1974–75, respectively). 15. KRIS 74–75. 16. KRIS 76.

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In Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, I discussed Rahner’s early Vienna lecture (1936), which was published in 1937 as “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World.”17 I noted that Rahner did not choose this title but used it constructively to illustrate the twofold character of Ignatian spirituality. I observed that Rahner sees Ignatian spirituality as bearing a twofold relationship to the world: flight from it and active life in it. He argues that Ignatian acceptance of the world hinges upon flight from it. As Rahner understands him, Ignatius insists upon God’s sovereignty over the world. This means that Christian devotion to God entails death to the world. But since this sovereign God elects to relate to the world freely and out of love, so must the Christian. Ignatian flight from the world prepares Christians for deep, active engagement with the world. What should be added here is a little more consideration of the phrase in actione contemplativus, which Rahner draws from his study of Nadal, with which he closes the main body of the “Ignatian Mysticism” lecture, and which structures (if silently) the piece’s conclusion.18 Rahner presents the idea like this: “Ignatius seeks only the God of Jesus Christ, the free, personal Absolute: contemplativus. He knows that he can seek and find him also in the world, if this should please him: in actione. And so he is prepared in indiferençia to seek him and him alone, always him alone but also him everywhere, also in the world: in actione contemplativus.”19 In this passage Rahner sets a schema for understanding Ignatian spirituality and its basic characteristics: indifference, finding God in all things, contemplation in action. The last one structures the other two by mediating between the contemplative, otherworldly aspect of indifference and the active aspect of finding God in all things. In the conclusion, Rahner attempts to make more sense of this sche17. See KRTA 103–9; see also Karl Rahner, SJ, “Die ignatianische Mystik der Weltfreudigkeit,” Zeitschrift für Aszese und Mystik 12, no. 1 (1937): 121–37; republished in Der betende Christ: Geistliche Schriften und Studien zur Praxis des Glaubens, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 7, ed. Andreas R. Batlogg (Freiburg: Herder, 2013), 279–93; ET: “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger [TI 3] (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 277–93. 18. On KRTA 105 I pointed to how this phrase resolves the dialectic between God and world, but more remains to be said. 19. Rahner, “Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World,” 292.

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ma by adverting to an early father of the church, Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215). Clement describes the perfect Christian as cosmic and hypercosmic (kosmios kai huperkosmios): living in this world while always recognizing, in keeping with the folly of the cross, that fulfillment in this world is merely provisional.20 While Rahner does not explicitly make this parallel, his intent is clear: the Ignatian formula in actione contemplativus expresses this same attitude as “kosmios kai huperkosmios.” The hypercosmic/contemplative/cruciform dimension of Christian life is the origin of the cosmic. Nevertheless, the cosmic/active dimension of Christian life is indispensable, as it brings this life’s origin to concrete existence. Rahner gives worldly action the lecture’s last word: “But once I have found the God of the life beyond, then such an attitude will break out of the deep seclusion of God into the world, and work as long as the day lasts, immerse itself in the tasks of the hour of this world and yet await with deep longing the coming of the Lord.”21 Here we have beautifully expressed the spirit of Hugo’s retrieval of Ignatius: not the superhuman soldier-hero, but the everyday saint, or the saint who recognized that the realm for holy living was, at least in most cases, everyday work. And we see emerging the Karl Rahner whom Harvey Egan calls the “mystic of everyday life.”22 Already in 1936–37 Rahner creatively applies the historical-theological work he began early with his brother Hugo. If Rahner imaginatively, or even eisegetically, interprets the spirituality of the founder of his order and of other early Jesuits like Nadal, nevertheless he does so from a well-informed position. As Arno Zahlauer puts it, “The encounter with Ignatius set free a productive and creative impulse, which had to do not primarily with imitation, but with the ever-new implementation [of Ignatius] in ever-new contexts.”23 We have already commenced seeing how the encounter with Ignatius affects Rahner’s theology of freedom, given the heightened index of action in his interpretation of early Ignatian spirituality. The encounter deepens two decades later. 20. Ibid., 292–93. 21. Ibid., 293, ET modified. 22. Harvey D. Egan, SJ, Karl Rahner: The Mystic of Everyday Life (New York: Crossroad, 1998). 23. Zahlauer, Karl Rahner und sein “produktives Vorbild,” 329.

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Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to Jesus’ Sacred Heart The most important text for assessing Ignatian spirituality as a source for Rahner’s theology of freedom is undoubtedly the brief, three-part suite of spiritual conferences he delivered at Canisius College in the University of Innsbruck in 1955. In these conferences Rahner describes what he takes to be the essential features (Wesenszüge) of Ignatian spirituality. He pairs these descriptions with a search for their “origin” in the love of Jesus Christ and thus the devotion to the Sacred Heart, through which believers dedicate themselves to Christ’s love. Using potent scientific metaphors, Rahner presents the features of Ignatian spirituality in their “chemical purity (chemischer Reinheit)” and devotion to the Sacred Heart as the “antidote” to their accompanying dangers.24 Before we consider the details of these conferences, I wish to place them in the context of later criticisms of them and to offer a new model for answering these criticisms. Philip Endean summarizes the viewpoint of several critics: “In the 1955 Canisianum conferences . . . Rahner seems to suggest that an Ignatian devotion to the heart of Christ serves mainly to forestall the decadent excesses of what is truly and distinctively Ignatian.”25 This would mean that Christ is a mere categorial supplement to the authentic features of Ignatius’s Exercises, a conclusion that even a cursory reading of the Exercises would contradict. Endean reports that for Bruce Marshall, this problem with Rahner’s understanding of Ignatius infects Rahner’s theology as a whole: “Throughout his theology, Rahner seems to begin by developing a general speculative account of human fullness under God, and then to introduce Jesus Christ as an illustration of this account.”26 Endean suggests that such criticisms derive from a misunderstanding of the genre of the Canisianum conferences. He judges the genre to be Hegelian: thesis (features of Ignatian spirituality)—antithesis (Sacred Heart)—synthesis (a holistic account of Ignatian spirituality in its transcendental and categorial aspects).27 I highly appreciate this pro24. ISDHJ 128–30/456–58. 25. KRIS 184. 26. KRIS 185. 27. KRIS 184–85.

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posal, because it allows me to recommend a revision: the genre relates to a German Idealist, but not Hegel. Schelling fits better. The Canisianum conferences present Ignatian spirituality in terms of its ground and its existence, with the Sacred Heart not as an artificial supplement that augments an already set transcendental structure, but as the ground that preconditions the three features of Ignatian existence. The problem of interpreting the Canisianum conferences is that Rahner, often a decidedly undramatic writer, injects a bit of drama into the proceedings. He gradually builds his case that devotion to the Sacred Heart is the living origin of Ignatian spirituality, leaving the punchline to the conferences’ closing pages. In my exposition, I shall follow the order of the text, pointing as I go to the pivots of Rahner’s argument. The opening pages seem somewhat pedestrian, as Rahner comments on varieties of spirituality in the one Christianity.28 Even here, though, Rahner foreshadows his conclusion, since the unifying origin of all Christian differences is the love of Christ. Rahner then mentions the three characteristics of Ignatian spirituality that he deems essential: indifference, the “existential,” and loyalty to the church. By “indifference” Rahner means “an extremely alert, almost over-acute sense of the relativity of all that is not God himself.”29 With the “existential” Rahner names “the skeptical, disillusioned, here-and-now, calculating, planning character, the acceptance that things can be otherwise, the occasional seeming disloyalty, the adaptability and all that kind of thing which, for good or ill, makes up the Jesuit character.”30 “Loyalty to the church,” while it may seem a straightforward Catholic proposition, denotes something specific in its Ignatian sense: “In Ignatius there is a reflexive consciousness of the Church’s presence: the Church which is to be served in spite of all one’s experience of its weaknesses. This Church is the ecclesia militans, the Papal Church, and thus the Church in its most unambiguous visibility.”31 Certainly it is true of all three definitions that Christ is not mentioned, so perhaps Rahner’s critics have him. Rahner seems to 28. ISDHJ 119–22/451–53. 29. ISDHJ 123/453. 30. ISDHJ 126/455. 31. ISDHJ 127/455.

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corroborate their fears when in the second conference he presents the distinctive features of Ignatian spirituality as tending, if not corrected, toward a cold rationalism, “a deadly functionalism . . . an ‘ability to ride in all saddles’ that in its ground is an ability for all things and therefore nothing,” or mindless toeing of a party line.32 It may appear, then, that the essential features of Ignatian spirituality are “transcendental” features that overshadow categorial realities and stand in need of categorial, Christic correction. An only slightly ungenerous reading of the second conference would find that indifference is corrected by a vague devotion to “love” in general, especially when Rahner suggests that “it can . . . happen that such adoring veneration is given to that Heart without the adoring lover’s ever having heard of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”33 For a critic, this sentence must smack of anonymous Christianity. Likewise, it may be taken as little comfort that the “lonely individuality” of the existential element is remedied by an “ultimate love for what is finite,” to which the Sacred Heart devotion attests.34 Nor may it seem Christologically sufficient when Rahner claims that the Sacred Heart immunizes its devotee against ecclesiastical “party fanaticism” by cultivating a spirit of “humble service.”35 By the end of the second conference, it could well appear that Rahner falls to his critics, to Marshall especially, and their contention that Christ is merely a corrective, merely an “illustration” of what Ignatian spirituality, which can function very well independently from Christ, could be if it were nicely supplemented. Zahlauer’s appreciative account of Rahner on Ignatius provisionally concedes to Rahner’s critics that, in the main, Rahner’s reading of Ignatius appears one-sided (einseitig) toward the transcendental pole.36 But Zahlauer ultimately overturns this verdict. For him, Rahner may be exonerated from the charge of onesidedness based on the metaphor of the “antidote.” This metaphor, while perhaps ill-chosen and unwieldy, 32. ISDHJ 129–30/457, ET thoroughly revised. 33. ISDHJ 132/458–59. 34. ISDHJ 133–35/459–60. 35. ISDHJ 136–37/460–61. 36. Zahlauer, Rahner und sein “produktives Vorbild,” 329.

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can also be helpful if understood correctly. An exacting reading of the Canisianum conferences reveals that “with ‘antidote’ the reference is not targeted primarily at a static structure, but rather is an attempt to reflect a dynamic and inherently complex unity.”37 This unity is the same type of plural unity I introduced in chapter 1: the plural unity of a being’s symbolic manifestation, the plural unity of appearances, and the freedom at the ground of appearances. The relationship between the “antidote” of the Sacred Heart and the “chemical purity” of Ignatian spirituality is not derivative, but the original plural unity of existence as it emerges from its ground. Jesus’ Sacred Heart is the source of indifference, the “existential,” and loyalty to the church.

Christ’s Love as Source The guiding text for the next two major divisions of this chapter will be the third Canisianum conference, the sine qua non of that group of meditations and the one that Rahner’s critics must sweep under the rug in order to prosecute their critiques. Briefly put, I offer extended discussion of the third conference and related ideas as a challenge to those who read Rahner critically by reading him overly selectively (of course, all readings are selective, but some select more capaciously than others). If critics like Marshall (or Balthasar, or Ratzinger, or whoever) deem Rahner’s spirituality Christologically underdetermined, it may just be because they do not take Rahner at his word. For them, it is coincidental that Rahner explicates the features of Ignatian spirituality by way of devotion to Jesus’ Sacred Heart, just as he develops his theology of the symbol by beginning and ending with the Sacred Heart. For them, it is coincidental that Rahner calls Ignatian spirituality a “true unfolding (echte Entfaltung) of devotion to the Sacred Heart.”38 Perhaps, from their viewpoint, this is a pious nicety necessitated by the occasion for which Rahner delivered these conferences, and that alone. For me, the “coincidence” reading grates against the facts. 37. Ibid., 331. 38. ISDHJ 137/461. The ET has “true flowering,” which poetically expresses the Sacred Heart devotion’s status as the germ or origin of Ignatian spirituality.

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As I discuss them in more depth later, I foreground what Rahner says in the third Canisianum conference about each of the features of Ignatian spirituality. I also make secondary references to the prior two conferences, which as I see it should be read through the optic of the third. In this way I set a baseline for understanding what Rahner says about indifference, the “existential,” and loyalty to the church elsewhere in his corpus. This baseline understanding can then contribute to our grasp of the Ignatian inflection of Rahner’s theology of freedom. The reader will notice that I treat indifference and the “existential” in close tandem with one another, maybe shortchanging the former in favor of the latter. I do this at Rahner’s prompting. In the Canisianum conferences, Rahner pairs the two so closely that they are impossible to separate and at times difficult to distinguish.39 Also, in the later sermon, “Christmas in the Light of the Ignatian Exercises” (1974), Rahner will elide indifference and the “existential” again, this time eclipsing the latter for the former.40 They are for him roughly interchangeable, even if each adds an indispensable nuance. Furthermore, together they help to establish the importance of freedom for Rahner’s understanding of Ignatian spirituality, and in so doing they firm up my contention that decision—the center that holds together indifference and the “existential”—is the pivotal idea of Rahner’s theology of freedom. The fact that Rahner depicts loyalty to the church as the antidote to these other two features (in somewhat of a slip of the metaphor, which otherwise he reserves for the Sacred Heart devotion) shows both that they belong together and that loyalty to the church may be treated alongside them.41 I do this later in “Loyalty to the Church.” I mean in doing so to display analytically the dual aspects of Rahner’s complex notion of subjectivity, which always and necessarily has individual and ecclesial valences. Ignatian spirituality as a source rounds out the view of freedom drawn from transcendental philosophy and penitential theology. Individuality is more sharply rendered, and so is ecclesiality. 39. In the second conference, for example, Rahner explains that the person living out the “existential” element of Ignatian spirituality does so under the “law of indifference”; ISDHJ 133/459. 40. See Karl Rahner, “Christmas in the Light of the Ignatian Exercises,” in TI 17:5–6. 41. ISDHJ 129/456.

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Throughout I take the following words from the third conference as determinative for and constitutive of Rahner’s theology of freedom: It is no accident that the Exercises, rightly understood, are at one and the same time the discovery of love in Jesus Christ, for the God who is ever greater than we have known, and the discovery of our own individual image, our “vocation,” in inspiration from above (and not in rational planning from below). . . . Here it must not be forgotten that our special, unique existence is a participation in the life of Christ, an imitation of our Lord and of his destiny renewed in such fashion that we are really continuing his life, not copying it for the nth time. And hence this Christian mission of ours, this special character, can only be discovered in love of the God-Man, a love in which we accept his love, in which he confers existence upon us.42

Anything Rahner says about the features of Ignatian spirituality stands under this rule. Individual vocation and ecclesial existence are discoverable through the discovery of Christ’s love. If the order of Rahner’s works does not always follow this order of discovery, that is a viable editorial choice that ought not to be gainsaid, especially if such gainsaying becomes a facile mode of dismissal. The proposition is tantalizing that individual (and likewise ecclesial) existence continues the life of Christ, “not copying it for the nth time,” but renewing it, refreshing it in new circumstances befitting a new individual and renewed community in their God-given freedom.

I n di v i d ua l D ecisi on Numerous critics have derided the individualism, latent or overt, of Rahner’s theology of freedom. The most famous, of course, has been Johann Baptist Metz, though it is usually his disciples that make the criticism damning. Gerd Neuhaus exemplifies this attitude in concentrated form. His book Transzendentale Erfahrung als Geschichtsverlust? (1982), whatever its ultimate conclusion regarding the merits of Rahner’s theology, mercilessly drives certain Rahnerian thoughts to what Neuhaus be42. ISDHJ 143–44/464–65.

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lieves are their logical conclusions.43 Chief among these, at least for our purposes, is Neuhaus’s contention that Rahner’s rendering of the love of God and neighbor, proceeding as it does from individual, transcendental experience, “willfully presses the other into the service of what concerns me (die willentliche Indienstnahme des Anderen um meinetwillen)”—that is, my own self-fulfillment.44 Michael Purcell’s work on the resonance between Rahner and Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–95), which emphasizes the similarity of Rahner’s theology to Lévinas’s ethically suffused philosophy, substantially challenges such an individualist reading. The sort of self-realization Rahner discusses does not occur over against the other (especially the personal other), but in encounter with the other.45 Such are the coordinates of recent scholarship on Rahner and the “individual.” Here I will pursue a different set of questions. I take it that relatively few people (Purcell is one of them) have actually inquired into what “individual” means for Rahner. The assumption is usually that the individual subject for Rahner is a modern individualist, and that we are clear on what modern individualism is. This assumption stands in tension with Rahner’s theology. It also fails to recognize something about the modern individual that would call into question any attempt to chastise Rahner for presenting a strong sense of individuality: many of the problems of the twentieth century were not caused exclusively by individualist disregard for “the other,” but also by individuals’ willingness to sacrifice themselves for a toxic “greater whole.” If Rahner’s theology presents a strong view of individual self-realization, 43. Gerd Neuhaus, Transzendentale Erfahrung als Geschichtsverlust?: Der Vorwurf der Subjektlosigkeit an Rahners Begriff geschichtlicher Existenz und eine weiterführende Perspektive transzendentaler Theologie [Transcendental Experience as Loss of History?: The Accusation of Loss of the Subject in Rahner’s Concept of Historical Existence and an Additional Perspective on Transcendental Theology] (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1982). Neuhaus draws heavily from Metz, but also from Herbert Vorgrimler’s critical questions toward Rahner, all set within a theoretical framework heavily influenced by Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. 44. Ibid., 105. Neuhaus takes special exception to the phrase reditio in seipsum, which demands close scrutiny, for sure, but does not mean what it would at first blush seem to mean. In KRTA 66–77 I began to address concerns with Rahner’s usage of the “subject’s return to itself,” but more work remains to be done to answer objections like Neuhaus’s. 45. Michael Purcell, Mystery and Method: The Other in Rahner and Levinas (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 1998), 354.

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it could and should be seen as opposing the latter eventuality, where the individual becomes a site of pathological sacrifice, of false self-emptying. I argue that Rahner’s strong sense of individuality, of individual freedom, derives from his reading of Ignatius’s Exercises. Indifference and the “existential” are the main pillars of Rahner’s Ignatian view of individual freedom. In its primary meaning, individual freedom signifies decision: the person’s eternal election in time to continue the life of Christ in the world without repeating it for the nth time, to make Christ’s loving freedom manifest. The key point to understand will be how Rahner differentiates between the individual as unique and divinely called and the individual as a mere particular instance of a universal. If this point is understood, the rest of the argument should snap into focus—so too will critiques of Rahner’s supposed individualism be theologically defused.

Indifference In the third Canisianum conference, Rahner explicates indifference in terms of divine-human love, since indifference involves “a detachment from oneself . . . a trustful letting go of oneself ” through which a person “becomes free, he loves all things, he loves not merely many individual things lumped together, but the primal Whole: God.”46 The key to understanding this definition of indifference in terms of love lies soon after, when Rahner relates this definition to 1 Corinthians 15:28: “Indifference is nothing but that phase of elevating love, which, with the world and still in time and history, is on the way to that ‘God all in all,’ where there is only love and nothing else.”47 Rahner does not engage in extended exegesis here, as that would have been inappropriate to the setting (preparing retreatants for meditation), but his evocation of this passage is potentially very Christologically fecund. Surely Rahner’s listeners would have known—so would not have to be told—that the phrase “God all in all” occurs amid Paul’s discussion of the Paschal Mystery and the place of the baptized in Christ’s victory over sin and death. The victory has 46. ISDHJ 139/462, ET modified. 47. ISDHJ 140/463, ET thoroughly revised.

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been won, but the fullness of the goal (God all in all) has not yet been reached. Christians live within the process of moving toward the goal’s final achievement, within the victory already won by Christ. Rahner suggests that indifference is an imitation of Christ’s death on the cross, a death to the world so that one may be raised to new life. My reading of Rahner on this point is corroborated by his Betrachtungen zum Ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch (1965; ET: The Spiritual Exercises), one of two books of meditations on the Exercises assembled from spiritual conferences Rahner delivered during the 1950s.48 Rahner initially presents indifference as a “distancing from things that alone makes possible a matter-of-fact seeing that is necessary to make a decision.”49 This is an important nuance that will help us later on, but for now it is even more significant that Rahner goes on to say that this distancing of oneself from worldly things is encompassed by a “human giving-oneself-over to God (Gott-Anheimgegebenheit des Menschen).”50 This givingoneself-over is most obvious in death, since “here we ourselves no longer have at our disposal total freedom, but can only persevere and say: ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit.’ ”51 The scriptural reference is clear: Jesus’ last words on the cross in Luke’s Gospel (Lk 23:46). Again, Jesus’ loving death is central to Rahner’s presentation of this essential feature of Ignatian spirituality. And this thought continues in the next meditation, on the “Magis.” Indifference, Rahner reports, “is freedom for decision, which properly is no longer mine, but God’s: I seek your will in the election.”52 Indifference imitates Christ’s loving trust in God at the point of his death. Such loving trust is freedom. With these thoughts on Ignatius’s Exercises we can return to the second Canisianum conference, where Rahner states that indifference “must 48. Karl Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch [Meditations on the Ignatian Exercises], in SW 13:37–265; ET: Spiritual Exercises; the other, which is more directly concerned with priestly life, is Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz [Practicing Priestly Existence], in SW 13:269–437; ET: The Priesthood, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury, 1973). I have for various reasons decided to provide my own translations of material quoted from these works. 49. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:47. 50. Ibid., 48. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 49.

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only be the death of that secret self-seeking which cramps us and rejects the infinite freedom of God. Indifference must be love.”53 We could recur even further back in Rahner’s corpus to Hearer of the Word, whose reflections on God’s infinite freedom to self-reveal or not could be seen to have a distinctly Ignatian and Christological cast. To cultivate indifference is to learn to dispose oneself properly toward the salvific decision of God to self-reveal and to share Godself with another. Such a disposition is precisely that taken by Christ on the cross when he commended his spirit to the Father (Lk 24:36). In this commission, this active-receptive event of trust, human freedom was made manifest to its widest possible aperture. I am convinced that Rahner has this in mind when he declares while discussing indifference, “The center of the world and of all truth is a heart: a burning heart, a heart which exposed itself to all fates, that has suffered all fates.”54 This heart is Christ’s, which would be pierced and from which— as Rahner wrote in his theological dissertation—the church was born ( Jn 19:34).55 If in the two texts we have considered Rahner emphasizes indifference as a cruciform death to the world, his brief remarks on indifference in the 1974 sermon “Christmas in Light of the Ignatian Exercises” round out the picture. Late in the sermon he describes indifference using language reminiscent of the overall drift of Geist in Welt, which I insist is a philosophical text that must be read backward from its last page—that is, through a Christological lens. He observes, “For Ignatius Loyola ‘indifferent’ freedom for the tremendous mystery of God does not mean, simply and exclusively, we have found a home where we can abide, so as never again to have to return to the here and now of our everyday earthly life. On the contrary, it is an encountering event which, without itself disappearing, sends us back from itself into the concrete reality of our 53. ISDHJ 131/458. 54. ISDHJ 132/458, ET modified. 55. Karl Rahner, E latere Christi: Der Ursprung der Kirche als Zweiter Eva aus der Seite Chrisi des Zweiten Adam, eine Untersuchung über den Typologischen Sinn von Joh. 19:34 [E Latere Christi (From the Side of Christ): The Origin of the Church as the Second Eve from the Side of Christ as the Second Adam, an Investigation on the Typological Sense of Jn 19:34], in SW 3:3–84. For an astoundingly astute recent study of E latere Christi, see Brandon R. Peterson, Being Salvation: Atonement and Soteriology in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017).

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life for particular decisions and actions.”56 Indifference and being sent into the world (mission) are two unified, abiding aspects of the Christian life. These aspects reflect, Rahner observes, the unity in diversity of the “hypostatic union of God and an undiminished and untruncated humanity.”57 Put less theoretically, the two sides of Ignatian spirituality can help a Christian to understand better Jesus of Nazareth’s birth into and life in this world, which are celebrated at Christmas. At this point we have gathered that indifference is a disposition whose source is not abstract, theoretical reasoning, so not “transcendental” in some objectionable sense. If indifference is a “transcendental” determination of a practitioner of Ignatian spirituality, it is transcendental in the sense of Christ’s transcending love on the cross, in full trust of the Father and comprehensive love of creation. It was out of this same love that the Word became flesh in the first place. Indifference’s Christic transcendence is a preparation for decision. With this insight, we are equipped to read Rahner on the “existential.”

The “Existential” I shall be brief in recounting what Rahner says about the “existential” in the third Canisianum conference, because I have already quoted it at length (on continuing and not copying Christ’s life), and yet another passage from it will occupy us in “Rahner’s Ignatian Aesthetic of Freedom.” Nevertheless, a couple of points demand coverage. Rahner defines the “existential” in two ways. First, he speaks of love in general: “There has never yet been any love which failed to regard itself as unprecedented and unique.”58 Rahner immediately relates the uniqueness of each instance of love to the intra-trinitarian life: “Love is the birth of the true, ultimate individuality that is not narrow solitariness, but an image of the in-each-instance-unique individualities in God (added together only by us), where each possesses the whole of 56. Rahner, “Christmas in Light of the Ignatian Exercises,” in TI 17:5. 57. Ibid., 6. 58. ISDHJ 141/463.

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the divine essence, by giving place to and lovingly accepting the other individuality in God, which uniquely possesses the whole of the divine essence, by giving place to and lovingly accepting the other individuality in God.”59 The reference to the Trinity is sublime. Second, “love, and love alone . . . gives knowledge of one’s own uniqueness in terms of vocation, task, and mission.”60 The “existential” element of Ignatian spirituality consists in a process of discovery by which one finds one’s own individuality, which is patterned on the unique personhood of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and which is given as a call to an unprecedented mission in the world. Within this context, Rahner makes his crucial remarks about continuing the life of Christ. For Rahner, the mode of participating and continuing Christ’s life taught by Ignatius is tailored entirely to the individual. This tailoring happens from two sides: by God’s specific, concrete, decisive love for each individual person, and by the individual’s free decision regarding who he is. “By his own free decision,” Rahner states, “a person rises from being a mere instance of his species to a unique, individual personality.”61 I indicated earlier that in order to understand Rahner’s theology of freedom, one must grasp his idea of an individual as distinct from a mere particular instance of a universal. In this statement he has raised the same issue. Now we must pursue it with reference to his other writings on the Exercises. We start with a description of the Exercises in the essay “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats” (1974–75): In the Exercises a fundamental and free decision of life-long importance should take place. Such an election essentially comes to be made according to Ignatius not simply by applying general human, Christian, and ecclesiastical norms to a specific case, which is merely a concrete instance, however complex, of a 59. ISDHJ 141/463. “Die Liebe ist die Geburt der wahren und endgültigen Individualität, die nicht verengte Einzelheit ist, sondern ein Abbild jener je einmaligen (nur von uns zusammengezählten) Individualitäten in Gott, die je einmalig das Ganze des göttlichen Wesens besitzen, indem sie die andere Individualität in Gott, die je einmalig das Ganze des göttlichen Wesens besitzen, indem sie die andere Individualität setzen und liebend gelten lassen.” 60. ISDHJ 141/463–64. 61. ISDHJ 142/464.

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universal principle, but rather by deciding upon the unique, individual destiny willed by God which transcends all general norms.62

These words confirm and extend Rahner’s description of the “existential” dimension of Ignatian spirituality from the Canisianum conferences. The added nuance is that the concrete individuality that the Exercises mean to reveal “transcend[s] general norms.” The intent of the Exercises to facilitate a retreatant’s discovery of the absolutely unique way in which he is called to serve Christ raises an interesting theological problem: how could we possibly account for such concrete individuality, such diversity? Rahner’s 1956 essay “The Ignatian Logic of Existentiell Recognition,” from The Dynamic Element of the Church, pursues exactly this question. The essay centers on the problem of election in the Exercises by posing a question and refusing any premade answer to it: “In what way is the discovery of God’s will for each individual human being meant and envisaged?”63 The answer to this question would involve navigating the problematic Rahner summarizes as follows: “Something individual in the matter itself which, as something positive (not merely as a limitation and a restriction of a universal nature) can in the concrete be an object of the divine will just as much as the universal can.”64 It has been generally agreed upon throughout the theological tradition that God wills the universal (e.g., by legislating universally applicable norms like the Ten Commandments). A more difficult question lies in how applications are made in individual cases. Even more difficult is conceiving of individual living as more than “a case” to which a universal rule applies. In short, the Ignatian Exercises face moral theology (especially the deductive moral theology in which Rahner and his contemporaries were educated) with a challenge, to think about a moral particular without it being simply a “ ‘case’ [Casus] of a certain kind.”65 This challenge to moral theology leads to ontology and, I shall argue shortly, to theological aesthetics. 62. Karl Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” in TI 16:141; see 135n1 on the history of this piece. 63. LER 90/372. 64. LER 108/383. 65. LER 110/384.

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The key site in the Exercises for establishing this challenge is “The Rules for Discernment of Spirits,” which, according to Rahner, Ignatius himself prized as “his own special discovery.”66 These Rules “are entirely constructed in order to distinguish from all other impulses those which contain an individual manifestation of God’s will and which are not merely promptings from God towards a decision the correctness and conformity of which to God’s will has already been established on other grounds.”67 The construction of the Rules assumes, without argument or explanation, a fascinating and new anthropology that has yet to be assimilated in moral theology (or the rest of theology).68 A theology adequate to the Rules would have to show “in the domain of a human being and his personal moral decisions, an individual element which as such, that is, in what it involves over and above the general, has a positive content and originality, fundamentally and absolutely unique.”69 This would involve an ontology more differentiated than Thomism or Suarezianism, though Rahner suggests that a more finely shaded ontology could emerge from Thomism. One could begin constructing such an ontology from the standpoint of the spiritual aspect of the human person, regarded not as a “repeated type” but as bearing unique, positive individuality and marking matter with precisely this individuality.70 Thomas’s account of angels’ “specific individuality” may help.71 Rahner quickly pivots away from these suggestions, though, modestly proclaiming that he cannot pursue these ideas further. Rahner merely intimates that a new consideration of individuality would be “not only a matter of philosophical niceties but [would] have a definite place in life.”72 This is so because the Exercises, for all their vagueness with regard to ontology (which Rahner knows was not Ignatius’s concern), put forward a “logic of concrete discovery [Erkenntnis] that may be achieved only in the 66. LER 95/375. 67. LER 95/375. 68. See Rahner’s closing remarks on LER 169–70/419–20. 69. LER 111/385. 70. LER 113/385–86. 71. LER 112/385. 72. LER 114/387.

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enactment of the thing itself, of a concrete recognition [Erkenntnis], which in this case is of the concrete will of God directed toward the individual as such.”73 The tacit ontology and anthropology of the Exercises, were it carefully identified and articulated, could provide a powerful account of human freedom within the context of God’s will, God’s eternal decision to self-communicate and to save people, not in general, but by electing each one specifically and concretely. This ontology would help people as they lead their lives (existentielly) to recognize God’s will for them, each of them; Christ’s love for them, each of them; and the Spirit’s movement in and through their hearts—each of them. This ontology could fortify Christian life and help people to inhabit the sublime ethos of Christianity, continuing the life of Christ, not copying it for the nth time.

Rahner’s Ignatian Aesthetic of Freedom Rahner calls the “Logic” essay a work of “epistemology,”74 but he would have been more correct to call it a text on the theological aesthetics of freedom. This is one reason I resist translating “Erkenntnis” as knowledge and choose “recognition.” This word is best because Ignatius’s logic helps the exercitant to recognize God’s particular will for him and then to make a decision based on this recognition. The “Logic” essay tells us far less about epistemology and knowledge than it tells us about freedom, flowing from the love of Christ, expressed in a unique human life. The “Logic” essay insists centrally on one particular point, which Rahner expresses in his essay on retreats: Ignatius’s “logic” “must be removed from the context of the choice of a vocation in the church and clearly expressed in terms of its general significance for human existence.”75 Ignatius, at least read by Rahner, expands the notion of vocation to the full breadth of its scope: not just a calling to priestly ministry, but to minister, in whatever capacity, to the needs of the world. But so too does Ignatius take vocation to its full depth and consequently sketch 73. LER 169/420, ET thoroughly revised. 74. Rahner, Dynamic Element of the Church, 9. 75. Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” in TI 16:141n11.

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it in its full individuality, inasmuch as the Ignatian account of election coheres with devotion to the Sacred Heart. This delving into the depths constitutes a turn toward the aesthetic as I first explicated it in this book’s introduction and specified in chapter 1: the precognitive, selfexpressive stratum (ground) at which human and divine freedom meet, which ex-ists through concrete manifestation in a material symbol—in this case, a life of service. I should firmly establish that the “Logic” essay concerns the “aesthetic” stratum of human existence. Late in the essay, Rahner writes a paragraph illustrating how the truth of Ignatius’s account of decision making is corroborated by the experience of people not making the Ignatian Exercises. People tend to make grave decisions “more or less exactly in the way that Ignatius conceived it, just as the man in the street uses logic without ever having studied it.”76 Each person makes such a decision out of a “basic experience about himself (Grunderfahrung über sich selbst)” and out of the “feeling of the congruence or incongruence of the object of choice to [the] basic feeling about himself (Grundgefühl über sich selbst).”77 Decisions are made out of one’s personal ground, as we discussed in chapter 1. This personal ground involves “feeling,” thus is aesthetic in a straightforward sense. Rahner adds that a person makes a grave decision “not only and not finally out of rational analysis, but out of the feeling (aus dem Empfinden heraus) of whether or not it ‘suits him.’ ”78 Furthermore, “the person certain of his vocation still has a certainty, which cannot be assembled adequately from rationally analyzable grounds.”79 Ignatius’s “logic” is not epistemological, not about “rational analysis,” but aesthetic. Human decision self-expresses out of the personal ground and is discoverable through an aesthetic logic. Rahner had prepared for the previous statements in his consideration of Ignatius’s formulation consolación sin causa. Rahner understands this formula to refer to consolation that occurs not on account of a particular object the exercitant encounters, but rather through an immedi76. LER 166/417. 77. LER 166/417–18, ET modified. 78. LER 166/418, ET modified. 79. LER 167/418, ET modified.

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ate encounter with God.80 Rahner states, “The objectlessness [Objektlosigkeit] . . . is pure openness [Offenheit] for God, the nameless, objectless [gegensstandlose] experience of love from the God who is raised above everything individual, definable, and distinguishable, of God as God.”81 Rahner continues his discussion of openness for many pages, eventually revealing that he sees at the base of Ignatius’s idea of consolation (especially sin causa) a “subjective starting point.”82 He is quick to clarify that this is not “a merely ‘transcendental subject’ in metaphysical abstraction.”83 Instead, by “subject” he means “the concrete human being . . . engaged with his freedom, individuality, and history.”84 Within this engagement the human person is “open” to God’s infinity. Rahner evokes his discussion of Vorgriff from Geist in Welt. In fact, he uses the same term when he says that with this open receptivity the person “experiences his pure anticipation [Vorgriff] of the spiritualsupernatural boundlessness of his goal.”85 This pure openness is, by definition, true, “because it excludes nothing but includes all. It always refers to the true God because it ascribes no law to him that could violate him, and expresses no judgment that would be finite and so could falsely limit him.”86 Consolation occurs in and as the Vorgriff, as a movement of freedom toward God, and as the prior condition to any epistemological, rational, or noetic logic. Consolation is a concrete manifestation of God’s free movement, as sustaining Ground, through the free (because open) human imagination, which sublime-aesthetically (actively-receptively) anticipates its fulfillment in God. But one more thing must be said regarding “concrete manifestation” to bring us back to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Let us consider at length a passage from “Unity—Love—Mystery,” a piece on the Sacred Heart that has undeniable Ignatian overtones:87 80. LER 132–34/396–98. 81. LER 135/399, ET modified. 82. LER 148/406. 83. LER 148/406. 84. LER 148/406. 85. LER 148/406, ET modified. 86. LER 149/407, ET modified. 87. Karl Rahner, “Unity—Love—Mystery,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 8, Further

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In yet another quite special respect the Sacred Heart points us on to the mystery of our own existence. Not only is God Mystery in Godself (an sich), but also insofar as he has freedom in us. [He has it] inasmuch as our own free selfrealization, the deed of our life, the innermost and last decision of our existence, which arises from our freedom, is . . . encompassed, supported, and defined by God’s freedom, and this evades us and our knowledge, is hidden in the silent abyss of God, where we are most ourselves, in the underivable, nontransferable decision of our freedom.88

Deep decision (i.e., the fundamental option), which is encouraged by consolation, which arises because of God’s activity in human freedom, occurs beyond cognitive thematization. It transpires in an “abyss” (Abgrund) beyond clear and distinct knowledge. God’s having-freedom-in-us becomes thematic in the Vorgriff through aesthetic thematization.89 The fundamental option transpires through an act of faith and hope and ultimately through self-surrender to God in love. This act is possible, Rahner contends, in the presence of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, “which—this is the miracle of grace that is new and quite unique in each individual case— gives us the courage to forget ourselves and to believe in his love as a love which has been bestowed on me in particular.”90 Human and divine freedom meet in a love beyond cognition, and at this meeting point love is expressed most fully, between God and an individual (not a particular instance of a genus). This love is expressed in the concrete symbol of the Sacred Heart, but also in the individual life of the person whom God loves, and who loves God in return, from the “hidden abyss” outward. Theology of the Spiritual Life, part 2, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury Press, 1971), 245–47. 88. Ibid., 245. I have retranslated this difficult sentence. The removed word is “nochmals,” in this case a particle that does not change the sentence’s meaning; see Karl Rahner, “Einheit— Liebe—Geheimnis,” in SW 13:537–38: “Nicht nur Gott an sich ist das Geheimnis, sondern auch, insofern er in Freiheit über uns verfügt, insofern unser eigener freier Selbstvollzug die Tat unseres Lebens, die innerste und letzte Entscheidung unseres Daseins, die unserer Freiheit entspringt, nochmals umfaßt, getragen, bestimmt ist durch die Freiheit Gottes und diese uns und unserem Wissen entzogen, verborgen ist im schweigenden Abgrund Gottes, so daß wir selbst uns gerade dort nochmals verborgen sind, wo wir am meisten wir selbst sind, in der unableitbaren, auf niemand anderen abwälzbaren Entscheidung unserer Freiheit.” 89. See LER 148/407, ET modified. The ET has “emergence into awareness” for “Thematischwerden,” which I render more straightforwardly as “becoming thematic.” 90. Rahner, “Unity—Love—Mystery,” in TI 8:247.

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Thus far I have focused on the individual. Next I must show that robust Rahnerian-Ignatian individuality is commensurate with ecclesial being. The “universal,” we should not forget, is the salvific will of God, concretely realized in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. The individual, as opposed to the particular of a universal, is a concrete symbol of the salvific will of God and the saving and redeeming action of Christ and the Spirit. And for all its individuality, this individual’s life is ineluctably and irreducibly bound up with the communal life of the economy of salvation. Individual decision occurs in an economy. Individual decision happens in a matrix given prior to explicit reflection, prior to thought, prior to system. Individual decision transpires within a life: the Way, the Truth, and the Life ( Jn 14:6). Thus Rahner’s consideration of the “existential” feature of Ignatian spirituality leads to an aesthetic question—a query about the precognitive, self-expressive ground that is the proper site for decision.

Loya lt y to the Church As Rahner sees it, the existential, individual nature of human freedom can be understood only once one has asked how Christian freedom works within its ecclesial “where.”91 To develop such an understanding, one must discover how the church and individuals can love one another “as one loves someone just by being there for him.”92 Already in chapters 1 and 2 we have explored the ecclesial valence of subjectivity with respect to Rahner’s theology of the symbol and his retrieval of the idea that penance effects reconciliation with the church. Here we augment those discussions by treating the Ignatian idea of loyalty to the church, the antidote to the “individual” teachings of indifference and the “existential.” Thus we continue to unfold the question of the threefold relation of freedom: human, divine, ecclesial. Rahner writes, “In spite of [Ignatius’s] subjective approach to the salvation of souls . . . in spite of the fact that he founded an order which was 91. Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” in TI 2:97. 92. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:238.

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no longer communal in the same sense as the orders of the Middle Ages, he is, nevertheless, the man of the Church, the man to whom the phrase ‘sentire cum ecclesia’ may be supremely applied.”93 Something similar goes for Rahner: he is a theologian keenly sensitive to “feeling with the church.” Here we shall finish our reading of the Canisianum conferences, in which Rahner relates love of the church to the love of Christ, the merciful love that flows from his pierced Heart. This connects with Rahner’s insistence that loyalty to the church must manifest itself as assent to the church in its concrete, weak, pilgrim, sinful condition. Thus ecclesial subjectivity emerges as a main operator in Rahner’s Ignatian aesthetic of freedom.

Loving the Church In the second Canisianum conference, Rahner asks the following question: “Is there any need to dwell on the fact that radical loyalty to the Church can only be sound and wholesome when it is the loyalty of a heart serving in love, a heart whose relationship to the church is loving?”94 He writes this question not to make the simple anthropological claim that loyalty to the church (and consequently, defense of church offices and practices in the face of critics) makes much more sense when one loves the church also. Nor is he making a simple, anthropological appeal to the attractiveness of humility. Instead, Rahner’s question sets up—because it emerges from—a Christological claim: love for the church is learned from “the Heart of our Lord, who loved and who was not ashamed to love.”95 Rahner elaborates this claim in the third conference. Rahner sounds a note that he had emphasized since his 1936 theological dissertation: “Ex corde scisso Ecclesia Christo iugata nascitur”—from the pierced Heart of Christ the church is born.96 The key to loving the 93. Karl Rahner, “Being Open to God as Ever Greater: On the Significance of the Aphorism ‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,’ ” in Theological Investigations, vol. 7, Further Theology of the Spiritual Life, part 1, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1971), 33. 94. ISDSHJ 135/460. 95. ISDSHJ 136–37/461. 96. ISDSHJ 144/465.

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church properly, to being truly loyal to it, is seeing the church in terms of its origin in Christ’s Sacred Heart. Rahner observes, “To see her as from our Lord’s Heart, to love her from thence, to love her, by grace, in co-operation and imitation of that love which is her very foundation, is to love her with love like that which Paul described as the love of Christ for his Bride, the Church, and love as it was seen by the Fathers of the Church.”97 Especially with this last phrase we see how dependent Rahner’s theology is on the writings of the church fathers, and with the next few sentences one witnesses the influence of the fathers’ penitential writings. Rahner continues, noting that Christ’s love for the church is a love for “sinful, lost humanity,” loving persons “notwithstanding (trotzdem)” their fallenness, within a church that he has made holy, even given its empirical sinfulness.98 Loyalty to the church must be a love that imitates this merciful love of Christ. It must mean loving sinful and lost people who, in their fallen condition, are searching for holiness but have not yet found it.99 The church in its current, pilgrim condition is “precisely not simply the holy, flawless Bride of Christ without wrinkle or defect.” This means that the one who would be loyal to the church must love it (through its members, of course) with “long-suffering, compassionate, enduring love.”100 Loyalty to the church is fidelity to an as yet incomplete church. Loyalty to the church is, in short, an imitation of Christ’s mercy. For these reasons loyalty to the church ought never to resemble partisanship. It ought never to be defensive. It ought never to look like loyalty to a political institution. Instead, loyalty to the church consists in “missionary” love, not in the sense of enforcing membership, but in the sense of spreading the mission of mercy that flows from Christ’s pierced heart on the cross.101 The object of this love is not the church’s honor, but greater manifestation of God’s free decision to create, to save, and thereby to self-communicate. 97. ISDSHJ 144/465. 98. ISDSHJ 144/465. 99. ISDSHJ 145/465. 100. ISDSHJ 145/465. 101. ISDSHJ 145/466.

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Loyalty to the church as commitment to Christ’s mission of mercy provides the proper context for the Christian individuality sketched by the other two features of Ignatian spirituality, indifference and the “existential.” Authentic individuality is recognizable and achievable only within the context of the church, only within the context of a mission of compassionate, long-suffering love for and from people on their pilgrim journey. Rahner states in “Freedom in the Church” (1953), an essay roughly contemporaneous with the Canisianum conferences, “Until it is seen in the light of Christianity, one cannot have any clear understanding even of real freedom of choice, i.e., of the freedom which consists not merely in the fact that man is not coerced from without, but also in the further fact that a free decision about himself is demanded of him—a freedom, therefore, which is rather a requirement and commission than freedom.”102 This remark and subsequent sentences could be understood as saddling individuals with a monumental task they must pursue alone, each making her own decision for or against God. But this is not so. If one understands the opening phrase well, one will recognize “Christianity” to mean an ecclesial context, where each person’s free decision is supported and sustained by the church, and where the “requirement” and “commission” in question consist in each individual’s participation in the church’s mission of mercy, flowing from Christ’s Sacred Heart. Rahner writes “Freedom in the Church” in an ecclesial situation in which people are taking “flight into a merely collective religious life,” waiting for ecclesial directives to decide their morality or, on the other side, considering everything permissible that the church has not specifically condemned. Correlative with this, the ecclesial situation includes dwindling personal piety in spite of continued participation in the Mass.103 He writes in a situation of superficial loyalty to the church that has been destructive of individual religious life. Superficial loyalty has bound individual freedom. He goes on to suggest ways that the official church might make room for individual freedom, so as to avoid a false 102. Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” in TI 2:91–92. 103. Ibid., in TI 2:106.

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collectivism. My purpose here is different, because of today’s different ecclesial context, especially in the North Atlantic world, where anemic individualism (which paradoxically issues in a perverse form of selfsacrifice to “the Market”) is hegemonic. I aim to show how Rahner proposes authentic loyalty to the church that properly contextualizes and fosters robust individual freedom. Rahner ends the Canisianum conferences on the note of loyalty to the church. He declares that devotion to the Sacred Heart can lead its practitioner to be blessed with an understanding of “how we love the church in order to love all people.”104 The true unfolding of Ignatian spirituality consists in a communal love for all consonant with one’s personal decision for God. In a commentary on the Exercises, Rahner upholds Mary as the ideal—yet fully real—embodiment of ecclesial service and personal life. “For her,” he contends, “office and subjectivity do not diverge.”105 He continues, “Her individuality sinks, as it were, into her mission, vanishes in her apostolate, but precisely in this way she becomes the one and only person she is supposed to be.”106 Then he completes the thought: “This Virgin who led her small, poor, soberly matter-of-fact life in a corner of Palestine, in her self-consuming, non-self-regarding service as handmaid of the Lord has become the one and only, the, as it were, absolutely human individuality.”107 For Rahner, Mary’s perfect individuality, made manifest in salvation-historical service, makes her the “archetype of the church (das Urbild der Kirche).”108 She perfectly enacts her role of conceiving Christ, not just in her womb but in her faith, heart, and action.109 Thus she becomes perfectly redeemed and mercifully helps others on the way toward redemption. The church, as a real symbol of Christ’s victory over evil, attempts throughout history to enact the same role, yet it remains in its pilgrim condition. Christians, as members of the church, must be loyal to the church and work to approx104. ISDSHJ 146/266. 105. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:235. 106. Ibid., 235. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 236. 109. Ibid., 234.

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imate the individuality-in-community that Mary achieves. By laboring with the church, by living with, thinking with, feeling with the church— the imperfect yet necessary church—Christians follow the path Ignatius recommends in the Exercises.

Assenting to the Concrete Church Rahner writes in his last will and testament, channeling the voice of Ignatius, “I loved the Church in the co-realization of God’s inclination toward the concrete body of his Son in history, and in this mystical unity of God with the Church—with all their radical distinctness—the Church was and remained for me transparent to God and the concrete place of my ineffable relationship to the eternal mystery.”110 This passage echoes what Rahner teaches in the Canisianum conferences regarding loyalty to the church while emphasizing the concreteness of ecclesial love. He also notes the distinctness between the church and God, even given the former’s “transparency” to the latter. The discrete life of the church vis-à-vis divine life becomes important when Rahner’s Ignatius turns to discussing criticism of the church. Rahner’s Ignatius contends that he himself maintained a “unity of obedient service and critical distance” that the Society has found difficult to replicate.111 Thus he exhorts his fellow Jesuits and a wider readership to effect a concrete relationship with the church, and consequently with God, that includes two things: obedience where the church is transparent to God and criticality where the church falls short of this transparency. Surely this is difficult. Rahner analyzes this difficulty in the 1968 lecture “Concerning Our Assent to the Church as She Exists in the Concrete.”112 The lecture’s audience is closely circumscribed: committed Catholics only, if its implications could be widely valuable. Rahner remarks that the problem of the individual’s assent to the church fits with two overall tendencies 110. Rahner, “Rede Ignatius,” SW 25:316. 111. Ibid., 318. 112. Karl Rahner, “Concerning Our Assent to the Church as She Exists in the Concrete,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, Confrontations, part 2, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1974), 142–60.

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in Western culture: society is becoming more planned and organized, while, at the same time, individual freedom is becoming more prized.113 Greater organization and greater individualization, it seems, must coexist, but how? Rahner sets his sights on how this question may be addressed within the Catholic Church. He begins by observing that committed Catholics experience the church as “a burden and a challenge.”114 This is so because, for all the gifts and graces the church offers, in her concrete form she also authoritatively and bindingly imposes demands on individual believers.115 In short, it seems to restrict individual freedom. As committed Catholics, individuals cannot arbitrarily or capriciously comport themselves with respect to the church’s authority: they owe her obedience and “cannot simply adopt an attitude of critical detachment toward her.”116 They must accept restrictions on individual freedom. This obedience, or assent, is as difficult as ever in the modern world of multiplicity of opinions, ways of life, and social arrangements, because in this situation the church’s authority cannot easily be accepted as unassailable. Furthermore, individual members of the church and those in authority often appear “pitiful, narrow-minded, old-fashioned, and out of date”; the church often seems unwilling and unable “to overcome burden of her own past”; and the church often prefers to build on the past rather than venture into the future, staying truer to the letter than the Spirit.117 The church’s imperfection in her concrete existence is glaringly obvious, making assent undesirable and unrestricted individual freedom more attractive. Nevertheless, Rahner argues, theologians must seek the “point of departure for a hopeful and committed assent to the church in the concrete.”118 He suggests three points that may be combined to constitute this point of departure. First, it must be recognized that human living is not developed by a process of pure speculation. One cannot avoid 113. Ibid., 146. 114. Ibid., 142. 115. Ibid., 143. 116. Ibid., 143–44. 117. Ibid., 145. 118. Ibid., 147.

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one’s own situation and assumptions and achieve an absolutely critical stance. Any critical stance must be founded upon a trustful and willing commitment to a way of life, just as any skepticism requires belief in intelligibility. This is particularly true for committed Catholics, for whom “assent to the church as she exists in the concrete has already permeated our entire life.” Even under conditions of critical questioning, “commitments to loyalty, love, integrity without thought of reward or trust” must remain, just as they do in other areas of our lives.119 Second, and similarly, doubts regarding the church’s authority or other insufficiencies in the church’s concrete existence do not automatically negate the commitment of faith, which involves free assent to the church. Instead, they present points of tension, and the life of the committed Catholic requires trustfully enduring unresolved tensions.120 Third, and most seriously, should a Catholic feel inclined to surrender loyalty or attachment to the church, this option should be considered grave. Rahner avers, “It is only in the act of striving for that which is greater, more enlightening, a greater force for life, that man has the right to relinquish something that belongs to his life, to surrender it.”121 Refusing assent to the church and directing one’s freedom elsewhere should hinge on a conviction that a path other than the Catholic Church, with its hope for eternal life, its fellowship of love, and its mission of forgiveness, would prove more life-giving. The point of departure for assent to the church as it exists in the concrete, then, involves honesty regarding the basis for one’s critical stance toward the church, courage to have doubts yet remain faithful, and trust that the church, even in its pilgrim pitiability, offers life. Rahner acknowledges once more, in conclusion, that individual assent to the church is exceedingly hard. But he reminds his hearers that the church’s complexity, from its sublime heights to its sinful doldrums, follows straightforwardly from the church’s role in the world: to be a sacrament of salvation for the whole of humanity.122 Precisely because of its holism the church proves incomprehensible to the individual and 119. Ibid., 148–49. 120. Ibid., 150. 121. Ibid., 152. 122. Ibid., 153.

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a risk for that individual’s freedom. Precisely because of its holism the church includes the weak with the strong, the sinner with the saint, the irresponsible with the responsible, the stupid with the wise. Rahner offers three pieces of advice as one departs toward assent to the church. One must assent to the church as one does to a loved one, who will always remain incomprehensible, but precisely for that is concrete (only abstractions are graspable).123 Although the church’s teaching authority presents a heavy burden, one must acknowledge that truth has to do with institution: authority helps us to overcome our own subjectivism and see truth as dialogic, occurring within the church.124 One must “consider above all that the Church is always the Church who wearily seeks her way through history, that she and we ourselves are on the way, and have not yet arrived at that goal at which all will be reconciled.”125 The church’s message of reconciliation finds concrete form in the embodiment of real Catholics’ lives, and in these only. Assent to the church always occurs as the church renews itself on its pilgrim way. Rahner elaborates his exhortations elsewhere, looking toward the future: “Attachment to the Church will . . . be an absolutely necessary criterion for genuine spirituality: patience with the Church’s form of a servant in the future also is an indispensable way into God’s freedom, since, by not following this way, we shall eventually get no further than our own arbitrary opinions and the uncertainties of our own life selfishly caught up in itself.”126 Like Ignatius, Rahner sees an intimate connection, even a transparency, between ecclesial freedom and God’s freedom. This transparency is not complete, the movement from ecclesial to divine freedom not friction-free. But it exists, and it is essential for the full flowering, rather than pathological self-restriction, of individual freedom.

123. Ibid., 153–54. 124. Ibid., 155–58. 125. Ibid., 159. 126. Karl Rahner, “The Spirituality of the Church of the Future,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 20, Concern for the Church [TI 20], trans. Edward Quinn, ed. Paul Imhof, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 153.

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Ecclesial Subjectivity I must still confront once more the objection that Rahner’s appropriation of Ignatian spirituality is individualistic. After all, Rahner writes the following in “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats” (1974): “However human subjectivity and the role of the Church are related to each other, the fact remains that the Exercises are a solitary event proper to the individual person and that in this process the Church does not figure as the controlling agent.”127 It would seem that if Rahner were a faithful reader of the Exercises, then he would have to advocate individualistic spirituality of some sort. For Ignatius, the church is merely an object to which the retreatant relates, so that the individual person may cultivate indifference for himself and may recognize his own call by God and consequently develop his own existential attitude. But were we to conclude on this point, we would miss something essential about Rahner’s reading of Ignatius—his insistence on the loyalty to the church that Ignatius demands of Christians, however clear or unclear this may be in the Exercises. Rahner continues his reading of Ignatius in “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” relating Ignatian spirituality to the Christian ethos as it was being inhabited in the postconciliar period. Rahner states, “The ‘whole’ Ignatius is not to be found in the explicit text of his Spiritual Exercises; rather we can discover in him anticipatory signs of community understanding and expression which are important for the notion of the Church and its life.”128 Rahner asks whether the Exercises may be refigured in a new epoch so that the church may appear not as an object, but as “an active subject finding expression in a specific community of believers.”129 Were this to happen, the church would appear in the way we discussed in chapter 2 in conjunction with penance’s ecclesiological aspect, with the church functioning as Ursakrament, whose influence flows through penance and the acts of the penitent. Rahner sketches a model for retreats that may fit better with the 127. Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” in TI 16:144. 128. Ibid., in TI 16:148. 129. Ibid.

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new epoch: applying the logic of existentiell recognition in an ecclesial group, such as a diocesan presbyterium, a parish council, or a less official gathering of religious people.130 This would be “an entirely new form of ecclesial self-realization, . . . but despite its novelty it is just as legitimate as the self-realization of the Church in the activities of the hierarchy or in the liturgical community.”131 Rahner goes even further to claim that this could “be one of the characteristic marks of the Church of the post-modern period, because . . . up until now ecclesial groups have either passively accepted decisions affecting them being made by one individual or, in the case of collective resolutions, have used methods common in the secular world.”132 The last phrase is momentous. Rahner appeals for a manner of self-realization that is genuinely Christian, genuinely open to God’s salvific will to a radical extent inaccessible to the modern world or the nonecclesial postmodern world. While it may seem that this discussion of retreats is limited in its applicability, in fact it bears insights with wide-ranging implications for ecclesial life. The point is this: the model of subjectivity Rahner discovers for individuals applies to the church as well, and when it is applied to the church reveals the proper, catholic (universal) scope of the Christian ethos. This has a radical further implication that contravenes objections raised toward Rahner’s allegedly “individualistic” theology. If Rahner’s model of individuality reveals the proper, catholic scope of the Christian ethos, it is not much of a logical step to argue that individual subjectivity for Rahner proves inextricably ecclesial—not just potentially related to the church, but ecclesial in its very ground. The church is not super-added to the individual. The individual can be separated from the church only artificially—and Rahner never performs such an artificial operation. As I argued in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, Rahner’s Ignatius is not a modern subject but a paradoxically transmodern person who, at the beginning of modernity, reforms the modern subject from the inside out.133 The Christian individual is apprehensible only as embedded in 130. Ibid., in TI 16:152. 131. Ibid., in TI 16:153. 132. Ibid. 133. KRTA 136–41.

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the church, not autonomously divorced from it. True individuality is the best antidote to modern individualism, just as ecclesiality roots out collective egoism and massification. Indifference and existentiell decision must always be combined with loyalty to the church for human freedom to appear as it should and to make God’s freedom manifest. Rahner’s 1970 essay “On the Structure of the People of the Church Today” includes several remarks apropos of the intertwining of individual and ecclesial subjectivity, with direct reference to freedom made manifest.134 He writes of the visibility of the church, how it manifests the event of salvation in history. Since salvation occurs for individuals— not just for a collective mass—“the personal history of the individual as uniquely vested with freedom belongs intrinsically to” the church. Rahner adds, “It must at least be made manifest in her, and must be capable of revealing itself for what it is. . . . [T]he Church must make a permanent place within her for a manifestation of this sort.”135 He insists that the church should see “individualization” as a “radical goal for the Church in the achievement of her own fullness.”136 And finally, he urges the official church to “maintain sufficient scope for [individuals] to operate within her.”137 We must understand all of these statements carefully in terms of Ignatian loyalty to the church. Rahner is not suggesting that the church should bend to individuals’ caprices. Instead, he is carefully rendering a two-way relationship of loyalty that follows the lines set up in the Canisianum conference metaphor of the antidote: individuality (indifference and “existential”) must be balanced by loyalty to the church, but so too is true individuality (based in recognition of God’s unique call) necessary for ecclesial life and subjectivity not to degenerate into party fanaticism and rigidity. In terms of Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest, ecclesial subjectivity consists in freedom that makes space for individual decision; individual subjec134. Karl Rahner, “Of the Structure of the People of the Church Today,” in TI 12:218–28. 135. Ibid., 221. 136. Ibid., 12:222–23. 137. Ibid., 12:223. I have modified Rahner’s sense here slightly. He is writing at this point about “sects” within the church. But his concern with individuality (even if collective individuality here) still abides.

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tivity consists in freedom that aids the church’s manifestation of God’s decision to save. A final way of saying all this is that Rahner’s theory of individual and ecclesial subjectivity is Christic.138 We must recall his conviction that the question of church in the Exercises turns on the individual’s encounter with Christ. This encounter we may call a “microsymbol” of ecclesial life. Subjectivity occurs as self-realization irreducible to, yet still belonging under, a universal principle. A more poetic and evocative way of saying this is that subjectivity happens under the banner of Christ, the bandera of Christ, or to go with the customary translation of Ignatius into English: the standard of Christ. To this theme, from the second week of the Exercises, we now turn.

Th e Fun da m enta l Opti on a n d the T w o Sta nda r ds One of Ignatius’s preferred descriptors for the church is ecclesia militans, the church militant. For him this denotes the church in its pilgrim condition, but also, most obviously, the church in its struggle against evil. Doubtless this ecclesial title makes me uncomfortable as an American theologian in an age of unrestricted, uncontested, and unconscionable U.S. militarism; for Ignatius it is hardly more appropriate, as his too was a time of growing world empire.139 But ecclesia militans is an unavoidable phrase if we wish to explore a suggestion from Jon Sobrino. Near the end of a 2004 essay on Rahner’s influence on liberation theology, Sobrino notes the difference between Rahner’s theological vision and that of liberationist thinkers like Ignacio Ellacuría: Rahner never seems to have understood Ellacuría’s contrast between a “civilization of wealth” and a “civilization of poverty,” but he 138. This becomes clear in the “Modern Piety” piece when Rahner contrasts his proposed “collective” retreat with Pentecostal movements that let the experience of the Spirit become uncontrolled by any discernable logic, whether Christic or ecclesial. He suggests the Ignatian logic of recognition as a corrective; Rahner, “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats,” in TI 16:153–54. 139. Endean too comments on this unsavory military metaphor; Endean, KRIS 188n18.

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should have, because “this vision has deep gospel roots, and also, in the meditation on the Two Standards, Ignatian ones.”140 Sobrino suggests that Rahner did not apply concretely enough Ignatius’s meditation on the dos banderas of Christ and Lucifer, the battle flags that the exercitant must choose between as he decides where he stands with respect to God’s will. I wish to explore this suggestion, if only preliminarily, by making one of my own: Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option, like Ellacuría’s contrast between the Christic civilization of poverty and the Luciferian civilization of wealth, maps well onto the Two Standards, thus the Christian’s role in the ecclesia militans, in its historical struggle against evil. I have argued in prior chapters that the fundamental option is more complex than seems to have yet been recognized.141 The fundamental option occurs largely imperceptibly because it is made at the level of a person’s hidden ground, and this option is made imperfectly due to the frictional drag of concupiscence (chapter 1). The fundamental option originates in Rahner’s study of early church notions of sin and co140. Jon Sobrino, “Karl Rahner and Liberation Theology,” Way 43, no. 4 (October 2004): 65. 141. One of the anonymous reviewers of this book before it went to publication insisted at this point in the text that I acknowledge that my reading of Rahner on the fundamental option is not straightforwardly exegetical but is also constructive interpretation. This is a fair request. Certainly by this point in chapter 3 I have chosen a particular path through Rahner’s works to arrive at a particular reading of the fundamental option. And certainly the reading I offer here is contestable on exegetical grounds. Likewise, though, I deem this particular reading of Rahner illuminating for a wide variety of his texts and a fruitful way of integrating his sometimes disparate writings on freedom. Resonances of all the ideas I present here are perceptible in central essays like “The Theology of Freedom” and, by sounding these resonances, perhaps, to an extent, theologizing with a hammer, I believe I have discovered an apt hermeneutic for Rahner’s Aussagen on freedom (on the “hermeneutics of Rahnerian assertions” to which I allude here; see Endean, KRIS 149–53). Even more, apropos of the juxtaposition with Sobrino and Ellacuría, the constructive reading that I offer here is also a corrective of Rahner. This is true, furthermore, of the perspective given in chapter 4. Though I insist throughout this chapter (indeed this book) on carving an apologetic path through Rahner’s works (i.e., addressing concerns of his critics), I do not mean to suggest a “rose-colored-glasses” devotion to Rahner. Instead, by constructively interpreting Rahner’s works, I aim to offer a path toward assent to Rahner’s theology of the fundamental option in the concrete—acknowledging its flaws (e.g., lack of concreteness with respect to sin [Sobrino], a kind of brinksmanship where Rahner’s elective affinities with German Idealism brings him close to a theoretical theodicy). I do not claim perfection for Rahner (still less myself!), but, perhaps, high-functioning gnoseological concupiscence. Thank you to the reviewer for prompting this clarifying note.

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heres with sacramental acts of penitents (chapter 2). Here I shall add one more nuance. Rahner’s fundamental option, rather than an idealist imposition on Christian theology, constitutes an Ignatian reading of the classical Christian notion of metanoia: change of heart. The fundamental option is a decision at the deepest stratum of the person to turn away from a life of sin and to be assimilated into Christ’s life. And this decision is ecclesial: the individual, while responsible for herself, never stands under a bandera alone. Thus, even for its infelicity, the phrase ecclesia militans proves helpful: the fundamental option is a realistic portrayal of the high stakes of Christians’ struggle, individually and collectively, in times momentous and seemingly insignificant, against sin.

Rahner on the Two Standards Endean raises critical questions regarding Rahner’s reading of Ignatian spirituality, but two are most germane at this point: “How can we reconcile Rahner’s ‘immediate experience of God’ with a conviction that such experience must be, in Ignatian terms, under the ‘standard’ of Christ? If God is truly creator of all that exists, what is the place for a unique, saving Jesus Christ who seems to divide the world into those for him and against him, and who, in Augustinian fashion, appears to override the creation’s original goodness?”142 We have seen already that Rahner’s theology of Ignatius’s Exercises privileges the immediate experience of God, yet I have shown how Rahner tempers this emphasis through the “antidotes” of Jesus’ Sacred Heart and the church. Still, Endean’s questions, which target the “transcendental” dimension of Rahner’s theology, bear careful consideration. Does the immediate experience of God bypass Christ? Does the fundamental option bypass Christ? To commence answering these questions, we must consult Rahner’s commentaries on the Two Standards meditation in Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch and Einübung priesterlicher Existenz. The Two Standards meditation concerns “the ultimate intensification of [the] problem of human existence,” which Rahner summarizes 142. Endean, KRIS, 188.

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in the following question: “How can I distinguish between a true call of God and a false impulse?”143 Ignatius approaches an answer to this question by presenting Lucifer’s “technique of temptation” and God’s “way of urging.”144 Before Rahner considers these two points, he describes the context in which an exercitant undertakes the meditation. This context is “a world burdened with sin,” so decisions are “structured by the history of unholiness (Unheilsgeschichte).”145 The meditation from the first week on the three sins should make this clear. But likewise, the context is determined by “the Incarnation of the Word, [by] his grace.” The context is not “neutral,” but “radically stamped by the opposition between Lucifer and Christ.”146 And this separation “spreads not only throughout our whole environment, but it penetrates all the way to the interiority of our hearts.”147 This is not to say, though, that this “radical dualism” is clear, with the church standing firmly on the side of Christ and the world standing under Lucifer’s standard.148 “There is nothing in the world,” Rahner explains, “that absolutely and simply represents the radical, absolute embodiment of the power of evil, godlessness, the satanic, however much certain phenomena in world history point in this direction.” Likewise, “the church, inasmuch as she is the embodied church of sinners, is not simply the representative of the standard of Christ.”149 Both standards fly over the whole world, mixed in with one another, never in their complete purity. But in their “concrete situations,” people must learn to distinguish between Christ and his retinue and the devil and his, because “Christ came to bring the sword, and not peace (Mt 10:34).”150 This learning happens through the imagination: picturing Lucifer enthroned on a plain near Babylon, and Christ standing in a lowly place on a plain near Jerusalem. Rahner writes first, following the order of the meditation, about imagining Lucifer as he commands his army 143. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:157. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid., 157–58. 146. Ibid., 158. 147. Ibid. 148. Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:371. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid., 371, 372.

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of demons. This act of imagination helps the exercitant to make three recognitions: evil is real, and one must resist the temptation to deny its existence; “the power of the devil is everywhere operative”; and the devil instructs his demons to tempt people on three levels: wealth, worldly honor, and pride.151 Rahner reduces this list of three to another list of three desires that the devil uses to seduce human persons into sin: desire to have (Habenwollen), desire for validation (Geltenwollen), and desire to be (Seinwollen).152 For Ignatius, the tempter need not lead a person sequentially through all three. But in its full expression, temptation could proceed as follows: the desire to have, ill-directed, leads to a person’s complete involvement in taking care of things; this involvement brings a person’s self-identification with things, garnering praise from others for what he has; and such validation can stoke a person’s “desire to be absolutely for himself (Absolutefür-sich-sein-Wollen)” and to assert himself unconditionally, eventually against God.153 In this way, Lucifer exploits human desire. A connection could be made here with Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge, which I take to be constitutive of his theological aesthetic. Lucifer perverts the way that the human person comports herself in the world. The dynamism of human knowing, which for Rahner is always a movement of freedom, occurs in three stages: becoming absorbed in worldly things through sensation, taking distance from them in abstraction, and returning to things in a spirit of greater openness, after having recognized one’s Vorgriff of absolute being. Lucifer tempts human persons to stifle this dynamism, to stop at the first stage and to short-circuit the subsequent two. Lucifer aims to render human freedom entirely finite, implacably closed. Thus Lucifer encourages freedom’s manifestation as its opposite, unfreedom.154 The exercitant’s imagining of Christ is symmetrical with the imagining of Lucifer. A humble Christ is imagined who sends out apostles and disciples to spread the good news of salvation to all regardless of their 151. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:160. 152. Ibid., in SW 13:161; Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:373. 153. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:161. 154. See Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:373.

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condition, and these apostles are to attract people to Christ by encouraging them to take on the conditions of poverty, insults and becoming despised, and humility.155 Rahner observes that poverty must be set against the Luciferian desire to have, humiliation against Luciferian validation, and humility against Luciferian being-absolutely-for-oneself.156 Followers of Christ’s apostles will become detached from worldly possessions, so they may trust in God; this will expose them to insults and contempt, because they will be seen as maladroit in the ways of the world; and not achieving this-worldly success (even, Rahner notes, in the church, where people “throw elbows” to get ahead) will bring humility, “openness and freedom of heart.”157 Proceeding under the standard of Christ means being “submerged in the ordinariness of duty,” taking part in a community that attempts to live out the generosity Christ showed on the cross.158 To refer back once more to Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge, the Christic path allows the process of conversion to the phantasm to ensue unabated, passing through sensation (rather than being arrested by it), into an anticipation of being beyond the world and back toward the world in a spirit of openness and freedom. Thus Christ encourages freedom to become manifest precisely as what it is: the finite’s capacity for the infinite. One could see the fundamental option, a quintessential “transcendental” idea of Rahner’s as watering down Ignatius’s original meditation, along the lines Endean critically probes in the questions presented earlier. But it would be better to read it as an aesthetic idea, a thesis that I will work out in more detail soon. Preliminarily I can say the following words. Key to reading the fundamental option, as I see it, is regarding it in terms of exposure.159 The “immediate experience of God” of which Rahner writes is a condition of exposure to God, without a buffering 155. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischer Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:162. 156. See Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:375. 157. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischer Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:162–63. 158. Ibid., 163–64. 159. On exposure, see KRTA 86, 89, 99, 143.

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intermediary. It seems that Endean worries that Rahner’s conception of the “immediate experience of God” has Hegelian resonance (recall his estimation of Canisianum conferences’ genre), where the immediate experience of God resembles the ultimate cancellation of revelation by reason. But if we stick to chapter 1’s argument that Rahner rejects Hegel in favor of Schelling, “immediate experience of God” takes on an aesthetic cast, where God is felt, not cognized, at a stratum deeper than reason—in one’s ground. And since ground is through its existence and through that alone, the Rahnerian-Ignatian “immediate experience of God” is through concrete existence’s exposure to Christ. The fundamental option takes shape under these conditions of exposure. The Two Standards meditation specifies these ideas. The scenes that the exercitant imagines—Lucifer instructing his retinue and Christ his—give the impression that the exercitant is exposed to a battle between evil and good that is beyond her comprehension and control. The exercitant is exposed to the Creator’s love for all creation, but also to temptation and the activity of demons. Rahner does not explain why or how this is the case; neither does Ignatius. Rahner is not doing a theoretical theodicy. But Rahner does write of what a person must do in this given situation to which she is exposed: she must decide.

The Fundamental Option and the Sacred Heart I must say more about what “decision” means in this context. The following lengthy quote from Declan Marmion provides us with an interesting starting point: “It can be overlooked that the Exercises constitute an initiation or a mystagogy into a basic experience of God. To facilitate such an experience is the main task of the director of the Exercises. It is not a question here of a merely theoretical initiation into the essence of Christianity. The Exercises are and remain a matter of choice and decision in a concrete life-situation, since the conversion or metanoia (sometimes called by Rahner a person’s fundamental option) is not just a theoretical occurrence.”160 Marmion is commenting on Rahner’s brief essay “The 160. Marmion, Spirituality of Everyday Faith, 205.

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Exercises Today.” He reminds us that, for Rahner, the Ignatian Exercises initiate retreatants into a fundamental, pretheoretical experience of God—one could call it an “experience of the heart” or of the personal ground. Such experience is, we know by now, crucial for Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. Also, and even more fascinating, Marmion equates (or attributes this equation to Rahner) the fundamental option with metanoia, a change of heart. This point reinforces and instructively specifies the first. Rahner emphasizes in Einübung priesterlicher Existenz that the decision to which the Exercises give rise occurs in the heart, the deepest interior ground of the person.161 He states, “This decision begins in the interiority of the heart and operates outwardly into the world, and what we see in the world as antagonistic, as contradictory, as demanding separation, as in need of being distinguished in an election, represents again only the reflection of each internal decision, which must be made in the ground of existence.”162 The decision aided by the Two Standards meditation is thus rendered aesthetically as a matter of the heart (rather than of the mind, knowledge, reason, and so on) and as expressive into and through the world (i.e., symbolically). We must count it as significant that in Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, Rahner inserts a scriptural meditation between Two Standards meditation and the next portion of Ignatius’s text, the meditation on the Three Pairs of Men. In a footnote, Rahner explains his choice of text, the Sermon on the Mount. It has to do with the fact that he is leading an eight-day retreat as opposed to the month-long Exercises; he has to be selective among the meditations on Christ’s life. He meditates on the Sermon on the Mount because “an almost immeasurable wealth of perspectives is offered there” to help retreatants come to a decision.163 161. On Betrachtungen zum ignatianischer Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:160, Rahner also refers to the Personenkern that I discussed in chapter 1. 162. Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:372: “Entscheidung beginnt in der Innerlichkeit des Herzens und wirkt sich in der Welt aus, und das, was wir als antagonistisch, als widersprüchig, als auseinanderzutrennen, als in einer Wahl zu unterscheiden in der Welt sehen, stellt wieder nur den Reflex jener innerlichen Entscheidung dar, die im Grund des Daseins getroffen werden muß.” 163. Rahner, Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch, in SW 13:164n1.

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Furthermore, though Rahner does not offer this by way of justification, the Sermon on the Mount clearly allows him to relate the Two Standards meditation to the heart: to Christ’s Sacred Heart and to the hearts of those who wish to follow Christ’s Heart by changing theirs. Explanations of individual verses do not matter as much for our purposes as his consistent mention of Jesus’ Heart throughout, the contrast he draws between an unconverted heart that rejects the beatitudes and one that humbly accepts them as wisdom, and the note on which he ends. Rahner instructs the retreatants that the Sermon on the Mount leads toward “a simple humility built upon God alone,” and this God “will only be found as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . only through Jesus and in the spirit of His heart, whose love was carried all the way to the cross, to make all things new.”164 The Two Standards meditation is supposed to induce the exercitant into “alignment with Christ.”165 Rahner recommends the Sermon on the Mount as a succeeding meditation so the retreatant may find God in Jesus’ Heart. I am now recommending that we do with the fundamental option what we did with the features of Ignatian spirituality: consider the Sacred Heart as its ground and recognize alignment with this Heart—or, should the option go the other way, resignation to Luciferian heartlessness—as its existence. We should return briefly to the key text on the fundamental option: the middle portion of Rahner’s “The Theology of Freedom.” It must be noted that love is the key theme as Rahner explicates his idea of freedom as centered on the fundamental option. Having explained the fundamental option with conceptual complexity, Rahner states more plainly, “Considered as the capacity of the ‘heart’ (Vermögen des ‘Herzens’) [freedom] is the capacity of love.”166 He elaborates with slightly more density, “The love of God, and this love alone . . . is able to unite all man’s many-sided and mutually contradictory capabilities because they are all oriented towards that God whose unity and infinity can create the unity in man which, without destroying it, unifies the diversity of the finite . . . it alone can still redeem even the dark hours of the past since it alone 164. Ibid., 168–69. 165. Cf. Rahner, Einübung priesterlicher Existenz, in SW 13:375. 166. TF 187/101.

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finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.”167 The “basic act” of the human person, the Grundentscheidung or fundamental option, is enlivened by God’s love. This love is integrative (recall the “collected person” in chapter 1) and merciful (recall “penitential freedom” in chapter 2). This integrative and merciful love is made manifest by the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Rahner turns to consider the theme of ethos (Ethos): “The Christian ethos does not basically consist in the respecting of objective norms imposed by God on reality. . . . The only ultimate structure of the person which manages to express it completely is the basic capacity of love, and this without measure.”168 The Christian ethos, this means, is not bounded first and foremost by finite prescripts—though Rahner’s insistence on loyalty to the church as a specification of love of God, combined with his meditation on the Sermon of the Mount (“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill”; Mt 5:17), disallows antinomianism. Instead, the Christian ethos is structured by boundless love. The fundamental option, properly directed, accepts its exposure to God’s boundless love. “Every sin,” on the other hand, “is in its ground (im Grunde) only the refusal to entrust oneself to this boundlessness.”169 Thus a negatively formed fundamental option opts for boundedness, a rejection of boundlessness that Lucifer’s demons attempt to inculcate in people. “Boundlessness” refers, we learn at the end of the essay, “to that event (Geschehen) which breaks open the prison of the world: the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son,” the Paschal Mystery.170 And “boundedness,” one can infer, is taking for one’s home the prison of the world of sin and guilt. The ground of the fundamental option is God’s love, symbolized by Jesus’ Sacred Heart. The existence of the fundamental option is an embrace of boundlessness or boundedness. The fundamental option may be equated with metanoia because its existence involves turning, at the level of the heart, toward or away from the boundlessness of God’s love, 167. TF 187/101, ET slightly modified. 168. TF 188/102. 169. TF 188/102. 170. TF 196/110, ET slightly modified.

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poured from Christ’s Heart. The fundamental option, or decision, is not a theoretical occurrence. It is an aesthetic one.

Theological Aesthetics and Decision Rahner proposes in a 1972 essay he wrote as part of a Festschrift for the Spanish Jesuit Joaquín Salaverri, “Reflections on a New Task for Fundamental Theology,” that a theology based in Ignatian decision be used to reshape fundamental theology. This branch of theology is dedicated to the relationship between “grounds of credibility of Christian revelation” and “the actual decision to believe.”171 Most modern fundamental theology prior to the Second Vatican Council (including Salaverri’s) insisted that a decision to believe should be made on firm rational grounds. Ignatius’s existentiell logic offers fundamental theology a way for discussing decision as total commitment made without rational analysis of a specified object. After all, the affective states involved in decision making in the Exercises tend not to present perspicuous rational content, but aesthetic (sensed, imaginative) content. In his conclusion, Rahner laments that Jesuit theology has not effectively used the Ignatian heritage to make sense of the Christian faith. He calls for Jesuits (or others inspired by Ignatius) to recast theology using Ignatian insights on decision.172 In my lexicon, this would mean reshaping fundamental theology as a theological aesthetic centered on freedom. We began to trace Ignatius’s aesthetic logic earlier, when discussing the “existential.” We can augment those findings here by proposing how the meditation on the Two Standards can function within this aesthetic logic. Then I shall bring us full circle by relating all this back to Rahner’s early philosophy. To promise a reformation of fundamental theology on this basis would be too overblown a claim. But to say that RahnerianIgnatian aesthetic logic can help us delve deeper into Rahner’s theological aesthetics is a safe bet. The meditation on the Two Standards can be seen as functioning di171. Karl Rahner, “Reflections on a New Task for Fundamental Theology,” in TI 16:156. 172. Ibid., in TI 16:166.

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alectically within the Ignatian logic of existentiell recognition. As an exercitant (or, we could generalize, as Rahner proposes, a Christian) nears recognition of God’s call and, consequently, an election, she imagines the Lucifer and Christ scenarios. In doing so, she considers how Christ calls and desires all persons to come under his standard and how Lucifer opposes Christ by doing the same. The person desires something and pursues it through this meditation. Desire from a person’s heart passes through Lucifer’s and Christ’s attempts to win it, and decision comes from submission either to Lucifer’s wiles, where desire would be arrested in its ground, or to Christ’s urging, where desire would blossom into a surrender in love and would proceed to service of others. The Two Standards meditation is both a site for dialectical process and an indicator of whether the divine call will be recognized or go unrecognized. If we were to translate this into the idiom of traditional fundamental theology, we could say that the credibility of Christian belief hinges primarily on recognition of a divine call in the movements of one’s desires, to which rational analysis could be applied afterward. Christian faith manifests itself in a life of love, reconciliation, and service, and only secondarily in rationality and calculation. Let us relate this all to freedom by returning to Geist in Welt. Within his consideration of the conversion to the phantasm, Rahner includes a section called “The Freedom of Spirit.”173 Rahner defines freedom of spirit as a “having-come-beyond the other of sensibility, which is the coming back of the spirit to itself.”174 Rahner reaches this definition of freedom after having articulated how spirit lets sensibility emanate from itself (see chapter 1). As part of this articulation, Rahner asks the following question: “Why, in letting sensibility emanate, does the spirit too not so lose itself in the other, in matter, that it has its being in the other only, and so is no longer present to itself?”175 This question connects 173. GW 290–99/218–24. 174. GW 295/221, my translation. I have altered the ET, which has “Hinausgekommensein” as “transcendence” and “Rückkunft” as “return,” because I wanted to render these as closer counterparts, which they are in Rahner’s thinking. For this reason I chose the constructions with the verb “to come.” 175. GW 292/220, ET slightly modified.

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with the Luciferian side of the Two Standards meditation. Should Lucifer have his way, human spirit would relinquish its freedom by misdirecting its desire to have (Habenwollen) and losing itself in materiality. Something similar goes for the following statement: “Insofar as spirit does not let sensibility emanate so that it lets itself be diffused without remainder into it, it retains the possibility of really becoming according to its own essence, whose region lies antecedent to sensibility and beyond it at once.”176 This remark corresponds to the Christic side of the meditation. We could say that spirit proceeds through its material desires (Habenwollen, Geltenwollen, Seinwollen), not abrogating but properly directing them toward its own unique becoming. The freedom of spirit, even when considered in the realm of the metaphysics of knowledge, is the opposite of Lucifer’s goal in tempting human persons, and it allows for alignment with Christ—not repeating Christ’s life for the nth time but living uniquely in accordance with his will. I have just drawn theological-spiritual parallels to Rahner’s metaphysical discussion of the freedom of spirit. I do so following Rahner’s lead, even if I pass beyond what he does. Within the passage on freedom of spirit, Rahner provides an example of how his metaphysical discussion may play out in theology. The example he gives is charity: “Charity, for example, is the form, root, and generative principle (mater) of the other virtues, which produces the other virtues and directs and moves them toward its own goal, and yet it does not disappear into them, it is a certain sense outside them and remains in itself.”177 Charity is, of course, the free love of God, the love that is made manifest in Jesus Christ’s Sacred Heart, and the kind of love that Lucifer aims to forestall. Human freedom of spirit, by the logic of Rahner’s example, operates along the same lines as God’s love, freely given, which infuses human virtues, moves through them, and brings them toward their goal. Freedom of spirit moves through the things of this world, directing and moving them toward its goal, God. This movement, assuming it is not stifled by Luciferian temptation, is metanoia, alignment with Christ. 176. GW 296–97/223, ET modified. 177. GW 294/221.

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The fundamental option is a decision for or against this alignment, for or against cooperating with the Sacred Heart’s symbolic expressiveness. Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest is a logic of love. Let us now carry this logic forward. We have spent the past three chapters gathering together the three sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom. Now we must apply these sources to the challenge posed to Rahner’s theology of freedom by experiences of suffering, interpersonal harm, and trauma—the catastrophes of history, which would seem to render God’s self-communication imperceptible and the fundamental option’s capacity for symbolizing God’s self-communication unexpressive. To do so, we must discuss a theme that I have gradually introduced on the Two Standards: freedom’s exposure.

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Rahner on Exposed Freedom

4

Rahner on Exposed Freedom

L ate in his life (1980) Rahner wrote that the only critique of his work

that he really took with grave seriousness came from his student and friend Johann Baptist Metz.1 Rahner made this observation soon after the publication of Metz’s magnum opus, Faith in History and Society (1977), which trenchantly pursues a critique of Rahner’s transcendental theology.2 This critique arose, as is well known, from the traumas of World War II and the Holocaust. Metz has fundamental sympathies with Rahner’s theology of freedom, but he presses Rahner to explore with greater earnestness how freedom is expressed or stifled within history.3 Attention to historical expression or nonexpression would entail engagement with historical catastrophes and traumas. Such engagement is not forthcoming from Rahner. Metz’s critique has been renewed and specified in recent years by a theologian exercised both by Rahner’s theology and by traumas in history: Jennifer Erin Beste in God and the Victim: Traumatic Intrusions 1. Karl Rahner, “Introduction,” in James J. Bacik, Apologetics and the Eclipse of Mystery: Mystagogy According to Karl Rahner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), ix–x. 2. Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Crossroad, 2007), hereafter FHS. 3. Susan Abraham is helpful on this aspect of Metz’s critique; see Abraham, Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence, 30.

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(2007). This book has proven influential in recent treatments of Rahner on freedom.4 She interrogates the capability of Rahner’s theology of freedom to account for the harm done to human agency by severe acts of violence, her preferred example being prolonged incestuous abuse of children.5 Beste follows Metz in depicting Rahner as an idealist who does not attend realistically to human vulnerability. She recommends and partially works out serious revisions to Rahner’s theology of freedom to facilitate its engagement with realities of trauma: of gravely ill people robbed of “normal” Christian freedom, who are often stigmatized and shunned by their communities—who have been undone.6 Beste centers her critique quite rightly on the fundamental option. She judges that Rahner makes “reason” the criterion for realizing “sufficient freedom to effect a fundamental option.”7 This leads her to portray the fundamental option as an aggregate of self-conscious acts.8 On these two crucial counts, her critique of the fundamental option could be put more precisely, with a sharper purchase on what subjectivity means for Rahner. Should it be so recalibrated, her already strong and incisive critique could bore more deeply into Rahner’s theology of freedom. I work in this chapter to put Rahner’s theology of freedom through such a recalibrated critique, with critique taken more in the sense of “de4. E.g., in Regan, Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights; Shannon CraigoSnell, Silence, Love, and Death: Saying ‘Yes’ to God in the Theology of Karl Rahner (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008); Declan Marmion, “Between Transcendence and History, Trauma and Grace: Rahner’s Anthropology Revisited,” Louvain Studies 37, no. 4 (2013): 309–26; Matthew Petrusek, “The Relevance of Karl Rahner’s View of Human Dignity for the Catholic Social Thought Tradition,” Philosophy and Theology 27, no. 2 (2015): 513–38; and Petrusek, “Making the Fundamental Option: How Human Capabilities Help Clarify Rahner’s Conception of Justice,” Philosophy and Theology 29, no. 2 (2017): 433–60. 5. Beste, GV 37. 6. I borrow this language of “undoing,” which could just as well be from Metz, from Judith Butler, who has reflected throughout her career on how human persons are “done” (constructed) or “undone” by discourse, interpersonal relations, social practices and structures, and, through all of these, power. Butler is a key source for Beste (see GV 61–73), so in part I follow Beste’s lead in reading Rahner with Butler in mind. The most obvious reference with regard to “undoing” is Butler’s book of essays; Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7. For the first use of this language of “effecting,” see GV 16, et passim; see also 86. 8. See, for example, GV 88.

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fining proper bounds” than “criticism.” The principle of recalibration is aesthetics. “Reason” and “subjectivity” in Rahner must be read aesthetically, through Geist in Welt. Human self-awareness, self-reflection, and self-transcendence (which Beste designates as hallmarks of Rahnerian subjectivity) are not functions of reason simply considered, but of an iterative process of sensibility and intellection driven by the imagination. The distinctive feature of human (as opposed to divine or angelic) reason is not the agent intellect, but the possible intellect, which is at once receptive and active.9 The possible intellect has a close correlate on the side of sensibility, the cogitative sense (der cogitativa).10 Rahner equates this latter term with the imagination.11 Subjectivity is based in the receptive-active imagination, dependent on, exposed, and vulnerable to whatever it encounters, whether the delicacy of a rose’s petals or the sharpness of its thorns. Since “freedom” is another name for subjectivity, freedom bears exactly the same characteristics. Human freedom begins as exposure, lives under conditions of exposure, becomes manifest in exposure. Human freedom is, by definition, exposed to being undone. And the fundamental option (as human freedom) is not an aggregate of individual acts. The relationship between the fundamental option and individual acts is best read in terms of manifestation and selfexpression. The fundamental option is the ground of the existence performed through individual acts. Surely individual acts affect the fundamental option, but it is more helpful and accurate to view individual acts as making manifest a deep, underlying, eternal decision in time.12 There is no requirement in Rahner’s theology of freedom, as Beste fears, for “enough” free acts. Instead, an underlying freedom is made mani9. Rahner writes, “Intellectus possibilis is the most adequate and most simple conception for human knowledge and for human being altogether” (GW 245/186, ET slightly modified). On the possible intellect, see KRTA 75–77. 10. GW 241/183. 11. GW 305­–9/229–31. 12. Rahner, Grace in Freedom, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 211: “Through his free decision [the human person] is rather truly good or evil in the very ground of his being, and thus, in the Christian view, his final salvation or loss is already present, even though perhaps still hidden. Thus responsible freedom undergoes a tremendous change in depth.”

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fest through existentiell acts, which vary in their degrees of freedom in ways that cannot be reasonably grasped. The fear with regard to trauma should not be that a person would be left without a fundamental option, but that this fundamental option cannot become manifest, that it would be present (in the ground) but that, in existence, it would not unfold. In such a case, we should see the incompletion of the fundamental option along the lines of an artwork, whose idea an artist conceived, but that another person (or disease, disaster) prevented her from executing. A trauma victim’s freedom may be arrested in its ground. Even with its problems, because of its deeper impulse and insight, Beste’s worry about Rahner still holds: unless treated with great care, Rahner’s theology of freedom threatens to produce a class of unfree nonpersons. My project in this chapter is not the same as Beste’s—to reconcile Rahner’s theology of freedom with trauma theory. But I cannot do without Beste’s critique, nor Metz’s that precedes it. I intend to show that, at its heart, Rahner’s theology of freedom attests to an exposed freedom that is traumatizable and susceptible to catastrophe. I also want to insist that, as exposed, freedom is open to a full range of touch, affect, support, love, and, indeed, embodied salvation. This contention opens a link between this book and Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics: questions raised by Beste and Metz prompt a new way of specifying the Catholic sublime. We must attend, inasmuch as we can, to the unmasterable capaciousness of freedom’s exposure, which is part and parcel with the universality (catholicity) of the Christian ethos. Likewise, we must note by way of introduction that “sublime,” especially as articulated in Kant’s aesthetics (see this book’s introduction), carries the connotation of failure (of imagination)—or confrontation with a phenomenon that undoes the subject. For Rahner, such a confrontation can be God’s incomprehensibility (positive undoing), catastrophe (negative undoing), or both. Human freedom is sublime inasmuch as it is constituted by (at the very least the possibility of) both undoings. With this, we arrive at my theses. If we read Rahner’s theology of freedom aesthetically on the background of its three main sources, we shall discover that, for him, human freedom’s most fundamental feature R a h n e r o n E x p o s e d F r e e d o m    183

is exposure to experiences banal and overwhelming: to world (including threats), to sin and guilt, and to God. Human freedom is not made manifest automatically, not by reason alone or primarily and not without danger and trial, and certainly not purely individually, but through a process where often it is undone as much as it is accomplished, and where it must be made manifest with communal support. Thus human freedom is an imperfect, though no less dignified, symbol of God’s freedom. As with the other chapters, this one has four main divisions. “Context and Exposure in Rahner’s Theology of Freedom” surveys what Rahner says across his writings about freedom’s fundamental and continual condition of exposure. It then raises the question of how the transcendental, penitential, and Ignatian sources for Rahner’s theology of freedom might illuminate freedom’s exposure. “Transcendental Freedom and the Concupiscent Remainder” starts with Metz’s famous critique of Rahner’s transcendental-idealist theology as a “hedgehog trick,” where Rahner absolves himself from the “running” of history. It answers that Rahner’s Schellingian idealism, attuned as it is to the “indivisible remainder,” involves him precisely in such running, particularly and perhaps unexpectedly in his theology of concupiscence. “Penitential Freedom and the Wordless Cry” combines Metz and Dorothee Soelle to uncover how Rahner’s penance studies open onto a spirituality of “suffering unto God” and “the silent cry” of history’s victims. “Ignatian Freedom and Jesus’ Agonized Heart” intensifies what I wrote in chapter 3 regarding freedom’s exposure in Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality. Recalling that, for Rahner, Ignatian spirituality (thus freedom) refers itself in a special way to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I explore how this Heart’s woundedness, particularly during the agony in the garden, is the living source of Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. The point of all these considerations is to show how Rahner accounts properly for human freedom’s variety, how he neither proscribes nor prescribes wounded people’s personhood, and how, indeed, catastrophe impinges on his theology—and to show that theological aesthetics is a generative avenue for arriving at this insight.

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C o nte x t a n d E x posur e i n R a hner’s Th eo lo gy of Fr eed o m Kathryn Reklis’s “A Sense of the Tragic in a Christian Theology of Freedom” (2009) presents an account of Rahner that grates against the majority report (at least as recounted by Beste) on his theology of freedom.13 Rahner is seen, at least stereotypically, as a theologian of grace, of resurrection, of a Christianity rendered so easy as to be achieved anonymously, of freedom’s unscathed victory over sin. He is impervious to a sense of tragedy, of things “not working out.” On this standard view, theologians more attuned to context would seem better equipped to attend to tragedy. But Reklis chooses Rahner as representative of a “tragic sensibility” that always, to a greater or lesser extent, accompanies Christian hope.14 Rahner bears this tragic sensibility for two reasons. First, he attends closely to the way freedom takes shape through “the concrete particulars of life,” where freedom’s own goodness or guilt and its effects for good or ill are often blurred.15 Second, and here Reklis refers to the fundamental option, Rahner recognizes the dreadful possibility that a person can pronounce a definitive “no” to God, effectively using freedom to negate itself.16 For Reklis these two reasons go together. Rahner’s feel for the quotidian “problems” of freedom (lack of adequate self-knowledge, unintended consequences of actions, and being on the receiving end of culpable actions by others) jibes well with his conviction that, mysteriously, human persons can say “no” to God. Taken together, these two aspects of Rahner’s theology of freedom constitute a comprehensive tragic sensibility, an attunement to the uncertainty of everyday life and the perilous stakes of a whole life. Rahner’s tragic sensibility, Reklis argues, can foster Christian hope—not the kind that would “take us out of human contingency,” but that “plunges us back into it.”17 13. Kathryn Reklis, “A Sense of the Tragic in a Christian Theology of Freedom,” Theological Studies 70, no. 1 (2009): 37–60. 14. On rejection of tragedy in Christianity, see ibid., 38–39. 15. Ibid., 41, 52. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. Ibid., 59.

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If we take Reklis’s view, it seems that Rahner treats freedom as involving, as often as not, the possibility and even the actuality of being undone. One need not seriously revise Rahner to yield this conclusion. I concur. This part aims to corroborate and to flesh out Reklis’s suggestion. I shall not retain the language of “tragic sensibility,” though I do not dispute the phrase. Instead, I choose the terms “context” and “exposure” to indicate how Rahner expresses something like what Reklis calls the “tragic sensibility.” I make an argument here similar to the one I made in chapter 3 with regard to the elevated Christological index of Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality: one must take Rahner at his word rather than explain his words away. The “words” in question are “context” and “exposure.”

Rahner’s “Old Age” Essay We begin with a late essay to give an example of how Rahner identifies his context and how he attests to the fundamental condition of exposure in Christian life: “A Basic Theological and Anthropological Understanding of Old Age” (1982).18 In the opening paragraphs, Rahner pleads ignorance on the topic of old age, even though, he jokes, he would seem to know something, being an old person himself.19 Rahner’s plea of ignorance pertains to his assumed theological context. Rahner notes that “traditional theology” has not explicitly and in detail considered the topic of old age. Nor has scripture said anything systematic about it. Rahner thus assumes as his primary context the scriptural and dogmatic tradition—a context no less material than any other. He acknowledges that, should one wish to advance theological thinking on old age, other contexts and other disciplines (“the anthropological sciences”) would have to be put into play.20 Such contexts and disciplines do not fall within his areas of expertise. As I argued in chapter 2, despite all the 18. Karl Rahner, “A Basic Theological and Anthropological Understanding of Old Age,” in TI 23:50–60. 19. Ibid., in TI 23:50. 20. In an interesting aside, Rahner reveals that he has been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s book on aging and confesses to being captivated by it; see ibid., 50n1. See also Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

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praise and blame Rahner has received for being an intrepid pioneer or aggiornamento theologian, he sees himself primarily as a theologian of retrieval. Any theological advances must be made by keeping firmly in view what traditional theology has (not) said. This may be frustrating to more progress-oriented critics, but it remains the truth, and in order to read Rahner with any adequacy, one must understand this point. Rahner does, though, circumspectly venture some remarks in the direction of a fundamental theological account of old age. With these remarks we move from the notion of context to that of exposure. Two topics from the section titled “Old Age and the Past” pertain most to our inquiry: (1) Rahner’s use of the phrase “dark ground” to describe the source of past free actions; and (2) Rahner’s comments on the relationship between freedom and debilitating physical or psychological pain. First, while responding critically to the common perception that older persons have their lives “behind them,” Rahner uses idiosyncratic—yet revealing—language to describe how, to the contrary, an older person’s past life remains present. He states, “Out of countless possibilities, as though out of a dark ground, which lies behind us as something ‘given’ and not subject to our disposal, the free history of life, by means of our free actions, brought the concrete shape of our life forth and brought it to us.”21 Rahner’s diction suggests that an older person lives exposed to her past. Although he notes that this past transpired through free actions, so too he intimates that these free actions arose from an incomprehensible source. This “dark ground” seems to hold sway over freedom, placing into question any conception of free actions as gestures of mastery and characterizing them more nearly as aesthetic gestures of shaping the material to which one is exposed. This reading is corroborated by the next paragraph, where Rahner again refers to the dark ground: “Precisely because in freedom it [an older person’s life] once became the way it is, our life is, not gone, but rather it has gone forth from the dark ground of the merely possible as something eternally real.” And he adds a few lines later, “The substantial and abiding ground of our spiritual soul receives from the actions of our lives 21. Rahner, “Old Age,” 53.

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permanent impressions which no longer pass away, even though we forget them and other waters of time flow over this ground.”22 These lines describe freedom’s becoming manifest in evocative, even poetic ways that illustrate what Rahner attempts to explicate in his more technical discussions of freedom. Freedom emerging from its dark ground is not so much the straightforward accomplishment of a subject, but an occurrence with which the subject can cooperate and to which the subject is subjected. An older person’s relationship to her past life lays bare these truths about freedom. Second, the latter part of the section occasions several statements in which Rahner reveals his sensitivity—theological, pastoral, and personal—to the debilitating effects of pain and disease on an older person’s freedom. He recognizes the possibility that “excruciating physical pain” and “deep, physiologically conditioned depression and mental confusion” can become conditions that absolve people of moral accountability for their actions.23 Proceeding further in this line of thought, he declares, “We are not obliged to do more than lies within our power, and Christian teaching does not expect the impossible of us. If physical pain and psychic depression plunge us into a state in which we can no longer do what we are, presumably, obliged to do, then we have come to the point where the eternal God in his love gently relieves us of all responsibility for our life.”24 The lesson here is that under conditions of grave suffering people cannot be blamed for their behaviors (e.g., “desperately cursing God”) when freedom has, for all intents and purposes, been eclipsed.25 Responsibility wanes when freedom’s exposure overtakes its activity (or even possibility). Christian hope must hold that God assumes responsibility for a person suffering like this.26 22. Ibid., 53, emphasis original. 23. Ibid., 56. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid.: “If a person in this state seems to be desperately cursing God, this must be viewed as a physiological occurrence and not as a human act, just as in the case of a dying person whose mind begins to wander.” 26. I am simultaneously affirming and contesting Beste’s criticism of appeals to mystery regarding grace’s endurance in cases of severe trauma. She discourages such appeals, since they could “increase [an] incest victim’s shame and alienation and/or lead others to blame victims” (GV 93). Certainly such eventualities must always be avoided. But we must also be careful not

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Our brief consideration of this essay reveals that Rahner possesses an attunement to gravely suffering people undergoing pain debilitating enough to lead them to curse God. This attunement coheres with a more general attunement to freedom’s fundamental condition of exposure. We can agree that Rahner more often expresses this general attunement than the specific one (largely because of his context), but attuned he remains.

Exposure across Rahner’s Works Rahner’s attunement to freedom’s exposure is not unique to the “Old Age” essay. We already saw preliminarily in chapter 3 how exposure recurs as a theme in Rahner’s account of Ignatian freedom. Christ’s exposure to “all fates” provides the lodestar for human freedom.27 The Two Standards meditation provides ample opportunity to reflect on human freedom’s exposure to a battle between good and evil. But there is far more to say about the theme of exposure in Rahner’s writings, which appears far more frequently than has been noticed. Exposed freedom appears and ramifies throughout Rahner’s writings, from Geist in Welt through Foundations and in many other texts in between. Again, we must take Rahner at his word and not act as if he regards freedom as invulnerable. I already examined in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics the convergence between Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge in Geist in Welt and Heidegger’s elucidations of the theme of exposure in Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry.28 The key insight that Rahner picks up from Heidegger is the subject’s “exposure to being,” rather than its standing self-sealed over against being as its master. I can add just a few thoughts here. Geist in Welt tells how human knowledge and freedom begin with dispersal in the world and proceed as exposed integration in the world. The key pasto dismiss appeals to mystery if they could offer trauma victims hope, spiritual sustenance, and aid on the way toward recovery. The point is not that God enlivens one’s freedom so that God (or “godly” people) can assess blame (such judgments are inexcusable, culpable, and sometimes Luciferian), but that God mysteriously and mercifully assumes one’s freedom when exposure tips toward destruction. 27. ISDHJ 132/458, ET modified: “The center of the world and of all truth is a heart: a burning heart, a heart which exposed itself to all fates, that has suffered all fates.” 28. KRTA 80–81, 86, 89, 99.

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sage for understanding freedom in Geist in Welt is chapter 4, section VI, “The Freedom of Spirit,” in which Rahner considers the mutual inflection of spirit’s freedom and sensibility. Spirit’s freedom is made manifest in sensibility.29 It is true that spirit’s freedom is not manifested completely as sensibility, but it is equally true that sensibility constitutes a crucial aspect of freedom’s manifestation. This is worth noting because sensibility must be passive.30 Rahner clarifies that sensibility is not absolutely passive. Sensibility involves in some sense a kind of “possession of the world” (Welthabe), where sense “has already moved out into the exterior of the world” and, in a manner of speaking, acts “over against matter.”31 Nevertheless, sensibility’s Welthabe consists in an “empty anticipation of possible objects (in einer leeren Antizipation möglicher Gegenstände).”32 This empty anticipation contrasts with the more nearly full anticipation (Vorgriff) characteristic of intellection. That is to say, freedom’s expression begins, at least in part, with an empty anticipation of what sensibility might receive, or with sensibility’s condition of exposure in the world to that which might impinge upon it. Even more, sensibility functions as a medium in which sensible things can self-realize.33 While in Geist in Welt this hardly spells trauma or catastrophe for human (sentient) freedom, it does suggest that Rahner constructs a metaphysic of knowledge and freedom attuned to the mutual interpenetration of human persons and the world. This interpenetration, as with any kind of porous relation, implies the dual potential of fruitfulness and disaster. “The Dignity and Freedom of Man” (originally delivered as a lecture in 1952) is through and through, despite impressions to the contrary from recent critics, an essay focally concerned with freedom’s exposure to tampering, interference, violation, and deprivation.34 The bulk of the essay considers freedom as threatened from a variety of angles, with primary emphasis given to state intervention and ecclesial limitation. This 29. GW 297/223. 30. GW 92/79. 31. GW 95/81. 32. GW 95–96/82. 33. GW 378/279–80. 34. Karl Rahner, “Dignity and Freedom of Man,” in TI 2:235–63.

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essay must, as much as other Rahnerian writings, be read in context: the growth of the bureaucratic state, both Keynesian and communist, in the postwar years; Romano Guardini’s diagnosis of the twentieth century as the age of a pathological “mass man”; and the United Nations’ “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) all provide essential coordinates for Rahner’s thinking about human dignity and freedom.35 Space permits just two examples of how Rahner considers freedom’s exposure to threats. In part I, paragraph 8, Rahner writes about threats to a human person from without—that is, threats to bodily integrity. Even if salvation or damnation depends on free personal decision, which Rahner will consistently maintain, human persons—even to the point of personal decision—can be and are menaced by interventions from without. “There is,” he states, “no ‘zone’ of the person which is absolutely inaccessible to such influences from without.”36 As a rule, these influences can degrade human dignity and freedom. Their menacing of human freedom and dignity cannot be ignored, and cannot be reduced simply to sinfulness (“man’s perversion from within”).37 Similarly, part II, paragraph 4 presupposes the possibility that a person can be deprived of freedom when insufficient space is allowed for it: “To deprive the person of freedom would . . . still be a degradation of the person even when the thing to be done would still be attainable without this concession of scope for freedom.”38 We must treat this statement carefully, because it has been misread in the literature. Rahner is considering here a very important example that ought not to be overcomplicated or overblown.39 35. For Guardini’s diagnosis, see Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, foreword by Richard John Neuhaus, trans. Joseph Theman et al. (Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 1998), especially 57–74; for the UN Declaration, see http://www .un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/, accessed October 25, 2016. 36. Rahner, “Dignity and Freedom,” in TI 2:242. 37. Ibid., in TI 2:242. 38. Ibid., in TI 2:248. 39. Beste does this by equating the phrase “the thing to be done” with the fundamental option. This is not what Rahner means; see GV 33 and 134n72. Instead, what he says must be read in terms of what he says in the piece that we shall explicate next: “Origins of Freedom”: “The attitude of Christians is not so simple as that of the man who has a phobia of any authority, a fear which will ultimately lead to anarchy and the destruction of true freedom. But neither does the Christian favor a society with hard and fast rules so that there is as little freedom as possible to

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Let us continue the quotation to see what Rahner has in mind: “Simply to deprive a person of the scope even for morally wrong decisions of freedom . . . cannot, therefore, be the business of any man or of any human society in its dealings with other men.”40 Rahner’s worry here is that the zeal to protect people from themselves (doing wrong actions) would tempt the state, the church, or individuals to deprive others of freedom. The point is this: whether by violent interpersonal menaces or by state, ecclesial, or individual intervention, freedom is exposed to threat. Rahner never denies this. He explicitly teaches this. Likewise, “Origins of Freedom” (1965), which could be seen as an abstract philosophical disquisition on freedom, treats freedom in context.41 Even more than in the “Dignity” essay, Rahner occupies himself with incursions of the state, technology, and other social relations on personal liberty. The piece begins with a brief schematization of general characteristics of human freedom from the standpoint of Christian theology.42 These general characteristics are then gradually specified, starting with a substantial section on bodily freedom, in which he writes, “Even the innermost act [of subjective freedom] is still external, because it belongs also to the physiological sphere which is open to external influences. Hence a perfect interiority of freedom is impossible.”43 He adds, “Persons who realize their freedom are not the untouchable Monads envisaged by Leibniz.”44 Subjective freedom is not fully integral or self-sufficient; it is always exposed. This is most true in the political realm. Rahner acknowledges the come to wrong decisions”; Karl Rahner, “Origins of Freedom,” in Grace in Freedom, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 226–47. 40. Rahner, “Dignity and Freedom,” in TI 2:248. 41. This essay was originally published in a volume Rahner coedited with leading critical theorist Max Horkheimer: Rahner, “Ursprünge der Freiheit: Vom christlichen Freiheitsverständnis” [Origins of Freedom: On the Christian Understanding of Freedom], in Über die Freiheit: Eine Vorlesungsreihe des 12. Deutschen Evangelischen Kirchentages, Köln 1965 [On Freedom: A Series of Lectures from the Twelfth German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church Day, Cologne, 1965], ed. Max Horkheimer, Karl Rahner, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1965), 27–49. It was then published in Rahner, Gnade als Freiheit: Kleine theologische Beiträge [Grace as Freedom: Small Theological Contributions] (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 54–74. 42. Rahner, “Origins of Freedom,” 228–31. 43. Ibid., 232. 44. Ibid., 233.

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enlargement of, increasing threats to, and anonymous forces’ determination of the sphere of human freedom in recent centuries.45 He contends that Christians must affirm where the sphere of freedom has been enlarged, even with its dangers, but also insists that Christians must reject social libertinism.46 He explicitly denounces “the totalitarian dictatorship of classical communism” and, on the capitalist side, expresses concern over advertising’s capacity for restricting freedom.47 He appeals for political structures that carefully distribute freedom and compulsion.48 These latter comments on the political sphere are contextual, steeped in the politics of 1960s Europe, but also suggest an undertow of anxiety with respect to freedom’s exposure—it faces external dangers running from anarchic libertinism to Soviet-style totalitarianism. We cannot ignore how these anxieties affect Rahner’s theology of freedom. While less clearly culturally and politically embedded, Foundations of Christian Faith (1976) considers freedom’s exposure still more. The title and content of its first chapter, “The Hearer of the Message,” show that this text is aesthetically framed.49 It should not be underestimated that, for Rahner, Christianity includes (though is not entirely reducible to [see James 1:22]) a message that must be heard. Perhaps most crucial with respect to this aesthetic framing is the note on which Rahner ends chapter 1. He qualifies everything he has said before about human beings as persons and subjects that are transcendent, responsible, and free. He declares, “In spite of his free subjectivity, man experiences himself as being at the disposal of other things, a disposal over which he has no control.”50 Primarily human persons are at the disposal of God (“the abyss of ineffable mystery”),51 but Rahner’s reference to “things” calls to mind the sort of aesthetic dispersal in world discussed in Geist in Welt. Rahner devotes the next chapter to the primary (and primal) expo45. Ibid., 235. 46. Ibid., 235–39, 240. 47. Ibid., 240–41. 48. Ibid., 242. 49. FCF 22. For a more explicitly aesthetic text on “hearing,” see Rahner, “Seeing and Hearing,” 196–204. 50. FCF 42; see also 80 (in chapter 2). 51. FCF 42.

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sure of human persons to God. Chapter 2’s main idea is that the word and idea “God” do not constitute a human grasp upon God, but express the way a person is “grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.”52 And lest his readers understand him as defining human subjectivity too strongly, Rahner clarifies, “By its very nature subjectivity is always a transcendence which listens, which does not control, which is overwhelmed by mystery and opened up by mystery.”53 Again, free human subjectivity is aesthetically framed, in terms of hearing, reception, even the experience of being overwhelmed. Both the perils and the promise of human freedom lie in exposure even to extreme experiences. Chapter 3, which is remarkably titled “Man as a Being Threatened Radically by Guilt,” to the credit of Rahner’s critics, does not fully deliver on its title. He begins by stating the central importance of guilt and sin for Christian theology, inasmuch as they relate to redemption and the need for it.54 He continues by criticizing modern culture and theory for its dismissal of the question of guilt.55 These remarks are fair enough and could lead to a strong chapter on freedom’s susceptibility to threats. Instead, Rahner presents a review of prior material on freedom, its transcendence, and its manifestation in the fundamental option that in large measure irons out the wrinkles I pointed out in chapters 1 and 2. Freedom is conceived of as involving relatively minimal drag and seems exposed minimally to threat—until one arrives at the following remark: “All of man’s experience points in the direction that there are in fact objectifications of personal guilt in the world which, as the material for the free decisions of other persons, threaten these decisions, have a seductive effect upon them, and make free decisions painful.”56 One should note the emphasis here: all experience involves a sense of the threats to which free decisions are exposed, and the pain with which they are accomplished. Subsequent sentences unfold this idea, indicating that freedom can never overcome this situation of guilt, never fully bring 52. FCF 54. 53. FCF 58. 54. FCF 90. 55. FCF 91. 56. FCF 109.

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about the good it intends, and thus always suffers under the weight of the sinfulness to which it is exposed. Hence Rahner’s discussion in the following section of Christianity’s “historical pessimism.”57 Even with these comments, the chapter remains weak on the theme of exposure. But amplification of these comments can reveal, even at this low point, that Rahner has freedom’s exposure in mind. I have surveyed the theme of freedom’s exposure across Rahnerian texts. As I close it, I wish to underscore how the theme of exposure has roots in Rahner’s early thought. One could compare, for example, the first three chapters of Foundations, a late text, with earlier texts. Foundations’ aesthetic framing (the “hearer” of the message) is continuous from Hearer of the Word (1941) forward. Human freedom’s exposure to the Mystery of God represents a continuous insight from Worte ins Schweigen (1939) forward. And exposure to guilt, both from the inside and outside, is continuous from the “Sin as Loss of Grace” essay (1936) forward. Attunement to freedom’s exposure is not a late insight for Rahner, but the matrix out of which his theology of freedom grows.

How to Read Rahner’s Sources I shall substantiate this claim further by returning to the three sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom—transcendental philosophy, penitential theology and practice, and Ignatian spirituality. I shall interpret them in such a way as to detect their aesthetic resonances, which prove decisive for understanding each source’s contribution to Rahner’s theology of exposed freedom. Even further, I shall contend that in order to apprehend the meaning of these sources in themselves, one should understand how freedom’s exposure comes to light within them. Thus I shall in what follows refocus the perspective that I have sketched in the first three chapters. I contend that Rahner’s theology of freedom is best read as a theological aesthetic of freedom made manifest. In Rahner’s texts, freedom appears more clearly the more one regards it from three interrelated 57. FCF 109–10.

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angles: (1) manifestation, or freedom’s expression or nonexpression; (2) receptivity, or freedom’s fundamental finitude where, even with its capacity for anticipating (vorgreifen) the infinite, it exists as exposed to threats, dangers, catastrophes, and malformation; and, consequently, (3) the precognitive stratum of the human person, which I speak of as the imagination and the heart. Such an approach helps to throw into particular relief the alterations Rahner makes to his sources in order to bring the theme of exposed freedom to the fore. We have already learned in chapter 1 that one cannot understand Rahner on transcendental freedom until one has passed through his theology of concupiscence. We must go even further here, to recognize that Rahner pivotally modifies Thomas Aquinas’s theology of concupiscence. Thomas ascribes concupiscence to the sensible appetite while, as we have seen, Rahner resists reducing concupiscence to sensibility and the body only.58 He reads it as impinging upon both spirit and body, which function together in freedom. In turn, freedom as spiritual-corporeal is exposed to concupiscent resistance. Even a traditional Thomistic theology drawn directly from Thomas himself could facilitate an aesthetic discussion of freedom and concupiscence. For Thomas, concupiscence pertains to pleasure and displeasure, key aesthetic categories. Nevertheless, Rahner’s strenuous insistence that the danger to human freedom not only comes from the “ontologically lower spheres of man” but also “from the Luciferian heights of the spirit” opens a space where he can do two important things at once.59 First, he can uncouple concupiscence from a one-sided portrayal of it as pertaining to the body only. Second, because of this, he can take a more holistic view of concupiscence that places it at the nexus of body and spirit, or the personal ground from which freedom becomes manifest. In this way, Rahner can make better sense of concupiscence’s impingement upon embodied human life, which is always led under exposed conditions. We 58. Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 30, a. 1, sed contra and corpus. Rahner is on firm standing in his modification, because he can defend himself using this very same text. Here Thomas refers to concupiscence’s belonging to the “united soul and body.” 59. TCC 354/9.

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can learn from him how freedom’s exposure, for which concupiscence is a figure, often results in frustrated manifestation. Likewise, with regard to penitential freedom, Rahner’s creative retrievals yield germane insights. We saw in chapter 2 that Rahner’s studies of early Christian penitential practice and theology reveal that the Christian community conceived of itself as exposed to the guilt of sinners. When a member of the church sinned, the church was wounded by this, and this wound could be healed through penitential practice, in which the community was intimately involved through prayer and the public welcoming of the penitent back into the fold. To Rahner’s mind, this sense of communal wounding and the need for communal healing has been lost in modern theology and practice. He proposes in part that this sense could be restored when coupled with another old and forgotten teaching: Thomas’s theology of penance’s “matter.”60 For Thomas the acts of the penitent comprise the sacrament’s “matter,” to which corresponds the “form” of the words of priestly absolution. Rahner calls this an “astounding proposition.” The matter of penance, analogous to the waters of baptism or the bread and wine of the Eucharist, is the sinner’s plea for forgiveness, expressed not as a heroic act of asceticism, not mighty grasping after God’s favor, but rather a sinner’s crying out, even weakly, for mercy. And just as staggering is the church’s participation in the liturgy of welcoming back the sinner: the “holy” church reconciles with the one who wounded it. Viewing individual human and ecclesial freedom through the lens of penitential theology and practice, as Rahner develops it out of his historical-theological retrievals, reveals how individual humans and the church community stand exposed to one another in a relationship defined by reception of wounds and of forgiveness. This relationship is also exposed to divine justice and mercy, the latter of which the sinner hopes to receive and the church works to mediate sacramentally. Reconsidering Rahner’s theology of penitential freedom will facilitate our examination of freedom’s receptivity. 60. For the interrelation between these two retrievals, see the following pages from Rahner, “Forgotten Truths,” in TI 2:136–40 (sin as an ecclesial matter), TI 2:153–62 (matter of penance), TI 2:162–66 (prayer of the church).

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Already in chapter 3, I prepared us to consider Rahner’s Ignatian theology of freedom in terms of exposure. Even prior to that I had written in Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics that for Rahner, Ignatian freedom means primarily exposure to the will of God.61 Since I gave a detailed discussion of exposure in Rahner’s Ignatian view of freedom in chapter 3, I shall be briefest on this topic. In what follows we shall revisit the topic of exposure in Ignatius by focusing more intently on the pierced Heart of Jesus. With this, we shall see how the whole of Rahner’s theology of freedom, which is a theological aesthetic of freedom, proceeds from a site of vulnerability. With these preliminary remarks in place, let us return to Rahner’s sources.

Tr a nsc en d enta l Fr eed o m a nd th e C o n c up iscent R e m a i nd er Beste’s chief insight consists in this: freedom’s condition of exposure is clarified in a special way through dialogue between Christian theology and trauma theory. While I cannot provide anything like a full-blown dialogue here, I can effect a partial conversation. It begins with a question. What resonances between Rahner’s theology of freedom might we find with the following words from physician Bessel van der Kolk’s recent book on the body and trauma? While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger . . . precipitat[ing] unpleasant emotions, intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.62 61. KRTA 143. 62. Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D., The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2014), 2.

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Van der Kolk points to an aspect of the human person “below the rational brain,” where emotions and sensations are activated on the hither side of rational control; of a feeling of incomprehensibility; of traumatized persons’ fear that they are damaged to the core. In foregoing chapters I have talked about the personal ground (which we could call a “core”) as constitutive of Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom, emphasizing aesthetics’ etymological roots in sensation or bodily feeling. The personal ground’s feelings were mainly related to eternal decision in time for or against God, or the mystery of personal fulfillment. But does the incomprehensible reality of personal destruction resonate with Rahner’s theological aesthetic? Although it may seem that it would not, given Rahner’s strong account of human transcendentality (often misunderstood as floating above history, as untoward universalism, or essentialism),63 I argue here that it does. By returning to Rahner’s theology of concupiscence, we shall discover that for Rahner the personal ground is traumatizable, its freedom precariously exposed.

Unveiling the Hare Trick The best way to begin this seemingly implausible argument is to reassess Metz’s forceful critique of transcendental idealism in Faith in History and Society, chapter 9: “Transcendental-Idealist Christianity or NarrativePractical Christianity? Theology and Christianity’s Contemporary Identity Crisis.”64 He criticizes transcendental idealism as a way of dealing with Christianity’s late-modern identity crisis. His main contention against Rahner centers on the idea of the anonymous Christian. This idea safeguards Christian identity by making the historical experience of Christian faith coextensive with universal human experience. In this way, Rahner removes any threats to Christian identity. While the historical particulars of Christian institutions may seem to or even be under threat, 63. For helpful differentiation between Rahner’s universalism (positively regarded) and charges of essentialism (negatively posed), see chapter 5 of Craigo-Snell, Silence, Love, and Death. 64. FHS 144–55.

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anonymous Christianity can never be, because it transpires in personal depths that remain untouched by history’s dangers. Metz calls this approach “over-legitimating Christianity” or “over-expanding its identity.”65 Transcendental-idealist theology anchors and secures Christian identity at the price of confusing it with a “tautology.”66 The Christian subject, who lives within this tautology, is immunized from endangerment. This subject is robbed of the possibility of robust Christian life, which always carries the potential of danger. As is well known, Metz prosecutes this critique through a literary metaphor. He retells Grimm’s fairy tale no. 187, the tale of the hare and the hedgehog. In brief, a hare challenges a hedgehog to a race in a field, securely confident that the hedgehog stands no chance against him. The hedgehog, taking up the hare on his challenge, enlists his hedgehog wife, who looks exactly like him, to wait by the finish line; once the hare arrives he will think that the hedgehog has done the impossible and beaten him. The hare runs the race, meeting the hedgehog (wife) at the finish line, then runs back in frustration to find the hedgehog (husband) at the starting line. The hare runs back and forth seventy times, eventually running himself to death, with the hedgehog having won a victory of wits—if not one of running. Metz compares Rahner’s transcendentalidealist to the hedgehog, which in its cleverness avoids the running of history, instead offering an overarching, tautological explanatory framework for understanding Christian identity. Metz casts himself as the hare, where his narrative-practical theology runs the race of history, practicing Christian identity rather than legitimating it through trans­ historical guarantees. While one must be captivated by Metz’s theological allegory, one need not agree with it. Metz acknowledges that he intentionally revises the story to suit his critique of transcendental-idealist methodology.67 If we return to the unrevised story, we can see how it can be used as an apologia for Rahner’s theology, rather than a critique of it. 65. FHS 149. 66. FHS 152. 67. FHS 150.

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The race between the hedgehog and the hare is instigated by the hare, who ridicules the hedgehog’s short, crooked legs, asking him how he could have arrived in the field so early in the morning when he moves so slowly. “The hedgehog’s legs could never stand up to mine,” the hare seems to think. The hare stands convinced that this entitles him to demean the hedgehog. Surely the hare is a superior racer, but the issue at the beginning of the fable is not racing. The issue is whether or not one can work in the field. The hedgehog certainly could do that. So could the hare. The hedgehog never doubts this. The moral of the story—do not degrade another person, even if that person is a “hedgehog”—revolves around the equal claim the hare and the hedgehog have to work in the same field. This is, indeed, a fable applicable to theological method, because it calls into question the tendency of historically engaged theologians (“hares”) to claim for themselves the field of history and to laugh off transcendentally oriented theologians (“hedgehogs”). It exposes the fact that both of these trajectories in theology work the same field, even if some “hares” believe this not to be the case. The hedgehog’s trick was to run the hare to death. The hare’s trick was to send the hedgehog packing. What exactly are Rahner’s “legs,” anyway? As I began to read him in chapter 1, and shall explain further now, Rahner’s transcendental “legs,” while they may look like they perform the “hedgehog trick” of standing to either side of history rather than getting involved in the fray, do not do this. If they did, Metz could rightly criticize them, as they would not be working in the field. But they do not stand aside. Transcendental method constitutes a way of elucidating organic human life, lived as embodied spirit or enspirited body—Geist in Welt. To support this contention, I must briefly discuss a text that concerns the genesis of Rahner’s transcendental “legs.” It is a brief portion of a chapter on prayer, anthologized in The Content of Faith as “The Divided and Enigmatic Nature of Humanity.”68 The selection begins 68. Rahner, “The Divided and Enigmatic Nature of Humanity,” in The Content of Faith: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Theological Writings, ed. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt, translation ed. Harvey D. Egan, SJ (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 118–20. The chapter from which this selection

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with Rahner discussing modern struggles for freedom. These struggles achieved some success, but concomitant with them has been a fall by many people into a “slavery from within.”69 There are obvious manifestations of this, like ambition, lust for power, and the unbridled search after pleasure. But Rahner emphasizes the less obvious side to this slavery: “the inner powerlessness of crushing concern and insecurity, of loss of meaning, of anxiety and radical disappointment.”70 In the face of this, modern people, who thought themselves autonomous, searched for some grounding for their autonomy within themselves—as a kind of willful effort against their powerlessness. Instead of self-grounded autonomy, they found something else. Human sciences like depth psychology, psychiatry, existential philosophy, and anthropology discovered that at the deepest levels of their being they were not themselves but a vast and frightening chaos of anything and everything in which human beings are really only chance intersections of dark, impersonal forces, which arising out of blood and soil or genetic structure or a collective soul or nothingness . . . come together arbitrarily for a moment and flow uncontrollably through humans as through conduits, from one unknown to another.71

Such discoveries foil any attempts by twentieth-century people to cling to ideologies of autonomy. Thus, Rahner contends, the simplicity of nineteenth-century human self-understanding, where any foundering of the self “could be handled with much enlightenment, a little morality, and good police,” proves completely impossible. In effect, any form of tautologous subjectivity proves off-limits for a thinker aware of twentiethcentury discoveries of the chaos within persons. Rahner is clearly aware of this impossibility of tautology and does not instantiate it in his transcendental theology. His “legs” are not nineteenth-century ones. For this reason I have contended that concupiscence proves just as emblematic of Rahner’s transcendental approach as the (presumably comes appears in full in Rahner, The Need and the Blessing of Prayer: A New Translation of Father Rahner’s Book on Prayer, trans. Bruce W. Gillette, introduction Harvey D. Egan, SJ (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1997), 14–24, with the selection at 15–17. 69. Rahner, “Divided and Enigmatic Nature,” 119. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid.

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ahistorical and thoroughly spiritual) anonymous Christian. Concupiscence, which for better or worse proves constitutive of human freedom in its concrete operation, resists tautology. Rahner never conceives of the human person as immune to the dangers of history, whether from without or within. If he universalizes human experience, this universalization includes universal susceptibility, universal exposure, where human persons universally find themselves endangered from without and within. Concupiscence, as it turns out, is bound up with such endangerment.72

The Schellingian Remainder as Traumatic Remainder Let us recall that chapter 1 related Rahner’s theology of concupiscence to Schelling’s idea of the indivisible remainder. Having done so, we shall treat Schelling’s idea first, returning in “The Concupiscent Remainder” to Rahner’s idea of concupiscence. By that point this idea will be placed in an entirely new register that can address, perhaps counterintuitively, the Metzian critique of Rahner’s transcendental theology. Furthermore, this idea will have been reexamined in such a way that we will see better the decisive role of exposed freedom in Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom. Our first step will be to relate Schelling’s indivisible remainder to trauma by turning to Sigmund Freud, via Cathy Caruth. In Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Caruth argues, he comes to see the whole of human life and history in terms of trauma. 72. I cannot leave this discussion without making a final point, but must relegate it to a note lest the flow of argument within the text be lost. Metz’s critique of Rahner still hits home on a crucial point, which can be summed up in one word: Auschwitz. Metz famously expressed disappointment that Rahner never mentioned Auschwitz in his theology, neither by name nor with direct and extended discussion of the Holocaust; see J. Matthew Ashley, Interruptions: Mysticism, Politics, and Theology in the Work of Johann Baptist Metz (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 36, 123, 251n4. I shall not speculate here as to why he remained silent. Undeniably Rahner’s transcendental “legs” could have functioned better, at a greater level of specificity and concreteness, as we already acknowledged in chapter 3 with respect to Jon Sobrino’s criticism of Rahner’s nonspecific theology of sin. I hope that this chapter on exposed freedom will lend further impetus to ongoing conversations, like Beste’s, Regan’s, Abraham’s, and many others that appreciatively extend Rahnerian theology so it may face up more directly to real, nameable catastrophes and traumas like Auschwitz.

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Freud arrives at this insight through observations of former soldiers’ traumatic nightmares of battlefield events.73 Intrusive, destructive dreams do not fit the pleasure principle, the linchpin of Freud’s pre-1920 psychoanalysis, which dictates that dreams have to do with the avoidance of displeasure and the production of pleasure.74 The soldiers’ traumatic dreams lead Freud to declare “that there exists in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle, but that that tendency is opposed by certain other forces or circumstances, so that the final outcome cannot always be in harmony with the tendency toward pleasure.”75 Freud unfolds this insight while investigating “the mental reaction to external danger.”76 The repetition of traumatic nightmares, which exemplifies such a reaction, prompts Freud to refashion his view of human consciousness. Ultimately he understands traumatic repetition, which defies the pleasure principle, as defining the shape of individuals’ lives.77 Caruth is referring to Freud’s formulation of the idea of “death drives.”78 She points out the most striking feature of Freud’s text: he begins with observations on “traumatic neurosis,” and quite expeditiously moves into intrepid speculation. He offers “an explanation of the origins of life itself as an ‘awakening’ from death that precisely establishes the foundation of the drive and of consciousness alike.”79 The dreams of traumatized people, rather than facing the psychoanalyst with phenomena inexplicable by the pleasure principle, clue him in to a prior moment in evolution and a deeper stratum in consciousness where the 73. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 59. In what follows I intertwine Caruth’s commentary, which presupposes familiarity with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with some of my own explanatory exposition of Freud’s book. 74. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans., ed. James Strachey, introduction Gregory Zilboorg, with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 3. 75. Ibid., 6, emphasis in original. 76. Ibid., 9. 77. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 59. 78. He first uses the term in Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 53. The ET renders “Trieb” as “instinct.” Following other translators of Freud, I prefer “drive.” 79. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 104.

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pleasure principle is not dominant.80 Rather, a dominant compulsion to repetition is built into organic life (a drive “to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world”).81 Trauma lays this bare. The “very origin of consciousness and all of life itself ” is revealed as something like traumatic repetition, and a remainder of this traumatic repetition marks life itself.82 Caruth’s constructive highlighting of the meaning of trauma for Freud directs us, most importantly, to a phrase from Freud that can illuminate Rahner’s theology of concupiscence at a new angle: “the inertia inherent in organic life.”83 This is what the death drive expresses. This is what, for Freud, trauma exposes. With this Freudian phrase in mind, let us follow a suggestion made by Slavoj Žižek in his book The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and related Matters (1996): that the “indivisible remainder” relates to trauma.84 In this work, Žižek examines psychoanalytically Schelling’s unfinished work The Ages of the World (three drafts: 1811, 1813, 1815), and the work that preceded it, the 1809 freedom treatise.85 He engages roughly the same Freudian idea that Caruth does: that life’s most primary stratum resembles the type of life suffered by victims of trauma. Both the Caruthian Freud and the Žižekian Schelling engage in a transcendental deduction of conditions for the possibility of some “x.” Freud seeks in Beyond the Pleasure Principle something in the human animal that makes it prone to traumatic repetition; he concludes that the death drive explains this susceptibility. Schelling seeks to explicate how human freedom is, on the one hand, capable of evil, and on the other hand, ineluctably incomplete; he answers that life begins at a complex nexus of traumatic repetition and a free decision to leave this trauma behind and lead a life that progresses rather than repeats. Nevertheless, traumatic repetition marks the life succeeding this free decision, placing an 80. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 36–38. 81. See ibid., 43, 76. 82. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 104. 83. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 43. 84. Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 1996). 85. Ibid., 9: “In short, Schelling’s Weltalter is to be read as a metapsychological work in the strict Freudian sense of the term.”

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unavoidable condition on human freedom: it is always constitutively haunted by an “indivisible remainder.” Žižek describes how Schelling’s philosophy in and after the freedom treatise speculates about what transpires “prior to the Beginning” (i.e., before creation and time). For Schelling, prior to the Beginning, “there is the chaotic-psychotic universe of blind drives, their rotary motion, their undifferentiated pulsating.”86 This “primordial vortex of drives” is the ground of all reality.87 But prior even to this is a “nothing,” an “abyss of freedom,” an indifferent will that, despite its original indifference, proves capable of willing. The Beginning occurs through an act of decision, which resolves the repetitious drives, opening their closed circle, effecting a move “from drive to desire.”88 The Beginning is a transition from a traumatic ground to free existence. One must be clear that there is not a clean division between traumatic ground and free existence: ground is irrevocably marked by freedom’s eternal decision, and existence is definitively marked by the “blind striving” of the ground. The two need each other and are made manifest together. Žižek observes that this is how Schelling accounts for evil: “This is why there is evil in the world: on account of the Perfect’s [existence’s] perverse need for the imperfect [ground].”89 In order to be free, freedom has to remain tethered to the ground from which it differentiated itself; this is, as a point of fact, the condition of human finitude.90 Thus Žižek states that for Schelling, “the Spirit is constitutively ‘outside itself ’; a kind of umbilical cord connects it to a traumatic kernel which is simultaneously the condition of its possibility (the well from which the Spirit draws its resources) and its condition of impossibility (the abyss whose all-destructive vortex continuously threatens to swallow the Spirit).”91 Soon after these remarks, Žižek quotes the passage from Schelling’s freedom treatise in which the “indivisible remainder” appears.92 86. Ibid., 13. 87. Ibid., 14. 88. Ibid., 13. 89. Ibid., 62. 90. This is the upshot of Žižek’s intricate analysis in ibid., 60­­–61. 91. Ibid., 73. 92. I quoted this passage already in chapter 1, but for convenience of reference reproduce

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By recounting all this I mean to suggest that the Schellingian “indivisible remainder,” which I have associated with Rahner’s theology of concupiscence, may be viably related to trauma. Žižek’s exposition of Schelling’s philosophy of “the Beginning” and the relationship between “ground” and “existence” uncovers structural similarities between Schelling’s account of human freedom and Freud’s discovery of the death drive. For Freud, the human animal seeks pleasure and avoids displeasure precisely as an animal at whose core operates the traumatic repetition of the death drive.93 For the Žižekian Schelling, human freedom proceeds precisely as an existence at whose ground abides a remnant of the traumatic vortex of drives. I am not recommending that we now proceed to articulate a Freudian or Žižekian theology of freedom. Instead, I advocate that we recognize the possibility of a structural similarity between Rahner’s bivalent theology of freedom and concupiscence to the bivalence of Freud’s pleasure principle/death drive account of consciousness and the Žižekian Schelling’s free existence/traumatic ground account of human freedom.

The Concupiscent Remainder In chapter 1, I quoted the following statement from Gregory Brett, but it is even more consequential here: “Rahner’s revision of the traditional concept of concupiscence enables him to describe the fragility and vulnerability of human powers, even the capacity for agency, love and spirituality.”94 Throughout her text, Beste treats Rahner’s theology of freedom as if it could only accidentally and occasionally depict how vulnerable and endangered human freedom really is. She could have looked to “concupiscence” as the key idea for discerning the high index of huit here: “This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground. . . . Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality; darkness is their necessary inheritance”; Schelling, Essence of Human Freedom, 29. 93. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 77: “The pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts.” 94. Brett, Theological Notion of the Human Person, 82.

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man vulnerability in Rahner’s theology of freedom, all the while keeping her argument intact and lending it greater persuasive force.95 In Theological Investigations 6, immediately after “The Theology of Freedom,” appears a lecture called, “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment” (delivered January 17, 1963).96 Against the impression that the theology of freedom is monolithic (tautological in Metz’s sense) in its guarantee of a fruitful outcome, Rahner says, “Even, and perhaps especially, the theological concept of freedom and responsibility is subject to an inner variability and gradation in freedom and responsibility. It is not only everyday life, psychology, and jurisprudence that know about the different degrees of responsibility and freedom.”97 He admits that this is not self-evident, especially because theology tends to emphasize freedom’s character as a definitive decision for or against God. Because of this, freedom seems “in indivisibili,” and it would seem impossible that this undivided freedom could admit degrees of “more-or-less.”98 But theology also knows, in a way analogous to psychology, that the subject’s decision is largely “determined by causes pre-existing the free decision.”99 Freedom is always offered finite possibilities, and sometimes they are so limited that freedom “becomes almost or even absolutely nil, since in a concrete case there may no longer be a plurality of motives among which one could choose.”100 Theology has no reason to deny this fact of life. It may seem that the theology of freedom’s axiom—freedom always concerns the whole of life—would mean “freedom” must be applied in the same way in all cases. But this is not so. Theology is aware that different creatures and different individuals live under different conditions. Thus a “formal equality in the totality and radicality” of freedom “does not signify equality of the result of the finality of the exercise of freedom.”101 95. Beste briefly considers concupiscence (the better part of a page), but elides its importance: “Of course, concupiscence does not preclude one from achieving a final self-disposal, a final orientation for or against God” (GV 30). But this is precisely what concupiscence does. 96. Rahner, “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment,” in TI 6:197–217. 97. Ibid., in TI 6:207. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., in TI 6:208.

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Theology shares the insight that psychology, jurisprudence, and life have “into a gradation of freedom and responsibility.”102 Freedom’s existence is, Rahner suggests, ineluctably tied to the preexisting conditions from which it embarks. Surely here Rahner has in mind external factors that impinge upon freedom, and Beste is well aware that he discusses these. But with his references to psychology, it seems that Rahner also has an eye toward internal conditions that foster or frustrate freedom. Chief among these internal conditions—or more accurately put, the source of these—is concupiscence, the mark of original sin, or death’s infiltration into life (see Rom 6:23). Rahner’s 1941 article on concupiscence dispelled the impression that “concupiscence” refers only or primarily to “evil desire” or to specifically sensitive desires or appetites. It ought not to be conceived, Rahner argues, “as a ‘rebellion’ precisely of the ‘lower’ man against the ‘higher.’ ”103 Instead, concupiscence is a desire that operates both through human sensibility and human spirit and through a human person’s voluntary and involuntary acts—it marks the whole person.104 Its defining feature is its spontaneity, which cannot be fully overcome in a free decision.105 These considerations yield Rahner’s properly theological definition of concupiscence: “man’s spontaneous desire, in so far as it precedes his free decision and persists against it.”106 Concupiscence’s spontaneity renders it unfree, thus “pre-moral (vormoralisch).”107 This is where a comparison between concupiscence and the Freudian death drive and Schellingian indivisible remainder appears plausible. Concupiscence manifests a stratum prior to the human person’s free self-disposal, and, as a remainder of the prior stratum, it cannot be erased or expunged through free activity (recall Freud’s phrase “the inertia of organic life”). Furthermore, as resistant and impenetrable, concu102. Ibid. 103. TCC 354/8–9. 104. Rahner develops this case gradually. For key steps, see TCC 352–53/7–8, 357/11, 359/12–13. 105. TCC 360/14. 106. TCC 360/14, Rahner’s emphasis, ET revised. 107. TCC 360/14.

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piscence renders freedom’s ideal deployment impossible: the “tendency within man’s ordinary free decision” toward total self-disposal “never succeeds without remainder (nie restlos gelingt).”108 To echo the Žižekian Schelling, human freedom always remains tethered to the traumatic kernel (Rahner’s word is Kern) in its ground. Rahner means effectively the same thing when he says, as we quoted in chapter 1, “The ‘person’ never absorbs its ‘nature’ without remainder (Die ‘Person’ holt ihre ‘Natur’ nie restlos ein).”109 Put in biblical terms, “We have the ability and obligation to love God with our whole heart [Dt 6:5, Mk 12:30, etc.], and yet we do not succeed in this.”110 This distinction between nature and person is interesting and does draw Beste’s attention.111 It is important to notice that Rahner discusses two possibilities of how nature (in Schellingian language: ground as “vortex of drives”) and person (ground as eternal decision + existence) may relate. First, there could be “ideal dominion (idealen Herrschaft)” of person over nature, where person completely absorbs nature, although Rahner proclaims this impossible for finite beings. Second, person could assume the spontaneous act of nature into “the inner dynamism of its personal attitude, in such a way that finally there is no longer resistance and an undissolved remainder of nature against person,” thereby integrating nature’s act as an “inner moment . . . of the controlling force” of personal decision.112 Should Rahner’s logic be extended, we could have a third possibility: nature dominates person, though never completely, since, as with (1), full absorption cannot happen in a finite creature. This would mean that freedom would be by and large overtaken by the spontaneous act of desire, which would resemble traumatic repetition or the vortex of drives. In short, “person” is susceptible to traumatization. I have just delineated how Rahner attests something like a Freudian traumatic remainder or Schellingian indivisible remainder in his theology of concupiscence. The last thing to do is to relate all this to theolog108. TCC 362/15, ET revised. 109. TCC 362/16, ET revised. 110. Rahner, “Brief Theological Observations on the State of Fallen Nature,” 49. 111. GV 29. 112. TCC 366/19, 366n20/19n19, 368/20, ET revised.

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ical aesthetics. Again I shall advert to the Žižekian Schelling. One must recall that the relation of ground to existence, or of drives to freedom, stems from Schelling’s account of “the Beginning.” And “the problem of the beginning,” Žižek argues, “is the problem of phenomenalization”: of how anything becomes manifest.113 The issue of phenomenalization is quintessentially aesthetic. Saying that freedom is always haunted by an indivisible remainder means that freedom’s phenomenalization is always incomplete. This is true for Rahner: his theology of freedom does not allow for freedom’s full manifestation, even if this would be the ideal scenario. Rahner’s theology of freedom is realistic—it attends, if “transcendentally,” to the friction, vicissitudes, pitfalls, even dangers of history. If we understand well the role concupiscence plays in Rahner’s theology of freedom, we can see how his theology of freedom could speak to the lives of people who have become unshielded from the traumatic remainder within by traumatizing situations coming from without.114 He does, as it turns out, have the legs to run the race of history, if in a different way from Metz. His transcendental account of freedom does not amount to a tautology: a Christian life without concreteness, and thus without danger. No, it offers possibility—of a Christian life that is endangered, yes, but precisely because it runs the race of history, in which God mercifully effects salvation, even, we hope, for the traumatized.

Pen itenti a l Fr eed o m a nd the W ordless Cry In a 1954 reflection on the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the scriptural verse that frames it (Gn 3:19), Rahner contends, “Dust is an image of the whole human being.”115 The “wholeness” of this symbol interests Rahner the most. It may seem intuitively correct that the human body comes from dust, while another story must be told of human spirit. But Rahner re113. Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 14. 114. I adapt this language of “shielded/unshielded” from Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 32–33. 115. Rahner, “You Are Dust!,” in The Content of Faith: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Theological Writings, ed. Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt, trans. edited Harvey D. Egan, SJ (New York: Crossroad), 92. It had been previously published in Rahner, The Eternal Year, trans. John Shea, SS (Baltimore: Helicon, 1964), 57–63.

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jects this position on biblical grounds (Genesis, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and Job). The whole human being, without division between body and spirit, is dust. This image connotes something commonplace, indifferent, or next to nothing. In this way, “dust” accounts for human existence as it is really lived, where more often than not our limitations, incapacities, and flat ordinariness are far more evident than our spiritual heights. Surely this saying is “not a complete formula of our essence.”116 Still, the accent when we talk about the human person must fall on its dust character. Scripture does not comfort us by saying we are more than dust; that would tempt us into destructive self-deception. The violence and hatred that people often direct toward others emerges from a kind of self-hatred. I hate the dust-dimension of my own life and perceive dust in others only. By contrast, we are more than dust when we admit and accept that we are dust. Rahner continues, “Left to its own resources, what is spiritual existence except the knowledge of things incomprehensible, the knowledge of guilt, and the knowledge that there is no way out of all this?”117 Singular focus on spirit can lead one to the horrific conclusion that the eternal cannot be reached.118 For Christian theology, the dust-character of existence must be seen through the optic of the economy of salvation—redemption from sin and guilt. God does not save humanity despite its dust-character, but in it: “God himself has strewn his head with the dust of the earth, . . . he fell on his face upon the earth, which with evil greed drank up his tears and blood.”119 Jesus Christ suffered our dust-existence. Because God saves us in this way, “Christianity does not set free from the flesh and dust, nor does it bypass flesh and dust; it goes right through flesh and dust.”120 The same is true of Rahner’s theology, especially his theology of penitential freedom. We shall see how by tracing resonances between Rahner’s penitential theology and Metz’s and Dorothee Soelle’s spiritualities of suffering, reappraising Rahner’s retrievals of earlier church 116. Rahner, “You Are Dust!,” 93. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 94. 119. Ibid., 95. 120. Ibid.

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ideas on penance, and reinforcing chapter 2’s insistence on Rahner’s message of mercy.

The Mysticism of Suffering Unto God, or the Silent Cry Metz ends a 1984 essay called “Karl Rahner’s Struggle for the Theological Dignity of Humankind” with the following, captivating words: Suffering unto God: for me this is the key phrase that summarizes Rahner’s theological existence, in which he became, for me and many others, not only a teacher but also a father in faith. Rahner never interpreted Christianity as some sort of bourgeois domestic religion that has been purged of every hope threatened by death and purged of every vulnerable and stubborn longing. I never felt his understanding of faith to be a kind of security-ideology. There was always homelessness; through everything there remained a longing I never felt to be sentimental, nor Pollyannaishly optimistic. Here was not a longing that could storm the heavens, but much more a hushed sigh of the creature, like a wordless cry for light before the hidden face of God.121

Several things are noteworthy in this passage. First, Metz ascribes to Rahner a phrase that Metz uses to describe his own spirituality and that Matthew Ashley contends is the key to Metz’s theology: suffering unto God (Leiden an Gott).122 Second, Metz acknowledges that Christian hope for Rahner is not free from vulnerability, frustration, and the threat of death. Third, Rahner’s theology does not consist in a securityideology, but rather in an open-eyed pessimism. Fourth, and this will prove most important for us, Metz characterizes Rahner’s theology in terms of a “hushed sigh” or “wordless cry” before God’s hidden face. These Metzian remarks follow upon a discussion of how Rahner avoids “an aestheticization of all suffering” by refusing, against influential trends in Protestant and Catholic theology, to speak of a “suffering 121. Metz, “Karl Rahner’s Struggle for the Theological Dignity of Mankind,” in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 119–20. 122. See the definitive book in English on Metz’s theology: Ashley, Interruptions, especially 122–29, 169–91. Ashley is to be credited, too, with coming up with the phrase “suffering unto God” to render Leiden an Gott.

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God.”123 Rahner resists the impulse to displace human suffering, which for him is a “nontransferable negative mystery,” onto God.124 As he puts it, if things go badly for God, this does not solve or relieve human suffering. Metz contends that Rahner’s opponents on this issue assume erroneously that God’s suffering love somehow could alleviate or make sense of human suffering. They tacitly hold, even with all their talk of God suffering, that God nevertheless remains invincible. They fail to see that solidaristic sharing of suffering and suffering itself are distinct, and importantly so. Rahner sees this distinction. He rejects any theodramatization of suffering, opting instead to recognize suffering in its radical negativity. Consequently, he understands that suffering must be directed toward God, not in a “beautiful” spirit of heroic renunciation, but in a contentious spirit of “complaint and . . . insistent questioning.”125 This is what Metz means by a spirituality of suffering unto God. Metz refers to an interview in which Rahner states, against the basic theses of German Idealism, Heidegger, and (possibly, he says) Husserl, “that it is death, real death, naturally not speculation about it in a lecture hall, that is the only real fulfillment of [the] fundamental structure of the human person.”126 The fundamental structure to which Rahner refers is the subject’s openness—or we could say exposure—to “an incomprehensibility that cannot be systematized.”127 The referent in this case of “unsystematizable incomprehensibility” is not, at least not foremost, the incomprehensible love of God (though God is never uninvolved!), but the nontransferable mystery of human suffering. In this world, shot through as it is with sin, guilt, concupiscence, and their attendant effects, the fundamental structure of the human person consists in exposure to death. Whatever we tend to be taught about Rahner, he attends continually to this kind of exposure. This take on Rahner coheres with another, which briefly appears in 123. Metz, “Karl Rahner’s Struggle for the Theological Dignity of Mankind,” 119. 124. Ibid. 125. These few sentences collate various thoughts from ibid., 118–19. 126. Rahner, Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965­–1982, ed. Huber Biallowons and Paul Imhof (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 124. 127. Ibid.

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Dorothee Soelle’s book on mysticism, The Silent Cry (2001). This title resonates obviously with the closing words of our quote from Metz. While Soelle does not discuss Rahner extensively, she places him prominently in her chapter on suffering. She cites him in a lengthy epigraph on the attempt to love God in a condition “where we seem to be dying of a love that looks like death and absolute negation, and we appear to be calling out into nothingness and the utterly unrequited.”128 Standing at the chapter’s opening, this epigraph is bookended by the chapter’s closing pages on “inconsolability”: an aesthetic concept introduced by German novelist Heinrich Böll.129 “Aesthetic” here refers to the realm of feeling; “inconsolability” means holding onto agony against the temptation to escape into numbness.130 Soelle’s theology of suffering in this chapter gradually homes in on this aesthetic notion of inconsolability. By the chapter’s end she contends that “remaining in inconsolability” is an exemplary “way of listening to ‘the silent cry’ ” (of history’s victims).131 For her, a mysticism of suffering, which she finds expressed in nuce in Rahner, consists in something like the spirituality of suffering unto God that Metz attributes to Rahner. It consists in attunement to the suffering of others that one feels not out of a vague sense of solidarity, but in one’s own moments or prolonged conditions of inconsolability. Soelle discusses Rahner just a bit more in the same chapter, when she paraphrases something she recollects him saying during a conversation about the mysticism of suffering. She recalls him saying that, in some moments of everyday love, one “suddenly faces the alternative of 128. Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, trans. Barbara Rumscheidt and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 133. Soelle does not footnote the quotation, but it comes from Rahner, “Experiencing the Spirit,” in Spirit in the Church, trans. John Griffiths (New York: Crossroad, 1979), 19. Griffiths’s ET of the paragraph from which the epigraph comes reads, “There is one who tries to love God although no response of love seems to come from God’s silent inconceivability, although no wave of emotive wonder any longer supports him, although he can no longer confuse himself and his life-force with God; although he thinks he will die from such a love, because it seems like death and absolute denial; because with such a love one appears to call into the void and the completely unheard-of; because this love seems like a ghastly leap into groundless space; because everything seems untenable and apparently meaningless.” 129. Soelle, Silent Cry, 151. 130. Ibid., 151–52. 131. Ibid., 154.

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loving without reward, to trust without assurance, to venture where it appears only that a senseless adventure lies before you that will not yield profit to anyone.” And she adds this to his statement, “But just such nonprofit love is the foundation of every mysticism of suffering.”132 Later in the chapter Soelle associates the nonprofit love to which Rahner attests to John of the Cross’s experiences of divine darkness. Such divine darkness, Soelle notes, “cries out in the suffering of the innocent, the losers of history, in Job’s lament.”133 On this basis, she argues that deus absconditus, the hidden God, corresponds to homo abyssus, the abyssal human being.134 Her inclusion of Rahner in this chapter on suffering, inconsolability, and the abyssal human being seems to imply that his theology bears fundamental insights regarding the mysticism of suffering and regarding suffering itself. Indeed, the lines she borrows from Rahner show his attunement to examples of inconsolability in human life. One could go even further to say that Rahner locates something like inconsolability within the fundamental structure of human existence, inasmuch as it is exposed and concupiscent. The next steps of my argument may seem odd, given that I have introduced them with two political theologians. One might expect that the rest would focus on historical suffering (political, economic, social). One must notice, though, that Soelle’s Silent Cry has a robust contemplative, sacramental dimension. But even more crucially, one must acknowledge that for Metz, the history of suffering and the history of guilt must go together if one wants to render Christian redemption as liberation. Metz writes, “Refusing to accept guilt does not promote a specific, concrete freedom, but rather a laboriously concealed heteronomy.”135 Furthermore, he praises Rahner for maintaining theology’s optic of the “history of suffering as a history of guilt.”136 Obviously, Metz admits, one must not allow this focus on guilt to renew oppression through “hamartiological overburdening.”137 132. Ibid., 136–37. 133. Ibid., 146. 134. Ibid. 135. FHS 118, 122. 136. FHS 122. 137. FHS 122; Metz, Passion for God, 62.

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Still, sin and guilt must remain as theological questions, and central ones. Ethna Regan can rightly accuse Rahner of not attending with full adequacy to “dis-grace” in the sense of historical-socioeconomic-political suffering, especially in the case of his penitential writings.138 But we shall see how, in nonobvious ways, Rahner could contribute to thinking about historical suffering precisely through his studies on sin, guilt, and penance.

Loss of Grace Let us revisit Rahner’s early publication, “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature” (1936, 1973). This article presupposes that sin involves real loss—the loss of baptismal grace. Thus it is an essential article to consider as we think about exposed freedom. Exposed freedom risks losing that which sustains it, the gift of God’s life. Rahner discovers the Shepherd of Hermas saying, “Sin ‘expels’ the Spirit which dwells within man. It ‘injures’ the Holy Spirit and brings it about that it ‘abandons’ man.”139 This early Christian document explicitly recognizes the damage that can be done to God’s grace in the human person. Rahner’s study of the slightly later theology of Tertullian reveals that he deems serious sins unforgivable, thus implying severe cases of the loss of grace to the point of irrecuperability.140 The church in general will not end up being as rigorist as Tertullian, but it will keep a modified version of his position: sin can involve a loss of grace, even if, due to the expansiveness of God’s mercy, all sins are forgivable. Rahner concludes the article by saying that after Tertullian, theologies of baptism and penance evidence anxiety over how to preserve the grace received in baptism. Safeguarding of grace, many conclude, must be accomplished through “a way of life which corresponds to [a Christian’s] call to share in the life of God.”141 Clearly, if the church fathers hold that baptismal grace must be preserved, it can be lost. In chapter 2, following upon my exposition of the “Sin as Loss of 138. Regan, Theology and the Boundary Discourse of Human Rights, 81. 139. SLG 39. 140. SLG 51. 141. SLG 53.

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Grace” article, I argued that the fundamental option has roots in this article. In short, Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option restates the early Christian conviction that freedom properly used safeguards God’s free gift of mercy, while freedom ill-used threatens to lose this grace. When thinking about the fundamental option, we must not overlook the possibility of loss of grace. This makes sense of why Rahner insists so strenuously that one cannot understand freedom without contending with the eventuality that a person’s fundamental option can be “no.”142 Sin as loss of grace, as the fathers describe it, is not only a loss for the sinner (individually), but also for the church (communally). Sin is, Rahner reports near the end of his historical lectures on penance, an “injustice against the holy church as Christ’s body”—it is a violation of Christ’s body, or to use language adapted from the Shepherd of Hermas, an injury.143 It would seem that Rahner would not contend that sin could bring about the loss of grace for the whole church, but one would be wrong to discount this possibility tout court. The famous lecture Rahner delivered on the eve of Vatican II, “Do Not Stifle the Spirit!” (1 Thes 5:19), entertains this possibility.144 Rahner warns, “We could stifle the Spirit! . . . Not only are we able to be false to ourselves and to betray the dignity and destiny of our nature. We can block the spirit who wills ever to renew the face of the earth! We can kill the life of God in the world, render the spheres of life Godless, empty, and meaningless!”145 The claim Rahner makes here is exceedingly important: not only can a person betray himself through sloth, cowardice, or lovelessness, he can “kill the life of God in the world.” If he can do this, he can kill the life of God in another person or a whole group of people. Rahner is being somewhat hyperbolic in the statements I just quoted, but given his strong sense of human finitude, concupiscence, and active sinfulness, his remarks are less inflated than one may think. At issue in the “Do Not Stifle the Spirit!” lecture is precisely what is at stake 142. TF 181–82. 143. See DP1 302. 144. Karl Rahner, “Do Not Stifle the Spirit!,” in TI 7:72–87. 145. Ibid., in TI 7:73, Rahner’s emphasis.

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in Rahner’s writings on penance: his concern that human sinfulness and sins can cover over the manifestation of God’s love and that symbols of God’s love (forgiveness and mercy) that run counter to sins, injury, and violation are necessary to uncover its manifestation. We must now return to Rahner’s retrieval of the early church idea of penance involving reconciliation with the church. In early church practice, reconciliation came at the end of a protracted process of discipline and repentance, all supervised by the church. This process was necessary, early church theology and practice held, because of the penitent’s loss of baptismal grace. This loss marred the sinner’s “organic membership [in] the body of the Church through which the Spirit is conferred upon her members.”146 While, as a result, the penitent was banned from participation in the Eucharist, the support of the church remained through “the prayer of the Church in the form of blessings, exorcisms, [and] exhortations.”147 After spending time in the class of penitents and proving his conversion, the penitent “was once more reconciled with the Church, i.e., fully received back into her through the laying on of hands by the bishop, and thereby also once more obtained the Spirit which vivifies the Church, in other words grace and so the forgiveness of sins.”148 Rahner sees Vatican II as trying to reconnect with this early church theology and practice, which center on shared woundedness, mutual support in addressing the wound, and in shared recovery from the wound in embodied practices of reconciliation. He underscores Lumen gentium’s statement that, when the sacrament of penance is viewed holistically, one can see how “the Church collaborates in working for the conversion of the sinner through love.”149 In this way, the Council aimed to clear the modern misconception of penance as a sacrament of guilt and punishment while recuperating the earlier view of it as a sign of mercy. Early church theology and practice suggest to Rahner that sin is not remitted and grace not restored merely individually and in isolation. If the church is to fulfill its role as “the abiding sacrament of the mercy 146. Ibid., in TI 7:136. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., Rahner’s emphasis. 149. Ibid.

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of God in the world,”150 it should support those gravely suffering from guilt. This is what the church does when it operates at its best. The church counteracts the potential for loss of grace (dis-grace) by mediating God’s grace to sinners.151 I have insisted throughout this book that for Rahner, human freedom, ecclesial freedom, and divine freedom always go together. Because of this he offers, especially in his theology of penitential freedom, a way of speaking theologically about the communal bearing of suffering. Obviously, a distinction must be made between the suffering of the sinner and the suffering of a person from physical aggression, assault, hunger, preventable disease, deprivation of dignity, lack of housing, absence of potable water, denied political representation, and so on. Still, we must not be unaware that Rahner regards all of these things as manifestations of human sinfulness—these are concrete examples of what he has in mind when he talks about people as being exposed to the effects of others’ sin and guilt. So while we must differentiate between suffering from guilt and physical suffering, we cannot and ought not to separate them entirely. This is Metz’s point in praising Rahner for keeping sin and guilt in mind.

Pilgrim Church—Matter of Penance—Silent Cry Pope Francis proclaims near the end of Misericordiae vultus, “The Church is called above all to be a credible witness to mercy, professing it and living it as the core revelation of Jesus Christ.”152 While many commentators, especially, tellingly, from wealthy countries like the United States of America and Germany, have narrowed the sense of “mercy” simply to its relationship to the official sacrament of penance, Francis’s appeal in the same document for a rediscovery of the corporal works of mercy suggests that alleviation of bodily suffering is as necessary as 150. Rahner, “Der ekklesiologische Aspekt der Sakramente,” SW 18:368. 151. See Rahner, “Forgotten Truths Concerning the Sacrament of Penance,” in TI 2:162–66, on how the church bears the guilt of sinners through prayer. 152. Pope Francis, Misericordiae Vultus, 25.

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allaying guilt.153 As a credible witness to mercy, the church must regard itself as wounded not just by the sins and guilt of people, but also by their hunger, thirst, nakedness, strangeness in a strange land, illness, incarceration, and untimely death. Rahner is guilty to an extent of deemphasizing (through omission more than commission) this latter side of the church’s mission of mercy. Jon Sobrino argues this most pointedly in The Principle of Mercy, where he wishes that Rahner would have specified “sin” by referring it to its “prime analogate”: “murder.”154 Such a specification of sin would have helped Rahner to clarify the connection between the two forms of suffering. Even with this caveat in place, though, we can work with what we have from Rahner and make some noteworthy discoveries. Earlier I intimated that the church’s vulnerability to being wounded by gravely suffering people could lend the type of credibility Pope Francis promotes. I inferred this vulnerability from the church’s susceptibility to wounding by sin. In chapter 2, I showed how, in significant ecclesiological essays from the 1940s and the time of the Vatican Council, Rahner aimed to retrieve a sense of the church’s vulnerability to sin. I joined that point of retrieval to another: Rahner’s recovery of Thomas Aquinas’s teaching that the “matter” of penance consists in the acts of the penitent. This allowed me to relate individual subjectivity to ecclesial subjectivity, with both exhibiting penitential freedom that bears the potential to make manifest divine freedom. Let us continue those reflections in the context of our discussion of freedom’s exposure to being undone. Rahner deems vitally important the Second Vatican Council’s image of the “pilgrim Church.” It allows the church to admit publicly that, although it is called to holiness and does in many respects make holiness manifest, it remains in the middle of a journey, its perfection as yet unachieved.155 He pushes this admission even further to confess that the 153. Ibid., 15. 154. Jon Sobrino, The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1994), 87. 155. See Vatican Council II, Lumen gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, November 11, 1964, 48.

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church is a subject of sin and guilt.156 Once again, the church is affected by the lives of its members, because it leads the same lives as its members. If we link Rahner’s thinking on the pilgrim or sinful church to his retrieval of Thomas’s teaching on the matter of penance, we can say that the church works through its vulnerable, wounded condition in penitential liturgies. Rahner knows full well that the sacrament of penance as it is practiced in the late modern church is a far cry from the public work of mourning, support, and reconciliation that occurred in the early church. But there is something interesting about the banality of modern penitential practice. Rahner observes, Today this liturgy is quite sober—indeed, it is often mistaken for a primitive psycho-therapeutic consultation of hideous profanity; it is the liturgy of the Confessional. But perhaps this liturgy is in its kind most expressive for anyone who can see by faith, just because it is so sober: the liturgy of poor little sinners, of the mediocre and the weak, who are too poor and feeble to say and do more than what is absolutely necessary. Perhaps this liturgy thus expresses even better today what a man is: a poor being which is just able to call out for the mercy of God in a weak, almost dying whisper, and whose little lamentation is already enveloped by the loud, powerful utterance of mercy which fills all spaces: ego te absolvo.157

Obviously, Rahner writes here of a penitent, someone repenting from sin and approaching the confessional. But the second half of the quotation suggests a broader application: not only does he seem to be describing a sinner begging for absolution from guilt, but a gravely suffering person pleading for release from degradation. We can hearken back carefully to Beste’s example of incest survivors, who experience severe diminishment of their self-esteem and selfconcept, a fragmentation of self so acute that they cannot respond with a full-throated “yes” to God’s self-offer in grace. The “yes” in question cannot be pronounced because, it would seem, the “yes” would have to be an expression of freedom’s strength. But what if Rahner’s description 156. Rahner, “Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” in TI 6:285. 157. Rahner, “Forgotten Truths about the Sacrament of Penance,” in TI 2:161.

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of the penitent’s appeal to God’s mercy in “a weak, almost dying whisper,” in a “little lamentation,” is more what Rahner has in mind when he writes of the “yes” to God? If this were so, then even the weakest appeal of a gravely suffering person to God for mercy, not of just of forgiveness but also of love and acceptance, would express a “yes” to God. We must remember Metz’s words. Rahner’s theology of penance resonates with the wordless cries of suffering people. Inasmuch as his theology of ecclesial freedom is shaped by the sober, penitential liturgy of the wordless cry for mercy, we find a vision for a pilgrim church that, along with victims of history, utters this cry that symbolizes mercy by imploring God for it. My presentation in chapter 2 of the “matter of penance” in Thomas told how he asserts the penitent’s agency in the sacrament, over against a prevailing view that sacramental activity stands entirely on the side of God’s grace, mediated through the priestly words of absolution. This assertion of agency would seem incongruous, given what I have just suggested. But we must remember that Thomas’s teaching on the matter of penance revealed him to be on the brink of a major discovery regarding the complexity of human, ecclesial, and divine freedom made manifest. For Rahner and Thomas, the sacrament of penance is an effective manifestation of God’s life of mercy and forgiveness. Thomas’s teaching on the matter of penance proposes that God’s free mercy lives through the coordinated activity of a “poor being calling out for God’s mercy,” a wounded church who accompanies her, and the kind and merciful God who responds to this silent call. For a Rahnerian-Thomistic theology of freedom, agency does not have to come with a trumpet blast, the cooperation of the church with a flash of lightning, or the love of God with a rushing wind. Agency is a task achieved through staggering liturgies of mercy, where agency undone becomes agency redone through Christian love.158 Despite the appearance of being freedom lost, a little lamentation may be the first inkling of freedom made manifest.

158. With this language of “task” I hearken back to Rahner’s “The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” which refers to human dignity as both an “essential structure” and a “task”; in TI 2:236.

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I gn ati a n Fr eed o m a nd J esus ’ Agon ized H e a rt Contemporary theologians Shelly Rambo and Serene Jones both seek spiritual and doctrinal support for a Christian theology that could address itself to experiences of trauma and provide impetus for Christian practices of care for traumatized people.159 In their searches, both gravitate toward something like the Sacred Heart. Rambo’s theological proposal centers on an image from Balthasar’s Heart of the World (1943). Balthasar describes a scene Adrienne von Speyr receives in a vision, in which a “chaotic drop” emerges from the wounded side of the dead Christ on the cross.160 This image of the chaotic drop emerging from the wound allows Balthasar to reimagine redemption “from the depths of hell.”161 Rambo sees the chaotic drop as a sort of traumatic remainder, an excess of death into life, a figure for a type of Christian witness that refuses to explain away the still-open wounds of trauma victims. Jones presents a similar figure when reflecting upon a friend’s traumatic experience of a miscarriage. Her friend Wendy tells her that she seeks “a vision of divinity into which she could crawl and then rest.”162 Jones proposes that such a vision could be found in trinitarian theology if one drew an analogy between how, with the death of Jesus on the cross, God takes death into God’s own depths, and how a mother who has lost a child bears death within herself.163 Jesus Christ’s death occurs “in the very heart—perhaps the womb—of God,” and while this death “consumes God,” God remains alive, living “to love yet again and to offer to the world the gift of the future.”164 This image of the Trinity, Jones hopes, can lessen a woman’s sense of isolation and assist her on the path toward healing. I end this chapter with these thoughts because they can help us to 159. Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010); Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), especially 127–50. 160. Rambo, Spirit and Trauma, 55–57. 161. Ibid., 59. 162. Jones, Trauma and Grace, 146. 163. Ibid., 148. 164. Ibid., 148–49.

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return to Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality, which centers largely on Jesus’ Sacred Heart, but now with people’s grave suffering in mind. Chapter 3 already discussed in brief how, for Rahner, Ignatian freedom is exposed (to Christ’s urgings and Lucifer’s assaults). Now I deepen such ideas by referring them toward the “pierced” aspect of the Sacred Heart, “which pours itself out in streams of blood.”165 As we shall see, a fruitful case can be made for the central importance of Christ’s agonized heart for Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality and, by extension, his theology of freedom as a whole.

Ignatian Subjectivity, Being Affected, the Sacred Heart, and Individuation Our work on freedom’s exposure has allowed us to delve more deeply into Rahner’s complex vision of the human subject. It prompted a review of the Schellingian-Rahnerian pair of ground and existence, whose interaction constitutes the subject. We can now say that the subject’s ground is at once the site of an eternal decision (fundamental option), of resistance to this decision (concupiscence), and of the subject’s vulnerability (again, concupiscence). Existence is the expression in time of the fundamental option (showing it), but also its performance (shaping it and making it effective). Both traverse the terrain of human sin, guilt, repentance, and reconciliation. The fundamental option, haunted and resisted by concupiscence, comprises the freedom at the ground of appearances, and temporal acts, both good and sinful, all marked by the concupiscent remainder, constitute the appearances without which the ground would not be. Said otherwise, the Rahnerian subject is aesthetic: not an ideal subject, but one exposed and affected in its ground and existence, to world (including neighbors) and to God. I have also argued, with recurring focus on ecclesial freedom, that the “affected” Rahnerian subject cannot exist, at least not healthily, apart from a community of shared burdens traveling on a pilgrim journey. 165. Rahner, “ ‘Behold This Heart!’: Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” in TI 3: 321.

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I review this material here because the Ignatian dimension of Rahner’s theology of freedom becomes understandable only when the Rahnerian subject is apprehended as centered on affect and imagination. For Ignatius, the human person is exposed to God’s call, which is recognized affectively. The living out of this call constitutes a unique way of living out the ethos of the church (hence chapter 3’s discussion of “loyalty to the church”). For the Rahnerian Ignatius, the affected, individual-ecclesial subject is sustained by the love of Christ’s pierced Heart. The Exercises involve God’s self-manifestation to the retreatant, where the economy of the affected subject that I have just summarized ought to become clear. This self-manifestation occurs, obviously, through meditations on the life of Christ and flows from the love of Christ—hence my stridency in arguing in chapter 3 that the features of Ignatian spirituality, which stem from the Exercises, have a living source in Christ’s heart. Late in Rahner’s life (1982), he keenly notices the impending obsolescence of the Sacred Heart devotion, and he disapproves of its disappearance.166 He criticizes it not because he resists change in the church; change can, does, and must happen. Instead, he sees veneration of the Sacred Heart as necessarily connected to a current, bleak situation of humanity following upon the (illusory) optimism of modernity. Humanity faces a crisis because, especially in its social life, it is directionless, and because of its exploitation of nature, it verges on suicide.167 The church answers this despair-provoking world situation with the universal hope of salvation, which derives not from modern optimism but from the folly of the cross. This hope is expressed and enacted in an overwhelming number of religious realities. But all this may be summarized and organized in a devotion focused on a word that “refers to the innermost center where the multiple is still one”: “heart.”168 This devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus symbolizes the church’s universal hope in the face of despair. Rahner suggests that “heart” is the word that would make sense for Christians to utter in the contemporary world. As the impetus to166. Rahner, “Devotion to the Sacred Heart Today,” in TI 23:117–28. 167. Ibid., in TI 23:125. 168. Ibid., in TI 23:126.

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ward the Sacred Heart devotion, this single word could ever so slightly be elaborated into a weak address: “We must eventually . . . try to pray, ‘Heart of Jesus, have mercy on me.’ ”169 In the late modern world, where people are exposed to the possibility of autoannihilation, it would be good to turn to that “burning heart . . . which exposed itself to all fates, that has suffered all fates.”170 Rahner’s Ignatian writings, as I read them, are oriented by such a turn toward the merciful heart of Christ. The theology of freedom—or theological aesthetic of freedom, since it concerns affected subjects—that he develops out of his Ignatian sources turns toward and has its vital origin in Christ’s exposed heart. By making this claim I wish to engage constructively with Rahner’s gestures toward a new ontology in the “Logic of Existentiell Recognition in Ignatius Loyola.” In chapter 3 I read this essay as tentatively putting forward a theory of human individuation based on a divine call, with this call being recognizable in the aesthetic stratum of human existence (the Grunderfahrung or Grundgefühl).171 Ignatius’s Exercises set up an aesthetic logic by which recognition of this call may occur and on the basis of which a person may decide how to respond to God’s call. It would be good at this point to make an observation about the book in which the “Logic of Existentiell Recognition” essay appears. The Dynamic Element in the Church (1958) includes three essays that originally were conceived and published separately, but that Rahner was urged by “attentive readers” to bring together in one volume.172 The “Logic” essay is the third, preceded by “Principles and Prescriptions” and “The Charismatic Element in the Church.” These two offer what Rahner calls “a sort of applied philosophy of concrete particulars in the life of the Church.”173 I wish to comment further on the first essay. “Principle” designates a universal moral proposition, the building block of a general abstract ethics.174 “Prescription” denotes a “propo169. Ibid., in TI 23:128. 170. ISDHJ 132/458, ET modified. 171. I based this contention on LER 166/417–18. 172. Rahner, Dynamic Element in the Church, 11. 173. Ibid., 9. 174. Ibid., 15, 24.

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sition which enunciates . . . an individual obligation,” where an individual person is seen as qualitatively different from the “mere limitation of a universal.”175 These two types of propositions are closely related, but the latter has the advantage of addressing “a residue which is out of reach, not because of a relative, but because of an intrinsic incapacity of abstract reason.”176 “Prescriptions” take into greater account the gritty details of life, which can be easily overlooked by abstract reasoning built on “principles.”177 A moral theology or, better for us, a theology of freedom attentive to “prescriptions” would implement an aesthetic logic less prone to letting individual persons’ lives slip through its cracks; it would be less likely than a logic built on “principles” to create a class of unfree nonpersons. A theology of freedom attentive to “prescriptions” is more prone to allowing for the vast space and multifaceted expressions of Christian life. Rahner constructs such a prescription-oriented theology. Even more, for Rahner, Christian prescriptions for freedom have a living source in Christ’s recognition of God’s call during the agony in the garden. This may seem an odd claim, because I reflected at length in chapter 3 on how, for Rahner, the Ignatian logic of existentiell recognition stands under the following rule: that Christ’s life should be continued (in various ways), not copied for the nth time.178 I aim to assert a paradox, which I find across Rahner’s writings—that the variety of “prescriptions” for Christian life finds its concreteness in the one life of Jesus Christ. For the rest of this chapter, we shall examine Jesus Christ’s life from the standpoint of his recognition of and decision upon God’s call during his agony in the garden. I contend that Rahner’s account of exposed freedom can be illuminated most brightly in his account of Jesus’ individuation during the agony in the garden. Jesus’ exposed human freedom is made manifest under a crucial historical-ontological condition. This is true of 175. Ibid., 17, 16. 176. Ibid., 29. 177. Rahner gives the example of the principle “defend private property.” A prescription, without disagreeing with this principle, “would have to say what form this private property would take, how it could be defended against the propertyless forces of a managerial society, how increased and better distributed, and so on”; ibid., 31. 178. See ISDHJ 143–44/464–65.

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human freedom generally, though always absolutely uniquely in each individual. Also, each absolutely unique individual mysteriously takes part in Christ’s singular individuation. In Lois Malcolm’s phrase, freedom becomes manifest through “our ‘ontological participation’ in the life Christ has already accepted,”179 that is, the life—unto death—that he accepted at Gethsemane. I hope that by this perhaps strange route I can sum up this chapter’s contribution to the ongoing theological conversation regarding freedom and grave suffering.

Indifference and the Agony in the Garden Philip Endean states that for Rahner, Christ’s death on the cross is not heroic, but “full and unreserved sharing in the human condition, in all its vulnerability.”180 He follows this thought two pages later by relating Christ’s death to Ignatian indifference, which, as Rahner sees it, “anticipates the ultimate dispossession of death.”181 These thoughts, the second of which treats what Rahner designates as first among the features of Ignatian spirituality, cohere well with Lois Malcolm’s enormously important chapter on the death of Christ as the heart of Rahner’s theology. Malcolm argues two theses: (1) “that a theology of the cross does, indeed, lie at the heart of Rahner’s theology and understanding of Christian practice,” and (2) “that his theology helps us interpret the cross in ways that lead not simply to self-abnegation and nothingness—although they do also lead to both—but also to a deep appreciation of God’s, and therefore also our own (in Christ and the Spirit), inexhaustible fullness.”182 The first thesis addresses itself to Rahner’s more conservative, often Balthasarian critics. The second directs itself toward feminist concerns regarding the theology of the cross. In the first, Malcolm builds off of Rahner’s answer to an interview question in the 1970s regarding the 179. Lois Malcolm, “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross,” in Rahner beyond Rahner: A Great Theologian Encounters the Pacific Rim, ed. Paul Crowley (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 121. 180. KRIS 191. 181. KRIS 193. 182. Malcolm, “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross,” 116.

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alleged absence of the cross in his theology. Rahner notes that a dissertation has been written on his theology of the cross, and he deems this an adequate response to this criticism.183 Malcolm adds more substance by, notably for our purposes, discovering Rahner’s theology of the cross through his meditations on the Ignatian Exercises.184 With respect to the second thesis, Malcolm shows that Rahner’s particular theology of the cross proves helpful and consistent with feminist theological concerns inasmuch as it presents a unique “perplexed pessimism” that combines emphasis on human freedom and agency—thus hope for redemption and inexhaustible life—with open-eyed awareness of human vulnerability, failures, disappointments, and experiences of abandonment, alienation, and injustice.185 The upshot of the second thesis can provide a link to Soelle if we invoke an important distinction that Soelle draws in the chapter on suffering I discussed earlier. Soelle differentiates “dolorousness,” or a pathological delight in suffering, from “suffering” properly defined, which is connected to compassion. “Suffering” in this latter sense means suffering with Christ and all who suffer.186 Malcolm seems to contend that Rahner’s theology of the cross centers on “suffering” rather than “dolorousness.” The crucial point of Malcolm’s inquiry into Rahner’s meditations on the Exercises lies in the portion of her chapter titled “The Passion of Christ in Light of the Incarnation.”187 She identifies the axiom at the heart of Rahner’s theology: “Nearness to and distance from God—dependence on and independence from God—are not opposed to each other but increase together.”188 This incarnational axiom gains definitive confirmation in Christ’s passion. For Rahner, especially in his meditations on the Exercises, “The nadir—and apex—of Christ’s assumption of our humanity is depicted in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ agony in the garden of Gethsemane and on the cross.”189 This absolute low-high 183. Rahner, Karl Rahner in Dialogue, 112. 184. Malcolm, “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross,” 118–25. 185. Ibid., 126–28. 186. Soelle, Silent Cry, 139–40. 187. Malcom, “Rahner’s Theology of the Cross,” 121–24. 188. Ibid., 122. 189. Ibid.

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point of the incarnation embodies a “paradox of abandonment and nearness” that concretizes Rahner’s incarnational axiom and grounds his “perplexed pessimism.” I want to take Malcolm’s argument somewhat further by fleshing out her case with specific passages from Rahner’s Ignatian meditations on the agony in the garden and then by relating this material back to Ignatian indifference, the theme I introduced earlier. Let us join Rahner in the middle of his chapter on the agony in the garden in Betrachtungen zum ignatianischen Exerzietienbuch (titled “To the Mount of Olives” [Am Ölberg] in the original).190 Rahner writes, in terms that befit our earlier discussions of concupiscence, “We have perhaps at some point confronted ourselves with how the anxiety-sewn prayer of Christ is compatible with His ‘freedom from concupiscence.’ ”191 Rahner suggests that this problematic, which is part and parcel with the greater problematic of the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, his simultaneous participation in the beatific vision and human ignorance, cannot be solved through the “pure work of a thinker.”192 Instead, “feeling (empfinden)” must guide the meditation. It is incumbent upon the exercitant to “seek to taste (verkosten) how the Incarnate Word in his human interiority (Innerlichkeit) opens himself toward something overpowering, and how through this he makes absolute suffering into His own act.” Deep reflection on his agony should yield the impression that “Jesus is, as it were, his own suffering.” This makes sense of Luke’s report that Jesus’ sweat became like drops of blood (Lk 22:44). During his time in the garden, the exercitant will find, Jesus “is exiled and threatened on all sides by death-dealing sorrow.” We see here Rahner hinting at themes with which we have familiarized ourselves in this chapter: the threatened character of human freedom and how threat can overtake a person 190. Though in chapter 3 I referenced the German version in the SW directly, here I shall cross-reference the ET (Spiritual Exercises, SE) and the German (Betrachtungen), as has been my practice with other sources; SE 217–26/198–205. 191. SE 221/201, ET entirely revised. I use the strange construction “anxiety-sewn” to render “angsterstickte,” whose second half suggests embroidery and fits with the idea of Christ being “pierced,” in this metaphor by a needle, which evokes the later piercing by a Roman lance. 192. SE 221/201, ET fully revised. The several subsequent references come from this same paragraph.

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comprehensively, yet, paradoxically, how the capacity to act may somehow emerge from this overshadowed existence. Also in this passage a window opens toward theological aesthetics. Just a page later, Rahner associates the exercitant’s method of meditation to Christ’s agony: “In the meditation on the agony in the Garden, the retreatant is supposed to make use of the ‘Applicatio sensuum’ . . . Jesus’ agony in the Garden is itself really a frightful ‘application’ of His ‘senses,’ which, as it were, are filled from their roots with loneliness and abandonment.”193 It is difficult, Rahner contends, and perhaps impossible to experience something similar, unless one has a “negative immediate relationship with God.”194 Here we see Rahner invoking the direct opposite experience to what Endean and others take to be definitive for Rahner’s Ignatian spirituality: the immediate (positive) experience of God. Instead of this experience, we find an Ignatian meditation whose cornerstone consists in Jesus shouting “Abba” into a “leaden heaven (bleiernen Himmel).”195 This cry of “Abba” is the kind of cry that Soelle has in mind when she talks about the “silent cry.” It is not, Rahner avers, the polite word of a courteous Son, “not an affectionate word of one who in filial-beatific love is united with His heavenly Father.”196 No—“much more is it the scream of a creature who almost skips over respect and awe and is so emptied, burned out, that she has her existence only as this dead cry.”197 But even so reduced to his dead cry, Jesus begins anew. From his heart, which has been pierced by his Father’s non-reply, flows the power to move onward to the cross.198 Malcolm’s second thesis is confirmed: Christ’s agony in the garden represents for Rahner a model for Christian pessimism, where grave suffering is faced head-on, yet with a tenuous hope in the continued possibility of movement, however weak, toward inexhaustible life after suffering. I also think that Malcolm’s first thesis—that Christ’s passion stands at 193. SE 223/203, ET modified. 194. SE 223/203, ET modified. 195. SE 223/203, ET modified. 196. SE 224/203, ET thoroughly revised. 197. SE 224/203, ET thoroughly revised. 198. SE 225/204, ET modified.

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the heart of Rahner’s theology—can be confirmed by relating Rahner’s meditations on Christ’s agony at Gethsemane to his theology of Ignatian indifference. Rahner cautions early in the text against conceiving of indifference as heroic.199 Instead, indifference is an attitude of humility. This humility should be modeled, Rahner suggests, on Christ’s agony in the garden: “We can see very clearly from the agony in the Garden that our Lord was not affected by a shallow apathy when he acknowledged the unappealable decree of God and made it a part of his existence.”200 Indeed not, as we have just learned. Jesus Christ’s decision comes not as he stands stoically and powerfully in the garden, asserting once and for all that his hour has come. Jesus in the garden is not the rationalist subject, impervious to threat, trauma, and catastrophe. More nearly, he is an aesthetic subject, affected to his roots by a catastrophe he already tastes and a trauma he already bleeds; this subject has a Vorgriff of the cross. This is Rahner’s model for human decision, even for the fundamental option—an existence grounded in a pierced heart, overwhelmed by a concupiscent remainder, suffering unto God, uttering a silent cry.

The Agonized Heart and Decision-in-Exposure Harvey Egan observes, “Rahner was once criticized for neglecting the Christological dimension of the Ignatian logic of existential decision. His reply underscores that the Ignatian Exercises place the decision in the context of meditations and contemplations on Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.”201 Rahner does not neglect the Christological dimension of Ignatian decision, Egan notes, but deems it undeniable. I have argued in favor of the same claim, with greater specificity. I shall now summarize and clarify my argument. A key meditation from Ignatius’s Exercises, on the agony in the garden, shows that even prior to being pierced by the Roman soldier’s lance ( Jn 19:34), Jesus’ heart was pierced by the leaden nonresponse to his cry at Gethsemane. This same place and same occurrence, the nadir of 199. SE 26/49. 200. SE 26/50, ET modified. 201. Egan, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life, 46.

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Jesus’ existence—when he participates most fully in humanity’s dustexistence—constitutes the apex of Jesus’ decision (i.e., his fundamental option, which takes him to the cross). Meditation on this event in Jesus’ life proves pivotal for an exercitant’s recognition of God’s call and decision based on this call. This meditation’s pivotal character lies in its aesthetic force: it leads one to feel and to taste Christ’s exposed freedom, to participate in this exposed freedom, and to recognize the extent of one’s own exposed freedom (in this case, to sin and death). The logic of existentiell recognition feels freedom’s exposure at its heart. I ended the previous chapter on the note of exposure because Rahner’s presentation of Ignatius’s meditation on the Two Standards emphasizes freedom’s exposure to the urgings of Christ and the assaults of Lucifer. I likewise argued that the fundamental option (which maps straightforwardly onto the Two Standards), if properly directed, consists in exposure to God’s boundless love, the same love that is poured out bountifully from the pierced Heart of Christ, both at Gethsemane and on the cross. I have now placed chapter 3’s ideas in a new key, certainly with Metz’s critique of Rahner in mind, but even more so Beste’s critique. It remained to be seen how the Ignatian source of Rahner’s theology of freedom could be squared with the concern that, even with all his discussion of Christ’s love, heart, and so on, he cannot account for people in desperate situations where freedom and hope, let alone indifference, existentiell decision, and love of the church, seem impossible. I have attempted to show that Rahner’s Ignatian theology of freedom (and by extension, his theological aesthetic of freedom in toto) provides the type of doctrinal and spiritual support that Beste (along with Shelly Rambo and Serene Jones) seeks for Christian theology and life attentive to the experiences of gravely suffering people. At the very least Rahner provides us with a constructive starting point. For Rahner, the Christ whose heart is pierced is the one who receives the full force of concupiscence (the traumatic remainder) and who utters the wordless cry (of history’s victims). This Christ lives, always bearing these wounds, promising resurrection even for those wounded 234  

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people for whom it would seem impossible (Lk 1:37). Let us consider one last text from Rahner, taken from his meditations on Christ’s “seven last words,” regarding Jesus’ cry of abandonment on the cross: If you prayed like this, O Jesus, if you prayed in such agony, is there any abyss so deep that we cannot call out from it to Your Father? Is there any despair so hopeless that it cannot become a prayer by being encompassed within Your abandonment? Is there any anguish so numbing that it must no longer expect its mute cries to be heard amidst heaven’s jubilation?202

These words bring to light Rahner’s wrestling with the central paradox of Christianity—that freedom is made most luminously manifest in the despair of an abandoned man hanging on a Roman cross, a person who has been completely undone. This paradox, not a transcendentalidealist theory of subjectivity, provides the grammar and the content for Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom, which as aesthetic is a theology of freedom attuned to freedom’s exposure. Freedom’s exposure, which comes palpably to light in grave suffering, challenges us, in conclusion, to recognize the fundamental option, the keystone of Rahner’s theological aesthetic of freedom, not as the simple, mathematical binary of “yes” and “no,” not as an act of power by a rational subject, but as the life of a wounded, yet still beating, heart. 202. Rahner, Prayers for a Lifetime, ed. Albert Raffelt, introduction Karl Lehmann (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 54.

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Conclusion

Conclusion L i b e rtat i s S p l e n d o r

Listen to Christianity as the message which does not forbid anything except man’s shutting-himself-off in his finite nature, except man’s refusal to believe that he is endowed with the radical infinity of the absolute God and that the finitum is capax infiniti. I know this message of the infinity and the absolute truth and freedom of Christianity is often interpreted . . . as a theology which loses itself in endless controversies and which merely consists in the dialectical opposition to some other opinion or form of experience. But do not let yourself be troubled by this wretched state of theology! Christianity is infinitely broad. For Christianity, among all religions, says the least in detail since it always says the one thing—but this with all the radiant splendor of truth and with the last ounce of that courage for living which only God can give—the absolute fullness itself, incomprehensible and nameless, infinite and unspeakable, has without diminution become the interior splendor of the creature, if only the creature will accept it.

—Karl Rahner, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Belief Today,” in Theological Investigations 5:10

H o w d o e s th e see m i n g ly i nsi g n i f i c a n t announce the eternal?

With this question the present book began. This overarching question was treated throughout under the auspices of subquestions regarding transcendental freedom, penitential freedom, Ignatian freedom, and exposed freedom in Karl Rahner’s theology. Having completed our considerations of those topics under those subquestions, we can now return to the opening question. For this conclusion, though, let us turn 236

the question around: how does the eternal announce itself in the seemingly insignificant? Or put in this book’s lexicon, how does God’s eternal decision to create, to save, and thereby to self-communicate occur in the seemingly insignificant (concupiscent, sinful, repentant, discerning, traumatized) choices, acts, and ultimate decisions of human persons and the church? By marking the announcement of the eternal as transpiring in the seemingly insignificant, we tailor our question to fit Rahner’s distinctive theology of freedom, indeed his theological aesthetic of freedom. For Rahner, freedom is not primarily a matter of drama, certainly not high drama fit for a grand stage. It may even be unfit for reality television. Instead, Rahner’s distinctive theological aesthetic of freedom pertains to the everyday life of Christians who, in most cases, develop existences out of their grounds on a mostly unremarkable pilgrim path of halting conversion. Lest this sound as if Rahner unduly pares Christianity down to size, or even less, makes an untoward “anthropological turn,” I remind the reader of Isaiah’s prophecy and its evangelical interpretation, which I invoked at this book’s opening: God’s servant appears without eyecatching majesty, without attractive beauty (Is 53:1–3; Mk 9:11–12). Emmanuel Falque argues, “Far from reducing God to man, Karl Rahner had in reality no other ambition than to expose the strange capacity of the divine to reduce itself by choice to the limits of the human.”1 If Jesus Christ appears in this reduced mode, especially during his suffering and through his death, this teaches us something about freedom and theological aesthetics. Freedom does not manifest itself paradigmatically with eye-catching majesty. Theological aesthetics does not concern primarily the beauty that draws in a (highly cultured) spectator. Freedom manifests itself as the divine majesty that decides to reduce itself to lowly everydayness. Theological aesthetics concerns primarily the enworlded embodiment we creatures share with the incarnate Word. Rahner’s theological aesthetic refers itself resolutely to the world, 1. Emmanuel Falque, The Metamorphosis of Finitude: An Essay on Birth and Resurrection, trans. George Hughes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 157n12.

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to subjects who live in the world, or more properly, who live world. Rahner’s theological aesthetic follows the design composed by God’s eternal decision to self-communicate through creation, redemption, and sanctification. Rahner merely listens to God’s word and translates it into a theological idiom. In my own listening to Rahner, I have decided to present his theological aesthetic under three rubrics: the sublime (KRTA), freedom (this book), and world (a book to come). I aim to represent Rahner’s theology of God’s self-reduction and the splendor of the creature that emerges from this divine self-reduction by discussing the sublime, freedom, and world as reduced beauty, goodness, and truth. The “reduction” in question is something like Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, in the sense that the transcendentals are bracketed in favor of lived experience. Rahner’s theological aesthetic comports with a metaphysic sensitive to the critiques of Kant and Heidegger, committed to finite being in (the) world (or concupiscent-material life), but also, as with the German Idealists, refusing any apriorism of finitude (concupiscent life does not have the last word). The point is that worldly existence—“aesthetic” in the etymological sense—provides the matrix for theological aesthetics. The result, or at least the result of the current volume, is an aesthetic of fragility, not of dramatic heroism. If Christians look to the saints as models of life, as Hugo Rahner recognized in his work on Ignatius’s letters to women (see chapter 3), their everyday living of the faith should compel us even more than their astounding displays of fortitude or virtuoso visions. After all, for the vast majority of us, everyday holiness proves most compelling, not simply because it is relatable, but because it shows how God’s saving freedom is announced through the insignificance—and with it, vulnerability and fragility—that constitutes the bulk of our lives. Precisely because freedom is borne by embodied (and consequently vulnerable) subjects, it is fragile and exposed. This is why it must be respected and protected. The foregoing pages demonstrated at length Rahner’s deep insight into freedom’s embodied fragility and exposure. He remains, of course, the thinker of the fundamental option, but now 238   C o n c l us i o n

we can see the fundamental option, that allegedly idealist concept, in new light. The fundamental option testifies to the paradoxical momentousness of an exposed freedom that can still pronounce a “yes” or “no” before God, not despite its fragility, but in its fragility. That fragile freedom remains capax infiniti, not despite its precarious finitude, but in its precarious finitude. That everyday life is the unfolding of eternity, not over against its tendency to run aground, but through its running aground. This is an unimaginable mystery. But precisely through the imagination and a logic of love, we can come to recognize it.

Th e Gro un d W e H av e (Un)cov er ed Let us review what has appeared in the foregoing pages, so as to tie up this book’s particular contribution to the three-volume picture of Rahner’s theological aesthetic. In short, we spent three chapters considering the sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom, and then one chapter applying these three sources so as to uncover a previously ignored or underplayed side (partially through Rahner’s own fault) to Rahner’s theology of freedom. All the while I contended that Rahner’s theology of freedom should be examined as a theological aesthetic of freedom, because for him freedom always means the manifestation or the concealment of God’s free, eternal decision to create, to save, and to selfcommunicate as love. Chapter 1 detected resonances between Rahner’s texts Hearer of the Word and “Theology of the Symbol” and Schelling’s philosophy of freedom, especially as expressed in his 1809 freedom treatise, which Rahner studied with Heidegger. The chapter’s interpretation of Rahner showed how he was critically engaged with German Idealism. His critique amounts to a rejection of Hegel’s thesis that being’s luminosity and the infinite openness of the subject to this luminosity ultimately obviate revelation. For Rahner, philosophy rightly construed comes to its apex when it reaches the threshold of a theology centered on the manifestation of God’s freedom in history to subjects who are ineluctably historical and material and who apprehend God’s free manifestation through C o n c l us i o n   239

their senses (per my reading of Hearer of the Word). The incarnate Word, of course, is the central “expressive presence” of this manifestation, the hinge on which turns God’s eternal decision to self-reveal. The chapter’s central contribution lay in its discussion, following upon all these ideas, of the human freedom that is charged with responding to God’s selfrevelation in Christ. While it has become commonplace to suggest that Rahner’s transcendental theological method presupposes an all-too-easy human response to God’s outpouring of Christ’s grace, I argued that the Schellingian inflection of Rahner’s transcendental method presupposes no such thing. Aided by Rahner’s crucial 1941 article “The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia,” combined with an analysis of his “The Theology of the Symbol,” I offered an aesthetic reading of Rahner’s theology of freedom in which freedom is always material, always complex, never “smooth,” and ever trailed by an “indivisible remainder.” Human freedom is made manifest not through autonomous self-determination, but through collection of the disparate moments of embodied human life into a multifaceted symbol of God’s freedom (called the “fundamental option”). Chapter 2 commenced by demonstrating Rahner’s credentials as a ressourcement theologian engaged particularly (for our purposes) with study of patristic ideas on and practices of penance. Rahner’s study of the fathers helped him to place his theology of freedom within a long tradition of thinking on sin, conversion, reconciliation, and the ecclesial dimension of all these realities. I showed how one of his first scholarly articles, “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature,” provides grounding for his later idea of the fundamental option, especially inasmuch as this idea includes the possibility of a person saying “no” to God. The chapter then examined Rahner’s historical and dogmatic lectures on penance, which he delivered several times in the postwar, preconciliar period. The major discovery here was that the holism of Rahner’s wider corpus, which is constitutive of his theological aesthetic, is replicated and specified in the penance lectures. He develops an account of penitential holism, where the sacrament of penance symbolizes the whole of Christian life, centered on metanoia away from sin and toward Christ. 240   C o n c l us i o n

Apposite to this penitential holism is an ancient Christian idea that Rahner aims to retrieve before, during, and after Vatican II: penance as an act of reconciliation with the church. Rahner intends to recover the ecclesiological and communal dimension of penance and, consequently, the church’s mission of mercy. Finally, corresponding to chapter 1’s closing discussion of “matter,” this chapter closed with a part on the “matter” of penance or the sacramental activity of the penitent. The church facilitates the “staggering liturgy” of the repentant sinner’s reconciliation with God. The church is both a manifestation of the Holy Spirit’s freedom and a broken material symbol—a pilgrim, an exercitant of penitential freedom that nevertheless symbolizes divine mercy. Thus Rahner’s penance studies prompted deep theological-aesthetic reflection on how true freedom is covered over by sin, but made manifest by the human search for divine healing and the reconciliation, both individual and ecclesial, that grows out of this healing. In sum, I contended that Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option (as a holistic manifestation or concealing of divine freedom through human freedom) must be understood within its hamartiological and ecclesiological matrix. Chapter 3 pursued the question of how Rahner’s theology of freedom roots itself in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. At the beginning of the chapter, “Features of Ignatian Spirituality” designated Rahner’s 1955 Canisianum conferences, “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” as a hermeneutical key for the Ignatian dimension of Rahner’s theology of freedom. While Rahner’s treatment of Ignatius has been seen by some as Christologically underdetermined, I suggested that, at least as a heuristic notion, we regard the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the fons et culmen of Rahner’s spirituality and as a lens that focuses his theology of freedom. “Individual Decision” and “Loyalty to the Church” examined the three dimensions of Ignatian spirituality identified in the Canisianum lectures. “Indifference” and “the existential” were treated in tandem, as bound up with individual subjectivity. The latter proved most important, since it occasioned Rahner’s preliminary reflections on an ontology sensitive to God’s unique call to each individual person. I identified the Ignatian logic of existentiell recognition (the eponC o n c l us i o n   241

ymous idea from Rahner’s lengthy essay in The Dynamic Element in the Church) as an aesthetic logic, one of feeling, not rationality (noetically understood). “The Fundamental Option and the Two Standards” complemented individual subjectivity with ecclesial subjectivity, following Rahner’s consideration of Ignatian “loyalty to the Church.” Of greatest note here was Rahner’s insistence that Christ’s love enlivens Christians’ assent to the church in the concrete, the same pilgrim state treated in chapter 2. Thus I bound together various threads from chapters 1–3 by reconsidering Rahner’s idea of the fundamental option as a contemporary expression of the same thing Ignatius meant by the two “banderas” of Christ and Satan. The whole of Christian life consists in resisting and turning away from the standard of Satan and working—within the concupiscent condition of this world—to make manifest the freedom represented by the standard of Christ. Chapter 4 reconsidered the three sources of Rahner’s theology of freedom in light of an old critique (Metz’s) and a new one (Beste’s). These critiques center on Rahner’s alleged inability to square his theology of freedom with historical catastrophe (Metz) or personal trauma (Beste). I answered these critiques by uncovering a theme that is operant, though evidently ignorable (again, partially by his fault) in Rahner’s theology of freedom. I called it “exposed freedom.” “Context and Exposure in Rahner’s Theology of Freedom” surveyed the terrain of Rahner’s writings to discover how in places more obvious, like a late essay on old age, and less obvious, like Foundations, freedom’s exposure is a focal theme. “Transcendental Freedom,” “Penitential Freedom,” and “Ignatian Freedom” read Rahner’s sources in a new light. I showed, first by turning Metz’s critique of Rahner’s transcendental theology back on the critic, then by delving briefly into psychoanalysis, how for Rahner transcendental freedom is always haunted by concupiscence as a “traumatic remainder.” Associating Rahner’s theology of penitential freedom with Metz’s spirituality of “suffering unto God” and Soelle’s mysticism of “the silent cry,” I highlighted Rahner’s concern with the weak cries of penitents and the church’s charge to help sinners bear their burdens. With respect to this, Rahner proves attentive to human suffering and 242   C o n c l us i o n

vulnerability in perhaps surprising ways.2 Finally I revisited the Ignatian source of Rahner’s theology of freedom, using Malcolm’s chapter on Rahner’s theology of the cross as an impetus to explore the centrality of the agony of the garden for Rahner’s theology of the Sacred Heart, which represents the hinge of his Ignatian spirituality and, consequently (based on chapter 3’s findings), his theological aesthetic of freedom. This chapter amplified the type of reflection begun in “Freedom Run Aground,” in chapter 1, which contended that for Rahner freedom runs aground more often and more normatively than it “smoothly” expresses itself. Rahner’s theology of freedom is not an idealist theory of human heroism without a sense of tragedy, catastrophe, or trauma. It is a theological aesthetic of freedom attuned to the friction of embodied, concupiscent, finite human life. The interior splendor of the creature must be sought precisely through its worldly conditions where, more often than not, splendor remains unapparent—or, we could say, subliminal.

Th e Tr i lo gy We now know that this book belongs to a set of three, which together comprise an account of a Rahnerian theological aesthetic centered on God’s “reduced” revelation. Volume 1 was Karl Rahner’s Theological Aesthetics, which could well have borne the title The Catholic Sublime, after its main category. Volume 2, Freedom Made Manifest, continues the project. Another volume to come, which I intend to call Love’s Terrible Radiance, will round out the trilogy. Before I conclude, let us briefly map the trilogy’s content. Perhaps I can best summarize by identifying a key question for each volume. KRTA revolved around this question: What is the space for God’s self-communication? That is, what is the “where” of God’s revelation? In order to answer this question, KRTA discussed how Rahner’s 2. I understand that these ways are insufficient for adequately or thoroughly addressing the concerns raised by theologians engaged by trauma theory and other critical discourses (i.e., I hope it does not come off as a “social theory has the questions, theology has all the answers” moment), but I do think they open an avenue for further productive conversation that includes Rahner.

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account of Christian “subjectivity” has broader significance than an “anthropological turn” or a turn toward the rationalist modern subject. Instead, in dialogue with Heidegger, Rahner explicates over the course of many writings how Christian “subjectivity” denotes a comprehensive ethos, a multifaceted and diverse form of life that constitutes a “home” for God’s revelation within finite, worldly, linguistic, historical confines, thus opening finitude toward the infinite. This ethos is defined not primarily by knowledge (noesis) or action (praxis), but by sensate, embodied, and enworlded living (aesthesis). I dubbed the comprehensive ethos the “Catholic sublime,” a term that, as I discussed in this book’s introduction, aims to express the Christian ethos’s universal scope, its elevating spirit, as well as carrying resonances with modern German aesthetics. God self-communicates in the aesthetic field of the Christian ethos. This book’s central question, it will be easy to recall, is “How does the eternal announce itself in the seemingly insignificant?” Or, “What is the means, the ‘how,’ of God’s revelation?” We know now that for Rahner God self-reveals by way of an eternal decision expressed through human and ecclesial freedom, with all the symbolic potentiality and concupiscent, sinful, pilgrim, and vulnerable friction that this expression involves. Essential to my description of Rahner’s theological aesthetic was chapter 3’s consideration of the Ignatian logic of existentiell recognition, an aesthetic logic, deeper than noesis or ethical deliberation, rooted in one’s personal ground (see chapter 1) that enables conversion (see chapter 2) and is enfleshed in the fundamental option. God self-reveals through this enfleshed decision. To use artistic terminology, volume 1 concerned the “support” of God’s revelation (like canvas or paper) and volume 2 discusses its “medium” (like paint or pencil). Volume 3, which will pursue the question “What is the content, the ‘what,’ of God’s revelation?,” will consider the “image.” I shall dedicate volume 3 to the reduced transcendental of truth, which I call “world.” From Geist in Welt and “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World” (both 1936) forward, “world” is an essential Rahnerian theme. “World” designates the arena (support/where), mode (medium/ how), and content (image/what) of the trinitarian God’s unsurpassable 244   C o n c l us i o n

self-communication in Jesus Christ. Volume 3 will set the keystone of Karl Rahner’s theological aesthetic by showing how Rahner develops a theology of enworlded truth by braiding together two modes of logic, apocalyptic logic (an aesthetic logic of sublime openness to God’s comprehensive yet incomprehensible self-communication), and existentiell logic (an aesthetic logic by which a person can decide—or not—to live out God’s self-communication by following Christ). In so doing, Rahner testifies to the Good News that, even with the obstacles this world places in the way of God’s comprehensive revelation, like gnoseological concupiscence (pluralism with respect to knowledge) and interpersonal violence (failures to love neighbor and therefore God), that, ultimately, “nothing is veiled that will not be uncovered, or hidden that will not become known” (Mt 10:26; see Mk 4:22 and Lk 8:17) and that even now God is making all things new (Rv 21:5). The drudgery of the everyday always remains constitutive for Rahner’s theological aesthetic, and attention to it comprises a major aspect of his aesthetic’s distinctiveness. But so too does the theme of anticipation (Vorgriff), where the terrible radiance of the divine image fully revealed shines in and through the soil of circumstance. Volume 3 will treat all these themes and more as it examines the “what” of God’s revelation in Rahner’s theology: the image of the invisible God, who dwells in unapproachable light, yet who did not grasp this invisible light, but came into the world to dwell among us, to bear our sins in his body, and to heal our wounds through his (Col 1:15; 1 Tm 6:16; Phil 2:6; Jn 1:14; 1 Pt 2:24­). But in advance of that volume, let us complete this one.

Th e H a r e ’s Unv ei li ng This book’s introduction considered the Feldhase, Albrecht Dürer’s famous drawing of a common hare. This opening reflection stemmed from Rahner’s use of this artwork as an example of spiritual (perhaps divine) expression in art. Let us return to Dürer’s hare as we conclude. In a 2016 interview, the director of the Albertina Museum, Klaus AlC o n c l us i o n   245

brecht Schröder, gives an overview of the collection’s masterwork. He points out both what is most loved about the piece (its virtuosity in naturalistic representation) and what tends not to be noticed or commented upon: the high degree of abstraction (Abstraktionsgrad) Dürer employed in depicting the hare.3 Schröder suggests that precisely Dürer’s isolation of the hare from its natural surroundings (forest and meadow) facilitates his close observation of it and displays “the total empathy, affection (gesamte Empathie, Zuneigung) that the artist felt” for the animal, and that this empathetic affection may account for the drawing’s widespread appeal over five hundred years after its creation.4 Schröder’s commentary on the Feldhase intersects interestingly with Rahner’s metaphysics of knowledge in Geist in Welt, which by now we could characterize as a metaphysics of freedom (see, e.g., “The Fundamental Option and the Two Standards,” in chapter 3), and which I take to be determinative for Rahner’s theological aesthetic. Dürer’s Feldhase exhibits the three moments of coming-to-knowledge (Erkenntnis) or of freedom’s expression (sensation/absorption-in-world, abstraction/ freedom-from-world, and conversion-to-the-phantasm/return-toworld): (1) His close sense-observation of the hare facilitates his carefully rendered naturalism, which has a powerful sensuous allure that draws crowds to the Albertina to view it; (2) His abstraction of the hare from its natural context, though, shows the artist’s freedom inasmuch as he does not simply copy what his senses apprehend; he exercises agency—though one always tethered to the limits of his eyes and hands, dependent upon the light cast by sun and candle, resisted by the materials he employs, and, of course, by the cooperation or noncooperation of the hare. For these latter reasons, the abstraction-dimension of Dürer’s work is easily missed. And there is another: (3) His free abstraction casts viewers (and surely Dürer himself) back into the sensed world to live with the kind of empathy and affection (or one could say love and mercy) the artist shows for the everyday hare. Dürer’s hare, examined in conversation with Rahner’s thought, can 3. Albertina Museum, “Albrecht Dürer, Feldhase, 1502 (Albertina-Direktor Klaus Albrecht Schröder),” accessed August 31, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwS9B4FuaHU. 4. Ibid.

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reveal an important lesson: by carefully observing (through the senses, aesthetically) something from everyday life (seemingly insignificant) and venerating it, one can open oneself to a whole field of freedom where one can make manifest one’s own freedom, as Dürer did, and where, theologically speaking, God’s revelatory freedom can be revealed. The question “How does the eternal announce itself in the seemingly insignificant?” leads to the hare, or more properly to human sensibility that can recognize an expression of divine life in this unremarkable companion on the pilgrim, earthly way. Undramatic though it may be, from the ground of this human sensibility shines the creature’s splendor.

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Bibliography

Selec ted Bi blio gr a p h y

Before I list the sources consulted in this book, I should note two extraordinarily helpful tools for studying Rahner that I utilized extensively as I researched: Raffelt, Albert. “Bibliographie Karl Rahner.” Freiburg im Breisgau: Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau, 2016 (original edition 1998), accessible online at https://www.ub.uni-freiburg.de/fileadmin/ub/ referate/04/rahner/rahnersc.pdf. This bibliography, compiled by one of the chief editors of Rahner’s Sämtliche Werke, presents in chronological order over 5,000 entries, including original publications of Rahner’s writings, rereleases of material in the Schriften zur Theologie and Sämtliche Werke, and selected English translations. Raffelt updates it periodically, with the most recent update having been completed in September 2016. Pekarske, Daniel T. Abstracts of Karl Rahner’s Theological Investigations 1–23. Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, 2002. This invaluable resource originated as Pekarske’s doctoral dissertation. As the title indicates, the book provides brief summaries with keywords and cross-references for all articles in Theological Investigations. The Abstracts is now available as an e-book, which offers even greater searchability and functionality. Pekarske also released a few years ago a similar volume with abstracts of Rahner’s unserialized essays (Marquette University Press, 2009). Taken together, these works provide a nearly comprehensive introduction to Rahner’s essays and an inestimably important aid to students and scholars of Rahner working in the English language. I was privileged to thank Fr. Pekarske for all his work at a meeting in 2015.

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W or ks by K a rl R a h ner Sämtliche Werke (Presented in Numerical Order) More than twenty years have elapsed since the publication of the initial volume in Rahner’s Sämtliche Werke, vol. 19, Selbstvollzug der Kirche: Ekklesiologische Grundlegung praktischer Theologie [The Church’s Self-realization: Ecclesiological Foundations for Practical Theology] (1995). At this point (Fall 2017), the final volumes are in production and will be released in spring 2018, completing the set and a monumental effort by a handful of editors and a host of translators, patient archivists, and more than a generation of scholars. In my country, the United States, the Karl Rahner Society (founded 1991), which holds its annual meeting at the convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America, has actively discussed the Sämtliche Werke for many years. My scholarship on Rahner has been formed by these conversations. They have prompted me to dig more and more deeply into the Sämtliche Werke to promote a broader and more detailed understanding of Rahner’s theology and the educational, cultural, and ecclesial contexts in which he lived and wrote. The Sämtliche Werke are a great gift to Rahner scholarship and to Catholic theology more widely. My practice of using them here should encourage other scholars to engage this resource, both memorially and constructively. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 1 [SW 1]. Frühe spirituelle Texte und Studien: Grundlagen im Orden [Early Spiritual Texts and Studies: Fundamentals in the Society]. Edited by Karl Kardinal Lehmann and Albert Raffelt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2014. ———. Vol. 2 [SW 2]. Geist in Welt: Philosophische Schriften [Spirit in the World: Philosophical Writings]. Edited by Albert Raffelt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1996. ———. Vol. 3 [SW 3]. Spiritualität und Theologie der Kirchenväter [Spirituality and Theology of the Church Fathers]. Edited by Andreas R. Batlogg, Eduard Farrugia, and Karl-Heinz Neufeld. Index by Jeanne Schlösser. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1999. ———. Vol. 4 [SW 4 ]. Hörer des Wortes: Schriften zur Religionsphilosophie und zur Grundlegung der Theologie [Hearer of the Word: Writings on Philosophy of Religion and on Laying the Foundations for Theology]. Edited by Albert Raffelt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1997. ———. Vol. 6 [SW 6/1, 6/2] De paenitentia: Dogmatische Vorlesungen zum Bußsakrament [De paenitentia (On Penance): Dogmatic Lectures on the

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Sacrament of Penance]. Parts 1 and 2, edited by Dorothea Sattler. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007 and 2009. ———. Vol. 7 [SW 7] Der betende Christ: Geistliche Schriften und Studien zur Praxis des Glaubens [The Praying Christian: Spiritual Writings and Studies on the Praxis of Faith]. Edited by Andreas R. Batlogg. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2013. ———. Vol. 8 [SW 8] Der Mensch in der Schöpfung [Man in Creation]. Edited by Karl Heinz Neufeld. Freiburg: Herder, 1998. ———. Vol. 10 [SW 10] Kirche in den Herausforderungen der Zeit: Studien zur Ekklesiologie und zur kirchlichen Existenz [The Church and the Challenges of the Age: Studies on Ecclesiology and Ecclesial Existence]. Edited by Josef Heislbetz and Albert Raffelt. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2003. ———. Vol. 11 [SW 11] Mensch und Sünde: Schriften zur Geschichte und Theologie der Buße [Man and Sin: Writings on the History and Theology of Penance]. Edited by Dorothea Sattler. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2005. ———. Vol. 13 [SW 13] Ignatianischer Geist: Schriften zu den Exerzitien und zur Spiritualität der Ordensgründers [Ignatian Spirit: Writings on the Exercises and the Spirituality of the Society’s Founder]. Edited by Andreas R. Batlogg, Johannes Herzgsell, and Stefan Kiechle. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2006. ———. Vol. 18 [SW 18] Leiblichkeit der Gnade: Schriften zur Sakramentenlehre [The Corporeality of Grace: Writings on Sacramental Doctrine]. Edited by Wendelin Knoch and Tobias Trappe. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2003. ———. Vol. 25 [SW 25] Erneuerung des Ordenslebens: Zeugnis für Kirche und Welt [Renewing the Society’s Life: Witness for the Church and the World]. Edited by Andreas R. Batlogg. Freiburg: Herder, 2008.

Books in English Translation Allow Yourself to Be Forgiven: Penance Today. Translated by Salvator Attanasio. Denville, N.J.: Dimension, 1975. The Eternal Year. Translated by John Shea, SS. Baltimore: Helicon, 1964. Foundations of Christian Faith. Translated by William V. Dych. New York: Crossroad, 1978. Grace in Freedom. Translated by Hilda Graef. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969. Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion. Translated by Joseph Donceel. Edited by Andrew Tallon. New York: Continuum, 1994.

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Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965–1982. Edited by Hubert Biallowons and Paul Imhof. New York: Crossroad, 1986. Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings. Edited by Philip Endean. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2004. Meditations on the Sacraments. Translated by Salvator Attanasio, James M. Quigley, SJ, and Dorothy White. New York: Seabury, 1977. The Need and the Blessing of Prayer: A New Translation of Father Rahner’s Book on Prayer. Translated by Bruce W. Gillette, introduction Harvey D. Egan, SJ. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1997. Prayers for a Lifetime. Edited by Albert Raffelt, with an introduction by Karl Lehmann. New York: Crossroad, 1995. The Priesthood. Translated by Edward Quinn. New York: Seabury, 1973. Spirit in the World. Translated by William Dych, SJ. Foreword by Johannes B. Metz. Introduction by Francis Fiorenza. New York: Continuum, 1994. Spiritual Exercises. Translated by Kenneth Baker, SJ. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965. Theological Investigations. Vol. 1 [TI 1]. God, Christ, Mary, and Grace. Translated by Cornelius Ernst, OP. Baltimore: Helicon, 1961. ———. Vol. 2 [TI 2]. Man in the Church. Translated by Karl H. Kruger. Baltimore: Helicon, 1963. ———. Vol. 3 [TI 3]. The Theology of the Spiritual Life. Translated by Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger. New York: Crossroad, 1982. ———. Vol. 4 [TI 4]. More Recent Writings. Translated by Kevin Smyth. Baltimore: Helicon, 1966. ———. Vol. 5 [TI 5]. Later Writings. Translated by Karl H. Kruger. Baltimore: Helicon, 1966. ———. Vol. 6 [TI 6]. Concerning Vatican II. Translated by Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger. Baltimore: Helicon, 1969. ———. Vol. 7 [TI 7]. Further Theology of the Spiritual Life. Part 1. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury Press, 1971. ———. Vol. 8 [TI 8]. Further Theology of the Spiritual Life. Part 2. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1971. ———. Vol. 9 [TI 9]. Writings of 1965–67. Part 1. Translated by Graham Harrison. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. ———. Vol. 10 [TI 10]. Writings of 1965–1967. Part 2. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1973.

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———. Vol. 11 [TI 11]. Confrontations. Part 1. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1974. ———. Vol. 12 [TI 12]. Confrontations. Part 2. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1974. ———. Vol. 14 [TI 14]. Questions in the Church: The Church in the World. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1976. ———. Vol. 15 [TI 15]. Penance in the Early Church. Translated by David Bourke. New York: Seabury, 1982. ———. Vol. 16 [TI 16]. Experience of the Spirit: Source of Theology. Translated by David Morland. New York: Seabury, 1979. ———. Vol. 17 [TI 17]. Jesus, Man, and the Church. Translated by Margaret Kohl. New York: Crossroad, 1981. ———. Vol. 19 [TI 19]. Faith and Ministry. Translated by Edward Quinn. Edited by Paul Imhof, SJ. New York: Crossroad, 1983. ———. Vol. 20 [TI 20]. Concern for the Church. Translated by Edward Quinn. Edited by Paul Imhof, SJ. New York: Crossroad, 1981. ———. Vol. 21 [TI 21]. Science and Christian Faith. Translated by Hugh M. Riley. Edited by Paul Imhof, SJ. New York: Crossroad, 1988. ———. Vol. 22 [TI 22]. Humane Society and the Church of Tomorrow. Translated by Joseph Donceel. New York: Crossroad, 1991. ———. Vol. 23 [TI 23]. Final Writings. Translated by Joseph Donceel. Edited by Paul Imhof. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Rahner, Karl, with Meinold Krauss. I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinold Krauss. Translated by Harvey Egan, SJ. New York: Crossroad, 1985.

Articles and Essays “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety.” In TI 23:162–68. “A Basic Theological and Anthropological Understanding of Old Age.” In TI 23:50–60. “ ‘Behold This Heart!’: Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart.” In TI 3:321–30. “Being Open to God as Ever Greater: On the Significance of the Aphorism ‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.’ ” In TI 7:26–46. “Brief Theological Observations on the ‘State of Fallen Nature.’ ” In TI 19:39–53. “Christmas in the Light of the Ignatian Exercises.” In TI 17:1–7.

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“Christology in the Setting of Modern Man’s Understanding of Himself and His World.” In TI 11:215–29. “Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World.” In TI 5:157–92. “The Church of Sinners.” In TI 6:253–69. “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology.” In TI 4:36–73. “Concerning Our Assent to the Church as She Exists in the Concrete.” In TI 12:142–60. “Considerations on the Active Role of the Person in the Sacramental Event.” In TI 14:161–84. “Courage for an Ecclesial Christianity.” In TI 20:3–12. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart Today.” In TI 23:117–28. “The Dignity and Freedom of Man.” In TI 2:235–63. “The Divided and Enigmatic Nature of Humanity.” In The Content of Faith: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Theological Writings, edited by Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt, translation edited by Harvey D. Egan, SJ, 118–20. New York: Crossroad, 1992. “Do Not Stifle the Spirit!” In TI 7:72–87. “Eternity from Time: Skepticism in Regard to Eternal Life.” In TI 19:169–77. “Experiencing the Spirit.” In The Spirit in the Church. Translated by John Griffiths, 3–31. New York: Crossroad, 1979. “Forgotten Dogmatic Initiatives of the Second Vatican Council.” In TI 22: 97–105. “Forgotten Truths about the Sacrament of Penance.” In TI 2:135–74. “Freedom in the Church.” In TI 2:89–107. “The Function of the Church as a Critic of Society.” In TI 12:229–49. “Guilt and Its Remission: The Borderland between Theology and Psychotherapy.” In TI 2:265–81. “Guilt—Responsibility—Punishment within the View of Catholic Theology.” In TI 6:197–217. “The History of Penance.” In TI 15:3–22. “ ‘I Believe in the Church.’ ” In TI 7:100–118. “The Ignatian Mysticism of Joy in the World.” In TI 3:277–93. “Ignatianische Frömmigkeit und Herz-Jesu-Verehrung.” In SW 13:451–66; ET: “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Heart of Jesus.” In Christian in the Market Place, translated by Cecily Hastings, 119–46. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966.

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“Introduction.” In James J. Bacik, Apologetics and the Eclipse of Mystery: Mystagogy According to Karl Rahner, ix–x. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. “Introductory Observations on Thomas Aquinas’ Theology of the Sacraments in General.” In TI 14:149–60. “Kirche und Sakramente: Zur theologischen Grundlegung einer Kirchen- und Sakramentenfrömmigkeit” [Church and Sacrament: On Laying the Theological Foundations for Ecclesial and Sacramental Piety]. Geist und Leben 28, no. 6 (1955): 434–53. “The Liberty of the Sick, Theologically Considered.” In TI 17:100–113. “Die Logik der existentiellen Erkenntnis bei Ignatius von Loyola” [The Logic of Existentiell Recognition in Ignatius Loyola]. In SW 10:368–420; ET: “The Logic of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola.” In The Dynamic Element in the Church, Quaestiones Disputatae 12, translated by W. J. O’Hara, 84–170. New York: Herder and Herder, 1964. “Modern Piety and the Experience of Retreats.” In TI 16:135–55. “Natural Science and Reasonable Faith.” In TI 21:16–55. “The New Image of the Church.” In TI 10:3–29. “Opposition within the Church: The Possibilities and the Limits.” In TI 17:127–38. “An Ordinary Song.” In Everyday Faith, translated by W. J. O’Hara, 196–204. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968. “Penance as an Additional Act of Reconciliation with the Church.” In TI 10:125–49. “The Penitential Teaching of Cyprian of Carthage.” In TI 15:152–222. “The Penitential Teaching of Origen.” In TI 15:246–328. “Poetry and the Christian.” In TI 4:357–67. “Priest and Poet.” In TI 3:294–317. “Reflections on a New Task for Fundamental Theology.” In TI 16:156–66. “The Secret of Life.” In TI 6:141–52. 1969. “Seeing and Hearing.” In Everyday Faith, translated by W. J. O’Hara, 196–204. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968. “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature.” In TI 15:23–53. “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II.” In TI 6:270–93. “The Spirituality of the Church of the Future.” In TI: 20:143–53. “The Status of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.” In TI 23:205–18.

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“Of the Structure of the People of the Church Today.” In TI 12:218–28. “Zum theologischen Begriff der Konkupiszenz.” In SW 8:3–32; ET: “The Theological Concept of Concupiscentia.” In TI 1:347–82. “The Theology of Freedom.” In TI 6:178–96. “The Theology of the Religious Meaning of Images.” In TI 23:149–61. “Zur Theologie des Symbols.” In SW 18:423–57. Freiburg: Herder, 2003; ET: “The Theology of the Symbol.” In TI 4:221–52. “Thoughts on the Possibility of Belief Today.” In TI 5:3–22. “Unity—Love—Mystery.” In TI 8:229–47. “The Unity of Spirit and Matter in the Christian Understanding of Faith.” In TI 6:153–77. “Ursprünge der Freiheit: Vom christlichen Freiheitsverständnis” [Origins of Freedom: On the Christian Understanding of Freedom]. In Über die Freiheit: Eine Vorlesungsreihe des 12. Deutschen Evangelischen Kirchentages, Köln 1965 [On Freedom: A Lecture Series from the Twelfth German Evangelical (Lutheran) Church Day, Cologne, 1965], edited by Max Horkheimer, Karl Rahner, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, 27–49. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1965. ———. “The Vatican Council’s Challenge to Theology.” In TI 9:3–27. “You Are Dust!” In The Content of Faith: The Best of Karl Rahner’s Theological Writings, edited by Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt, translation edited by Harvey D. Egan, SJ, 92–96. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Rahner, Karl, and Hugo Rahner. “Über die Gnade des Gebetes in der Gesellschaft Jesu, nach P. Hieronymus Nadal S.J” [On the Grace of Prayer in the Society of Jesus, by Fr. Jerónimo Nadal, S.J.] In SW 1:174–86.

Other Pr i m a ry So urces Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. Latin text and English translation, various translators. Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1964ff. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, 16–49. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. ———. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.

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Pope Francis. Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation on the Proclamation of the Gospel in Today’s World. November 24, 2013. ———. The Church of Mercy: A Vision for the Church. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2014. ———. Misericordiae Vultus: Bull of Indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee Year of Mercy. April 11, 2015. ———. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Encyclical Letter. May 24, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated and edited by James Strachey, introduction by Gregory Zilboorg, with a biographical introduction by Peter Gay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. Guardini, Romano. The End of the Modern World. Introduction by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen. Foreword by Richard John Neuhaus. Translated by Joseph Theman, et al. Wilmington, Del.: ISI, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), Gesamtausgabe II, Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919–1944. Vol. 42. Edited by I. Schüßler. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988; ET: Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985. ———. Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. Edited by George E. Ganss, SJ, Parmananda R. Divarkar, SJ, Edward Malatesta, SJ, and Martin E. Palmer, SJ, with a preface by John W. Padberg, SJ. New York: Paulist Press, 1991. Jones, Serene. Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Metz, Johann Baptist. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Crossroad, 2007. Poschmann, Bernhard. Paenitentia secunda: Die kirchliche Buße im ältesten Christentum bis Cyprian und Origenes [Paenitentia secunda (Second Penance): Ecclesial Penance in the Oldest Christianity up to Cyprian and Origen]. Bonn: Hanstein Verlag, 1940. Przywara, Erich. Analogia Entis: Metaphysics, Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2014.

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Rahner, Hugo. Maria und die Kirche: Zehn Kapitel über das geistliche Leben [Mary and the Church: Ten Chapters on the Spiritual Life]. Innsbruck: Marianischer Verlag, 1951. ———. Saint Ignatius Loyola: Letters to Women. Translated by Kathleen Pond and S. A. H. Weetman. New York: Herder and Herder, 1960. Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010. Schelling, F. W. J. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in Sämmtliche Werke, edited by K. F. A. Schelling, 7:336–416. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856– 61; ET: Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2006. Semmelroth, Otto, SJ. Die Kirche als Ursakrament [The Church as Primal Sacrament]. Frankfurt am Main: Knecht Verlag, 1953. Vatican Council II. Lumen gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. November 11, 1964. ———. Presbyterorum Ordinis: Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests. December 7, 1965. Viller, Marcel, SJ. La Spiritualité des premiers siècles chrétiens [Spirituality of the First Christian Centuries]. Paris: Bloud and Gay, 1930. Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 1996.

Sec onda ry So urces Abraham, Susan. Identity, Ethics, and Nonviolence in Postcolonial Theory: A Rahnerian Theological Assessment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Ashley, J. Matthew. Interruptions: Mysticism, Politics, and Theology in the Work of Johann Baptist Metz. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. Babka, Susie Paulik. Through the Dark Field: The Incarnation through an Aesthetics of Vulnerability. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2017. Bacik, James. Apologetics and the Eclipse of Mystery: Mystagogy According to Karl Rahner. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. ———. Humble Confidence: Spiritual and Pastoral Guidance from Rahner. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2014.

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Index

I n de x

Abraham, Susan, 3n5, 23–24, 180n3, 203n72 Adorno, Theodor, 142n43 aesthetic(s), 1, 4, 6, 10, 11–20, 21, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 34, 35, 53–63, 65, 70–76, 79, 83, 89, 91, 100, 117, 121, 125, 127, 129, 130, 146, 148, 150–55, 165–66, 170–79, 182–84, 187, 193–96, 198, 199, 203, 211, 213, 215, 225, 227, 228, 232–35, 237–47 affect(ive), 126, 176, 183, 225–29, 246 aggorionamento, 80, 81, 187 Albertina Museum (Vienna), 2, 245–46 analogy, 18, 20, 45–46, 48, 224 angels, 52, 149, 182 anonymous (Christian), 19, 27, 28, 83, 138, 185, 199–200, 202 appearance, 13, 35, 42, 46, 53, 55–59, 61–62, 74, 75, 93, 139, 225 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Aristotle, 36, 48–51, 58 art, 2, 11–13, 16–20, 74, 183, 245–47 “Art against the Horizon of Theology and Piety” (Rahner), 17–20 Ashley, J. Matthew, 129n4, 203n72, 213 assent, 155, 159–62, 242 Augustine, 72, 81, 95, 168 Babka, Susie Paulik, 17n42 Bacik, James, 24, 180n1 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 11, 15, 16, 27–29, 32, 54, 56, 80, 133, 139, 224, 229

baptism, 86, 87, 89, 90, 96, 99, 118, 122, 197, 217, 219 Barnabus, Letter of, 86 Barth, Karl, 90 Batlogg, Andreas, 129, 133 Baumgarten, Alexander, 13 beauty, 1, 2, 11–15, 20, 214, 237, 238 Beauvoir, Simone de, 186n20 Benjamin, Walter, 142n43 Beste, Jennifer Erin, 3n5, 9, 10, 22, 180–83, 185, 188n26, 191n39, 198, 203n72, 207–10, 222, 234, 242 Betrachten zum ignatianischen Exerzitienbuch (Rahner), 144, 154n92, 158, 168–71, 173, 231–33 Bhabha, Homi, 23 body/corporeality/embodiment, 12, 15, 30, 34, 51, 54, 57, 59–62, 69, 124, 126, 127, 162, 183, 192, 196, 198–99, 201, 211–12, 237, 238, 240, 243 Boehme, Jacob, 41 Böll, Heinrich, 215 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 133 Borgia, Francis, 132 Bradley, Dennis M., 32n10 Brett, Gregory, 70–71, 207 Brown, Robert F., 41n63 Brown, Wendy, 25n60 Bruckner, Anton, 18 Buckley, James J., 60n149 Butler, Judith, 181n6 267

call/vocation, 5, 15, 75, 133, 141, 143, 147, 150, 151, 163, 165, 169, 177, 226–28, 234, 241 Carolingian reforms, 96 Caruth, Cathy, 203–5 choice, 3, 4, 6–8, 25, 30, 99, 127, 157 Christology, 10, 33n14, 41, 55, 59, 130, 138, 139, 143, 145, 155, 166, 178, 186, 233, 241 church/ecclesia(l)/ecclesiology, 6, 16, 17, 21, 25, 31, 61, 79, 80–82, 84, 87, 90, 91–127, 130, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 145, 154–66, 168, 169, 175, 197, 217–19, 221–23, 225–27, 234, 237, 240–42, 244 Clement, Letters of, 86 Clement of Alexandria, 81, 135 collection/collected person, 71–72, 76, 175 Columban, 95–96 concupiscence, 2, 5, 20, 22, 29, 30, 63–76, 83, 101, 167, 184, 196–99, 202–11, 214, 216, 218, 225, 231, 234, 237, 238, 242–45 Congar, Yves, 110 conversion/metanoia, 76, 80, 83, 85, 95, 99, 101, 110, 115, 116, 127, 168, 172–73, 175, 178, 219, 237, 240, 244 Corduan, Winfried, 32n10 Craigo-Snell, Shannon, 3n5, 181n4, 199n63 creation/creatures, 1, 2, 16, 20, 21, 30, 38, 39n56, 48–50, 56, 57n136, 61, 62, 68, 69, 72, 73, 79, 89, 90, 98, 116, 125, 127, 130, 146, 156, 168, 172, 206, 213, 232, 236, 237, 238, 247 cross. See Jesus Christ Crowley, Paul, 23 Cyprian of Carthage, 87, 90, 94, 105n117 death, 67, 85, 134, 144, 145, 204, 209, 213–15, 221, 224 death drive, 204–11 decision, 1, 4, 6–10, 15, 16, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 39, 42, 50–52, 56, 59, 62, 63, 66–71, 73– 76, 79, 89, 98–100, 117, 125, 127–30, 132, 140–54, 156–58, 165–68, 172–73, 176–79, 182, 191, 194, 199, 205–6, 208–11, 225, 228, 233, 234, 237, 238, 240, 244, 245 268   I n d e x

De Lubac, Henri, 80, 110 De Paenitentia (Rahner), 21, 90–104, 117, 218, 240 Descartes, René, 37 desire, 65–66, 170–78, 206, 209 Didache, The, 86 Didascalia Apostolorum, 87 dignity (human), 9, 190–91, 220, 223n158 Drey, Johann Sebastian, 33 Dulles, Avery, 128–29 Dürer, Albrecht, 2, 4, 19, 245–47 Dutari, Julio Terán, 46n86 Dych, William, 43n73 ecclesiology. See church ecological crisis, 115–16 Egan, Harvey, 135, 233 Einübung priesterlicher Existenz (Rahner), 168–71, 173, 174n165 Ellacuría, Ignacio, 166–67 embodiment. See body Endean, Philip, 129, 133, 136, 166n139, 167n141, 168, 172, 229, 232 epistemology, 9, 130, 150–52 eternity/eternal, 1–5, 8, 9, 30, 42, 56, 73, 74, 76, 127, 130, 143, 150, 159, 182, 187, 199, 212, 225, 236–37, 239, 244, 247 ethos, 2, 16, 25, 26, 61–62, 88, 97, 102, 104, 114, 115, 150, 163, 164, 175, 183, 226, 244 Eucharist, 1, 92, 197, 219 everyday(ness), 1, 4, 7, 8, 19, 132, 135, 145, 185, 215, 237, 238, 245 evil, 36–40, 50, 51, 65–70, 113, 158, 166–67, 169, 170, 172, 189, 205–6, 209 existence/existential, 5, 10n23, 21, 23, 27, 38, 40, 48, 49, 53, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68, 73, 82, 98, 102, 127, 130, 132, 135, 136, 138–41, 143, 146–54, 157, 160–61, 163, 168, 172–74, 176, 182–83, 206–7, 212, 216, 225, 232–34, 237, 238, 241 existentiell recognition/decision, 130, 164–65, 176, 227–28, 233–34, 241, 244, 245

experience, 18, 19, 34, 141–54, 168, 171–73, 183, 194, 199, 203, 232, 238 exposure, 22, 171, 179, 180–236, 239, 242 expression, 3, 13–19, 25, 28, 30, 34, 51, 55, 56–62, 63, 121, 131, 151, 154, 173, 179, 180, 182, 189, 196, 222, 225, 228, 240, 244, 246–47 Fagerberg, David, 105n117 faith, 1, 9, 15, 28, 41, 55, 62, 80n11, 89, 92, 103, 112, 125, 153, 158, 161, 213, 238 Falque, Emmanuel, 237 Farrugia, Mario, 68 fathers of the church/patristics, 20, 79, 81–97, 103, 108, 122, 124, 131, 135, 156, 167, 217–22, 240 feeling, 21, 36, 151, 155, 159, 215, 242 Fessard, Gaston, 133 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 27, 32 Fields, Stephen, 33–35 finitude, 15, 16, 39, 45–48, 57, 58, 64, 69–71, 75, 131, 138, 170–71, 174, 196, 206, 210, 218, 236, 238, 239, 243, 244 Fiorenza, Francis, 32n9 Fischer, Klaus, 128–29 forgiveness, 6, 78, 80, 81, 92, 96, 111, 112, 116, 119, 121–23, 161, 197, 217, 219, 223 Foucault, Michel, 113–14 Foundations of Christian Faith (Rahner), 33, 189, 193–95, 242 Francis, Pope, 105, 114–16, 220–21 Fransen, Piet, 8n13 Freud, Sigmund, 203–11 Friedman, Milton and Rose, 25n59 Fritz, Peter Joseph, 3n5, 12n26, 29n4, 31n8, 52n118, 58n142, 83, 113n152, 134, 164, 171n159, 183, 189, 198 fundamental option, 5–10, 15, 20–22, 28, 63, 64, 69, 73, 79, 80, 88–90, 127, 128, 130, 153, 166–79, 181–83, 185, 194, 218, 222–23, 225, 233–35, 238–42, 244, 246

Gabriel, Markus, 34–35, 42 Geist in Welt (Rahner), 12–14, 27, 29n3, 32, 43–44, 53, 58, 65, 66, 77, 80, 145, 152, 177–78, 182, 189–90, 193, 244, 246 German idealism, 27–29, 32–53, 54, 70, 73, 137, 167n141, 214, 238, 239 glory, 11, 12, 14, 15, 126 Gnosticism, 41n63, 86 God. See infinitude; mystery; Trinity Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 33, 74 grace, 11n25, 59, 65, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83–90, 100, 101, 106, 107, 111, 112, 115, 119–24, 126, 127, 133, 153, 156, 160, 169, 185, 217–23, 240 ground, 5, 15, 18, 20, 21, 31, 34, 38, 40, 42, 46, 48–51, 53, 56–58, 63, 68, 69, 74, 82, 98, 103, 137, 151, 152, 154, 164, 167, 172–75, 182–83, 187–88, 196, 199, 206–7, 210, 225, 237, 244, 247 Guardini, Romano, 79, 191 guilt, 64, 71, 99, 112, 119, 120, 123, 126, 175, 184, 194–96, 208, 212, 214, 216–17, 219–22, 225 Hearer of the Word (Rahner). See Hörer des Wortes heart, 6, 72, 75, 76, 150, 155, 158, 168, 169, 171, 173–75, 177, 196, 210, 226, 235 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 32–36, 38n43, 44, 46–51, 53, 54, 68, 71, 136–37, 172, 239 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 20, 29, 30, 31, 35–42, 47, 50, 68, 189, 214, 238, 239, 244 Henry, Michel, 32n11 Highfield, Ron, 90 history/historicity, 51–53, 63, 78, 112, 123, 143, 152, 158, 159, 162, 169, 179, 180, 184, 199–201, 203, 211, 216, 234, 239, 242 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 74, 189 holiness, 2, 19, 88, 89, 93, 100, 108, 111–13, 118, 124–27, 132, 135, 156, 197, 221, 238 Holocaust/Auschwitz, 24, 180, 203n72 Holzer, Vincent, 32 home, 16, 92, 145, 244

I n d e x   269

hope, 1, 79, 103, 112, 153, 160, 185, 188, 213, 226, 232, 234 Hörer des Wortes (Rahner), 20, 30, 41, 43– 53, 54, 56, 62, 65, 73, 78, 145, 195, 239–40 Horkheimer, Max, 192n41 Ho-Tsui, Emmie Y. M., 3n6, 78 Husserl, Edmund, 214, 238 idealism. See German idealism; transcendental idealism Ignatian spirituality, 5, 21–22, 31, 128–79, 184, 186, 189, 195, 198, 224–36, 241, 242 “Ignatian Spirituality and Devotion to the Heart of Jesus” (Rahner), 130, 136–47, 155–58, 165, 189n27, 227n170, 228n178, 241 Ignatius Loyola, 10, 22, 128–79, 226, 233, 234, 238, 241 Ignatius of Antioch, 81, 86 image, 2, 17n41, 25, 57n135, 141, 146, 244–45 imagination, 6, 13–15, 18, 19, 22, 152, 169–70, 172, 176, 177, 182, 183, 196, 226, 239 Imhof, Paul, 131 incomprehensibility. See mystery indifference, 21, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 143–46, 154, 157, 163, 165, 229–33, 234, 241 individual(ity), 21, 38–39, 40, 50–51, 91, 93, 94, 103, 122, 125, 127, 130, 132, 138, 140–54, 157–60, 162–66, 168, 219, 225–29, 237, 241, 244 infinity/infinitude, 13–14, 19, 45, 47, 69–70, 145, 152, 171, 174, 236, 239, 244 intellection/reason/noesis, 9, 13, 26, 37, 49–51, 67, 151–53, 172, 177, 181, 182, 184, 189, 228, 242, 244 Isaiah, 1, 237 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jesus Christ (Word/Son of God), 1, 6, 10, 22, 55, 59, 72, 73, 82n18, 85, 93, 96, 102, 106–9, 111, 112, 121–22, 124, 125, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 141, 143, 144, 146, 150, 154, 155, 159, 166, 167–79, 189, 198, 212, 270   I n d e x

218, 220, 224–35, 237, 240, 242–43, 245; cross/paschal mystery, 9, 87, 99n91, 100, 101, 107, 135, 143–44, 146, 147, 156, 158, 171, 175, 224, 226, 229–35, 237, 243; Sacred Heart of, 21, 22, 26n61, 56, 59, 73, 74, 130, 136–40, 145, 151–58, 168, 172–76, 178–79, 184, 198, 224–35, 241, 243 John Chrysostom, 81 John of the Cross, 216 Jones, Serene, 224, 234 Jowers, Dennis W., 3n5, 63, 64, 67, 68, 75 judgment, 13, 14, 75 Justin Martyr, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 12–17, 27, 32–37, 39, 71, 183, 238 Kenny, J. P., 65 Kilby, Karen, 32n12 Kolk, Bessel van der, 198–99 Kopfensteiner, Thomas, 8n13 Kosch, Michelle, 30n5 Lawrence, Joseph, 48–51 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 69, 192 Lennan, Richard, 124–25 Leo XIII, Pope, 109 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 41 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 142 liberation, 4, 113, 166, 216 life, 3, 7, 10n23, 20, 49, 50, 71, 88, 89, 92, 96–97, 101–3, 107, 126, 135, 141, 144–54, 159, 161–63, 166, 168, 178, 185, 187, 196, 200, 205, 208, 211, 212, 216–18, 222, 224, 225, 227–228, 232, 236, 238, 240, 244 Little, Brent, 17n42 liturgy, 124–27, 222–23, 241 “Logic of Existentiell Recognition in Ignatius Loyola” (Rahner), 148–53, 227, 241–42 Loose, Helmuth, 131 Lotz, Johannes, 27n1, 29n3 love, 26, 28, 51, 72, 74, 76, 103, 112, 136–38, 141–43, 145–147, 150 ,152, 154–59, 161–62,

174–75, 177–79, 183, 207, 210, 214–16, 219, 223, 226, 232, 234, 239, 242 Love, Jeff, 41n63 Lucifer/devil/Satan, 10, 22, 66, 85, 130, 167–79, 196, 225, 234, 242 Magisterium, 88, 97 Malcolm, Lois, 229–33, 243 manifestation, 2, 4, 5, 12, 15, 20–22, 30, 35, 42, 46, 48, 52, 53, 56–59, 62, 73, 75, 79, 83, 89, 91, 93, 100, 112, 116, 121, 124–27, 130, 131, 133, 139, 143, 145, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 165, 170–71, 177, 178, 182–84, 188, 189, 194, 196, 206, 211, 219–21, 223, 228, 235, 239–42, 247 Maréchal, Joseph, 27 Marmion, Declan, 80, 172–73, 181n4 Marshall, Bruce, 136, 138, 139 Mary, 10, 17, 19, 107, 158–59 matter/materiality, 20, 21, 29, 52, 53, 60, 62–76, 79, 88, 99, 101, 103, 109, 117–28, 149, 151, 177, 197, 220–23, 238, 239, 241 Mayer, Paola, 41n63 mercy, 2, 5, 16, 76, 79, 80, 83, 87–89, 99, 105, 109, 110, 113–16, 124, 155, 158, 174–75, 197, 211, 213, 217–23, 227, 241 metanoia. See conversion metaphysics, 24, 36, 39, 43, 44, 47, 48, 51–54, 56–59, 75, 170–71, 178, 189 Metz, Johann Baptist, 22, 28, 141, 142n43, 180, 183, 184, 199–203, 208, 211–16, 220, 223, 234, 242 militarism: of United States, 3, 166 mission, 16, 105, 108, 116, 141, 146, 147, 156–57, 161, 221, 241 Möhler, Johann Adam, 33–35 Monet, Claude, 19 monasticism, 95 Montanism, 87 Mügge, Marlies, 82n18 mystery, 1, 9, 18, 43, 49–51, 74, 87, 98, 99, 107, 123, 124, 145, 152–53, 159, 183, 185, 188n26, 193–95, 212–14, 216, 236, 239, 245

mysticism, 22, 24, 71–72, 80, 96, 134, 213–16, 242 Nadal, Jerónimo, 132–35 Nandy, Ashis, 23 nature, 37, 38, 40, 50, 65, 67–69, 72, 75, 210 necessity, 8, 36, 39, 48 neoliberalism/market ethos, 8, 25, 30, 158 neo-Scholastic(ism), 54, 65, 77, 80, 85, 89, 97, 107, 109, 110 Neufeld, Karl, 82–84, 90, 128 Neuhaus, Gerd, 141–42 obedience, 159–60 O’Meara, Thomas, 29n3, 32–33 O’Regan, Cyril, 41n63 Origen, 82n18, 87, 90, 94, 105n117 panentheism, 45 pantheism, 37, 45 Pater, Giles Henry, 81 Paul, St., 61, 85, 126, 143, 156 Pearl, Thomas, 32n10 penance/penitential theology and practice, 5, 20–21, 31, 75–127, 154, 156, 163, 168, 175, 184, 195, 197, 210–12, 217–23, 236, 240, 242. See also priestly absolution person, 67–69, 75, 209, 210, 214 Peter Lombard, 102 Peterson, Brandon, 81, 145n55 Petrusek, Matthew, 181n4 pilgrim(age), 2, 20, 126, 127, 155–58, 161, 162, 166, 220–23, 225, 237, 241–42, 244, 247 Plato, 36 poetry, 11, 17, 73–74, 76n195 “Poetry and the Christian” (Rahner), 73–75 Polycarp, 81, 86 Poschmann, Bernhard, 105 priestly absolution, 92, 94, 96, 99, 111, 115, 118–23, 197, 223 Przywara, Erich, 46 Purcell, Michael, 142

I n d e x   271

Raffelt, Albert, 14 Rahner, Hugo, 106, 130–33, 135, 238 Rahner, Karl. See individual works by title Rambo, Shelly, 224, 234 Ratzinger, Joseph, 80, 110, 139 reason. See intellection reconciliation, 21, 79, 81, 94–96, 100, 103–13, 114, 127, 154, 162, 177, 197, 219, 222, 225, 240–241 Reformation, 41 Regan, Ethna, 3n5, 27–29, 32, 181n4, 203n72, 217 Reklis, Kathryn, 3n5, 185–86 remainder (indivisible/concupiscent/ traumatic), 67–70, 72–75, 184, 203–11, 224, 225, 233, 234, 240, 242 Rembrandt, 18 Reno, R. R., 3, 23 repentance, 75, 96–98, 108, 121, 124, 225, 237, 241 ressourcement, 80–90, 240 revelation. See self-communication Rilke, Rainer Maria, 74 Romanticism, 11, 15, 33, 41n63 Rulands, Paul, 82n18 sacrament(s)/sacramentality, 16, 20, 28, 34, 55, 77–127, 130, 161, 197, 216, 219, 220, 223 Sacred Heart. See Jesus Christ Salaverri, Joaquín, 176 salvation, 2, 5, 15, 30, 56, 73, 79, 85, 89, 97, 100–102, 106, 124, 126, 127, 130, 132, 145, 150, 154, 156, 158, 161, 164, 166, 170, 183, 191, 211, 212, 226, 237, 238 Sattler, Dorothea, 77, 84n21, 91n47, 97n81, 113–14 Scheeben, Matthias, 11–12, 15 Schelling, Friedrich, 20, 22, 28–53, 57, 62, 63, 67–71, 73, 82, 103, 107, 131, 137, 172, 184, 203–11, 225, 239–40 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 110 Schmidt, Johannes, 41n63 Schmidt, Josef, 32n10 272   I n d e x

Schneider, Burkhart, 131 Schröder, Klaus Albrecht, 245–46 Scotus, John Duns, 121, 123 self-communication/self-revelation, 1, 6, 13, 15–18, 31, 38–40, 42, 46, 47, 53, 56, 61, 62, 68, 76, 79, 89, 90, 130, 145, 150, 156, 179, 226, 237, 238, 240, 243–45 Semmelroth, Otto, 16, 106 sensibility/sense, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 22, 65–67, 75, 170–71, 176, 177–78, 182, 189, 196, 199, 232, 240, 244, 246–47 service, 138, 158, 177, 209 Sheehan, Thomas, 29n3 Shepherd of Hermas, 81, 217–18 sick(ness), 128 “Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature” (Rahner), 84–90, 217, 240 sin(ner), 6, 21, 40, 71, 77, 79–81, 83–90, 92–96, 99–101, 103, 104, 108–14, 116, 118–27, 143, 155, 156, 161, 162, 167–69, 175, 184, 185, 194, 195, 197, 203n72, 209, 212, 214, 217–23, 225, 237, 240–42, 245 Sobrino, Jon, 166–67, 203n72, 221 Society of Jesus, 129, 132–35, 137, 154–55, 159, 176 Soelle, Dorothee, 22, 184, 212, 215–216, 230, 232 Speyr, Adrienne von, 224 Spinoza, Baruch, 37 spirit, 2, 19, 37, 40, 44, 46, 47, 52, 53, 65, 66, 69, 86, 93, 111, 126, 132, 144–45, 147, 154, 160, 177–78, 190, 196, 206, 209, 211–12, 214, 217–19, 229, 241, 244 Spirit in the World (Rahner). See Geist in Welt Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 23 Staudenmaier, Franz Anton, 33 St. Peter’s Basilica, 14 subject(ivity), 7, 13, 15, 17, 18, 21, 25, 38, 49, 51, 52, 67, 70–71, 83, 103, 122, 127, 130, 140, 152, 154, 155, 158, 163–66, 181–83, 188, 189, 192–94, 200, 202, 214, 221, 225–29, 233, 235, 238, 239, 241, 244

sublime/sublimity, 11, 14–16, 19, 26, 75, 131, 150, 152, 183, 238, 243–45 suffering, 22, 179, 184, 188–89, 195, 212–17, 220, 222–23, 230–35, 242 supernatural existential, 82n18 symbol, 6, 18, 20, 21, 28, 31, 33–35, 53–62, 63, 73, 74, 91, 99, 100, 102, 107, 119, 123, 124, 126–27, 130, 139, 151, 153, 154, 158, 166, 173, 179, 184, 211, 219, 240, 241, 244 Tallon, Andrew, 43 Tanner, Kathryn, 8n16 Tauler, Johannes, 71–72 Tertullian, 81, 87, 90, 217 theodicy, 167n141, 172 Theodore of Canterbury, 95 “Theological Concept of Concupiscentia” (Rahner), 64–67, 69–71, 75, 209–10, 240 “Theology of Freedom” (Rahner), 7–9, 167n141, 174–75, 208 “Theology of the Symbol” (Rahner), 20, 30, 41, 53–62, 63, 239–40 Thiessen, Gesa Elsbeth, 17n42 Thomas Aquinas, 36, 45–46, 58, 68n172, 79, 99, 100–101, 103, 117–24, 127, 196, 221–23 Tilliette, Xavier, 33n14 time, 3, 8, 9, 18, 30, 42, 64, 127, 143, 182, 188, 199, 206, 225 transcendental(ity), 18, 20, 23, 26–76, 136– 39, 141–54, 168, 171, 180, 184, 196, 198–211, 236, 240, 242 transcendental idealism, 5, 28, 32–53, 66, 73, 80, 88, 184, 195, 199–200, 235 trauma, 6, 22, 179, 180, 181, 183, 188n26, 190, 198–99, 203–11, 224, 233, 234, 237, 242, 243

Trent, Council of, 93, 111, 112 Trinity, 55, 57, 146–47, 224, 244 truth, 40, 41, 44, 117, 121–27, 162, 188, 189n27, 236, 238, 244 Vass, George, 81 Vatican I Council, 44 Vatican II Council, 21, 24, 79, 105, 109–12, 125–27, 176, 218–19, 221, 241 Viller, Marcel, 80 violence, 2, 24, 113, 181, 190–92, 212, 245 vocation. See call Voiss, James, 17n42, 54–55 Vorgriff, 14, 152–53, 170–71, 189, 196, 233, 245 Vorgrimler, Herbert, 77, 142n43 vulnerability, 22, 53, 70, 181, 182, 189, 198, 207–8, 213, 221, 225, 229–30, 238, 242, 244 Weigel, George, 3, 23 Weil, Simone, 1 will, 48, 50, 120, 198, 206 world, 14, 15, 18, 22, 31, 34, 52, 58, 59, 68, 71, 74, 109, 116, 134–35, 143–47, 161, 169–71, 173, 175, 178, 184, 189–90, 193, 220, 224, 225, 237–38, 242–46 World War II, 78, 90, 180 Xavier, Francis, 132 Xiberta, Bartholomew, 105, 110 Zahlauer, Arno, 129, 135, 138 Žižek, Slavoj, 205–11

I n d e x   273

Freedom Made Manifest: Rahner’s Fundamental Option and Theological Aesthetics was designed in Arno with Hypatia Sans display type, and composed by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 60-pound Maple Eggshell Cream and bound by Maple Press of York, Pennsylvania.