Hans Urs von Balthasar and the dramatic structure of truth: a philosophical investigation 9780823223213, 9780823223220

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Abbreviations (page ix)
Notes on Translations (page xi)
Acknowledgments (page xiii)
Introduction (page 1)
1 The Gift of Being Given (page 28)
2 The Birth of Consciousness (page 96)
3 Truth as Gestalt (page 163)
4 Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth (page 255)
5 The Transcendentals (page 350)
Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth (page 422)
Bibliography (page 429)
Index (page 447)

Citation preview

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan David Tracy Hent de Vries

Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, vertes editor

=| PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL

PHILOSOPHY

D.C. SCHINDLER

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth A Philosophical Investigation

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York aw 2004

Copyright © 2004 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other —except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series, No. 34 ISSN 1089-3938 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schindler, D. C. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the dramatic structure of truth : a philosophical investigation / by D.C. Schindler. — Ist ed. p. cm. — (Perspectives in continental philosophy, ISSN 1089-3938 ; no. 34) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2321-3 (hardcover) —ISBN 0-8232-2322-1 (pbk.) 1. Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 1905- 2. Truth. I. Title. II. Series. BX4705.B163S34 2004 121.'092 —dc22

2003024302

Printed in the United States of America

08 07 06 05 04 54321 First edition

Contents

Abbreviations ix Note on Translations XL Acknowledgments XL

Introduction I The Plan of the Present Work Drama and Gestalt in Balthasar

1 The Gift of Being Given 28 The Fourfold Difference Polarity: The Moving Image Being in Action: The Moving Idea Conclusion: The Originality of Being

2 The Birth of Consciousness 96 The Transcendental Unity of Apperception and the Problem of Self-Consciousness Consciousness as Birth: Donum Dont Attunement to Being The Unity of Consciousness Apriority: A Presuppositionless Philosophy?

3 Truth as Gestalt 163 Gestalt and Motion Characteristics of the Gestalt

Gestalt as Epiphany and Conversio Gestalt as Unifying Knowledge Truth as Fruitfulness

4 Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth 255 Meta-Anthropology as Dramatic Role Body and Soul in Human Being and Knowing Death, Martyrdom, and Drama: The Foundation of Truth Status Vitae as Paradigm of Dramatic Gestalt Conclusion: Marriage and the Task of Meta-anthropology

5 The Transcendentals 550 The Transcendental Paradox The Transcendentals in Balthasar Truth and Goodness in Beauty The Transcendentals and the Meaning of Being

Index 447 Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth 422

Bibliography 429

vut m Contents

Abbreviations

Below is a list of abbreviations used in this work. Books or essays listed without the author’s name are by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Full titles and information are provided in the bibliography.

ADS Apokalypse der deutschen Seele

CA Der Christ und dte Angst CathPhil “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time”

CJ Kant’s Critique of Judgment CPR Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason CSL The Christian State of Lafe De pot. Aquinas's Quaevstiones dtsputatae, De potentia det De ver. Aquinas's Quaevstiones dtsputatae, De verttate

DK Diels and Kranz’s Fragmente der Vorsokratiker

E Epilog EuP Evangelium und Philosophie GL 1-7 The Glory of the Lord, vols. 1-7

GW The Gratin of Wheat HA Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus KL Kosmtsche Liturgte

LA Love Alone

Meta. Aristotle's Hetaphystcs MetaPrz “Die Metaphysik Erich Przywaras’”

MTG “Movement toward God”

Lx

MW My Work PCM “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism”

PF “Persénlichkeit und Form” PT Presence and Thought Rep. Plato's Republic

RT “A Résumé of My Thought” SCG Aquinas's Swmma Contra Gentiles

ST Aquinas's Summa Theologica TD 1-5 Theo-Drama, vols. 1—5

TE Test Everything

TL 1-3 Theologic, vol. 1 (English translation) and Theologtk, vols. 2 and 3

UBC Unless You Become Like This Child

x m Abbreviations

Note on Translations

Whenever possible, I have referred to published English translations of texts from Hans Urs von Balthasar. Otherwise, I have provided the original German in a footnote, and given an English translation in the body of the book. I would like to thank Adrian Walker for allowing me to use his manuscript translations of Theologtk volume 2, which will eventually be the published versions of that work. For other authors, I have either referred to extant translations or translated the texts myself. In this latter case, the original language has been provided in the footnote. Foreign-language texts quoted in the footnotes have been left untranslated.

XL

Acknowledgments

There is no solitary fruitfulness, in intellectual work as much as in any other. A number of people have helped, directly or indirectly, to bring this book into being, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. First, there are my professors at The Catholic University of America who offered many suggestions for this work in its dissertation stage: Richard Velkley, Eric Perl, Peter Casarella, and Robert Sokolowski. I am especially grateful to my director, Riccardo Pozzo, who also encouraged me to work the dissertation into a book. I would moreover like to thank the people who made the time of research and writing in Freiburg and Basel so rewarding: Anton Schmid, for his noble patience and generosity with his vast knowledge of the German language and culture; the members of the Littenweiler Lesekreis for stimulating conversation and good food; and Cor-

nelia Capol, and the others at the Balthasar Archiv, for their kindness and constant readiness to help. Conversations with many people provided the impetus and the direction for the reflection in this book. Among those whose insights have most directly contributed to it, I would like to mention my father, who has been my first and most important teacher; Adrian Walker, who read through drafts and always had significant and helpful comments; Juan Sara, who shared his profound knowledge of Balthasar and Balthasar’s own teachers and companions; and most recently, Michael Hanby, who has been a model for me of the integration of faithful commitment and bold speculation. In a special way, I owe my thanks to Nicholas Healy, for years of friendship and intense XU

discussion, in particular while this work was being written. The best parts of this book spring directly from conversations with him. I would also like to express my gratitude to Andrew Matt for his care-

ful proofreading of this book at an early stage, to Sonya Manes for her excellent final copyediting, and to Michael Metcalfe for his help in prepar-

ing the index. My thanks are due, moreover, to the editor of this series, John D. Caputo, for his encouragement and help in bringing this book to the light of day. Finally, I wish to thank the Johannes Verein, of Trier, Germany, and Communv: International Catholic Review, whose financial support enabled its publication. This book is dedicated to three Stellas: my sister, my mother, and my grandmother.

Christmas, 2003

xiv m Acknowledgments

Introduction

This book aims to develop a dramatic concept of truth using the resources of the thought of the Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-88), in dialogue with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Continental philosophy. The concern that forms the background of my study is the one that has occupied much of contemporary Continental thought, namely, the desire to overcome what is often called today a “metaphysics of presence,” that is, a reduction of the object of knowledge to its immediacy to the knower,! or, in other contexts, “identitarianism, ” that is, the privileging of identity over difference in relation. This desire is connected — particularly in response to Edmund Husserl—with an attack

on efforts to provide an absolute foundation for knowledge, under the assumption that because knowledge is essentially “egocentric,” such a foundation entails a kind of tyranny of human subjectivity, the mastery of the human subject over the world.

Driving this concern is the need to safeguard a genuine and abiding difference in the truth relation. And yet, in addressing this concern, many philosophies of the past two centuries have taken for granted, to varying degrees of explicitness and often unwittingly, the “identitarian” model of truth that lies at the heart of the problem. Rather than develop a more

1. In other words, its unmediated identity with the knower, an identity exclusive of any mediation.

I

adequate concept of truth, they have often opted to overturn the privileging of the epistemic relation to the world in favor of that of feeling (Roman-

ticism) or some form of will (Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Seren Kierkegaard, later existentialism), or to displace the subject by some

“non-egological” structure, such as tradition (Hans-Georg Gadamer and hermeneutics), the unconscious (psychoanalysis and semiotics), lan-

guage (structuralism, deconstruction, and Ludwig Wittgenstein), or cultural systems (critical theory). To the extent that these philosophies fail to address the question of difference within the structure of truth, how-

ever, they leave the core of the problem untouched. They are forced to make any genuine encounter with an other vrrational precisely because they have restricted truth to the object’s immediacy to —its unmediated identity with —the knower. Indeed, the irrationality of otherness tends more often than not to collapse into another version of immediate identity (an identity of feeling, experience, an undifferentiated mystical night, and the like). I hope to show, in this book, that the resources provided by Balthasar open up another possibility, one that takes full account of difference as a matter of truth and reason itself. To affirm the ultimate irreducibil-

ity of difference, it is not necessary to abandon truth. One of the hallmarks of Balthasar’s philosophy is his constant insistence on myJfery as intrinsic to truth av truth, and vice versa. If mystery is characterized by abiding difference (or, as some would have it, absence as opposed to simple presence), then Balthasar’s intrinsic linking of truth and mystery indicates a refusal to identify truth with difference-excluding identity and mystery with identity-excluding difference. Rather, the mutual implication of truth and mystery reveals a mutual implication of

unity and difference in knowledge. The disclosure implied in truth is never one that brings the object wholly and helplessly under the control of the subject. Balthasar’s assessment of the great figures of the history of Western thought is guided, among other things, by the concern for an abiding otherness in the truth relation. For Balthasar, the birth of self-conscious philosophy in the mythic world of ancient Greece represented a moment of “crisis, or a time for judgment (Arinein). It confronted human self-understanding for the first time with the question that has remained the central one for philosophy, namely, whether philosophy allows a properly “dialogical” sense of reason. As he puts it: “The one, unique, fundamental question of all philosophy remains this: Has the act of transcendence already found the transcendental object? Is it, as act, therefore one with its object or not? Is the light in which we accomplish the act of transcendence identical with the illumination (Lin-Leuchten) of transcendence? Or, to put the

2 a Introduction

question another way: Can the light of reason bring the radiance and the glory of myth within its purview?”” In other words, if we interpret the light and illumination Balthasar speaks of here as the grounding a priori aspect of knowledge, the question is whether this light “breaks in” in any

sense from outside the subject (as an “Ein-Leuchten”) or whether it is wholly projected by the knowing subject, something that is already a func-

tion of the subject himself. In this latter case, Balthasar goes on to say, reason is essentially “monological,” and it is exclusive of relation to an other as a matter of its structure. If we consider premodern philosophies generally from the perspective of this “one, unique, fundamental question of all philosophy,” we find a persistent ambiguity, which Balthasar himself repeatedly identifies in his treatment. The mythic or religious context in which these philosophies for the most part emerged tended to emphasize an “open-ended” sense of reason. Only God or the gods are wise; the philosopher himself is always “on the way to truth, and therefore possesses an openness to the transcendent other as part of his nature. It is significant that many more recent attempts to show how ancient philosophy —and Plato most typically — avoided what Balthasar calls a “monological” sense of reason, have retrieved

this religious context.° But retrieving the religious context does not yet clarify the ambiguity: To what extent is the open-endedness part of the structure of reason av vuch, and to what extent is it merely a result of its context? Prior to Balthasar, a number of early twentieth-century French Catholic philosophers (Maurice Blondel, Pierre Rousselot, and Joseph Maréchal) sought to make the i” via sense of reason philosophically thematic.‘ In reaction to the increasingly closed structures of modern essentialism, these thinkers articulated various forms of what might be called 2. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antigutty [=

GL 4], trans. Brian McNeil et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 155-56. 3. Catherine Pickstock, for example, has argued that Plato resists a “metaphysics of presence” by virtue of his sense of the essentially “doxological” nature of language: After Writing: On the Itturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). For a sense of the philosopher as always in via, see Eric Voegelin’s interpretation of Plato: Order and Huwstory, vol. 3: Plato ano Artstotle, 2nd ed. (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1985; originally published 1957). Compare, likewise, William Desmond, Being and the Between (Ithaca, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995). 4. See Maurice Blondel, “Illusion idéaliste,” Revue de Métaphystque et de Morale (November 1898): 726-45; Pierre Rousselot, “Amour spirituel et synthése aperceptive,” Revue de Philosophie (March 1910): 225-40, and its sequel, “L’Etre et l’esprit,” Revue de Philosophie (June 1910): 561-74; and Joseph Maréchal, Le point de 0épart de la métaphystque, vol. 5: Le thomisme devant la philosophte critique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1949).

Introduction m= 3

an “intellectual dynamism.” According to this intellectual dynamism approach, taken generally, reason is of its essence open to the otherness of objects because, in its finitude, it is open to the infinitely transcendent Other. The objectivity of objects, or their abiding d¢fference within knowledge, is grounded ultimately in the vériving that constitutes the nature of finite human reason. My claim with respect to these various attempts at articulating difference into the structure of reason is that they leave the profound ambiguity intact. To affirm that reason in via is open to the other as other prompts

the question of the nature of reason in fine. What, in other words, is the structure of reason in its most complete and ideal form? The fundamental question Balthasar puts to philosophy, we recall, is whether the transcendence of the act of knowing is accounted for wholly by the subject,

or whether it is something the object coenables. This question brings to light a fundamental inadequacy in the intellectual dynamism approach and, indeed, in any approach that attempts to open reason up only by emphasizing its incomplete character: if the ground of the object’s objectivity is nothing other than the “transcendental” striving of the subject, then the subject's openness ends where the object begins; the object's otherness is lost precisely to the extent that the subject's union with it is con-

summated. Merely emphasizing the finitude and hence openness of reason in via does not yet address the problem of an u/tiumate reciprocity of union and difference in knowing, but only postpones it. To get to the heart of the matter, then, we must raise the question, not in the first instance about the structure of reavon, but about reason in its ultimate teleological fulfillment; in other words, we must address the question of the vtructure of truth.

The most significant recent thinker to raise the question of the struc-

ture or nature of truth is Martin Heidegger, and so it may be worthwhile at the outset to say a word about how Balthasar’s understanding of truth differs from his. (Heidegger will repeatedly provide a point of comparison and contrast with Balthasar over the course of this study.)° Like Balthasar, one of Heidegger's fundamental concerns in reflecting on the essence of truth is to avoid a reduction of truth to human subjectivity. The heart of the Kefre (turn) in Heidegger, in fact, is the dramatic reversal of no longer viewing being in function of the “ego cogito” of metaphysics or the “rational animal” of humanism, but rather of

5. This book will engage primarily with the later Heidegger’s notion of truth, although some key concepts from Being and Time will also be discussed.

4 «wu Introduction

understanding the human essence itself on the basis of being.® This reversal is accomplished, in part, by a criticism of the traditional identification of truth with the concordance of mind and reality, and the related association of being in its essence with /dea (as that which is open to the human gaze), to the extent that these conspire to yoke being to (a superficial conception of) the mind.’ In contrast to these traditions, Heidegger claims to recover the pre-Platonic notion of truth, “a’-&theta, which shelters being from human consciousness as much as it opens it: the alpha-privative refers to the darkness out of which that which becomes visible emerges. Such a model makes hiddenness equiprimordial with

revealedness in the essence of truth.® It is this coessentiality of concealment, tor Heidegger, that persistently wrests being from human control (what Heidegger calls Machenschaft).? The question of the reciprocity of union and difference in truth, however, is not eliminated even in Heidegger; it is merely transposed to a deeper level. What Heidegger calls the “subject-object-relation” of meta-

physics is in turn founded on the ultimate reciprocal relation of being and the human essence (dav Sein und das Menschenwesen).'" It is on this point —the precise nature of the relationship between man and being —

that the difference between Heidegger and the approach articulated in this book emerges most sharply. Heidegger affirms the radical finitude of both being and man, identifying being with nothing and defining the human essence as “the placeholder of the nothing.”!! The essential relation that each has to the nothing is what links being and man to each other. In other words, being and man belong essentially together because there is precisely nothing, so to speak, to keep them apart. But, in this case, the question arises about whether Heidegger merely exchanges a negative identity in darkness for the identity in light he was trying to overcome, and therefore, whether he, at the most profound level, does not leave in place the impossible alternatives of an identity-excluding 6. See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 2014. 7. Heidegger attributes the origin of this traditional understanding to Plato: Platons Lehre von der Wahrbert, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997). 8. See Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 114; and “On the Essence of Truth,” in Baste Writings, 132. 9. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), 47-49. 10. Heidegger, Zur Setnsfrage (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956), 28. 11. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” in Bavic Writings, 110; and Zur Seinsfrage, 38.

Introduction m= 5

difference and difference-excluding identity.!” Without a pouitive and abiding otherness at the heart of this “belongingness,” I suggest, there is nothing to prevent the mystery of being from losing its “strangeness” and degenerating into merely the final horizon of human consciousness. The basic thesis of this book is that the reciprocal relation that consti-

tutes the heart of truth will avoid some version of a reduction to immediacy only ¢f tt ts understood dramatically. An essentially dramatic relation is an unreleased tension, an inward relation of terms that resist one another, and a union that frees into ongoing difference. A dramatic conception of truth is the opposite of a monological one: it is encounter. In Balthasar’s philosophy, drama occurs in the interaction of (positive) centers of freedom. Thus, in contrast to the intellectual dynamism approach, which views

reason's “other” as, so to speak, the inert object of its striving, a dramatic approach understands truth in a more comprehensive sense as the whole that emerges in the encounter of mutual dynamwms. Furthermore, in contrast to Heidegger, who connects truth to the mystery of being as something lying in darkness Jeyond particular beings, Balthasar shows that the mystery of being is revealed, that is, made unmedtately apparent, in and through the mediation of the encounter of particular beings in their simultaneous unity and difference. The mystery of being is, for Balthasar, not the murky night of ambiguity in which being and man dissolve into one another, but it is instead the translucent joy of genuine mutuality.

The Plan of the Present Work I do not intend to present an introductory overview of Balthasar’s philosophy, in its development, sources, and its influence, or a detailed exposition of his philosophical works. Such an overview and exposition have already been admirably achieved in a number of published dissertations covering the major themes in Balthasar’s philosophical thought. First, the most profound is no doubt Juan Sara’s Forma y amor: Un estudto metaftstco sobre la trilogta de Hans Urs von Balthasar.'° This work is a careful study of the relationship between form (Gevfa/t) and love in Balthasar's main work,

12. For example, Heidegger objects to the proposition that being and man “are the same” not because of the undifferentiated identity it implies, but because it still permits the slightest difference: “In Wahrheit kénnen wir dann nicht einmal mehr sagen, ‘das Sein’ und ‘der Mensch’ ‘seien’ das Selbe in dem Sinne, dafs we zusammengehéren; denn vo sagend, lassen wir noch beide fiir sich sein.” Zur Seinsfrage, 28. 13. Juan Sara, Forma y amor: Un estudto metafisico sobre la trilogia de Hans Urs von Balthasar (Késel, Germany: Private Printing, 2000).

6 «= Introduction

his fifteen-volume trilogy, on the basis of the trilogy'’s concluding epilogue. Second, Eliecer Pérez Haro, in his El misterto del ser: Una medtactén entre

filosofia y teologia en Hans Urs von Balthasar,“ provides an outstanding illumination of Balthasar’s philosophical thought in relation to the fundamental theme of being’s role as “mediator” between God and the world. Both of these works offer, in addition, excellent overviews of the most significant philosophical influences on Balthasar’s thought (Erich Przywara, Gustav Siewerth, and Ferdinand Ulrich) —although one may wish to claim that Pérez Haro goes a little too far in his distinction between the early, more “Przywarian” Balthasar I, and the later, more Siewerthian-Ulrichian Balthasar II. A third book, Georges de Schrijver’s Le merveilleux accord de Ubomme et de Dieu: Etude de Vanalogie de Vétre chez Hans Urs von Balthasar,

gives a thorough account of what may be the most central dimension of Balthasar’s philosophy, the theme of the analogia entis (analogy of being).

Finally, there has appeared a study of the development of Balthasar’s understanding of the transcendentals by Mario Saint-Pierre, entitled Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar.'®

Besides these foundational works, there is a book by Pascal Ide, called Etre et mystére: La philosophie 0e Hans Urs von Balthasar, which offers a more

general exposition of Balthasar’s philosophy in relation to traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic thought. !” And finally, there are several shorter studies of Balthasar’s most systematic philosophical work, The Truth of the World,

one of the best of which is perhaps Jérg Splett’s dense but penetrating essay “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit: Auf Balthasar héren.”!8 Further works on Balthasar’s philosophy are listed in the bibliography. The number of significant possibilities opened up by these studies is a testament to the fruitfulness of Balthasar’s philosophical insights. His dramatic theory, in particular, promises enormous fruitfulness. Until now, however, it has only been studied within the framework within which Balthasar developed it, namely, as a means of understanding the relationship between

14. Eliecer Pérez Haro, El musterto del ver: Una medtact6n entre filosofia y teologta en

Hans Urs von Balthasar (Barcelona: Santandreu Editor, 1994). ; 15. Georges de Schrijver, Le mervetlleux accord de Uhomme et de Dieu: Etude de Uanalo-

gle de létre chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Louvain, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1983). re Mario Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar (Quebec:

Laval University Press, 1998). 17. Pascal Ide, Etre et mystére: La philosophie de Hans Urs von Balthasar (Brussels: Cul-

ture et Vérité, 1995). 18. Jorg Splett, “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit: Auf Balthasar héren,” Theologte und Philosophie 69 (1994): 411-21. Other articles on this book are listed in the bibliography.

Introduction a 7

God and man as it plays itself out historically, and as a key to interpreting action in light of the transcendental property of goodness.!? But the notion has a usefulness beyond situations that are “dramatic” in an obvious sense. Indeed, I hope to show that the notion of drama presents a pow-

erful way to deal with problems in the philosophy of knowledge. More than just providing a key to anthropology, it provides one to metaphysics. Insofar as this notion implies a way of integrating unity and difference that is neither monological nor dualistic, I want to claim that a dramatic approach to truth enables a new response to a series of persistent problems in Continental philosophy. The novelty of this approach is confirmed by the fact that while the Hustortches Worterbuch der Philosophie mentions

“drama” as a possible subject of philosophical reflection, it provides no listing whatsoever for the “dramatic” as a philosophical category —dramatic, here, meaning more than merely a theme, but, like dialectic, a distinctive mode of philosophy.”° Moreover, if indeed an understanding of the

dramatic is indispensable for preserving the genuine myvfery of being, which is a central topic in all of the studies mentioned above, then a profound reception of Balthasar’s thought requires working out the implications of his thought toward a dramatic philosophy. My method will be more constructive and systematic than historical. The engagement with Balthasar will be guided by the demands of the theme itself more than by the order of Balthasar’s texts. Characteristically, Balthasar elaborated his own ideas through engagement with other thinkers in the tradition. In this spirit, I aim to set key philosophical implications

of his thought into relief, not primarily through textual analysis, but by engaging that thought with the specifically philosophical questions raised by other thinkers according to the various aspects of the problem of truth. 19. The first, as far as I know, to envision a philosophical dramatics, drawing inspiration from Balthasar’s “theodramatics,” is Balthasar’s cousin, Peter Henrici, in “La dramatique entre l’esthétique et la logique,” in Pour une philosophie chrétienne: Philosophte et théologte (Namur, Belgium: Culture et Vérité, 1983), though he provides only a sketch

of what it might look like. A couple of studies, which will be discussed in this chapter, engage Balthasar’s dramatics from a theological perspective: Ben Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” in Balthavar at the End of Modernity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 139-71; and David Stuart Yeago, Theology and Drama: A Study tn the Work of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). Stephan

Gratzel explores the philosophical presuppositions at work in Balthasar’s dramatic theology in “Der philosophische Hintergrund von Balthasars Theodramattk,” in TheoOramattk und Theatralitét: Ein Dialog mit dem Theaterverstindnts von Hans Urs von Balthasar,

ed. Volker Kapp, Helmuth Kiesel, and Klaus Lubbers (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2000), 33-42. 20. J. Steiner, “Drama,” in Hwtortsches Worterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, ed. Joachim

Ritter (Basel: Schwabe, 1972), 289-90.

§ m Introduction

More specifically, I try to frame a dramatic concept of truth on the basis of elements of Balthasar’s metaphysics, his theory of consciousness, his theory of judgment and knowledge, his anthropology, and his understanding of the transcendentals. The primary sources used in this book are the philosophical parts of Balthasar’s fifteen-volume trilogy (along with its brief but potent Eprlog), which he composed from 1961 to 1987: Herrlichkett, in seven volumes (translated into English as The Glory of the Lord = GL), Theodramatik in five volumes (7heo-Drama in English = TD), and Theologtk (= TL; the first vol-

ume of which has alone thus far been published in English) in three volumes.”! The titles of the volumes are provided in the bibliography. The trilogy, apart from the first volume of the third part, Theologtk volume 1: Wabhrhett der Welt, represents the mature expression of Balthasar’s thought.

TL 1 is peculiar in this context: Balthasar originally published the book in 1947, intending to follow it up with a second, more theological volume.

Never returning to this original project, he decided to republish it, unchanged, in 1985 as a philosophical prolegomenon to the Theologtk. When a distinction is made, in this book, between Balthasar’s earlier and later thought, TL 1 is understood to belong to the earlier writings, while the rest of the trilogy is grouped with the later. The main philosophical sections of the trilogy, and thus the primary sources for the present book, are the following: The Glory of the Lord, volume 1, called Seeing the Form,

which contains a development of the concept of Gestalt and the foundations of Balthasar’s aesthetic theory; and volumes 4 and 5, called The Realm of Metaphysics tn Antiquity (vol. 4) and The Realm of Metaphysics tn the Mooern Age (vol. 5), which provide an overview of the development of Western thought in relation to the question of “glory” or the analogia entis. The Theo-Drama is primarily theological, though philosophical themes are scat-

tered throughout; most notably, Balthasar outlines the principles of his dramatic theory in the Prolegomena, vol. 1, and he develops the philosophical aspects of an anthropology in vol. 2, Dramatis Personae: Man tn Goo. With regard to the Theologic, as mentioned above, the first volume, Truth of the World, is a phenomenology and metaphysics of truth. Finally, the central, and longest, section of the Epilog is an essay on metaphysics, recapitulating

21. To be precise, the numbering of the volumes in the English translation is different from the original German. The German version has free volumes for Herrlichkett: an introductory volume, a “double volume,” and a “quadruple volume,” which was eventually republished in two separate “double volumes.” The final German version of Theodramattk has four volumes: a prolegomenon, a “double volume,” and two additional volumes. The specific details for these may be found in the bibliography.

Introduction = 9

themes from the trilogy in relation to the question of polarity in created being and the transcendentals. The plan of the book is as follows: chapter 1, “The Gift of Being Given,” expounds the dramatic structure of being itself that provides the ontolog-

ical foundation for a dramatic conception of truth. In relation to Heidegger’s sense of the ontological difference, and the metaphysics of cer-

tain twentieth-century Thomists, this chapter discusses the reciprocal relationship between being and action, which Balthasar claims is the essence of drama. The chapter begins with an analysis of the rich text from

GL 5 on the “Fourfold Difference,” to show the philosophical implications of the finitude of worldly being, namely, the irreducible —and creative — difference in the heart of all being. This difference is worked out in its various polarities as Balthasar sets them forth in his Epilog. Then, the theme of “Trinitarian difference and the ontological difference” from TL 2 is discussed. Finally, these themes are related explicitly to action in the light of the divine ideas (understood as dramatic roles) through an engagement with certain passages from TL 1. Chapter 2, “The Birth of Consciousness”: One of the most provocative problems to arise in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy concerns the nature of the unity of consciousness and its relation to experience. This chapter lays out the aporias that this question raises, and it proposes once again a properly dramatic solution on the basis of Balthasar’s notion of the durth of consciousness. In opposition to a “monological” or, as it is called in this chapter “monophoristic, ~~ understanding of consciousness, Balthasar insists that even in its most transcendent unity, consciousness is essentially dialogical. The event of the unity of consciousness, such as Balthasar describes it, eludes the alternatives that Kant’s philosophy has seemed to set up as mutually exclusive, namely, apriority and aposteriority, and it thus allows us to understand conscious spirit as always already “ontological,” without conflating (idealistically) the spheres of being and knowing. The main source for this chapter is Balthasar's essay “Movement toward God,” a section from GL | that treats the relation between the soul and being, and the discussion of the analogy between being, consciousness, and God in TL 1. Making use of Balthasar’s aesthetic notion of Gestalt, chapter 3, “Truth as Gestalt,” attempts in a systematic fashion to work out a “dramatic” sense of relation at every stage in the act of knowing — that is, a relation that is

22. Monophorism borrowed from Blondel, designates the attempt to understand a phenomenon in terms of only one of its constitutive elements.

10 «a Introduction

simultaneously and asymmetrically unitive and differentiating, one that both surprises and resolves at a single stroke. The basic “levels” of this relationship are appearance/perception; self-gift and (free) judgment; and then union in knowledge. The chapter culminates with one of the most important conclusions of the thesis: a dramatic approach views truth most basically as simultaneous unity and fruitfulness and therefore in every case as both mediated and immediate. In other words, truth is an objective Gestalt that both transcends and includes the subject and object in their dramatic existence. Here, in light of this new sense of truth, aspects of Balthasar’s thought on logic and language are briefly compared to that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Husserl. The primary sources used are GL 1, TL 1, and TL 2. Chapter 4, “Meta-Anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth,” first turns to the implications of this sense of truth for questions of philosophical anthropology in relation to certain contemporary religious thinkers, on the basis of texts from TD 2, GL 1, and TL 2. Second, this chapter addresses the book’s most explicitly dramatic theme in the question of man's role in providing a foundation for truth. Through an interpretation of Heidegger and Plato, I show that the appearance of the transcendent whole that is necessary for truth arrives only through a dramatic act, which

for Heidegger is the facing of death, for Plato is martyrdom, and for Balthasar is the analogy between drama (art) and the total gift of self in the definitive life-decision represented paradigmatically in the professing of vows. Here, the main sources are TD | and TD 4. Chapter 5, “The Transcendentals,” inquires into the ontological dimension of truth in the context of the other transcendentals (goodness, unity, and beauty). I argue that the only way to see truth as ontological is through

the dramatic encounter of particular beings. This encounter is described here as an event of “reciprocal causality,” which proves to be the fundamental logic of the dramatic Gestalt. In this chapter, I give a brief account of the development of the notion of the transcendentals and show Balthasar’s

place within this tradition. Then, I develop a more systematic dialogue between Balthasar and certain figures in twentieth-century Thomism on the question of the relationship between truth and goodness and beauty, using texts from TL | and the Epilog, and from Aquinas's De veritate. It is beauty’s mediating role, I propose, that makes truth (and goodness and unity) dramatic. The dramatic character of the transcendentals reveals, in turn, the dramatic character of being itself. Being, as manifested in the encounter of beings, is always more than itself, and it is so because of the difference that lies originally within it. We thus reach, at the end, the point from which the book began: the fourfold difference of being. Introduction m= J/

Before we start, it may be helpful to provide an introductory sketch of

two of the most pivotal terms in this book and their significance for Balthasar: Gestalt and drama.

Drama and Gestalt in Balthasar The history of new ideas — their provenance, birth, and growth —is always

mysterious. However, even if there can be no question of following the trails of the notions of drama and Gestalt in Balthasar to their absolute

beginning or end, evidence suggests that Balthasar began to see the importance of these two notions at roughly the same time, and that he developed them in tandem. His notion of Gestalt, of course, comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a fact he emphasized every time he gave an account of his thought.*? The significance of drama for Balthasar may be due to his reading of the French poet and playwright Paul Claudel, who hada sharp sense of the dramatic’? — unless, that 1S, Balthasar’s native interest in drama brought him to Claudel. At the end of the thirties, Balthasar dealt with Goethe at length in his Apokalypue der deutschen Seele,”> published an article on Claudel,”° and worked on translations of Claudel’s poems and dramatic masterpiece, The Satin Slipper.*’ These two

thinkers early and often occupied Balthasar’s attention and colored the atmosphere in which he thought. It was apparently only later, however,

that two notions of drama and Gestalt moved explicitly to the center of 23. See, for example, one of the clearest accounts: “Dank des Preistragers an der Verleihung des Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart-Preises am 22. Mai 1987 in Innsbruck,” in Elio Guerriero, Hans Urs von Balthasar: Eine Monographie, trans. Carl Franz

Miiller (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1993), 419-24, esp. 420-21. A good account of the history and meaning of the notion of Gestalt can be found in Michael

Waldstein, “Expression and Form: Principles of a Philosophical Aesthetics According to Hans Urs von Balthasar” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dallas, 1981), 65-84. 24. Claudel presents a brilliant explanation of the significance of the dramatic in a letter to the journal Le Temps, dated June 1914, published in Claudel, Pouctions et propositions (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1928), 237-43. 25. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele [= ADS]: Studten zu etner Lehre von letzten Haltun-

gen. 3 vols. 3rd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998), 1:4—7, 514. 26. Balthasar, “Auch die Siinde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel,” Stimmen der Zett 69 (1939): 222-37. 27. Balthasar’s admiration for Claudel can be seen in the fact that he returned repeatedly (six times) to rework his translation of the Satin Slipper; moreover, when he mentions the few books of his that continued to be a source of joy to him toward the end of his life, he singles out his anthology Origen (Spurtt ano Fire: A Thematic Anthology of Hts

Writings, trans. Robert J. Daley [Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984]) and his many translations of Claudel’s poetry: My Work: In Retrospect [= MW, trans. Kelly Hamilton et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 109.

Z2 a Introduction

Balthasar’s thinking. Peter Henrici cites a personal letter from 1950 in which Balthasar mentions he had been meditating on writing a philosophical “dramatics,” with action and event at the center.7° In 1952,

Balthasar published an article, “Persénlichkeit und Form,” which expounded the importance of Goethe's notion of Gestalt/Form for synthesizing Greek, medieval, and modern forms of thought. The reason for this parallel development is clear. From his first writings, Balthasar had been looking for a way to privilege the “existential” without thereby surrendering (or destroying) conceptual or “essential” forms.*? He sought to engage intellectual problems against a horizon of ultimate meaning and the fate of concrete human beings.*” And, finally, he wanted to discover a sense of the “revelatory” character of being, that is, a mystery dimension that belongs to being étve/f and does not have to become imme-

diately theological.*! He eventually realized these possibilities in the convergent notions of Gestalt and drama. Each, as we shall see, is crucial to the meaning of the other, and we will thus fail to understand both if we neglect either. We can avoid certain common misunderstandings if we approach them together from the outset.°”

28. Peter Henrici, “La structure de la trilogie,” Transversalités: Revue de l'Institut Catholique de Paris 63 (1997): 19. Balthasar confirms this, MW, 29, when he writes (in

1955) that he had been increasingly occupied with, and lecturing on, the significance of the dramatic in all things Catholic. 29. See, for example, his early study on Gregory of Nyssa (Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Religious Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa [= PT], trans. Mark Sebanc [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], esp. the introduction, 15—23), wherein he claims that

the Church Father can be understood only if we approach his thought in an existentialist mode that nevertheless integrates essential thought-forms. 30. See Alois Haas, “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘Apocalypse of the German Soul,’ ” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: Hts Life and Work, ed. David L. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 45-57, esp. 52. 31. This is a general theme in Balthasar’s volumes on the “realm of metaphysics,” GL4 and 5 (The Realm of Metaphysics in the Moodern Age, trans. Oliver Davies et al. [San

Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991]). See, for example, GL 4, 232-41. The role is played primarily by “Myth,” which Balthasar understands essentially as a revelation of Being. The “mystery” character of being itself, then, becomes a crucial mediator between philosophy and theology. See Pérez Haro, El musterto del ver. 32. There is a tendency to view these notions in isolation from each other: for example, in his very helpful book on the basic elements of Balthasar’s philosophy, Pascal Ide nevertheless shows a tendency to think of Gestalt as an essentially static concept that needs to be complemented by other dynamic notions: Htre et mystére, 178. Similarly, and perhaps more gravely, Ben Quash misunderstands Balthasar’s sense of the dramatic by precisely pitting it against any relatively stable or transcendent forms. Because of the importance of this issue, I will discuss Quash’s treatment of drama at greater length later in this chapter.

Introduction ma 13

Gestalt In his 1952 article, Balthasar compares the ancient/medieval notion of form with the modern notion of personality. The ancient/medieval notion of form represents finitude, not in the modern sense of imperfect limitation (for example, the emptiness suggested in the modern use of the term formal), but rather as fullness, perfection, and determination. Balthasar contrasts form with the “un-Greek” notion of person, which represents the infinite indeterminateness of freedom. In spite of their apparent opposition, Balthasar shows how these two senses come together in Goethe.“ The key point of unity between them, according to Balthasar’'s interpretation of Goethe, is Bildung (formation or education). We see this most clearly, for example, in Fawst. Education is the formation, the making determinate, of a personality, and yet it occurs not in static isolation but rather in the tension and danger of engagement in the world and the making of choices. Likewise, movement (the modern sense of striving in the infinite) is genuine movement only in decision, and decision is precisely exclusion, limitation, and determination (the ancient sense of the finite).®” Moreover, the increase of determinateness, and thus the formation of personality, is in turn a deepening of freedom, to the extent that it unifies and opens the otherwise dull and formless chaos of subjectivity. “Form,” Balthasar says here, can never be translated by the (rigid, definitive) Greek term ananké (fate/necessity) but must be seen in its relation to e/pis (hope), which he interprets in this context as a moving openness to the infinite. Thus, the essential Goethean paradox is the simultaneity of “the form that brings to a close and the mysterious, outward-bound hope.”°° The determinateness of form is constituted in the openness to the beyond. By relating it to Bildung, we therefore see that Balthasar from the beginning thinks of Gestalt as dramatic. Only thus conceived does it point the way toward resolving 33. Balthasar, “Persénlichkeit und Form” [= PF], Gloria Det 7 (1952): 1-15, here: 1. Interestingly, in this context Balthasar translates the Platonic Eidos with the German Bild/ldee and the Aristotelian Jforphée with Gestalt. Clearly, he sees Goethe more in

line with the Aristotelian tradition, which thinks of “form” first of all in terms of concrete, natural, living entities. 34. Ibid., 3-5. It may be more accurate to say that Goethe vows a way to bring them together. Balthasar judges, in fact, that a certain unresolved tension remains in

Goethe, and indeed a// of German philosophy, in relation to the question of how ultimately to bring together the infinite and the finite. In the end, Goethe seems more modern than ancient, preferring the constant striving in the infinite to the final perfection of form.

35. Ibid., 5-6. 36. Ibid., 8: “das goethische Paradox von schliefSender Form und geheimnisvoller, schweitender Hoffnung.”

14 «a Introduction

what would otherwise be merely contradictory, namely, the relation between

the infinite and the finite. Balthasar’s later, “aesthetic” use of the term Gevfa/t includes but goes beyond the relationship to personality, since it determines the more general, fundamental phenomenon of the appearing of any being at all. Nevertheless, he retains to the end a dramatic sense of form, even if the term dramatic receives more analogous application. As Balthasar employs the term in the opening volume of his trilogy, first published in 1961, Gestalt designates not an inert thing in relation solely to itself, but essentially a movement that already possesses in itself a tension. Gestalt is the appearing of the depths of a thing’s being and as such has a twofold nature. This polarity, moreover, finds expression in the classical articulation of the beautiful as the inseparable instance of wpectey (or forma) and lumen (or splendor).*’ On the one hand, we have the /idden depths that appear, and on the other, we have the appearance of those depths:

The appearance of the form (Gestalt), as revelation of the depths,

is an indissoluble union of two things. It is the real presence of the depths, of the whole of reality, and it is a real pointing beyond itself to these depths. In different periods of intellectual history, to be sure, one or the other of these aspects may be emphasized: on the one hand, classical perfection (Vollendung: the form which contains the depths), on the other, Romantic boundlessness, infinite (Unendlichkett: the form that transcends itself by pointing beyond to the depths). Be this as it may, however, both aspects are inseparable from one another, and together they constitute the fundamental configuration of Being.*®

What we should notice in this passage is that Gestalt itself is the intersec-

tion of the horizontal and the vertical dimensions, an essential tension between the finite and the infinite. As such, it is not a static entity that may then be set in motion or inserted into a larger movement, but it is rather the “structurality” of event. Balthasar describes Gestalt in terms of tension, and tension by its very nature is concrete: if we remove the “here and now’ character from the Gestalt, it will no longer be a tension, which means it will no longer be the appearing of depths, that is, the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical. Instead, it will be merely an empty form. Henriette Danet and Vincent Holzer are therefore right to see the 37. Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis [= GL 1] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 118. 38. Ibid., 118-19.

Introduction m= /5

concept of Gestalt as seeking to reconcile the “vertical” plane of being with the “horizontal” plane of history.*? The finite-infinite tension, however, is not the only one involved in a Gestalt. As the appearance of depths, it represents a ground or unity that simultaneously transcends its parts, even while being manifest in and thus codetermined in some sense by its parts. Balthasar alludes to this tension in the principles that ground his approach in volume | of Herrlichkett, Seeing the Form (Gestalt): “Our first principle must always be the indissolu-

bility of form, and our second the fact that such form is determined by many antecedent conditions.’“"2 Furthermore, Gestalt similarly features a tension between part and whole, since the whole (unity) is never accessi-

ble except in its “parts,” that is, in its appearing, even while every part always remains less than the whole.*! Finally, the fact that a Gestalt appears means that the phenomenon necessarily includes a subject-object tension, since every appearing implies an appearing-to or -for. We can see that this

aspect also sets in relief the essential “event” character of every Gestalt, insofar as it does not exist except in the encounter between a subject and an object. The “twofold,” or polar, structure of Gestalt (as appearance [1] of depths [2]) is reflected in the twofold structure of the encounter: on the one hand, the object is veen (appearance); on the other, the seer is frany-

ported (toward the depths).47 The movement inherent in the object in its act of expressing its depths is, in other words, met by the movement of the beholding subject, and this interaction of movements gives rise to a situation that is clearly analogous to the encounter of figures in a drama. In his study of Balthasar’s philosophical aesthetics, Michael Waldstein explains that the German term Gevfa/t has a multiplicity of meanings that

cannot be covered by any single term in English. He lists the various 39. The concept of Gestalt “permet de donner une solution a la tension voire a la dichotomie étre-histoire. Lontologie risque toujours de donner une interprétation pointilliste de l’histoire. Balthasar y répond par la théorie de l’intégration. En effet, ’éclat qui enveloppe l’object et le sujet, l’étre et |’étant [tension essence/existence] appartient a une centre intégrateur, une source commune’: Henriette Danet, “Le concept de figure [Gestalt] dans la gloire et la croix de Urs von Balthasar,” photocopy, Institut Catholique de Paris, 1979, 314, cited in Ide, 171; and Vincent Holzer, “La vérité comme figure [Gestalt], histoire comme chair: La contribution du théologien Hans Urs von Balthasar a !’intelligibilité du rapport vérité/histoire,” in Transversalités: Revue de [Institut Catholique de Parts 63 (1997): 53-73.

40. GL 1:26. 41. Some have said that the best definition for Gestalt in Balthasar is the title he chose for his book developing the principles of a theology of history, Das Ganze um Fragment, a title, according to Henrici, that has become proverbial in German: “La structure de la trilogie,” 18. 42. GL 1:120.

16 «w Introduction

meanings of Gestalt as follows: (1) outward shape or outline; (2) intelligible form; (3) life-form, in the sense of an entire being; and finally (4) historical figure.** But it is crucial that we also see these various senses in their fundamental unity: first of all, the concept of Gestalt reveals an analogy between human being and all other nonhuman being, since all being is shown to have inward depth (uniting meanings 3 and 4); and, second, the concept holds together internal, metaphysical principles with external, concrete phenomena (meanings | and 2). I will return to and develop all of these senses, and further aspects not yet mentioned, specifically in relation to the problem of truth (especially in chapter 3). For the moment,

it is important to note that the tension-filled event-like character of the Gestalt —as well as its involvement of a subject-object encounter —show that the notion of Gestalt, intrinsically and from the beginning, is related to the notion of drama. Without drama there can be no Gestalt in Balthasar’s sense. And I will now suggest why the reverse is also true.

Drama The term drama refers, in the literal sense, to the form of art created in Attic Greece, in distinction from the lyric and epic forms of poetry that are also due to the Greeks.44 What makes drama unique in relation to these other forms is, in the first place, that it is essentially dalogical, involving the interaction of relatively autonomous characters.*° Second, drama is not merely recited but performed and, indeed, performed before an audience. These two points come together in the fact that in a good drama, the interaction of “freedoms” is more than just a display of movement, but a revelation: this is why drama has an audience. As Balthasar observes repeat-

edly, drama has been such a force throughout history precisely because of its singular capacity to shed light on existence: To be presented with [a] meaning, to be able, as a spectator, to explore oneself within its context at one remove, is [another] pleasure of the 43. Waldstein, “Expression and Form,” 65-67. 44. From the Greek term meaning “action” or “deed.” 45. See Aristotle, Poetics, 4.1449a15—20. All citations of Aristotle in this book will use the translations provided in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). The earliest tragedies, for example, from Thespis, seem to have had only a single “free” character, who was set off against a basically immovable chorus. When it grew into its “natural form,” as Aristotle puts it, in the three great tragedians, the number of characters gradually increased while the role of the chorus diminished. See H. D. F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Iuterary Study (Garden City,

N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1950), 23-32.

Introduction a /7

theatre: it grants us an insight, however limited, into the world’s embracing horizon of meaning, within which a complex action unfolds,

illuminated and judged by it. And this action is acted by real human beings lending their own reality to realize a fictional role, so that, through them, the embracing revelation of meaning may interject itself into the concrete world that unites both actor and spectator.*° A play is capable of shedding light on existence because it is not a mere “naturalistic” repetition of life, with its confusion and resolved problems,

but a complex event that is given unity by the creative idea of the playwright.47 Moreover, a play is not merely a mechanical transcription of this creative idea. Rather, this idea itself passes through the creative free-

dom of the director; it is further interpreted through the creative talents of the actors; and finally it is conditioned in surprising ways, not only by the atmosphere of the theater itself and the creative contribution of the staging, but also by the subtle yet unmistakable interaction between actors and audience. Reading the text of The Winters Tale, for example, makes an impression that is vastly different from the one received in seeing it performed. The meaning of the play in this case becomes different, as it would if it were played by different actors, under a different director, or even before a different audience. In short, drama presents a complex phenomenon: an overall meaning is given (which does not mean an

obvious or univocal meaning), but it is not “dropped in” simply from above. Rather, this meaning is conditioned in surprising ways by the concrete medium or media that communicate it. At the same time, these media are not scattered and formless; they are gathered into a unity by the very meaning they mediate. In the center of his trilogy, the five volumes of the Theo-Drama, Balthasar makes use of these rich elements in a straightforward manner to construct a whole theology: volume | outlines the principles of the project, namely, the meaning of the theater of the world ultimately as a play within God's (Trinitarian) play; volumes 2 and 3 present the “dramatis personae’; volume 4 concerns the action, and volume 5 displays the “final act” (Das Enoyptel in German, translated as Le Dénouement in French). This theodramatic

46. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1: Prolegomena [= TD 1], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 265. See this whole section, called “Drama and the Illumination of Existence,” 259-68. 47. “For the performed drama should never be merely a poor imitation of life in the concrete with its unsolved problems. Even when showing life ‘as it is,’ the drama must show how it ought to be and why it appears in such a way, or why things are not as they seem.” TD 1:262.

18 a Introduction

approach is endlessly fruitful in bringing new dimensions out of traditional teachings, and it is no doubt a major achievement in the history of theology. But we would miss the full impact of this approach if we saw it only as a helpful metaphor, enabling a new hermeneutics.*® For Balthasar,

the reason for the power of a theodramatic approach, and indeed the reason drama has always been a dear art, is that drama w the expression of the structure of Being. When he articulates the essence of drama “in a nutshell,”

he puts it thus: “Only the action itself will reveal who each individual is; and it will not reveal, through successive unveilings, primarily who the individual always was, but rather who he w fo become through the action, through his encounter with others and through the decisions he makes. There is at least a reciprocal relationship between the ‘was’ and the ‘will be.’ “Agere vequitur esse’ [action follows upon being] also requires ‘ewe sequitur

agere’ [being follows upon action].”4? Drama is the mutual implication of the metaphysical principles agere vequitur esse and esse sequitur agere. In

other words, the meaning of any thing, its being, is revealed only in that being’s activity even while the activity is an interpretation or unfolding (Aus-legung) of the being. It is not the case that the being “essentially” comes first, and then it merely manifests in action what it always/already was in being: for ese sequitur agere. And yet the action does not only give rise to being from nothing, but in fact follows upon being in every moment as its enabling presupposition.°” Being and action follow each other! How are we to understand this mutual implication? Drama is the simultaneity of movement “from above” and “from below,”

or the intersection of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. To be sure, the simultaneity does not mean that the movements or dimensions are symmetrical. Indeed, they are essentially asymmetrical, because the movement from above can comprehend the movement from below in a way that

48. David Yeago tends in this direction in his article “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Paradigm for a Theology of Culture,” Renascence 48, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 95-109. Although it does not go so far as to deny the possibility of a deeper anchoring of the principle of drama, Yeago’s otherwise excel-

lent and insightful essay seems to see this principle primarily as a new “interpretive practice” (106). 49. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2: Dramatis Personae: Man tn God

[= TD 2], trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 11. 50. Jean-Paul Sartre forgets this point, which from the perspective I am developing is what undermines his interpretation of the phrase “existence precedes essence”: see [/Exwistence est un humantsme (Paris: Les Editions Nagel, 1970), 17-27, where Sartre

argues in a unilateral fashion that “l’homme existe d’abord . . . [et] se définit aprés.” On the other hand, philosophies that are founded on an abstract conception of nature as a “pre-given” essence often forget the previous point.

Introduction a 19

the latter cannot comprehend the former. On the other hand, the asymmetry does not mean that the movements are not genuinely reciprocal. Indeed, they are essentially reciprocal, inasmuch as the vertical dimension could not bring a unity to the horizontal dimension unless it included

that dimension and was to that extent “conditioned” by it, even while the horizontal dimension depends on the vertical in order to receive a unity

it could not produce on its own. The fact that drama requires the mutual inclusion of two “opposed” principles means that at no point can we take merely one aspect in itself and then, in a second moment, bring in the other by way of deduction (which would essentially reduce the one to the other),

or by way of mere addition (which would imply that the two principles did not include each other from the beginning). The phenomenon of drama,

as Balthasar understands it, is a complex, organic whole. We will end up viewing drama “undramatically” if we fail to take it as such. Because of its simultaneous unity and complexity, the phenomenon of drama is by its nature a mysterious event. Our discussion of some of its principles is not meant to dispel this aspect of mystery in the least, but merely to draw attention to what constitutes it: drama will in any event always remain a fascinating mystery, even if it is one with which all of us are very familiar. David Yeago identifies the essence of the experience of this mystery as the simultaneity of “surprise” and “fittingness”: “In a well-crafted drama, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, both things are true: the plot is so constructed that it could have no other satisfying conclusion, and at the same time the conclusion is altogether surprising and unforeseen.”°! This observation about our experience of drama equally describes the relation of principles we indicated above. For the conclusion to be genuinely satisfying, Yeago continues, it must in some sense already be contained in or prepared for by the premises of the play. The end is already in the beginning, in a certain sense. However, the conclusion is not deduced from the premises of the action in the manner of a logical syllogism, but rather it emerges from these premises in a way that gives room for freedom and thus surprise. We may elaborate on this point by saying that if the conclusion could be wémply deduced from the premises, then we would not have the complex whole that characterizes drama: the “whole” would in this case be entirely reducible to its parts.°” If we are to have a whole

51. Yeago, “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace,” 99. 52. There is, of course, room to object that syllogistic logic is, itself, not altogether undramatic. The fact that a conclusion does not follow from a single premise alone, but requires the “interaction” or combination of several premises, as well as the fact that the inference itself is a kind of movement, suggests that we might read even logic

20 « Introduction

that is inclusive of its parts, then the unity that makes the whole must emerge

at the end, when everything has “played itself out,” rather than intruding somewhere in the middle, and in this way excluding from relevance everything that comes later. At the same time, the unity cannot emerge only at the end as one of the play's elements; it must come from outside the various elements, and in this sense it can be present already in some sense at

the beginning. In other words, a coherent drama requires an author who is not merely one of the players: “The coherence of a drama is established from the end of the story, not at its beginning, although that end is aimed at by the playwright from the beginning.”°? To sharpen our understanding of what Balthasar means by drama, it may be helpful to consider a counterexample. In his essay “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” Ben Quash presents what he takes to be Balthasar’s understanding of drama as an attempt to overcome the modern, post-Enlightenment, fascination with “ends”:°7 that is, clear and distinct ideas,” “brutely given” truths,°© individualistic subjectivity or solipsism,”” a war against the dispersion of temporality by means of organtzing the flux in terms of fixed patterns: the “spatialization of time,”°® a focus on the consummation of relationships as opposed to an ongoing play,°? a drive toward tidy resolutions, and so forth. Quash explains that Balthasar uses a typology he inherited from Hegel, presenting drama as a middle way that avoids the extremes of epic and lyric. Epic, on the one hand, presumes a timeless perspective, which allows a privileged grasp and mastery of the whole in a detached stance of crude objectivity. Lyric, on the other hand, with its submersion in inner experience, represents a tendency toward “asocial and atemporal sub-

jectivity —the subject's presence to herself in a consciousness around which the world revolves.”© Drama, by contrast, insists on our always being “in the middle,” without allowing us to escape either into a detached

dramatically. A syllogism is a kind of Gestalt, that is, a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and it can come to be in this form (rather than a loose collection of inert propositions) only through the activity of the logician, which is transcendent of the propositions and therefore “free” in relation to them. Nevertheless, even if drama and syllogistic logic are not wholly without analogy, there still remains a great distance between them. 53. Yeago, “Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace,” 99. 54. Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 141. 55. Ibid., 14142, n.7. 56. Ibid., 140. 57. Ibid., 149. 58. Ibid., 148. 59. Ibid., 162. 60. Ibid., 148.

Introduction a 2/

objectivity or a detached subjectivity. It blurs lines and frustrates the establishment of fixed forms, forcing them to become “social,” to undergo constant revision within the interplay of creative persons. A genuine “theo-dramatic” approach, Quash contends, “will restore to theology the forgotten knowledge that we can only think towards the truth ‘from the middle’ of creaturely existence, and that this necessarily involves a continuous activity of imaginatively constructive participation, in which we develop our own interpretive readings of God's ways in the world alongside the readings of other people.”°! Such an approach will require, specifically, a reinterpretation of analogy, which sees the vertical space held open in all God-world analogies reflected in horizontal analogies as the “superabundance of the world’s particulars and their ‘wonderful commerce,’ ” a superabundance

that is not foreclosed by a premature ending or resolution. With such a notion of drama as a criterion, Quash judges that Balthasar is not sufficiently dramatic; he fails in overcoming the modern preoccupation with “ends,” because, under Hegelian influence, he inadvertently slips into modern thought forms: We perceive this debt to Hegelian thinking when Balthasar talks of drama’'s “unificatory endeavor that sheds light on existence,” ... as mirroring “the eternal, divine plan,” .. . or of “the indivisible unity of the play’s ideal content,” or of “the pleasure of being presented with a ‘solution.’” ... He fuels the suspicion that he is often in danger of looking for an innate stability in the constitution of human life and its interactions which it is not theirs to possess. This can only compromise Balthasar’s attempt to restore to life once again a “cor ingutetum” in modernity’s breast.°° To put it most directly, according to Quash, Balthasar is unable to carry

through a “dramatic” approach and in the end falls, like Hegel, back into a narrative, epic mode. Quash’s judgment, however, misses the target in a basic sense: Balthasar’s use of terms suggesting transcendent meanings, ends or solutions, ideal wholes, spatial forms, and so forth, is not “inadvertent” but deliberate, because, for him, such transcendence, far from undermining a dramatic approach, is essential to the possibility of drama.™ 61. Ibid., 154. 62. Ibid., 155. 63. Ibid., 158-59. 64. In this, Balthasar is much closer to the Aristotelian approach to “the narrative arts” proposed by Francis Slade: “On the Ontological Priority of Ends and Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts,” in Beauty, Art, and the Polts, ed. Alice Ramos (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 58-69. Slade shows how

22 a Introduction

Quash presupposes that all ends are essentially opaque and “monistic,” and that they so cannot fail to stop up dramatic movement.® Balthasar, by contrast, rejects such a “modern” interpretation of ends, proposing instead a more organic, paradoxical sense, which is simultaneously determinate and open. Understood dramatically, the stability of form or “ends” does not stop up, but rather it enables genuine movement. Drama, for Balthasar, is a matter of fenvions, not merely disruptions and blurry lines, and tensions arise in the fullest sense when opposed principles are seen to be intrinsic to each other. Horizontal movement is dramatic only in rela-

tion to a vertical end that transcends it.°° Thus, while Quash (and Hegel and Foucault) would want “definitively” to “overcome” epic and lyric modes, Balthasar recognizes them as good, indeed necessary, even if insufficient in isolation. So he seeks instead to integrate, rather than exclude, them.” In short, if Yeago is right in saying that drama represents the simul-

taneity of surprise and resolution, then we could say that what Quash

the priority of end (telos) and its distinction from purpose and consequence are precisely what allow for the possibility of the tension involved in genuine human actuon. Where Balthasar may differ with Slade is on affirming the ontological priority of ends only within the paradoxical reciprocal priority of action we discussed earlier. Quash, for his part, explicitly draws his sense of the meaning of drama not from Balthasar, but in the first place from Michel Foucault: Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 139-41. 65. It is important to see that Quash and Balthasar have very different readings of what we might call the “problem of modernity.” Whereas Quash sees it as consisting essentially in the tendency toward fixed forms, Balthasar sees it as just the opposite: “the tendency today is toward the destruction of form” (GL 4:37). Thus, Balthasar would claim that Quash himself is residually modern precisely because of his desire to overcome stable forms. This is not to say, of course, that Balthasar embraces what Quash is rejecting, namely, a rationalistic sense of form. Rather, Gestalt, for Balthasar, both includes and transcends movement, as we will see in chapters 3 and 4. 66. “The horizontal has genuine tension only within the accompanying vertical tension.” TD 1:352. Thus, we do not preserve dramatic tension by constantly postponing the “ending,” which would imply, conversely, that drama is compromised precisely to the extent that it has any unity at all. Rather, dramatic tension w a tension because it affirms a sort of unity that is profound enough to be conditioned by what it brings together. A good ending, even if it is already known, does not remove the drama from drama: “The thrill of a play, in which the eternal destiny of man is set forth within a finite time-span, is quite different from that of a detective thriller. It is worth reflecting that we can keep returning with renewed excitement to great dramas in spite of the fact that we know the story and its outcome.” Ibid., 349. 67. See TD 2:54—-62. In this passage, Balthasar associates epic with theology (as an objective consideration of “facts”) and lyric with spirituality (specifically the

Ignatian form of imaginative participation im the event, rather than contemplation from outside). Clearly, he is not trying to overcome either of these aspects. Indeed, a complete Christian life must include both elements, which means it must be dramatic.

Introduction m 23

wants in the end is not, in fact, drama in the strict sense. Rather, in his own words, what he is proposing is something much more similar to a “perpetual rehearsal.”°® Nevertheless, Quash’s essay is helpful in allowing a further clarifica-

tion on the relationship between Gestalt and drama. The objections he raises against Balthasar give voice to a more general criticism against modernity: specifically, that one of the deepest problems of modernity has been its tendency towards the “spatialization of time.”°? Quash sees this tendency reflected in Balthasar’s use of Gestalt, which is clearly a “spatial” term, in his interpretation of drama, which is essentially a temporal art.” However, if Balthasar uses the notions of Gestalt and drama to illuminate each other, it is because he does not see time and space as opposing or mutually compromising principles. Drama and Gestalt are not fundamentally inimical expressions of time and space, but are rather both the paradoxical expression of the intersection of both time and space, according to a more temporal order or a more spatial order, respectively.’ ! Indeed,

Balthasar explains that the notion of Gestalt, which is primarily a spatial metaphor, was first suggested to Christian von Ehrenfels by analogy to melodies,” which are temporal forms.’° Similarly, we could interpret the “horizon” that Balthasar insists is crucial to genuine drama as its 68. Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 140. 69. Lucy Gardner and David Moss express the same criticism as one of their basic cases against Balthasar. “Something like Time; Something like the Sexes — An Essay in Reception,” Balthasar at the End of Modernity, 69-137, esp. 100-104. These two authors

and Ben Quash attribute the inspiration for this critique to an essay by Catherine Pickstock, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity,” Modern Theology 12, no. 4 (October 1996): 405-33, sections of which were reprinted in After Writing. 70. On the one hand: “Drama needs time. More than that, it relishes time, instead of trying to mitigate its effects.” Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 165. On the other hand: “Dramatic interchange can succumb to a composite patterning, and because this patterning aspires to the wholeness of Gestalt, it becomes precisely a pseudo-spatialization.” Ibid., 157; cf. 155. 71. Although it lies outside the scope of this book to pursue an engagement between Balthasar and Pickstock on this point, I wish at least to suggest that for Balthasar, the loss of a sense of “time” does not arise because of “spatialization” but is in fact coterminous with the loss of a sense of “space.” 72. Christian Freihen von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) was an Austrian psychologist and philosopher. He studied under Franz Brentano and Alexius Meinong. In addition to introducing the Gestalt principle into psychology, he wrote many studies on ethics and metaphysics (cosmology). 73. GL 4:33. Waldstein presents a brief history of the concept of Gestalt in “Expression and Form,” 73-80. In Epilog [= E] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1987), 47, Balthasar observes: “die Gestalt kann auch zeitlich fliefSender Rhythmus sein oder theatralisch ablaufende Handlung,” thus characterizing the temporal aspect of drama as a kind of Gestalt.

24 « Introduction

“spatial” dimension.“ The decisive difference between Balthasar and these

other approaches is that although he too jealously protects the “event” character of existence, he insists that “the character of event belongs not only

to the art of time but also to the great art of space.””° Drama without Gestalt becomes a one-dimensional, formless, and tasteless mass that lacks real movement, insofar as movement requires the tension of directionality (space). Gestalt without drama becomes the one-dimensional, mechanical imposition of rigid structures that do not open up beyond themselves, insofar as opening requires movement and movement requires time. Only

when we take both together do we have a genuine Gestalt and a genuine drama; only in their mutuality do they reveal the paradox that is essential to each. Gestalt, when understood dramatically, acquires the paradoxical simultaneity of the infinite and finite, which is what makes it the appearance of hidden depths. Drama, when understood as a form, acquires the paradoxical simultaneity of the vertical and horizontal dimensions, which is what makes it the revelation through the interaction of freedoms of a transcendent meaning that both surprises and resolves. The purpose of introducing the fundamental notions of Gestalt and drama in relation to each other is to reject from the outset any inclination to break apart and set in opposition the constitutive elements of the structure this book aims to articulate. Gestalt and drama converge as irreducibly different, and yet mutually necessary, aspects of a single whole. Drama refers

to the moving, event-like character of structure or order, while Gestalt refers to the véructurality or order of event. Taken together, they are part of a transcendent whole that appears only through the mediation of the interaction of irreducibly different elements, even while that whole is, in a reciprocal sense, presupposed by that interaction. It is this paradox — which I merely indicate here, but which will obviously require extensive

74. TD 1:314—23. This interpretation is “negatively” confirmed in the absence of the term 4ortzon (or anything related) in Quash’s treatment, which at the same time urges an overcoming of “spatialization.” 75. GL 4:33. Cf. Balthasar’s criticism of the “actualism” that results from a tendency to affirm the “lightning-like” event character of time at the expense of the spatial, structural dimension of form: GL 1:522—53. According to Balthasar, such actualism inevitably

becomes anticontemplative. It is perhaps this criticism that leads him in Theologue: Theologtcal Logical Theory, vol. 1: Truth of the World [= TL 1], trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 220; and “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time” [= CathPhil], trans. Brian McNeil, C.R.V. Communwo: International Catholte Review 20 (Spring 1993): 184-85, to refuse to wentify being and time, even if he accepts that the mystery of time must be seen to reach into the very heart of being.

Introduction m 25

elaboration —that points the way to dealing with the problems surrounding truth in Continental thought. Anticipating the investigation that follows, I conclude this introduction by mentioning two aspects of the solution. First, truth possesses the formally “egocentric” structure that much of modern philosophy rejects only if the act of knowledge that represents reason’s teleological fulfillment comes to an ultimate rest in the mind of the knower. If this is the sole possible model for truth, a desire to salvage real difference and otherness would require the sacrifice of truth. The affirmation of a dramatic Gestalt as the final locus of truth, by contrast, allows a genuine union of subject and object even while preserving their difference. It does so, I will argue in chapter 3, because it represents a distinct whole that transcends both the subject and the object and is therefore able to include both integrally. For truth to “occur, ” then, the subject cannot merely take the object into the mind, but must come out ecstatically to meet the object within this greater whole: hence, the dramatic structure of consciousness elaborated in chapter 2. Likewise, if truth is to be an encounter with a pouitive other, and not merely the assimilation of a “lifeless” object, being itself must possess its

own inherent mystery and spontaneity: hence, the dramatic structure of being developed in chapter 1. Second, as I have already made clear, an attempt to account for reason's openness to the other simply by stressing its essential incompleteness fails to address the question of whether reason in its complete form still remains open. The sketch of drama in its relation to the notion of Gestalt in Balthasar’s philosophy offers a different possibility. Rather than

identifying transcendent form with mere closure, Balthasar’s dramatic sense of truth reciprocally intertwines the transcendent and the immanent with one another. Thus, on the one hand, it implies a transcendent meaning that is in some respect already present at the beginning, so even in via, reason is not open in a wild and irrational sense but already participates

in the completeness of the end. On the other hand, it does not anticipate, but in fact indispensably requires, the inmanent working out of that meaning, so the end in turn participates in, and includes something of, the openness of the “journeying.” The unfolding of the event of truth therefore both surprises and resolves at once. In sum, if we are to overcome a reductionism built into the very struc-

ture of truth, it can only be by opening that structure as radically as possible to otherness and difference, even while refusing to relinquish gen-

uine presence, the unity of mind and reality, without which truth is no longer truth. A conception of the structure of truth as a dramatic Gestalt promises to avoid reduction by comprehending the elements or principles

26 « Introduction

that appear to be mutually exclusive within a greater, complex whole that

both connects those parts and frees them into difference. If Aristotle is able to describe the dramatic event as a kind of truth, that is, a “change from ignorance to knowledge,” we will see that an adequate concept of truth warrants the definition he gives to drama: it is a reversal (peripeteta) that brings about a revelation (anagnérismos: discovery).’°

76. Aristotle, Poetics, 11.1452a22-31.

Introduction m= 27

The Gift of Being Given [D]Jenn Fruchtbarwerden der Gabe, das allein ist Dankbarkeit fiir die Gabe.!

— Meister Eckhart

The depth dimension of the problem of truth will come into view only if we have first gathered a sense of what the great mystery of being means for Balthasar. As he himself often says, the beginning is decisive; foundations must be laid as deeply and comprehensively as possible, because what is not anticipated in principle in the beginning will not be able to be included later. Thus, he says, even the specific discussions of theology cannot dispense with an engagement of the fundamental question of metaphysics, the question of being as such.” Balthasar’s engagement with the

mystery of being is in dialogue primarily with Hegel, Heidegger, and Aquinas, although directly behind Aquinas stands the mighty figure of Dionysius the Areopagite.° In relation to contemporary thinkers, he

1. Gratitude for the gift is shown only by allowing it to make one fruitful. 2. Balthasar, Theologtk, vol. 2: Wahrheit Gottes [= TL 2] (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1985), 159. 3. Balthasar’s relation to Aquinas, Hegel, Heidegger, and Neoplatonism on the question of being is variously emphasized by different commentators: Henrici emphasizes Hegel (“The Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: Hts Iufe and Work, ed. David L. Schindler [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991], 163).

Emmanuel Tourpe emphasizes Aquinas, though directly in contact with Heidegger and especially Hegel (“La logique de l’amour: A propos de quelques volumes récemment traduits de H. U. von Balthasar,” Revue Théologique de Louvain 29 [1998]: 202, 210-11). Mario Imperatori draws attention to Heidegger’s presence in Balthasar’s thinking: “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Nouvelle Revue Théologtque 122 (2000): 191-210. Emmanuel Bauer emphasizes the Neoplatonic influences: “Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905—1988): Sein philosophisches Werk,” in Christliche Philosophie un katholtschen Denken des 19. Und 20. Jabrhunoerts, vol. 3: Mooderne Strémungen un 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Emerich Coreth, Walter M. Neidl, Georg Pfligers-

dorffer (Graz, Austria: Verlag Styria, 1990), 299-300. All of these emphases must be kept in mind.

28

was strongly influenced early on by Erich Przywara, who himself had a deep knowledge of the major thinkers in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, and who brought them into a unique synthesis primarily under the “primal figure” (Urtyp) of Augustine.4 This influence was succeeded by that of his younger friend Ferdinand Ulrich and by Gustav Siewerth.° The latter was a student of both Husserl’s and Heidegger's in Freiburg, had a profound affinity to Hegel and German Idealism, and brought all of these influences to bear on his unique interpretation of Aquinas. In my treatment of Balthasar’s metaphysics, I will not make explicit the presence of Balthasar’s influences or his relationships with other thinkers

except where it is helpful to clarify a point. Nor will my treatment be in any sense comprehensive. His metaphysics is far richer and more wideranging in its implications than I can suggest. The fruitfulness of his metaphysics is due in part to the fact that Balthasar himself was always more interested in finding the heart of a problem, opening it up, and showing the directions to take in order to remain faithful to the problem, than in giving lengthy systematic treatment aimed at finishing with it: “Problems do not exist in order to be solved; we can never get ‘behind’ Being. We always look with mild contempt on everything we have solved. Problems should always become more luminous in the light of the great mystery in which we live, move, and have our being.”© The primary goal in this

chapter is to sketch the basic ontological structures that will ground Balthasar’s understanding of truth. The chapter title is an attempt to give succinct expression to the multifaceted mystery that Balthasar sees at the heart of reality. “Being given” means simultaneously that being, which is deepest in all things, is not dead matter but a translucid event: it is a gift. And “being” can also be interpreted here progressively: what is given does not come to an end in itself but is (actively) passed on in a concrete, historical manner: it gives itself. Finally, these two aspects, the foundation (fdr-vich) that is given and the centrifugal movement of receptive relation and generosity (fiir-andere), are not two separate things in competition with each other, but are unified in a single gift that comprehends both at once: the gift of being given.

4. See Balthasar’s essay “Die Metaphysik Erich Przywara” [= MetaPrz], Schwecz.

Rundschau 6 (1933): 489-99, here: 491, 493-94, where Balthasar compares Przywara to other recent thinkers in Catholic philosophy, for example, Blondel and Maréchal.

5. For an excellent summary of the thought of Przywara, Siewerth, and Ulrich in relation to Balthasar, see Juan Manuel Sara, Forma y amor, 66-86. 6. Balthasar, The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms [= GW], trans. Erasmo Leiva (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 21.

The Gift of Being Given m 29

One of the most basic implications of this metaphysics is to deepen the sense and the significance of action. Balthasar seeks to show that when a being expresses itself in action (taken in its largest possible sense to include everything from the manifestation of qualities to personal selfexpression), it is a matter not of surfaces (appearance) but of depth (being). The “stuff” of activity is not extrinsic “contact” but real communion, in the sense suggested at the end of one of Balthasar’s aphorisms: “Individuals nourish one another not only by their reciprocal knowing and willing, but also through the unity of their blood or, more deeply, of their being.”” That which entails change —all action, acts, deeds, movement, events, in short, everything designated by the word history —concerns the interaction of the depths of reality itself. But if his-

tory has to do with being, it is only because being has to do with history.® In other words, we can have such an understanding of action only if being ctve/f is in motion in some sense, if it itself is basically act. When Balthasar approaches metaphysics, one of the primary issues he pursues is the “question of the relation between Being and act, or the question of the event-character of the actus (essendt) [the act of being].”? The title of a major unpublished philosophical exploration, Sein als Werden (Being as Becoming),!° shows how concerned Balthasar was in overcoming a dualism that would think of change as merely extrinsic to the meaning of being. The key, for Balthasar, to revealing the act-character of being

is attending to its gift character. As we will see, its being due to the “wholly other” is what opens being “upwards, downwards, and outwards” from within. This, in turn, means that being cannot be resolved in itself except by being resolved in another: it is finite; that is, it is penetrated all the way through by difference. However, because this “differentiating” is not dualistic for Balthasar but “polar,” it does not destroy unity but charges it with life. To borrow from Kierkegaard, created or

7. Ibid., 17. 8. Without seeing history in a Hegelian manner as the process of conceptual necessity, Balthasar nevertheless insists that we recognize “both the historicity of Being as a fundamental ontological category, as well as the significance of history in terms of Being.” CathPhil, 187. 9. MW, 24. 10. This text, along with another entitled Geeinte Zwienatur, is presented by Jorg Disse in Hetaphystk der Singularitét: Eine Hinftibrung am Lettfaden der Philosophie Hans Urs

von Balthasars (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996). When consulting this presentation, it is important to realize that the texts belong to those of Balthasar’s works that he himself decided not to publish.

350 uw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

finite unity is unity that is “recollected forward.”!! Balthasar’s metaphysics provides the possibility of grounding such a notion. Specifically metaphysical discussions arise often in Balthasar's work. I will not give an account of all of these discussions, but I will engage a few of the most important metaphysical sections in the trilogy, since these address the fundamental themes that concern this book. I will begin with the dense, fifteen-page section at the end of the Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, volume 5 of the Glory of the Lord, entitled “The Miracle of

Being and the Fourfold Difference,” !? which many regard as the centerpiece of Balthasar’s philosophy. In essence, it is Balthasar’s version of what is called the “ontological difference” in Heidegger and what is referred to as the dwtinctio realts in Thomism. This section will provide the governing structure for the rest of our discussion. Aspects of the fourfold difference will be spelled out further in an engagement of the middle section of the Eptlog on the polarity of created being, and then the discussion of “Trinitarian difference and ontological difference” in TL 2. Finally, we will use these later texts to illuminate a related theme in TL 1, Truth of the Worlo. This latter will allow us to connect the metaphysical themes with the ques-

tion of truth specifically.

The Fourfold Difference Before entering into a discussion of Balthasar’s view of difference in being, it is good to say a word about his particular method.

On Mystery and Freedom Balthasar’s Summary attempt to explore the basic question(s) of metaphysics follows a method that is at once phenomenological and straightforwardly metaphysical. This simultaneity is not a function of a personal idiosyncrasy, but it is demanded by the subject matter itself. “Being as such by itself,” Balthasar says, “to the very end ‘causes wonder,’ behaving as something to be wondered at, something striking and worthy of

11. Sgren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 131. 12. The Glory of the Lord, vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age [= GL

5], trans. Oliver Davies et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 613-27. The English translation gives diwtinction rather than difference. I will refer to it as difference in

order to allow the other term to indicate the various “distinctions” made within the basic difference.

The Gift of Being Given m= 3/

wonder.”!° It is not a mere fact to be talked about from without; it is a “wonder” to be contemplated from within, even while this wonder always

has an object that is not reducible to the experience of that object. To put the point from another direction, wonder is not a merely subjective experience, but it is rather the objectively adequate response to the reality of being. Likewise, since it is the nature of being to cause wonder, being cannot be perceived as it is except from within this experience. This becomes clearer when we ask what constitutes “wonder” for Balthasar and how this wonder relates specifically to the question of difference in being.

Metaphysical wonder is a particular form of surprise, and surprise is the reaction to an event that is in some fundamental respect unforeseen. To put it another way, surprise (and therefore wonder) is possible only in an encounter with something that transcends the horizon of expectation. Wonder in an ontic sense, therefore, would be the arrival of an unanticipated person or thing within the horizon of a person's particular field of attention or concern. Metaphysical wonder, however, is possible only where the horizon of deing itself is not closed but is constituted in such a way as to include a “more’: in other words, to include a difference. We might get a better sense of what Balthasar means by considering how he distinguishes genuine wonder from mere admiration. Admiration is the astonishment one experiences that “everything appears so wonderfully and ‘beautifully’ ordered from within the necessity of Being.”4 What is lacking here —even if we grant that such admiration is indispensable and may itself be a profound experience —is precisely the element of surprise. Let us take the term necessity, which Balthasar uses in this context. It is a word to be contrasted with freedom, understood not in the psychological sense of having choices and not being under constraint, but rather in a metaphysical sense connected with a notion of “positivity,” that is, the arrival of an unanticipated “more.” Necessity is related to negativity, in the sense of the sort of movement we could describe by analogy to logical deduction: an inference proceeds deductively if its conclusion is already

13. Ibid., 615. As a rule, I will capitalize Betng whenever I use it in a technical sense, indicating the transcendence of Being over particular beings. Correlatively, beings will refer to the things that make up the world qua particular things as distinct from Being either as act or as totality. Whenever I use the term deimg (singular, lowercase), it is meant in the most general and inclusive sense possible —roughly the same as “reality.”

14. Ibid., 613-14.

52 uw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

fully contained in the premises.!° In this case, that which is new, namely, the conclusion, does not emerge by means of any addition to what is already

given but rather by subtraction, so to speak. In other words, the movement occurs at every turn through a distinction (the one is not the other) and therefore through negativity. Freedom, by contrast, is related to positivity insofar as it designates a movement that is genuinely new, because it genuinely adds something to what was already given. But, to return to the logical analogy, this means that the source of the “conclusion” cannot simply re-reduce back to the premises from which it was de-duced, but

rather it must owe itself to the premises and something besides. Thus, admiration may be the “adequate” response to an inner, necessary ordering of being, which is beautiful perhaps Jecause of the harmony that results

from its reducibility to a single principle. But only wonder is adequate to freedom. And without freedom, there can be no wonder. Balthasar’s understanding of freedom allows us to grasp a little better his assessment of Heidegger. On the one hand, Heidegger affirms that it is precisely difference (of a particular sort) that permits wonder, since real difference means irreducibility and irreducibility means “freedom.”!® It is the difference and the freedom that emerge when one poses the question,

Why is there anything at all and not simply nothing?!” As Balthasar explains it, the wonder Heidegger intends here is that caused by the difference between Sein (Being) and Secende (beings), expressed in the specific form of a particular existing being who wonders “at Being in its own

15. It is interesting in light of this observation to consider Wittgenstein’s discovery that all of the truth functions for a given set of propositions can be generated from negation, which means that all logical operations can be produced from the operation of negation. See Wittgenstein, Zractatus Logtco-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1967), 83-101. On this section of the Zractatus, see the commentary by H. O. Mounce, Wittgenstein s Tractatus: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 49-57. 16. Freedom, of course, is not the first word Heidegger uses in this context, but as I have interpreted the term so far, it captures his sense of the space given that allows the revelation that things could have been otherwise, which causes the “wonder” that they are as they are: “In astonishment [Zrvtaunen = wonder] we restrain ourselves (étre en arrét). We step back, as it were, from being, from the fact that it is as it is and not otherwise. And astonishment is not used up in this retreating from the Being of being, but, as this retreating and self-restraining, it is at the same time forcibly drawn to and, as it were, held fast by that from which it retreats. Thus, astonishment is the disposition [Ae Stimmung] in which and for which the Being of being unfolds.” What Ls Philosophy? trans. Jean Wilde and William Kluback (Albany, N.Y.: NCUP, 1956), 85. 17. Cf., Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 1: in this passage, the question is translated “why are there essents (Secende) rather than nothing?”

The Gift of Being Given m 353

distinction from Being.” !® Because thinking is precisely an attunement to Being, wonder, for both Heidegger and Balthasar, is not simply the starting point of thinking but the abiding principle or medium of all philosophy.!? But Balthasar claims that Heidegger is incapable of affirming won-

der over Being itself. He cannot do so because Being, for Heidegger, is the last horizon, as it were. We notice he does not ask: Why is there Being at all? Instead, it is: Why are there beings? Presumably, he formulates the question as he does because the other formulation would strike him as meaningless. Strictly speaking, Being does not exist. The fundamental difference for Heidegger lies therefore in a certain sense between Being and beings and not within Being itself. We thus return to the fruitless ambiguity mentioned earlier (in the introduction) expressed in the notion of Ereig-

nis, which Heidegger precisely does not allow to be defined in terms of freedom, or as a genuinely transcendent “third.”*? The meaning of the possibility of their being a difference within Being itself I hope will become clearer as we proceed. Before we turn to consider Balthasar’s version of the ontological difference, there are two further preliminary points to help clarify what will follow. The first is the connection between freedom and irreducibility. It

would seem, at first glance, as if a distinction or difference “created” in the mode of necessity rather than freedom would best ensure the irreducibility or autonomy of the “term” that was inferred. If B follows A with necessity, B itself exists necessarily if A exists, and thus it has no cause for fear that it might not have existed: it is therefore “independent.” However, this appearance is misleading insofar as the necessary existence of B is merely

18. GL 5:614-15. 19. Ibid. Cf., Heidegger, What ls Philovophy?, 79-885. 20. “If Gwith Heidegger) we regard the Sein-Davein distinction as ultimate, we risk

the nihilistic and tragic conclusion that being overall, instead of offering illumination and significance to the world of Davein, is an organic, impersonal and alien process of fate or necessity.” Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner,” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986), 21. See also Matthew A. Daigler, “Heidegger and von Balthasar: A Lover’s Quarrel over Beauty and Divinity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 375-94, here: 390-91. It seems, in fact, that Heidegger approaches the possibility of wondering over Being itself in his understanding of Ereignis as the expression of the 4s that gibt Sein (It gives being”; colloquially, “There is being”) (see, for example, Zur Seinsfrage, 38), and, indeed, this is the direction in which John Caputo interprets him (Herdegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics [New York: Fordham University Press, 1982], esp. 167-76). However, as Siewerth argues, Heidegger himself rejects

the identification of Ereignis with God: see Siewerth, “Martin Heidegger und die Gotteserkenntnis” and “Martin Heidegger und die Frage nach Gott,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3: Gott in der Geschichte (Diisseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1971), 264-93.

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the alternative expression of its reducibility back to A. If A is by itself the sufficient cause of B, then it needs nothing else to bring B about. B, in this case, “adds” nothing to A and represents only a part or aspect of A. This

sort of relationship, then, is the simultaneity of total independence and complete tyranny. By contrast, if the relationship between A and Bis free, then it means that B possesses the sort of dependence that expresses contingency, and yet this is precisely another expression of its relative freedom with respect to A: if it cannot simply be reduced back to A, it is in some respect “more than” A. This sense of the simultaneity of dependence and freedom will be important for us at various stages in the argument.

The second point is a comment in relation to the question, Why does Balthasar discuss the ontological difference as a fourfold difference? There seem to be two aspects to the answer. First, I propose that the difference turns out to be fourfold precisely because, as marking a fundamental dif-

ference, it does not permit unilateral or univocal formulation. To put it bluntly, difference is so radical that even difference is different.7! For Balthasar, the single fact of the ontological difference, which is just another way of expressing creatureliness and finitude, multiplies the dimensions of difference into a more complex configuration than the unilateral Sein-

Seiende difference.2” Moreover, it valorizes difference itself to such an extent that it can go beyond Heidegger's somewhat abstract notion of the “historicity” of Being in its temporality to include the concrete differences that subsist ontically. Thus, where Heidegger always shows an impatience

21. Lucy Gardner and David Moss have made a similar observation, referring not to Balthasar’s metaphysics but to his theology: “Difference, then, is always plural, is always more; it is always opening on to more. Difference is always the differencing of difference. Difference is never only two, even when it is ‘a’ difference between two things, because that difference will always make a difference.” Gardner and Moss, “Something like Time,” 127. However, the affirmation of this point does not necessitate the conclusion that these commentators draw, namely, a fundamental directionlessness and undecidability at the heart of things (see ibid., 133-34). Such an undecidability would follow only if “differing difference” necessarily precluded order. I wish to propose, on the contrary, that only such an order will in the long run sustain a sense of fundamental difference.

22. Because the difference is itself intrinsically differentiated and so includes further differences as part of its own meaning, it is important to realize that although Balthasar occasionally in this section speaks of the various distinctions, he is nonetheless discussing a single (fourfold) difference. We should therefore try to avoid reading the four distinctions as a linear series, one after the other. Martin Bieler, for example, seems to take the distinctions in just this linear way: see “The Future of the Philosophy of Being,” Communtio: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 468-72,

and also “Meta-anthropology and Christology: On the Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Communwo: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 129-46.

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with anything ontic—even, for example, with any question of intersubjectivity — and insists instead that we need in every case immediately to penetrate to Being, Balthasar sees ontic differences (paradigmatically the differences of intersubjectivity) as intrinsic mediators of the ontological difference. Thus, these differences themselves are already worthy of wonder. Balthasar degins with the ontic experience — which is “first for us” —

and, moreover, asks this question with the same radicality with which he asks the fundamental ontological question. If this latter question is put most radically as a question concerning Being itself (and not just beings), the ontic question is likewise put as primordially as possible. It aims at the very (ontic) origin of intersubjectivity, that is, the child’s wonder at first recognizing his difference from his mother. And so we come full circle: we began talking about wonder, which led us to difference, and difference, when radicalized, led us back to wonder — now in its most concrete form. The Stagev of the Difference Balthasar’s fourfold difference is a single, complex reality constituted out of four irreducible differences: (1) the intersubjective difference of the awakening child’s “I” from his mother (and, implicitly from all else in the world), (2) the difference of Being from beings, (3) the difference of beings from Being, and (4) the difference between God and all of these. I will address each of these in turn.”° 1. The difference between the childs “T’ and his mother. The first “stage” of the

difference is itself a manifold phenomenon: it is the difference between a child's “I” and the “other,” who is initially the mother but implicitly everything else that will be an other to the child. In spite of the complexity of 23. At this point, a comment about Balthasar’s terminology, in relation to that of Aquinas and Heidegger, is in order. It is important to note from the outset that though the meaning of “difference” here is clearly indebted in different ways to both Aquinas and Heidegger, it does not line up cleanly with the thought and terminology of either one. Indeed, with the notion of a fourfold difference, Balthasar makes a genuine, creative contribution to philosophy, and so it is not surprising that it demands a new light on terminology borrowed from other thinkers. A detailed exposition of the difference between Balthasar’s use of these basic terms and that of others would require a dissertation in itself. I hope, in any event, that the following presentation of the fourfold difference gives some sense of the unique way Balthasar uses the terms. One of the studies on Balthasar that is most helpful for understanding Balthasar’s terminology is Pérez Haro, H/ muterto del ser. Pérez Haro explains that Balthasar’s metaphysical language varies according to the problem he has at hand. This movement is particularly clear in his shifting back and forth between the Thomistic distinctio realis and the Heideggerian ontological difference. Balthasar does not take pains to show

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this first difference, the whole of it—and indeed the whole development of the further stages —is already contained i” nuce (or perhaps in embryo) in a single event: namely, the child’s awakening into his own self-consciousness (difference in unity) within the comprehending grace of the mother’s love (unity in difference), which is expressed in her smiling on him: Its “I” awakens in the experience of a “Thou”: in its mother’s smile through which it learns that it is contained, affirmed and loved ina

relationship which is incomprehensively encompassing, already actual, sheltering and nourishing. . . . Existence is both glorious and a matter of course. Everything, without exception, which is to follow later and will inevitably be added to this experience must remain an unfolding of it. There is no “gravity of life” which would fundamentally surpass this beginning. There is no “taking over control” of existence which might go further than this first experience of mir-

acle and play. There is no encounter —with a friend or an enemy or with a myriad passers-by —which could add anything to the encounter with the first-comprehended smile of the mother.”4 In order to appreciate the full breadth of implications of this “starting point,” we would have to compare it to the understanding of self-consciousness and the “transcendental ego” in modern philosophy, the dialectic of self and other in German Idealism, and the fundamental experience of Angst in Heidegger. This will be a matter for the next chapter and chapter 4. For now, I simply record it as arguably the most fundamental insight in Balthasar's philosophy, an insight that affects everything else.7° It nevertheless bears remarking that this starting point in a sense already satisfies the criteria of both metaphysics and phenomenology. Some recent the difference between the two, or even make explicit which one he is talking about at any given point, presumably because, as Balthasar himself explains, the two are ultimately similar in their significance. While Bauer finds such a comparison “somewhat bold” (Bauer, “Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 302), Pérez Haro claims that his use of these various terms is harmonious, and is due primarily to whether he is distinguishing Being from universal essences (esentiae) or from particular beings (Seiende): Pérez Haro, El musterto del ser, 179-80. For a list and explanation of Balthasar’s basic metaphysical terminology, see ibid., 171-72. The difficulty is sometimes increased by the fact that the German term Weven can stand both for universal, abstract essences and for concrete beings. This duality allows for a certain fluidity in Balthasar’s use of concepts that is sometimes ambiguous in translation. 24. GL 5:616—17.

25. Rowan Williams states that it is precisely the question of the constitution of consciousness that most radically distinguishes Balthasar from Karl Rahner: “Balthasar and Rahner,” 31. See also David Schindler (Sr.), “Preface,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: Hts Life and Work, xi.

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thinkers criticize metaphysics for trying to find an absolute beginning, unaffected by the vagaries of history. They insist that such “privileged” perspectives are impossible: we are always and will always remain “in the middle” of things.*° The anti-intellectualism that such an insistence often betrays reveals that “beginnings” are somehow natural and even essential

to thought. How can we integrate a need for starting at the beginning without disregarding the legitimate insistence that we remain within the necessarily relative perspectives of history? It seems there is only one pos-

sibility: we begin with what is both historical and a genuine beginning, namely, the fundamental experience of the child.?” As historical, it is relative, but as fundamental and, as we shall see, paradigmatic, it is at the same time in a certain sense absolute. Now, the content of this fundamental experience, which lies “unacknowledged but alive” in the child’s first awakening to his “I,” has two dimensions, each of which is itself twofold. The first is, so to speak, the ontic dimension. There is, on the one hand, a radical contingency at the heart of the child’s selfhood: “the infinite prodigality of the act of generation” (which Balthasar remarks has received inexplicably little attention from philosophers) gives rise to an ego with a certain necessity and universality in its capacity to open to the world and Being as a whole and in its own reditio completa (the complete return of consciousness to itself), which cannot itself be the product of chance.*® This means that the child cannot be reduced back to his source; he stands before it separated by an ineradicable chasm. Simultaneous with this irreducible difference, how-

ever, is the mother’s love for the child, a “sheltering and encompassing world” that gives the experience of this difference precisely the character of “being permitted to be.” From the very outset, therefore, difference occurs primordially as povitivity; the different is a “more” that is affirmed, rather than a product of loss or a fall (negation). But this positive differ-

ence immediately unfolds into a twofold ontological dimension. On the one hand, the child’s spirit positively transcends Being as a whole (in the strict sense of the child's capacity to view it as a whole). Balthasar uses

26. See Quash, “Drama and the Ends of Modernity,” 139. Although Quash believes the “in the middle” approach is the only way to be genuinely dramatic, I wish to argue that such a perspective, as he understands it, actually undermines the possibility of drama. The fenvion of drama is possible only with a real “beginning.” We will see the full implications of this in chapter 4. 27. See Gustav Siewerth, Wetaphystk der Kinobett (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1957), 11-15. Siewerth argues here that Heidegger’s discovery of the temporality of Being necessarily points to the philosophical significance of childhood. 28. GL 5:615.

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Heidegger’s neologism nichten (to “nought” or “nihilate”), which was appro-

priated by Siewerth, to express this transcendence, which is at once an expression of the freedom, irreducibility, and contingency of the spirit (Gewt) in relation to Being. On the other hand, because the povitivity of the difference implies a “more” that is to be attributed to both sides of the difference, it is likewise the case that being transcends the spirit. In other words, if the spirit is irreducible to being, then being is irreducible to spirit. The verb nichten, moreover, helps us to see that the twofold transcendence is at the ame time and in the same respect the openness of the one to the other.”? The word nothingness understood verbally is as it were the act of opening, and it is thus both ek-stavis (Heidegger’s term: “to stand out”) and receptivity. Balthasar summarizes the ontological dimension of the first stage as follows:

And thus there occurs an opening within me as spirit to the lightspace of Being, which does not in any sense align itself with the Being of the world as a whole: if in the first aspect my spirit “nihilates” with respect to the Being of the world into which I find myself to be thrown

and constrained, then in the second aspect the Being of the world “nihilates” within the opening of my spirit, which can attribute to the Being of the world no necessity within itself which would excel our wonder at its existence: both are related to each other, but they do not coincide.*” 2. The difference of Being from beings. Balthasar then develops the two aspects

of this ontological dimension as the second and third stages of the difference. The second stage unfolds the “more” aspect of Being; we might formulate this stage as the difference of Being from beings. No matter how many beings there may be, have been, or will be in the universe, no matter how perfect or complete any being may be —even if we could per iumpou-

Jibule imagine a single being so perfect that it comprehended the totality of the universe —the superabundance of Being itself would not thereby be exhausted in its instances, or even barely “tapped.” In this respect, 29. According to Balthasar, this simultaneity is one of the key principles in Heidegger’s philosophy (See “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus,” Stunmen der Zett 137 [1940]: 1-8). The fundamental difference in Balthasar’s use of the notion lies in the fact that Balthasar sees the mutual “nihilation” in its primordial positivity (rather than negativity) because in no case does it become itself ultimate but is always seen as the fruit of a higher union. 30. GL 5:618 (translation slightly modified). Note that the reciprocal transcendence spoken of in the passage is not symmetrical: Being transcends the spirit within the spirit’s transcending of Being.

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Being rises sovereignly over all of its participants: “The relationship that each of the parts has to nothingness is not carried into the whole; and yet Being, which opens itself to be participated by the world-totality, possesses its own form of nothingness [nichten], namely, as an ineradicable indifference with respect to all that participates in it.”°! This theme, the “superessentiality” of Being (esse; actus essendi), has been one of the most creative developments in twentieth-century Thomism.” Balthasar refers to it in particular as part of the Neoplatonic heritage, and he sees it specifically expressed in Aquinas's attributing “to the actus essendt its own bonum-

pulchrum [goodness-beauty] in which the individual ewentiae [essences | and the world which is constituted by them only participate.”*4 What perhaps makes Balthasar’s approach to this mystery unique in comparison with that of other Thomists is that he insists that the openness to this superabundance of Being, or philosophy’s movement into it, does not occur in the first place through the process of abstraction, nor even through the separation of Being from all limiting differences (eparatio) — although these are both eventually included as essential moments — but rather initially in the inexhaustible fullness of the child’s joyful awakening in love. As we shall see, this point is crucial because it keeps us from falling into a dualism of competing principles, where the superessentiality of Being

31. GL 5:618 (translation significantly modified). 32. The most obvious examples would be Etienne Gilson, e.g., his Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952); Cornelio Fabro, e.g., his Participation et causaltté selon Saint Thomas (Louvain, Belgium: Publications universitaires de Louvain, Belgium, 1961); or Joseph Pieper, e.g., his The Stlence of Saint Thomas, trans. John Murray and Daniel O’Connor (New York: Pantheon, 1957). More directly connected to Balthasar, there is Gustav Siewerth, Dav Schicksal der Metaphystk von Thomas von Aguin bis Hetoegger (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1959); and Ferdinand Ulrich, Homo Abyssus: Das Wagnts der Setnsfrage [= HA], 2nd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998). I do not intend

to imply that the identification of the Being that transcends all particular beings with the actus essendi immanent within each being is necessarily something Aquinas himself explicitly affirmed. There is of course some controversy surrounding this point. Nevertheless, it is a move made in certain schools of Thomism, if not by Thomas, and Balthasar would certainly place himself within this tradition. 33. Balthasar presents the transcendence of Being over its participants as what Proclus intended by his notion of amethektos metekhetat, GL 5:618. Moreover, in GL 4:374, Balthasar suggests that Dionysius anticipated this Thomistic insight. 34. GL 5:619. 35. Williams compares Balthasar’s starting metaphysics with the rich multiplicity of concrete forms of Being to Rahner’s beginning with a formal Vorgriff of the “unlimited possibility of ewe.” “Balthasar and Rahner,” 14—21. It would be interesting to compare Balthasar’s principle that metaphysics begins with the child’s wonder with Aquinas's principle that it begins with separatio. See John Wippel’s explanation of this method

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would be emphasized precisely to the exclusion (separation) of the rich variety of essences, or where the wealth of particular essences would be seen to overshadow the comprehensive fullness of Being. The dualism is avoided, we see, only by a concrete method, which attends to the fundamental, concrete experience that includes all at once the various elements that will later be distinguished.*° Therefore, Balthasar begins to open up the third stage already within the second stage, when he shows that the twofold aspect of consciousness (intellectus agens [agent intellect] and also the necessary conversto ad phantasmata [return to phantasms]) already

has a necessary counterpart in Being itself: the actus essendi cannot be act without a subject, and so it is in some respect dependent on essences.” 5. The difference of beings from Being. lf the second stage of the difference is

the difference of Being from beings, then the third stage, which Balthasar

expounds at the greatest length, might be formulated as the difference of beings from Being. This difference is clearly related to the previous one,

but it is also clearly distinct. It is at least initially possible, for example, that Being might be more than (different from) beings without beings in turn being more than (different from) Being itself. But this would ultimately mean that beings are merely a function of Being, and so even the initial difference collapses. According to Balthasar, a difference (within the created order) cannot remain a difference if it is merely “one-sided”; we must therefore, he says, posit a third difference, namely, one between beings and Being. It is not simply the case that all beings depend on Being since they /ave or are nothing other than Being (all that they have other than Being is by definition nonbeing, 1.e., nothing); rather, the reverse is also true: Being, which Balthasar interprets along with Siewerth and Ulrich

in “Metaphysics and Separatio in Thomas Aquinas,” in Metaphysical Themes tn Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 69-104, and Frederick Wilhelmsen’s contention that it begins, not with the second act of the mind (judgment) as Gilson suggests but with the third act (reasoning): see The Paradoxical Structure of Extétence Urving, Tex.: University of Dallas Press, 1970). As I read Balthasar,

the point would not be to oppose these methods but rather to integrate them into a more fundamental context. 36. However, if a concrete starting point is necessary, it does not suffice on its own but must be seen as the manifestation of a greater comprehending unity, which we will see in the fourth stage, to be elaborated at the end of this section. 37. I will say more on this point later, but it bears remarking that a dualism occurs only if we think of God as creating esse first and only then creating essences or, in any

event, creating them separately. But, in fact, this is not the case. What God creates is the ens, the always-already actualized being, which within itself bears the real distinction between esse and essence.

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as “completum et simplex sed non subsistens” (complete and simple but nonsubsistent), does not itself vubiwt, and so it needs particular beings “in” which to become actual. As Balthasar puts it, “not only ‘concepts without intuition are empty,’ but the ‘idea’ or the ‘light’ or the ‘abundance’ of Being remains so too.”°® So, how are we to understand the relationship between Being and beings? According to Balthasar, once we have penetrated to the depth of this third distinction, we have only two alternatives. The first alternative is that Being’s relation to beings may be described variously as explicatio-umplicatio (unfolding-enfolding), ground-expression, or actualization-evolution. The second alternative “refuses to close the circle between Being and beings”; that is,

it insists on avoiding the unfreedom of a direct, one-to-one, relationship. Why such a relationship is necessarily “unfree” we shall see in a moment. The difference between these two alternatives is essentially whether we can affirm the second and third Stages simultaneously, or whether we oscillate between reducing the former to the latter and the latter to the former. Into this second category Balthasar groups any evolutionary theory (materialist or otherwise), German Idealism, and even Plotinus and Neoplatonism. He proposes a surprising but compelling criterion for determining the success of a given metaphysics in avoiding this alternative: namely, the capacity to appreciate the wealth of forms of subhuman nature as an irreducibly positive value. The first approach, evolution, “mechanizes” these forms, and so it finally misses both their freedom and their necessity. The second, which begins with the Spirit in search of itself, cannot explain how an as-yet imperfect and therefore needy source could give rise to such perfect and free forms in Nature. The third, finally, cannot answer and does not ask “why a divine abundance of Being should explicate itself precisely in beetles and butterflies and not also in entirely different, unpredictably various, forms and figures.”49 In each of these cases, Being is ultimately forgotten because it comes to be identified with its “self-explication” in beings: there is thus no way to affirm the dependence implied in Being’s being manifest in beings without “automatically” compromising the freedom or distinction of Being in relation to that manifestation.

The second of the two alternatives mentioned above preserves a difference between Being and beings from two sides: it not only views Being essentially as a “letting-be” (which allows the difference within unity of beings from Being), but it simultaneously “lets Being be” (which 38. GL 5:619. 39. Ibid., 621. 40. Ibid.

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allows a difference in unity of Being from beings). Here, then, is the essential connection between this problem and the issue of subhuman nature: Being can be seen as a letting-be only if we, in our being, “let it be,” which means granting a space for all other realities rather than rushing as quickly as possible to close the space between us and Being in an identity of thinking and Being. Only by granting such a space can we affirm the freedom of the relationship, because only then can we hold the difference finally open. Balthasar goes on to show, however, that this difference, this gaping “hole” or “wound” so deep within the heart of reality, brings reality into a sort of risk; the cosmos stands precariously before this difference, and its deepest determination comes from the meaning that is ultimately given to this difference. It can mean alienation: and thus the cosmos darkens in guilt, death, valuelessness, cold neutrality, and fear. On the other hand, it can mean glory: and thus the cosmos is bathed in light, grace, and power.1! Balthasar contends that a leaning in the one direction or the other has marked whole epochs in the intellectual history of the world, and it is therefore of the utmost importance how the move is made from the second and third stages to the fourth. The meaning of the difference cannot be determined from within the difference itself, because all that comes into view at this level is the fact of the difference. Heidegger, who is closest to Balthasar on this point, comes to a rest precisely here, making this fact the final mystery, ne plus ultra. According to Balthasar, because Heidegger does not allow this mystery to open up beyond itself as well, it hardens for him into a sort of mathematical necessity.” For Balthasar, by contrast, it leads us to the fourth dimension of the distinction, namely, between God and created being as a whole. 4. The difference between God and the world, As Balthasar remarks in a later

section, this fourth step is not a solution that we conveniently apply to the metaphysical problem at hand (in the manner of a “God of the gaps”),

but it is one we make “gingerly, almost against our will.’45 The point seems to be this: the movement to God is not carried through in order to dispel the mystery, but in order to preserve it. Moreover, we cannot preserve mystery from outside of it, but only from inside, which means we must work through the inner dimension of the problem on its own terms

without “short-circuiting” it by appealing directly to a “theological 41. Ibid., 622-24, 42. Ibid., 625. 43. Ibid., 636. The Gift of Being Given m= 45

response.’”“4 The problem, in short, is fundamentally how the multitude of particular beings can be positive in their difference from Being if Being itself is comprehensive. The only way to affirm this multiplicity — without, in reaction, reducing Being in turn to this multiplicity —is by positing a “unicum” beyond and within the ontological difference.4° Being, as nonsubsistent, cannot on its own decide or will to create the multiplicity of forms, because such a willing requires the freedom that can belong only to a subsistent, and indeed personal, Being (God). At the same time, God does not create beings “directly” but rather through the creative medium of Being,“° since such an immediate creation of beings would fuse the fourth distinction to the second and third together. Such a fusion would once again sap beings of their positive otherness. Nevertheless, we do not simply deduce God from the mutual relation of Being and beings: doing so would comprehend God's freedom within the necessity of a logical inference. Instead — precisely because

the mutual relation is a mystery of freedom —we are referred beyond the freedom and finitude of worldly difference to an ultimate freedom, which is the ultimate guarantor of the positivity of the multiplicity of created forms.” It is important to see that the passage from the third to the fourth distinction is not a movement from philosophy to theology, insofar as God enters here in the guise, so to speak, of the principuum et fints mundi (origin and end of the world). At the same time, it is not merely philosophy, since it is precisely here that the opening to theology occurs. We can understand

44. Balthasar insisted strongly on this point in a late lecture he gave to theology students in Freiburg, November 1975, published as “Evangelium und Philosophie” [= EuP], Prethurger Zeitschreft fiir Philosophie und Theologte 23 (1976): 3-12, see esp. 3-5,

10-12. Balthasar here claims that one of the root causes of modern atheism has been the failure on the part of Christians to think through the problem of God in relation to the being of the world in a way that is philosophically responsible. 45. GL 5:625. Balthasar says that this move is one that “Plotinus correctly and definitively saw.” 46. Siewerth characterizes Being, which is the first effect of creation according to Aquinas (“Prima rerum creatarum est esse. Sed esse rei creatae non est subsistens”: Summa theologica [= ST], 5 vols. [Ottawa: Commissio Plana, 1953], 1:45, 4 ad 1), asa peculiar sort of mediator between God and beings; see Tourpe’s presentation of this issue in Siewerth, E. Tourpe, “Différence ontologique et différence ontothéologique: Introduction a la pensée de Gustav Siewerth, I,” Revue Philosvophique de Louvain 3 (1995):

331-69, here: 352-59. Ulrich likewise develops this issue in profound ways in HA. For both Ulrich and Siewerth, esse as “pure mediation” does not violate the Thomistic principle that “non potest aliquid esse medium inter creatum et increatum” (Quaevtioned dtsputatae, vol. 1: De verttate [= De ver.| [Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1949] 8, 17), because, as non subststend, esse is precisely nothing (“non aliquid”). See Ulrich, HA, 15-19. 47. GL 5:625. Georges Chantraine explains this point in Balthasar, “L’Epilogue de la trilogie: ‘Une bouteille lancée a la mer,’” Transversalités: Revue de UInstitut Catholique

de Parts 63 (1997): 26-27.

44 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

this essential ambiguity by analogy with the first distinction: there, the meaning of the difference between the child’s self and the world, which is in a sense undecided in itself, was given in the love of the mother —it was shown to be povitive in the mother’s free (and personal) turning toward the child. Here, the philosophical problem of the meaning of the difference

between Being and beings, which mediately implicates the difference between God and created being, turns on God's freedom. In other words, it will be given its sense only in God's free self-revelation, his turning-toward

the world (or indeed his free not-turning-toward the world). Thus it follows that if theology and philosophy have any point of intersection, it is here, where God's self-revelation fills and opens further the space already opened up between the third and fourth distinctions: God's word, in other words, emerges from the very heart of being.*® There are two incidental observations in more wide-ranging topics and one essential further point to make about this fourth dimension of the dif-

ference. The first is to notice that because the fourth does not eliminate the second and third distinction, but rather “sanctions” it even while it transcends it, the “protective accompaniment” it brings does not eliminate the “uncanny alienation” that this uncloseable circle between Being and beings implies.*? It does not do so because the fourth distinction does not operate, as it were, within the same order as these other two distinctions — in which case it would precisely have to vubytitute for the other two — but rather it includes that order even while not allowing the alienation it implies to be the last word. And so, on one hand, we see how Balthasar can appre-

ciate in great depth the role of Angst as Heidegger articulates it, though he includes it (without foreshortening’) within the more fundamental transcendent act of faith, hope, and love.°” On the other hand, we likewise 48. “The formal object of theology . . . lies at the very heart of the formal object of philosophy.” GL 1:145. “But however at odds the revelation may be to all that is foreseeable, and however little it may appear to be the supplying of a missing fragment, it must nevertheless enter into the distinctions as a form of completion: the word of God must be written into the word of Being, the word of Being into the words of creatures which are exchanged as comprehensible words among existent creatures.” GL 5:631. See also GL 1:244-45. Ulrich has a similar understanding of the relation between grace and being: “Grace must come along the ‘path of Being’” (“die Gnade muf auf dem “Weg des Seins’ kommen”), HA, 110. 49. GL 5:628. 50. See the philosophical discussion in Balthasar, Der Christ und ote Angst [= CA] (Ein-

siedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1951). In this book, Balthasar shows how a refusal to allow philosophy to open up to theology cannot avoid identifying that aspect of Angst that is due to fallenness with the Angst in general that is an essential expression of finitude: in other words, when philosophy closes to (the possibility of) theology, sin and creatureliness as such get conflated. In a sense, this reduction would be the mirroring of the conflation of the third and fourth distinctions we mentioned earlier.

The Gift of Being Given = 4

understand the basis for Balthasar’s general insistence on overcoming a dualism between contemplation and action: if contemplation (indifferencia,

apatheta) is the subjective correlate so to speak of the second difference (Being over beings),°! and action is the subjective correlate of the third difference (beings over Being’), then the fourth distinction gives us a place “beyond action and contemplation,”°* which allows us to integrate both

into a unity. The deepest form of detachment, Balthasar says, is not the static detachment from all that exists, but a detachment from Being itself, since this allows an availability simultaneously for Being (contemplation) and beings (action).°° The second observation moves along similar lines: if it is true, as Heidegger has said, that we attain to Being in a full way only if we can transcend in some sense the ontological difference (between Being and beings) itself,°4 then the fourth distinction allows us to transcend it precisely with-

out closing ut, which is in a sense Heidegger’s temptation. Moreover, if Husserl is right that the philosophical act finds completion only if it goes beyond the thematizing of beings from within Being (..e., from within the “interestedness” of the natural attitude) to reach a disinterested thematizing of Being itself from the perspective of the transcendental ego — detached as it were from the world —this fourth distinction shows how such a move can be made without denying the finitude of the human

spirit or calling into question in any respect the existential status of the world. It can do so because it confronts the finite “I” with the absolute otherness of the infinite “I” on the other stde of created being, an “1” who is

still Being even if he is not created Being.®” Husserl’s transcendental

51. On this sense of contemplation as the heart of philosophy, which was then taken over and integrated into the monastic orders during the Christian period, see Balthasar, “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism” [= PCM], in Explorations in Theology, vol. 2: Spouse of the Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 333-72. 52. Balthasar treats this issue in “Jenseits von Kontemplation und Aktion?” /nternationale Katholtsche Zeitschrift Communto 2 (1973): 16-22. 53. GL 5:651. 54. See, for example, Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, 250-51: “Deshalb gilt es, nicht das Seiende zu iibersteigen (Transzendenz), sondern diesen Unterschied [that

is, the ontological difference] und damit die Transzendenz zu iiberspringen und anfanglich vom Seyn her und der Wahrheit zu fragen.” 55. The relation between God and Being, which has become a particularly pressing question since Heidegger’s critique of “ontotheology,” will be addressed in part later in this chapter and then again more thoroughly in chapter 5. Nevertheless, it warrants strong emphasis that though he speaks often about divine being and created being, Balthasar by no means understands “being” as a univocal concept that can be participated in indifferently either by God or by creatures. Rather, for Balthasar, the term remains analogous to the core and therefore neither equivocal nor univocal. 46 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

ego, it seems, enjoys the absolute solitude that Heracleitus once said belonged to God alone.°® The final point to make about the fourth distinction concerns the paradox of the simultaneous wealth and poverty that it reveals in both divine and created being. This theme is perhaps the heart of Ulrich’s philosophy,

and Balthasar makes explicit reference to Ulrich as he enters upon this discussion.*’ The second distinction brought to light the inexhaustible fullness of Being, but it was immediately complemented by the third distinction. This distinction showed that this fullness is not én ttvel/f actualized,°® but finds its actualization only in the relative otherness of the various beings, even if these never actualize Being in its totality.°? That this tension does not fracture is due to the fourth distinction, namely, the revelation of the Being beyond the polarity of the ontological difference, which is the actuality of the very fullness of Being, fotwm et totaliter. This, then, is the wealth of divine Being. However, precisely because divine Being, as absolute perfection, knows no limitation that needs to be overcome, there

56. Heracleitus, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [= DK], 3 vols. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1985), 108. 57. GL 5:625. 58. By no means is this observation meant to compromise Aquinas's statement that esse is the “actuality of all acts and the perfection of all perfections.” Quaestiones Otsputatae, vol. 2: De potentia det [= De pot.|, ed. Raymond M. Spiazzi (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1949), 7, 2, ad 9 (esse est actualitas omnium actuum et propter hoc est perfectio omnium perfectionum). But the point is just that: it is not actuality in reference to itself but in reference to another, i.e., “actualitas omnium actuum.” Created esse is never actual as esse, because it is nonsubsistent; what vuhvists is the concrete substance, even while the actuality of substance comes not from itself but from esse. See Kenneth Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Milwaukee University Press, 1982), 116-17. In his explanation of this point, Schmitz highlights the dependence of the composite being on esse but he seems to neglect the genuine reciprocity. In fact, he reads the possessive genitive in the term actus essendt as esse’s appropriating the being in which it subsists, whereas I, without denying the validity of that point, would want to emphasize the particular being’s appropriation of esse. The grammar more clearly supports this latter interpretation. On the other hand, we may read essendi as an olyective genitive, which, far from canceling the being’s possession of the act, makes this possible by grounding it. The whole then, founded on the velf-giving of esse implied in the objective genitive aspect of the verbal noun, which is the “other-centeredness” of esse, is a real reciprocity. 59. This is not to say that created beings actualize only part of the perfection of esse. Rather, insofar as they exist at all, they completely exist: “Wird Sein im Sinn von Wirklichkeit genommen, dann besitzt ein wirklich Seiendes nicht einen Teil von Wirklichsein in sich, sondern das Ganze, obgleich es neben ihm unzdhliges anderes Wirkliches gibt.” E, 38. The distinction is more subtle and is best captured in Aquinas’s phrase “totus sed non totaliter” (“the whole, but not in every respect”): created beings actualize the whole perfection of esse (because they do not partially exist!) even if they do not do so totally, i.e., in every possible manner.

The Gift of Being Given = 47

is nothing to prevent it from passing itself on: “Nothing is richer and fuller

than Being in its incomprehensibly glorious and absolute victory over nothingness... and yet this fullness can unfold absolutely only once: in God. But since there is nothing against which it must assert itself (for nothingness is nothingness), it does not need, holding on to itself, to enclose itself in the casing of an entity in order perhaps to break out from this and

communicate itself beyond its borders (which it does not have).”°° This “not holding on to itself,” then, is what Balthasar calls the poverty of divine being. Now, the fourth distinction does not set God over/against man as one particular being to another: rather, this relationship is mediated by the analogical “allness” of Beng. Moreover, the relationship between God and creature is more than a relationship between a being and (created)

Being, but it transcends this as free personality. These two simultaneous aspects, divine Being and freedom, illuminate the God-world relation, which in turn receives illumination from the inherent “poverty-wealth” paradox. If God were merely rich, then the creature would be mere poverty, that is, sheer negativity, in relation to God. The identification of creature and loss is the danger of any philosophy or religion that posits an émpersonal good, which as fen kat pan (all-in-one) does not have the freedom to permit a (positive) other. But God is so rich, as it were, that he can afford to be poor: in

other words, in his wealth he does not need to hold onto himself but can allow a corresponding wealth on the part of creatures in relation to him.®! Now, the positivity of the creature that results from God's creative act gives rise to a genuine analogy of being rather than a mere dialectic. Ulrich describes dialectic as an attempt to “revive” through violence what is taken to be dead: that is, the negating of a negation.°” A “dialectical” relationship would posit the world as simple negativity in relation to the simple positivity of God, and it would then attempt to mediate this simple difference by simply negating this simple negativity of the creature and thus building a complex (pseudo-) analogy between God's positivity and the world’s non60. GL 5:625-—26.

61. See Schmitz, Gift, 97-130, where he accounts for the possibility of the otherness of the world from God (creation) by interpreting esse, or actus simplictter (act par excellence), as generosity. The note that what Balthasar (and especially Ulrich) adds to this understanding is to see generosity not merely as the capacity to give but also the capacity to receive in some reciprocal (but not symmetrical) sense. Schmitz dwells

at length on this aspect with his profound phenomenology of gift giving earlier in the book, but he specifically denies this aspect in God’s generosity in relation to the world. The question is whether this aspect needu to be denied in order to present a consistent and Christian understanding of God. 62. Ulrich, “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe: Ein Fragment,” in Leben in der Einhett von Leben und Tod (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1999), 152.

48 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

negativity. Balthasar’s “analogia entis,” by contrast, begins with God, not as a simple positivity but as an absolute poor-wealth, in relation to the relative rich-poverty of the creature. In this case, the difference between God and creature is not compromised by similarity, but rather it paradoxically increases directly with similarity. 64 More concretely, it means that what is negative or imperfect in the creature on account of its finitude is not to be merely “opposed” to God's (positive) perfection (for what can be opposed to the absolute?) but becomes rather, in and because of its very finitude, an image of the divine.®° More concretely still, in this case, it means that the “poverty” of the creature in its finitude paradoxically becomes a positive image of the divine poverty/wealth, since it is now to be seen as an aspect of the creature's own goodness and generosity: if poverty positively means the capacity to receive from another —which means giving the other the gift of giving —and creation, as God's letting an “other” be, is the expression of divine goodness, then the poverty of the creature becomes an image of God. As Balthasar puts it, the creature is not the image of God 63. What I have described as a dialectical av opposed to a genuinely analogous understanding of the God-world relation is, in fact, in oversimplified form, the method Przywara uses in Analogia Entis, 2nd ed. (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1962), 104-41. Here, Przywara distinguishes himself from the dialectic of German idealism by founding his “analogy” on the principle of noncontradiction while dialectic is founded on the principle of identity. (For a good account of this method, see Juan Sara’s discussion in “Forma y amor,” 69-71.) But this only plants the “negation of a negation” method deeper. The “early” Balthasar seems to have affirmed this approach whole-

heartedly (see MetaPrz), even though he generally avoided this language himself. However, if Balthasar was deeply influenced by Przywara, not only intellectually but also personally, he nevertheless developed in his mature writings a unique understand-

ing of analogia entis. See James V. Zeits, “Przywara and von Balthasar on Analogy,” Thomist 52, no. 3 (1998): 473-98; and Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de Uhomme et de Dieu, esp. 284-88.

64. Balthasar explains in greater depth what he calls the essential Christian principle, namely, the paradoxical relation between distance and nearness when comparing God and creation in his important early (1939) essay published in English as “The Fathers, Scholastics, and Ourselves,” Communto: International Catholic Review 24 (Summer 1997): 347-96. 65. If this assertion “jars,” we need only consider what denying it implicitly entails: namely, that finitude av vuch is not good, which is another way of denying creation or the positivity of otherness. If creation is not evil but good; if created goodness is always an image of the divine goodness; and if creation necessarily means the coming to be of something other than the infinite God, and therefore something finite, then the very finitude of creation must be an image of God’s goodness. A person may, of course, want to deny creation or even deny that it is good. At this point, I have not provided any philosophical argument for creation as such. Nevertheless, I have given reasons for the necessity of the fourth distinction, and one who would want philosophically to deny creation (and thus the fourth distinction) would have to deal with the fragmentation of the other differences, or at least offer an argument why they would not so fragment.

The Gift of Being Given m 49

in such a way that the finite “first” constitutes itself as a “closed” entity or subject (through the seizing and hoarding of the parcel of actuality which it is able to take into oneself from the stream of finite Being) in order “then” (and perhaps for the rounding-out of its own perfection) to pass the surplus on. But rather in such a way that the finite, since it is subject, already constitutes itself as such through the letting-be of Being by virtue of an ekstasis out of its own closed self, and therefore through dispossession and poverty becomes capable of salvaging in recognition and affirmation the infinite poverty of the fullness of Bemg and, within it, that of the God who does not hold on to Himself.®°

What we should notice in this passage is that a dynamic analogia entis, as Balthasar here employs it, suggests that the creature is not first created as a self-enclosed unit, which then images the divine creativity/generosity/ receptivity in a second moment, that is, in its subsequent action. Rather, the creature is constituted already “on the move’: the “passive” reception of its own being — since that being is itself the simultaneity of poverty and wealth, or receptivity and generosity — occurs precisely in its active letting-be and passing-on. | will return to this important, but difficult, point in the discussion of the Epilog and TL | to follow.

On the Fourfolo Structure ai a Whole Niemand versteht besser die wahre Unterscheidung, als wer zur Einheit gekommen ist.o7

— Johann Tauler

Having gone through each of the four stages of the distinction, we must now consider them all as a whole. If we compare the various distinctions with one another, a certain peculiarity comes immediately to the fore. The second, third, and fourth distinctions seem to be properly metaphysical, while the first seems to be merely phenomenological, or perhaps even psychological. What does the personal experience of the child’s awakening to self-consciousness 1n the love of its mother have to do with the structure

of Being? One might reply that it ensures that we are working with a concrete method. There is heavy emphasis in recent philosophy on remaining concrete, as if a concrete method is self-evidently good and needs no

66. GL 5:627. 67. No one has a better understanding of genuine difference than the one who has attained to unity.

50 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

argument to justify its necessity. But we have to ask whether and why such

a method is necessary. In what way is it more philosophically adequate than the traditional method that philosophizes precisely by abstracting from concrete experiences and therefore attaining to a universality that is lacking to those experiences? Or, we could ask in relation to the discussion at hand, What would be lost in terms of the philosophical content of the difference if we removed the first distinction and carried through the other three, accompanied perhaps by a constant reminder to “remain concrete’?

I propose that the only way to understand the philosophical import of the first distinction is to view the four stages not as a series of distinctions, one after the other, but as the gradual unfolding of a single, concrete structure. Balthasar’s own elaboration of the structure may mislead because of its complexity, and because it presents what are in fact four relatively distinct differences. But Balthasar is nevertheless clear about the relation between them: he titled the section “The Fourfold Difference” (Die vierfache Differenz), and he relates each part as a relatively distinct phase or stage of “the difference,” namely, that which characterizes finite being as a whole. If we break these apart into so many separate differences, we end up with a series of dualisms, which can be brought to unity only dialectically. We must therefore take them all together at once, which means beginning concretely (con-crescere: the organic growing together of the parts). At the great risk of oversimplifying and thus falsifying certain aspects, it may be helpful to see the whole fourfold difference intuitively at once, as a single “con-

stellation” of irreducibly distinct elements (and therefore as a Gestalt):

God

Being —- beings (Mother-) Child Figure 1.

The Gift of Being Given m 5/

This figure is inadequate in a number of ways: It suggests that the elements are separate from each other, when in fact the child, for example, or any particular being for that matter, would never simply stand “outside of” Being. Moreover, it is not evident in the figure how the whole structure occurs within the child’s initial wonder. And, perhaps most significantly, we do not see in what way the child’s experience comprehends the whole, and further how God comprehends even the child’s experience. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind its limitations, this basic structure, which reveals a set of relative oppositions and intersections, will eventually help

us to understand what Balthasar means by drama and Gestalt, or the involvement of Being in history. The fourfold difference is Balthasar’s most fully articulated version of the basic structure of being, whether formulated in terms of the Heideggerian ontological difference (between Sein and Seiende) or the Thomistic

distinctio realis (between esse and essentia). The structure, in its four points, forms a relatively stable tension, not only within the whole but between any two terms as well. The removal of any term would eventu-

ally collapse the tension of the whole and that between any two other terms. Now, the full structure of the difference is often implicit in discussions of the “real distinction,” but making the structure explicit can help us to avoid some of the problems into which these discussions tend to drift. For example, it would be possible, through separatio, to begin immediately with the second distinction, the transcendence of Being over beings. In this case, we are struck at once by the fullness of Being that is greater than any actualization but immediately also by the emptiness of this fullness, which does not exist precisely to the same extent that it transcends all that is actual. Being, taken by itself, thus shows itself to be what Siewerth calls “an unbearable contradiction,” since “the real act that actually grounds all of the real-being of things, and thus that which is most real in

them, would be for itself... something unreal, a mere ‘thought-object, ' an aimless streaming in the void, the unchecked passage over and fall into non-being, or the constant loss of self.”°°

68. Gustav Siewerth, Dav Sein als Gleichnis Gottes, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Sein und Wahrheit (Diisseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 665: “Der wirkliche, alles Wirklichsein erwirkende Aktgrund der Dinge, also das Wirklichste an ihnen, wire ftir sich selbst ... etwas Unwirkliches, ein Gedankending, ein haltloses Verstrémen ins Leere, der ungehemmte Ubergang und Untergang ins Nichtsein oder der wahrende Selbstverlust.” Cf., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2: Der Thomtsmus als Identitétsystem (Diisseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 130.

52 wu Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

In order, then, to revolve this unbearable contradiction, Being must find actualization by making a “decision against the nothing.” Since this decision cannot be realized in particular beings insofar as they subsist only by virtue of the act of being itself, Siewerth leaps over the third distinction, as it were, and proceeds immediately to the fourth distinction, wherein God as ewe vubsistens (subsistent act of existence) appears as the resolution of the contradiction inherent in Being. Such an approach,

however, will inevitably disfavor genuine analogy: it falls instead into the pattern of a dialectical movement, which begins with contradiction and resolves the contradiction through negation. According to Martin Bieler, in his excellent introduction to Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus, this is one

of the most significant points on which Ulrich differs from Siewerth, from whom he has otherwise assimilated so much.®°? While Siewerth brings his reflection on Being to the point where it reveals its essentially contradictory nature, Ulrich sees the meaning of Being as lying so fully

in its movement into finite actualization (i.e., the ever-present Verendlichungsbewegung, a term Ulrich borrows from Siewerth),”? that there is never a moment when Being is not always already realized, either

in God or in the creature: “If Being as completum et simplex sed non subsistens is seen as a gift from God poured into beings, then it becomes clear that the apparent contradiction of Being is always already resolved.””! The contradiction arises only when we think of Being as “something” lying between God and the creature, which means when we fail to take

the metaphysical structure of reality in its concrete moving character (Verendlichungsbewegung) and instead freeze the dimensions of it into so many abstract, isolated moments.

69. Martin Bieler, “Einleitung,” in HA., xxv—vii. 70. The term Verendlichungsbewegung is difficult to translate except periphrastically. We might translate it as “the essential movement Being has nfo finitude.” 71. Italics mine. Ibid., xxvi: “Wenn das Sein als completum et simplex, sed non subsistens als in die Seienden hinein entausserte Gabe Gottes gesehen wird, dann wird

deutlich, dass der scheinbare Wiederspruch des Seins immer schon gelést ist.” It is crucial to see, once again, that “Being” is not meant here as a universal concept that can be actualized indifferently either in God or in creatures. This would be a waivocity, which both Balthasar and Ulrich plainly reject. To the contrary, what grounds a genuinely analogous notion of Being is precisely the fact that “Being” has no “in itself” but is rather pure mediation, insofar as this indicates that, even while Being meotates between God and man (and therefore avoids equivocity), it does not do so as a universal concept (thus avoiding univocity). Instead, as a “self-less” mediator, it has its own meaning only either as divine being or as creaturely being. The key to analogy, in other words, is being’s nonsubsistence.

The Gift of Being Given m 53

If in general Balthasar’s philosophy —and this volume of GL in particular —has been deeply stamped by Siewerth,” he is closer to Ulrich on this point. And, indeed, Balthasar follows this point to the new method-

ology it demands.” The point in fact requires a different methodology. We can understand the reason a new methodology is needed if we consider what most essentially distinguishes dialectic from analogy, as I have so far presented it. Dialectic proceeds by negation, and analogy affirms positivity. Or, more accurately: dialectic includes positivity within a more comprehensively negative movement, while analogy includes negation within a comprehending positivity.” 4 The key, then, turns on the pecuhar nature of the pouitive. If we consider thought forms, the “positive” — that is, that which is posited, affirmed —is what is taken without demonstration or systematic verification as a place from which to begin, whether as the “given” premises in argumentation or that which is “given” to sensible intuition, upon which knowledge is founded. In short, the positive precedes thinking as the starting point from which thought proceeds. It is not produced from thought itself, but it is rather “received” by thought;

it is that which is “given” to thought to think. In this respect, the positive is what connects thought to what is more than just thought; it introduces a new order into thinking by linking thought to an extracognitional order. Because the “given” is the locus of the encounter of thought and reality, it becomes crucially important what value is accorded to the positive in thinking, in relation to everything else, or what role the positive plays in a particular philosophy. Dialectic, and one might say modern philosophy generally, aims to minimize the significance of the positive as much as possible: we might consider Hegel’s allowing only the emptiest of all possible concepts, sheer indeterminate “Being,” as the

72. Balthasar says explicitly that the two volumes of Herrlichkeit that deal explicitly with the history of metaphysics could not have been written without Siewerth, MW, 90-91. 73. Both Siewerth and Ulrich have likewise explored these methodological implications. See Siewerth, Jetaphystk der Kinobett; and Ulrich, Der Mensch als Anfang: Zur phtlosophtschen Anthropologte der Kindbett (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1970), esp. the second part, “Der Mensch als Kind, personaler Symbolos der Einheit von Reichtum und Armut des geschaffenen Seins als Liebe,” 47-111. 74. This is what characterizes the two av methods, i.e., methodologically. More would need to be said to characterize the full principles of the two approaches. Thus, the sentence is not meant to deny the classical definition of analogy, namely, the inclusion of similarity within ever-greater difference. Unfortunately, there is no room here for an argument about this point, but I would affirm that the methodological priority of the positive is the only way to affirm the formal priority of difference.

54 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

sole given.’ We might also consider Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s critique of Hegel's neglecting the positivity of even this merest of concessions — Being as the sole given —the recognition of which would cause the upset of the whole system.’ 6 Analogy, by contrast, affirms the given precisely because it affirms the positivity of difference; this means, in turn, that the given is received as gift.’’ And so we look to the child, in his first experience of his own existence as a gift. The wonder over this gift, indeed, embraces not only the child’s being, but necessarily also the existence of the mother and eventually all of being as such, insofar as the experience is precisely that it is good to be at all. The further articulations of the meaning of this original gift are not the addition of new elements, or a movement outside the sphere that designates the first experience, but are an unfolding of what is already contained in the beginning. The whole complex structure of the fourfold difference is but the szvide of the sphere of the child’s first conscious experience

of the love of the mother: “The first experience contains what cannot be surpassed, 0 guo mayus cogitart non potest. It is an experience in which distinction slumbers in the unopened unity of the grace of love —at once before

and after the tragedy of its dissolution.”

75. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets et al. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 136-39: “Pure being makes the beginning, because it is pure thought as well as the undetermined, simple immediate, [and because] the first beginning cannot be anything mediated and further determined. . .. But this pure being is the pure abstraction, and hence it is the abvolutely negative, which when taken immediately, is equally nothing.” 76. Schelling, On the Hustory of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1994), 137-41. Schelling eventually insists that a dialectical system such as Hegel’s fails to grasp the character of actuality in objective being (i.e., that which distinguishes that something is from what it is: see Kierkegaard’s notes from Schelling’s Berlin lectures on the “Philosophy of Revelation,” published as an appendix to The Concept of Irony, trans. Howard and Edna Hong [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989], 335). According to Schelling, the recognition of this distinction gives rise to a povitive philosophy. Schmitz echoes Schelling’s critique to some extent when he argues that Hegel’s Wirklichkeit differs from the Thomistic

actualitas in that the former designates mere result, while the latter designates a principle: see Gift, 102—3. Where Schmitz would differ from Schelling is in reading Being’s actuality in the Thomistic sense of a complex principle that includes the various orders of causality (see ibid., 118-19, 123-25) rather than in the Suarezian sense Schelling seems to accept, namely, actuality as sheer “thereness.” 77. See Schmitz, Gift, 35-48.

78. GL 5:617. The “tragedy of its dissolution,” here, refers to what Balthasar had said earlier about the fact that the idyllic beginnings of the child’s existence in the mother’s womb and later in her arms will necessarily be invaded by the violence of life in a fallen world.

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To enter more deeply into the point: since the difference between Being and beings is in fact irreducible from both sides, it is impossible to get either to Being from beings alone (because this will always end up reducing Being to beings to the same extent it has deduced Being from beings) or to beings

from Being alone (because the same occurs from the other direction). It necessarily follows, then, that we must either deny a difference altogether, or we must take them both simultaneously and in their difference. This cannot happen z one or the other. And so we must begin with a “third” distinct from them both, in which both are simultaneously given in their difference. But what is this third? On the one hand, we would want to say, as Siewerth does, that the unity is given in God himself, who is the identity of existence and essence or who is the actuality of the whole fullness of Being. But we immediately run up against a problem: God is not the actualization of Being in the “ontotheological” sense of one being among other beings; rather, he transcends all beings as the “wholly other.” If we always philosophize from within our experience, we have to ask in what way God enters into experience so as to inform our philosophizing with the concrete unity that makes the genuine ontological difference possible. If we say that we attain God philosophically by eliminating the limitations that necessarily determine our experience — somewhat in the manner of the wa negativa or of Aquinas's remo-

tio as it is sometimes interpreted —then we precisely eliminate the actuality aspect, since everything actual in our experience is inevitably bound up with limitation.” We therefore project the form of infinity given in the nonsubsistence of created esse onto God and so lose the simultaneity of Being and beings that we were seeking. On the other hand, if we turn instead to the given unity of Being and beings that appears in every particular being, a particular being taken as one of the countless items we encounter every day, we will receive only a partial instance of that unity, which will remain ambiguous and therefore always relative and provisional. A limited beginning will give rise to a horizon that is too narrow, and it will inevitably tend to absorb the meaning of Being as such into the meaning of its finite “realizations.” In short, it seems that we are caught between a whole that is unattainable (and,

as unattainable, therefore abstract; and, as abstract, therefore partial and not a whole at all), and a part that can only more or less successfully — and always imperfectly — project the whole.

79. It may legitimately be argued that, not actuality per se but only the limited form of actuality is eliminated in this approach —to which I would reply that what is attained by this method is merely the idea of perfect actuality and not an actual experience of actuality. And if actuality meanv precisely reality rather than mere ideality, then what is attained in the idea of actuality is in fact not actuality at all.

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The only way out of this dilemma, then, is to understand the ¢ird, which is the guarantor of the difference in unity of Being and beings, not simply univocally as one thing or another but as déve/f polar in a certain sense. Thus,

unity is both concrete and transcendent. In a certain sense, the child’s experience comprehends the whole, and in a certain sense God comprehends the whole. Or, to affirm both at once, we have to say that the experience of the child is, as it were, the coming to light of the always already comprehended difference between Being and beings in the unity of God. This is the reason for Balthasar’s insistence on the unsurpassable fullness

of the child’s awakening to love. The unity is not first “forged” in the mother’s loving the child, but is always already complete, so to speak. Yet this fullness is not something projected on the basis of a partial and finite instance, but it is itself incomparably (and in this respect “absolutely”)

manifest within that experience. There is no infinity that the child will experience greater than the infinity of its awakening of consciousness, which is the same gesture as his inexhaustible wonder at being permitted to be. But this does not mean that God, as God, appears immediately to the child’s consciousness. Rather, the “immediacy” of God to the child is

nevertheless mediated, first by the mother (whom the child does not at first distinguish from God, or even from Being itself), and then also by the irreducible difference between Being and beings.®° As Balthasar says over and over again, however immediate God may be, we can never reach him except through Being.®! If we refer again to the figure drawn above, representing the fourfold difference, we see the complexity of the structure that emerges: the “metaphysical” relationship between Being and beings is mediated and to that extent interpreted by the “personal” relationship between the child and

80. See Balthasar’s essay “Movement towards God” [= MTG], in Explorations in Theology, vol. 3: Spurttus Creator (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 15-23. 81. See, for example, Balthasar’s criticism of René Descartes, who begins with an

immediacy of God to self-consciousness that bypasses the mediation of Being, GL 5:455-62. Here, Balthasar comments, “But there is one other line which must be drawn from this Cartesian thought which is forgetful of Being to the various forms of spiritual metaphysics of his century (Francis de Sales, Lallement, Bérulle, Fénelon), which in a similarly devout immediacy of God to consciousness which was likewise forgetful of Being, was inclined to ignore the world and our fellow men.” Cf., the comment made in GL 1:447: “In the same way it follows from what we have said, that a ‘supernatural’ piety, oriented to God’s historical revelation, cannot be such unless it is mediated by a ‘natural’ piety, which at this level presupposes and involves a ‘piety of nature’ and a ‘piety of Being.’” This is the reason for Balthasar’s frequent assertion that one cannot be Christian without being in some sense (not necessarily professionally) a philosopher: see EuP, 5, and PCM, 359.

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God, while at the same time the personal relationship between the child and God is mediated and to that extent interpreted by the metaphysical relationship between Being and beings. The unity and difference of each illuminates the unity and difference of the other. It is impossible to say which comes first, if this means that one aspect is fully revealed and then in turn provides a sort of foothold to enter into an understanding of the other aspect. It is impossible to say which comes first because they all come first: the complex whole lies in embryo in the child's first wonder.®” And it is important to see that this wonder is vast enough to contain such a complex whole, because it is not the closed wonder of the child’s

simple discovery of himself but is an infinitely open wonder, a wonder at the absolute greatest of all graces: namely, being permitted to be by another. It is an infinitely open wonder because the child wonders precisely at one who is wholly other, and the mother is the wholly other because the child did nothing himself to bring about such a gift. He can only receive

it as a sheer grace. To Say that all other occurrences happen instde this wonder is another way of saying that all further experiences are a further interpretation of this fundamental experience: the child will never in the course of his life know anything greater than the experience of being given being even if it takes the whole of his life (and more) to learn what it means.

Similarly, the wonder implied in what Heidegger calls the fundamental question of metaphysics — Why is there something rather than nothing? — is in every case a recollection (anamnesis) of the most radical way each of us ever put the question at the moment of our birth of consciousness: Why

do / exist at all rather than not? Why is this world given to me and me to the world? ... To whom do I owe my gratitude?

Polarity: The Moving Image The fourfold difference has provided the background for everything that will follow concerning the question of truth. In particular, it has placed us before the mystery of Being and moreover shown that this mystery remains mystery only to the extent that it involves a fluid relationship between being and person.®° The purpose of the rest of this chapter is to

82. Cf., the comment Balthasar made in 1946: “But these first principles cannot be abstract propositions, since it is precisely not on the basis of abstraction that we arrive at them: they must necessarily be concrete and immediate encounters, not only with the /aws of Being, but with Being itself.” CathPhil, 150. 83. Many authors have noted that Balthasar’s metaphysics surpasses itself toward a meta-anthropology: See Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology”; Scola, Hans

58 m Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

amplify aspects of this relationship, in order to bring into relief the “dynamic” character of being itself, and its relation not only to act but indeed to action

in its concrete sense. To this end, I turn first to a pair of later writings, the central section of Balthasar’s Epilog and a brief section from TL 2. Our discussion of these sections will then be used to illuminate two related sections from the earlier writing The Truth of the World. Balthasar wrote the Epilog at the end of his life, immediately after finishing the last volume of the trilogy, in response to requests from friends that he provide some “way in” to his Mewterwerk, which over the years had

grown to epic proportions. Rather than summarize the contents of that work (in the manner of an American “digest,” as he put it),84 he made a new beginning, a new attempt to think through in a succinct fashion problems that had occupied him from the beginning. This book is therefore helpful, not only because it presents some of his most mature thoughts on these subjects, but also because of the great unity, comprehensiveness, and elegance of the presentation.®° The first section, “The Vestibule,” offers a dialogue between Christianity and the world religions. The final section, “The Sanctuary,” is an exploration of the central Christian mysteries. The middle and longest section, “The Threshold,” deals with the basic questions of metaphysics.®° There are seven subsections in this “threshold”: the last three are on the transcendentals, which I will discuss in the chapter 5; the first is on the role of the thinking of being — which is the first

thing present to the mind (Aquinas) but nevertheless that which must always be questioned (Aristotle) —in Christianity. I will focus, here, on sections 2 through 4, which evaluate the polar structure of created being. The metaphysical section of the Epilog is concerned with explicating the mystery of created being in its “pluriform” unity in relation to the unity of divine being. The initial question driving this section, then, is “Where is unity to be found in finite being?” The answers given to this question are

Urs von Balthasar: A Theological Style (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1991), 84—100; and Disse, Metaphystk der Singularitat, \7tf. Balthasar recognizes this as a central theme in Maximus Confessor (See Kosmusche Liturgte: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners [= KL], 2nd ed. [Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961]); it is moreover a major theme in Ulrich’s Homo Abyssus. Disse, however, is correct to insist that a metaphysics

cannot be thereby replaced but must be transformed. The question of meta-anthropology will be addressed in chapter 4. 84. E, 7. 85. According to a good source, Balthasar composed this book in about two days. Having emerged all in one breath, so to speak, it has a perfect unity and is one of the few books by Balthasar without an extraordinary number of footnotes. 86. On the method and structure of the Epilog, see Chantraine, “L’Epilogue de la trilogie.”

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continually taken up into new contexts and thereby relativized. Where the fundamental “chasm” in being seems to be bridged in interiority or “subjectivity” (which is expressed paradigmatically in human self-consciousness), this interiority is itself not self-contained but is constituted in its very “expressing itself,” that is, in its concrete relating to other beings (communication). However, the possibility of communication is, in turn, given by the Being that comprehends the particular beings. There is clearly a circularity here, but it is not a vicious one. Rather, it is an essentially fruitful circularity because it is the “moving image’ of the divine unity. We will see more specifically how this is so when we turn at the end of this section to Balthasar’s discussion in TL 2 of the meaning of difference in God.

Being ano Beings Balthasar initially revisits the paradox inherent in all of Being itself, which

we saw strung out between the second and third distinctions in the previous section. The “readiness” of Being to actualize essences is always greater than the essences that are actualized (Being over beings).*” At the same time, since Being itself does not exist, it cannot produce its own essences, even if it has the possibility for these essences in itself. This paradox, again, turns on Aquinas's definition of Being: “Esse significat aliquid completum et simplex, sed non subsistens” (de Pot. 1, 1), which Balthasar

translates in a straightforward manner: “Actuality [Wirklichsein = realbeing| designates something perfect and simple, but without existence [Bestand] in itself (but only in individual beings).”°° Whereas Balthasar previously showed how this difference was unified in God and manifest in the experience of the child coming to consciousness, here he develops this unity in difference further. The unity of Being and essence in God is revealed concretely in the hierarchy of being in the world, which is ordered according to the depth of interiority. At the lower level, we see vegetative life, which internalizes its environment, albeit unconsciously. Next, animals do so consciously, but not self-consciously. Finally, human beings internalize more than just their environment (Umwelt): they internalize a

world (Welt), and they can do so because they possess their environment and themselves self-consciously.®?

87. E, 38. 88. Ibid.: “Wirklichsein besagt etwas Vollstindiges und Einfaches, aber ohne Bestand in sich (sondern nur in einzelnen Wesen).” 89. Although Balthasar does not mention it explicitly in this context, a central point in his thinking generally is that a// beings, without exception, have something

60 uw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

The reason “interiority” is the manifestation of God's unity is that it represents the coming together of existence and essence: We see [the unity in God] by virtue of the fact that there is an ascending hierarchy of beings in the world, which, according to this hierarchy, have an ever clearer perception of [or: internalize ever more

clearly] both their actuality and their actualized essence, or more precisely: the capacity (dynam) given to their actualized essence for self-actualization (energeta). And insofar as they have this capac-

ity by virtue of the actuality given to their essence, they are given an insight into actuality in general.?° Becoming aware or “taking in” ( In the dialectic of action, decision has to be made within

the interplay of opposing vital drives and interests, within a more comprehensive context of the meaning of a part in relation to the sense of the whole. In making decisions, a person particularizes himself, which always means at the same time both gain and renunciation or loss. Moreover, such

action always faces judgment, and it must contend not only with the opposition of good and evil but indeed with their outright contradiction. Thus, Blondel points to the existential phenomenon of renunciation or loss (lerésts) as the originating ground for what turns out to be merely its inadequate symbol in formal logic, namely, negation (antiphasis).” 6 However, the total contradiction between good and evil becomes the enabling space for the relative opposition of logical contrariety. This leads to our first observation. Formal logic has its basis in the principle of noncontradiction. If we see that formal logic is constituted only 174. TL 2:29-35. 175. Blondel, “Principe élémentaire d’une logique de la vie morale,” in Les premiers écrits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: PUF, 1956), 123-47, cited in TL 2:30. 176. TL 2:31.

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in relation to real being, we can affirm the principle of noncontradiction without denying the possibility of rea/ contradiction (evil) in the existen-

tial or moral order. The counterapproach is represented by Hegel. He gives priority to logic in his integration of ideality and reality. And so, while he seems to take evil even more seriously by making it a logical contradiction, nevertheless, since it is in fact in the first place /ogical, evil gets

reduced to mere contrariety, and so it gets relativized as a moment in the necessary progression of the dialectic.!’” Thus, once again Hegel shows himself to be simultaneously too radical, in his denial of the principle of noncontradiction, and not radical enough, because a complete contradiction always turns out to be a mere relative, and eventually sublimated, difference. Blondel’s perspective, by contrast, allows us to take both evil and logic seriously. In fact, the continuity within discontinuity that it implies

provides a new way to interpret the traditional metaphysical identification of evil and nothingness. To the extent that logic and being are taken to be identical (essentialism), the problem of evil forces the alternatives of evil into being nothing at all, or of evil having a “positive” significance and thus forcing us into a Gnostic dualism. If, however, we understand that logic is united with being within a radical discontinuity, we can affirm the real existence of evil without, for all of that, “essentializing” evil into a positive being with a positive ground. To put it another way, this allows

us to speak existentially of contradiction without denying the integral structure of logic. But this is because the inner structure of logic is not complete in itself by itself, but is complete (in itself) only in being rooted

within a transcendent ground, that is, in the drama of concrete reality. Thus, even if logic essentially excludes contradiction, it is not simply indifferent to it. As Balthasar puts it, Blondel sums up with the affirmation that “ideological logic is only a partial expression of the dialectic of action.”!”® Next to Blondel in Balthasar's understanding of logic stands Paul Claudel, with his dense and difficult treatise art poétique, a work Claudel himself called “a mother-work, a book that I feel is full of books.”!”? Without entering into the details of this treatise, which is primarily a development of conNalsJance as co-natsdance, that is, knowledge as a “being-born together” (because, Claudel says, no one can be born alone), we can note the salient 177. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1: Introduction ano the Concept of

Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 194. 178. TL 2:30. 179. Paul Claudel, notes to Lart poétique, in Oeuvre Poétique, 1060: “C’est une oeuvre-mére, un livre que je sens plein de livres.” This sentence is quoted from a letter Claudel wrote to Frizeau in July 1905.

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points. Claudel explains that the one thing common to all realities in the universe is movement, and that even what seems to be static is in fact involved in a particular kind of motion. Now, if movement, which is a going

outside of oneself, is positively constitutive of the identity of things, then it ultimately follows that there “can be logically no A without, 1) the finite progression of non-A’s that determine it and, 2) without a relation of this entire finite series of determined-delimited things to an unlimited reality that determines them all.”!8° Thus, because things transcend themselves in movement, things depend on others for their meaning. This is true of each, and it is true of them all, taken as a cosmos. The conclusion that Claudel draws is that knowledge means the simultaneous connection in which each needs every other member of the whole, and the whole in turn needs each,!®! and that these two reciprocal affirmations depend on the fundamental difference between God and the world. The point for us, in particular, is to see how such a logic, rooted in real being, makes difference concretely positive before it is abstractly negative. !5 Moreover, it shows that the mutual relation of positivities needs to be grounded in the basic God-world difference: this is therefore precisely the logic needed for a dramatic analogy of being (as opposed to mere dialectic), which alone is capable of providing an adequate interpretation of the “being-in-action” that we saw emerge in chapter | from the fourfold ontological difference.

Space and Time The notion of truth as Gestalt not only roots logical meaning more deeply in being than we generally suspect, but it reciprocally roots being in meaning. Indeed, it entails a profoundly new sense of olyectivity, a new sense of the concrete shape of space and time. Pieper repeatedly laments in his writings the loss of a sense of the ontological truth of things, a sense that beings themselves are true zz their very being, for the sake of a merely logical, propositional notion of truth.!®> For Pieper, recovering this sense means

180. TL 2:35: “[Damit ist gesagt, dafs] es logisch kein A gibt ohne 1. die endliche Reihe von Nicht-A, die es bestimmt, und 2. ohne einen Bezug dieser ganzen unendlichen

Reihe von Bestimmt-Begrenzten zu einem bestimmenden Unbegrenzten.” 181. Claudel expresses this reciprocity in a striking pair of sentences whose pithiness defy translation: “Connaitre donc, c’est étre: cela qui manque a tout le reste.” art poétique, 153. And on page 135 of the same work: “Ma richesse est inépuisable! C’est posséder tout |’Univers que de manquer tout |’Univers et de lui manquer moi-méme.” 182. See TL 2:35: “B, C usf. sind gleichzeitig (abstrakt) die Negation von A, aber (konkret) seine Mitkonstituenten, sofern ihr Anderssein A positiv mitbestimmt.” 183. See in particular Pieper, Die Wahrheit der Dinge, 11-31.

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recovering a sense that things are known already by God, a sense in which God's (creative) knowledge of things w their being. Affirming the validity of Pieper’s insistence, however, does not relieve us from the obligation

of interpreting it with great care. The need for such an interpretation becomes clear in light of Heidegger's objection that the grounding of the “ontological” truth of Being in the relation it has to the divine intellect, far from preserving its ontological dimension, binds this dimension ever more irretrievably to “mind.”!*4 To avoid falling into an understanding of God's knowledge of things as the source of their ontological truth that could justify Heidegger’s objection, we must avoid projecting a conventional view of the mind-being relation onto God. We can do so primarily by seeing that God's knowledge of the world is mediated to human understanding —™m a way that ts tndtspensable —by the truth of being. The meaning of this suggestion will become clear at the end of this subsection (and in chapter 5), when we return to this problem. The point is to recover a sense that things have

an ontological truth already in their concrete and even “physical” way of being. To put it in a word, if truth and therefore knowledge, as Gestalt, is necessarily in some respect concrete (physical), it is because physical being is already in some significant sense a kind of truth and physical relation is already a kind of knowing. Again, this topic would require more extensive elaboration than I can offer here, but it is at least possible to indicate a few basic principles in relation to space and time. The key to understanding the ontological truth character of space and time is to see that they can both essentially be understood as event-like Gestalten.!*° I referred in chapter | to Heidegger’s notion of temporality as ek-stasis. Ek-stasis is, for Heidegger, the decisive characteristic of Dasein. Heidegger's notion, in fact, has some relation to Kant’s explanation of the forms of intuition, because Kant, like Heidegger, asserts that time is not an objective property of beings in the world, as something that so to speak exists in itself, but is rather a function of the inner structure of “subjectivity. 186 The point, for Heidegger, is that the possibility of time,

184. See Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrhett, 37-38. According to Heidegger, the linking of the truth of Being to the divine mind was one of the fateful steps in the gradual “subjectification” of philosophy and the forgetting of Being. For a brief account of this process, see Manfred Frank, “Subjectivity and Individuality,” 10-11. 185. Once again, we refer to Balthasar’s explicit connection of the notions of space, time, Gestalt, and event, in GL 1:33—34. 186. See Kant, CPR, A 33 = B 49: “Time is nothing but the form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of our selves and of our inner state. It cannot be a determination of outer appearances; it has neither to do with shape nor position, but with the relations of representations in our inner state.”

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even in its objective sense of “clock” time, depends on the possibility of transcendence, and transcendence is not the mode of being of objects, but is rather the very being of Dasein (and Dasein alone).!*” Similarly, Heidegger insists that the “dis-severance” (Hnt-fernung) that is the essence of space is likewise grounded on the “transcending” structure of Dasein: “Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space; but, the subject (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial.” 188 The “Ent-fernung” is an expression of the entvetzen-entziicken (displacement-rapture) structure of ek-stasis that we discussed earlier, and this connection is ultimately what allows Heidegger to identify being and time. Balthasar, however, as we have seen, understands both subjects and objects in terms of a kind of transcendence or ek-stasis; that is, they both are simultaneously spontaneous and receptive in relation to each other, a relation therefore both reciprocally (and asymmetrically) dependent and genuinely creative or fruitful. And this entails several significant consequences. Borrowing Heidegger’s notion in which space and time are constituted in transcendence, and affirming, contrary to Heidegger, that transcendence 1s ewentially reciprocal and thus basically something that beings do fogether (whether subject and object,

object and object, or subject and subject) —to the extent that there ts no transcendence without reciprocity —we can say that both space and time are

Gestalten or events, produced in every case as the fruit of union. This entails a sense of space primarily as spherically curved and a sense of time as primarily kairos and decision, and it sees both as being the very ground of truth. I will take each of these points briefly in sequence. There is a connection between, on the one hand, the sense in which the objectivity of truth means nothing more than “universally valid” and, on

the other hand, an understanding of space primarily in terms of coordinates on a grid: they are both abstract formalizations. In a way, this abstract formalism can be summed up symbolically by the straight lines of geom-

etry, which Descartes took as the fundamental model for both thought and the extension of things in space.!®? In contrast to a conventional under-

standing of “objectivity” in the “linear” sense of universal validity or the formal consistency of the logic of geometry, Balthasar characterizes the 187. On Heidegger’s notion of it being only “subjects” that transcend, see J. L. Marion, Reduction and Givennesds, 133.

188. Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 24, 146. 189. The “method” of the single science, the mathesis universale to which all sci-

ences (including both philosophy and physics) can be reduced, is modeled on that of geometry: see rule IV of “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, vol. 1, 9-14. On extension as geometrical, see rule 14, 54-65.

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Gestalt character of space, which we find, for example, in Goethe, in terms of “spherical curvature.”!”9 In the conventional sense, abstract lines suffice to characterize both thought and space because the “objectivity” of objects is constituted by the unidirectional “ray” of subjective intentionality. For Balthasar, in contrast, objective space is not only curved (which may yet be conceived merely two-dimensionally), but spherically curved, precisely because it is an encounter between the mutually receptive and irreducible spontaneities of subject and object (or object and object, etc.).!7!

The encounter, the Gestalt, is constituted in the subject’s and the object's both transcending themselves, both going outside of themselves ek-statically, and thereby disrupting the vector-directionality of straight lines, not in the sense of deconstructionist fracturing but in the bending of things into real wholes, that is, three-dimensional spheres. This three- (and by implication four-, insofar as the real objectivity of the whole necessarily includes a relation to time) dimensionality of space

is the only understanding adequate to the organic complexity of the relation between things that occurs in knowing, the paradoxical relation between unity and difference that takes place there. Unity and difference are, after all, spatial metaphors, or we might say conversely that nearness and distance are to be understood by analogy to the metaphysical concepts. The organic ordering of space, in the building and architecture of both humans and animals, the relating of distance and nearness, lines and shapes, into a meaningful, useful, and beautiful whole is thus a sort of fulfillment of the very meaning of space, and not something that is “tacked onto” space as some mere indifferently neutral backdrop. This is also why space itself has an event-like character: it is, in fact, the event of encounter between beings in which they spontaneously go out to meet and welcome each other, which means that they “give each other space” and at the same time fill it. But in light of what we have already said about Gestalt and mutually intrinsic relation, this means that space is not simply dead extenslo (extension), but is itself already, one could say, creative activity, and its being essentially creative is directly related to its being spherically curved. It is crucial to note that this affirmation is not mere metaphor, 190. See Georges de Schrijver, Le merveilleux accord de Uhomme et de Dieu, 63-64.

Here, de Schrijver gives an account of Balthasar’s presentation of Goethe in ADS. It is interesting to note, moreover, that Balthasar entitled the first section on Goethe in GL 5: “1. The mean as a form of resistance: the curve” (Mitte als Widerstand: Die Kurve), GL 5:339. Clearly, since Goethe is so to speak the representative of Gestalt, there is a connection in Balthasar’s mind between Gestalt and curves. 191. Cf., GL 5:369, on nature in Goethe as the mutual indwelling of subject and object: it is perfect immanence but without the removal of transcendence.

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which means mere anthropomorphism. The act of welcoming, giving space, and filling it that occurs between human beings is not simply a moral act

played out in (dead) space, which for its part is just “there,” but is in fact a human, personal recapitulation of the essential structure of space in general. Space, as the fruit of the union of reciprocally transcending beings, is a Gestalt. Similarly, time is not simply monological ek-stasis or the self-transcendence of subjectivity, since transcendence is always reciprocal, but it is itself a fruct, a kind of whole generated from the mutual relation of beings. I already mentioned certain aspects of Balthasar’s understanding of temporality in relation to being in the chapter 1, and it is appropriate in this context to refer back to what was said there. The development of the notion of Gestalt in relation to the act of knowing or the event of truth, however, allows us to add further decisive elements, particularly the reciprocal character of temporality. For this, we receive help from Ulrich. In his discussion of knowledge as kennen and erkennen, Ulrich makes the claim that in the act of knowing, the knower enacts (vollzieht) the temporality of the ontological constitution of that which is known.!”* The presupposition in Ulrich’s account is a notion of knowledge as a fulfilling movement of creativity, which is so because of the essential gift-character of being. In other words, according to Ulrich, knowing is the knower’s “carrying to term” (austragen) the ontological genesis of the thing known. This means, specifically, that through knowledge, the thing known “comes-to” (Zu-kunft) itself, which is the “transcendental” constitution of futurity. In this, we see as it were the spontaneous or creative aspect of knowing. At the same time, insofar as knowing is an affirming reception of the reality of the object known, the knower confirms the object’s essence (Wesen), that which it fav been (ge-wesen). We might recall here the imperfect tense, indicating continuity in the past or repetition, that Aristotle “built into” his term for the “what” of a thing, “to tién einai.” Finally, in the actuality of the act of knowing, the knower synthesizes, or perhaps crystallizes, the presence of the object (Gegenwart) out of the two “ontological distances” of the future and the past. Aristotle speaks of the present “moment” as being a sort of middle term uniting past and future.!?° But we have seen that every middle term is a creative fruit: the presence is not one of the various passing sequences of moments, but it is a creative event wherein past and future are synthetically brought together. It is precisely here,

192. Ulrich, “Der Tod in Erkenntnis und Liebe,” 161. 193. See Aristotle, Physics, 8.1.251b17—27.

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within the creative act of “presencing,” which involves both the subject and object reciprocally, that we can insert the whole dynamic of manifestation, decision, and grasping (in being grasped) that I have used to characterize the act of knowing. The key, for us, is to see that such a Gestalt, as the “shape” of time, is in a sense nothing more than a fundamental unfolding of the logic of gift. There is no such thing as gift without relation to an “other”; the fullness implied in the word gift arises only out of the difference implied in giving. But this means that what it w in itself is not a simple, circumscribed “all at once’ “there-ness’; rather, it requires, out of its most inward exigence, a “gradual unfurling.” A gift has to take time. It “arrives” —that is, it comes from another. And it also “lasts” —that is, it is truly given (and so not imme-

diately taken back). The temporality of knowing, then, results from the gift character of being. If gift characterizes the essence of being in general (and not just human being), then a dynamic that is in some sense anal-

ogous to the relation of knowing, such as we have described it, will be played out in the ground of the real. The “nearness” and the “distance” of temporality are the Gestalt of union that creates fruit and fruit that creates union in the foundational relations among things. The “personal” quality of time, then —that is, the various dramas that it entails, involving deci-

sion, endurance, loss, patience, celebration, and so forth —is again a recapitulation in human being of the meaning of time itself. The purpose of this understanding of the nature of time and space is twofold. In the first place, it is to see that objective being, the physical things in the world, and indeed physicality itself, can be understood already as a kind of knowing.!”4 Once we saw the Gestalt nature of truth, and the necessary physical dimension of knowing that followed from it, we were given the possibility of seeing relation in general as analogous to knowing. This possibility has an important immediate implication. The Thomistic

insistence on the convertibility of truth and being and the more recent stance of phenomenology, which requires seeing an intrinsic reciprocal correlation between being and being known, raise the perennial question:

Would things exist at all if they were not known? Aquinas asserts that they would not, but that this does not mean they must be the object of human knowledge. Rather, truth and being are convertible because the very existence of things is their being known by God.!”° To a modern mind, such an answer seems gratuitous or improperly theological; in fact,

194. We refer again to Claudel’s notion of connaissance as a “being born together.” 195. Aquinas, De ver, 1, 2 and 2, 14.

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rather than accept such an answer, phenomenology tends instead to disregard the question as essentially moot. It is asserted that the notion of being without some relation to mind falls to the retortion argument: it is self-contradictory. Such an answer, however, cannot help but prompt in common sense the suspicion of sophistry. It seems in any event to make the “objective” world somehow dependent on our knowing of it, and there-

fore in an inappropriate sense a function of our knowledge. Balthasar’s notion of Gestalt, however, allows a different approach. If all relation is genuinely analogous to knowing, then the assertion that things can exist without actually being known (in some analogous sense) reduces essentially to the assertion that things can exist without being in relation, which is a much more obvious impossibility. We can thus say that knowledge has a genuinely ontological, constitutional, or creative function, without in the least suggesting any sort of solipsistic idealism. !7° Actual human knowing, on the other hand, attains in a creative manner to the very being of things precisely because it is a recapitulation at a cognitive level of the relation that co-constitutes things in their metaphysical identity and difference, and in their physical nearness and distance in space and time. This sense of knowing as the recapitulation of ontological relations, in turn, leads us to the second purpose of this understanding of space and time: specifically, it allows us to see that any generation of “wholes” or Gestalten is the bringing into being of a kind of truth,

and that therefore the productive activity that gives rise to such Gestalten is itself a kind of knowing. Such praxis, in other words, is not simply the opposite of theorta. Rather, action has the inner form of knowing, just as knowing is a kind of creative action. To speak more generally, they are both inseparable aspects of the making and enjoying of culture. I will thus close this chapter with some reflections on the relationship between truth, work, culture, and community.

196. Aquinas himself, in fact, in De ver, 2, 14, asserts that God’s creative knowing of things is mediated in two ways: first, it is mediated by the divine will (an assertion that accords nicely with what Balthasar says about how God's creative knowing of things in the divine ideas is in some respect identical to any particular thing’s “mission,” i.e., the task it is “sent” to achieve in the world, which we discussed in chapter 1); second, it is mediated by the vecondary causality of creatures. Thus, if we interpret secondary causality as analogous to this primary causality, and therefore as analogous to creative knowing, then we can say that God creates things only by means of their creatively knowing each other. If we understand knowing, here, conversely in the

analogous sense of creative relations (i.e., “Adam knew Eve and she bore a son ...), then we can justify once again the ontological role of mutual relation: the gift of being given.

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Whole as System, Whole as Community The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing. — George MacDonald

According to Aquinas, truth is the final end of the entire cosmos.!?” There

is, in other words, nothing greater than truth, nothing to come after it. But if this is so, it becomes a matter of urgency to ask after its most basic

form or structure. If the structure of truth is the immediate union of subject and object, a “union” wholly circumscribed by the soul of the subject —which is a common way of interpreting the notion that the terminus ad quem of truth is in the mind of the knower!?®— then the final end of

the cosmos, its purpose or meaning, is to be concentrated into that single point of immediacy. Anything that remains outside is unintelligibility and untruth. Such a view of truth has its model in the vytem, if we take system to mean the ultimate reducibility of parts to a single first principle, such that the parts do not “add” anything whatsoever to that principle. This system is characterized by a pure immanence that generates both form and content “from below,” that is, from within itself. But this model

will necessarily have two, diametrically opposed faces. Because it is a total immanent possession, there is nothing in the cosmos that resists identification with the self, and so the final form of truth will be the noésis

noéseds. On the other hand, because of the undeniable multiplicity of knowers in the universe, the whole will be at the same time a conglomeration of wholly unrelated “atom”-souls, each enclosing everything and therefore having no need of, and thus no openness to, the others.!?? We see a radically different image emerge when we affirm that truth has its terminus ad quem in the Gestalt, such as it has been elaborated in this chapter. In this case, the “circle” of the subject-object relation does not come to a close in the subject alone. Instead, the circle closes in a concrete whole, and only therefore does it close in a certain way in the subject and in a certain

way in the object. But to the extent that the “closing” happens primarily in what lies beyond both subject and object, the structure of truth itself has

197. Aquinas, SCG 1:1. 198. Aquinas, De ver, 4, 2, ad 7. 199. This duality expresses the same logic as that which connects Parmenides’ monistic “Being” to the Greek atomists, as to its coherent consequence and inevitable outcome. On this passage in early Greek philosophy, see Harold Cherniss, “The Characteristics and Effects of Presocratic Philosophy,” Journal of the Htstory of Ideas 12 (1951): 319-45.

Truth as Gestalt = 25/

an inward openness to more which ws precisely constitutive of tts completion. With this

affirmation, we come as far as we possibly can from an “identitarian” model of truth. If truth has its ultimate locus, that is, its resting place, in a concrete totality, the final form of truth can only be the most comprehensively con-

crete totality that there is: the concrete cosmos itself, now taken as a real Gestalt in itself and therefore as a community. In other words, while truth ending in the mind means truth is system, truth ending in the Gestalt means that truth ws community. In this latter case, the “completion” of the truth relation becomes literally “objective”; the truth of things, their complete sense, is not something first possessed by the individual knower, but rather by the individual-transcending community, and is alvo possessed by the individual to the extent that he is immersed in the community. I will note some conse-

quences of this understanding in conclusion. First, to say that the “ends” of truth come together in the Gestalt and ultimately in the community understood as a real Gestalt, makes truth “objective” in a way that does not prohibit but rather enables a profound freedom. The objectivity is not in the first place an abstract form possessed by individuals, like Kant’s “subjective universal,” but a concrete life that both contains and supports individuals in their cognitive life. With such support, the individual can play out the drama of seeking, losing, and finding ultimate meaning —in a way I will elaborate further in the following chapter —on a “stage” that allows the meaning to be genuinely meaningful.

Second, “landing” truth in the concrete Gestalt entails a new way of understanding the relation between action and thought, a way that avoids both extrinsicism and reduction. We tend to think of “ideality” (the realm of thought) and “reality” (the realm of action) as, so to speak, parallel uni-

verses, which relate only by reflecting each other from a distance, and which would never make genuine “contact” even if each were extended into infinity. Thus, from this perspective, thoughts are true when they most perfectly “mirror” reality, and the passage “beyond mere ideas” into reality is made only by putting already-completed thoughts into action. In this respect, action is not intrinsic to thought av thought. If, by contrast, we exchange “intelligible essence,” taken in a wholly abstract sense, for the concrete Gestalt as the basic vessel of meaning, then the integrity of

thought as thought is seen to occur only in its transcending itself into the radically different order of action. Likewise, we understand that action itself is not empty positivity or sheer physical movement: it is all the more action the more it is the bringing into being of intelligible form. The perspective offered by Balthasar becomes clearest in contrast with

Hegel’s and Marx's. On the one hand, Hegel deduces the real from the ideal: history becomes a necessary unfolding of the concept. Marx, on the 252 uw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

other hand, deduces the ideal from the real: “ideology” is a superstructure, that is, it is a mere epiphenomenon of material conditions. In contrast to both, Balthasar’s Gestalt joins ideality and reality in a vingle whole, but it joins them as radically different orders. Thus, from this perspective, thought becomes relatively distinct thought only 2 transcending itself into

reality (initially as a real word, but in principle in all forms of work and action), while action has its own relative autonomy only in being the realization of intelligibility. According to what we saw in the previous two sections, we might say that both ideality and reality are crystallized into integral, self-related wholes only in their inner self-surpassing relation to the other order. In other words, it follows that truth is tntellectually grasped only in being concretely lived; as Heracleitus once said, truth is not something we merely know or speak but something we do.*°° That which makes

a thing intelligible is precisely the same thing that makes it transcend the (mere) intelligence — not in the sense of being beyond knowing, but more specifically in the sense of being ummanent only to the thinking that is already beyond itself. The notion of truth as Gestalt affirms both the intelligibility of action and the action of intelligibility. Once we see the intrinsic relation between thought and action that is implied in the proposal of the Gestalt as the basic vessel of truth, action acquires a further significance in epistemology. In chapter 1, it was shown that action is not something that simply follows upon being, but it also in a certain sense gives rise to being: action is the self-manifestation of a thing because it is through action that a thing becomes what it is. In this chapter, we have seen that self-manifestation, as epiphany, is as it were the seed of truth: it is where truth begins. Moreover, we “filled out” the notion of epiphany as a complex event of the giving and receiving of self in relation to others. The point for us in this context is that this activity lies at the foundation of the very possibility of truth. Self-giving and receiving action is, so to speak, the proper atmosphere in which things can Ce true. Action becomes an epiphany in persevering work into which one pours one’s substance, in self-sacrificial deeds that attest to a reality beyond appearance, and in the personal relationships that one forms by committing, not one's surfaces but one’s being. Such action, then, “builds up” community because it serves to form an intelligible whole, a Gestalt. In a community that thus comes about, the light of Being shines in and through the things of the world and allows them to show themselves as 200. DK B 112: “séphonein areté megiste kai sophié, alétheia /egein kai potein kata physin epaiontas.” Cf. St. Paul’s famous use of the word truth as a verb: alétheuein (Eph 4:15).

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they are. Whenever, by contrast, the impetus for authentic self-gift in work

is drained from a culture, whenever the cultural forms of epiphany are worn away, then the intelligibility of things begins to dim. I will take this theme up again in the next chapter. Here, I wish to insist that each of the elements discussed above have their final form in their function as part

of concrete community. Thus, the otherwise abstract notion of space and time must be understood in terms of their most “filled” (concrete) sense: namely, as place and history.-9! The “word” and “language” becomes

dialogue; it finds its unity only “in the Gestalt of speech and answer.”?"" Thought and action become the joint modes of the “figuring forth’? of truth in the form of work. Culture as a whole, then, from this perspective, is understood in its most fundamental essence as the incarnation of truth, as its indispensable body. Human truth can no more be without culture than the human being can be without a body. Truth as community, in sum, does not overcome the “closedness” of system by seeking to avoid the “completion” of clear and stable forms or genuine wholes. Rather, it affirms that real transcendence, the openness to the ever-greater and thus the avoidance of system, is best conceived in terms of frutfulness. But fruitfulness requires reciprocity; indeed, it requires community. One cannot be fruitful alone. The destruction of “fixed forms,” that is, of Gestalten, though it seems to represent the most direct route to the mystery of absence, to transcendence, in the long run fails that transcendence; it leads to the pure immanence of the “monological act,” precisely because it is only in the Gestalt that the other can be truly encountered as other. The more perfect the presence, that is, the more intimate the union, the more the result is transcendent of that union. It is in this respect, in truth, that the immanence of c/ovure is not at odds with the openness of transcendence, even if that openness is in the end the final word. But if “openness” is the “final” word of truth —and if, as Balthasar puts it, truth forms conclusions only at the service of an openness for evergreater truth — then this final end is likewise the very first beginning: “truth is always an opening, not only to itself and in itself, but to further truth.”24

And this is ultimately because truth is not death, but life.

201. TL 1:204-6. 202. See ibid., 173. 203. Phillip Sidney translated Aristotle’s numevis as a “figuring forth” of ideas, and he understood it as the basic function of poetry. See Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1966), 25. 204. TL 1:39.

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Meta-anthropology The Person as Actor of Truth Aber vielleicht kann man den Menschen und sein gesammeltstes Abbild, den Kiinstler, nicht besser definieren, als indem man sagt, er sei das einzige Wesen, von dem zuviel verlangt werde.! — Elizabeth Brock-Sulzer Chaque homme a été créé pour étre le témoin et |’acteur d’un certain spectacle, pour en déterminer en lui le sens.” — Paul Claudel

Meta-anthropology as Dramatic Role Every Gestalt described in the last chapter, and indeed in any of the chap-

ters up to this point, has proved to be a whole made up of parts in tension. The basic tension we have seen is that between the finite and infinite (however analogously it appears in any particular case). If these two “aspects” are in tension, it is because they are not simple opposites, but rather have their essential difference only in relation to each other —in other words, because they are a polarity. However, we have seen that a polarity is always a volatile phenomenon; it demands to be resolved, whether reductively or dramatically. Up to this point, I have shown how polarities can remain polarities only within Gestalts of various sorts. The moment we see that every Gestalt itself represents a certain polarity, the nature of the problem becomes fundamentally different. The question,

1. But perhaps there is no better way to define the human being and his most concentrated image, the artist, than to say that he is the sole being from whom too much is demanded. 2. Each human being was created to be the witness and the actor of a certain spectacle, and to determine its meaning. 255

in this case, is the following: Is there a way that the irreducibly different tensions that make up any “relative” whole —that is, transcendence and immanence, infinity and finitude, sensibility and supersensibility, and so forth —can converge in a single, paradigmatic whole, such that their difference can be preserved without the danger of fragmentation? To put it another way, is there a fundamental unity capable of holding all the relative unities together? What we are looking for, in a word, is a foundation for the possibility of truth. The problem of grounding the possibility of truth has been often addressed in the history of philosophy, and so it is essential to point out

how the nature of the problem in the present context differs from the usual way the problem is conceived. In modern philosophy, the problem was understood as that of finding a single principle into which all knowledge ultimately resolves, so that, once this principle is grasped with certainty, al/ knowledge falls into secure possession. If, however, the truth in question is not a system of interlocking propositions, each implying the others, but is in the end a Gestalt that is nonreductive by its very nature, a Gestalt that accepts unity only when it can see that unity shared among parts that are essentially different from each other, even while it refuses any difference that does not manifest a deeper unity, then the problem of foundations is not that of finding a unity to which all difference reduces, but rather of finding a perfect unity that at the ame lime liberates difference. If truth itself, as we saw in the last chapter, cannot

be truth without subsisting within irreducible tensions, then the question of founding truth is the question of not only allowing the possibility of tensions, but of producing them. It has become a commonplace in recent philosophy to reject the need to establish a ground, or an “absolute foundation,” for truth. Such a need, it is said, is merely an expression of the modernist fetish for system, control, and domination. But, we may ask, in order to abandon this “fetish,” do we have to remain content with only partial, relative, and temporary “truths” without a foundation, which, in the final analysis, cannot be said to be truths at all? Do we have to concede from the outset the impossibility of establishing foundations in any other sense than that of modernist closed systems, or is there such a thing as a foundation that avoids the modernist tendency without surrendering its founding function? This chapter will attempt to show how Balthasar’s dramatic approach provides the possibility of establishing a foundation that is, in principle, perfect, which does not preclude but in fact ensures the various open tensions of existence. For Balthasar, the establishment of epistemological

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foundations is the establishment of tension, and it is indeed the necessary precondition for tensions. In Balthasar’s philosophy, the resolution of the problem of foundations, and therefore the establishment of basic tensions, falls in a particular way to the human person as a fundamental task. It is not that there would necessarily be no such tensions without man —such a possibility is no longer one we can raise. Rather, it is that man comes into the world at the intersection of tensions; they cut through him to the heart of his existence. He may therefore not remain indifferent to them: it is in every case too late. The nature of the tensions is such that man participates in them in the form of being called to decision —to personal decision, but with implications extending far beyond his own person. From Balthasar’s

perspective, then, the problem of founding truth can be resolved only through dramatic engagement.

In Balthasar’s terminology, the philosophy that sees man as “caught up’ in the tensions that make up existence and as called upon to make a decision with respect to them, is essentially a meta-anthropology. He introduces this term in contrast to the classical term metaphysics.? Metaphysics,

in classical philosophy, was the endeavor to uncover the meaning of the world as a whole. According to Balthasar's reading of the tradition, metaphysics fulfills this function, not only by determining the whole in its most basic respect (being av being), but even more fundamentally in its movement beyond the whole (metaphysics). Thus, he says, for the classical mind,

physics stood in a representative way for the whole of the cosmos, and man was taken to be a part of that whole.4 The movement beyond this whole, then, was the “playing out” of the existence of the world against the backdrop of the divine. The world, from this perspective, is not merely a thing closed in on itself (physics); it receives its meaning in a tension toward what is essentially greater and essentially different from it: the 3. It is important to note that Balthasar does not mean to imply that metaphysics

is thereby rendered obsolete. Unlike many strains of contemporary philosophy, Balthasar does not seek to “overcome” metaphysics, i.e., the inquiry into being as being. Indeed, as we have seen particularly in chapter 2, metaphysics plays an indispensable role in Balthasar’s thinking. The point of the term meta-anthropology, which

Balthasar uses in fact only in two places (in addition to the final summary of his thought, which I have cited here, he mentions this term in the same sense in an interview with Angelo Scola, Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good [= TE] [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989], 24-25, where he points out, moreover, that he borrowed the term from his cousin Peter Henrici), is to set a particular dimension of his thought into relief. 4. RT, 2-3.

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cosmos lv cosmos only against a horizon that is illuminated by the break-

ing-in of dawn. Meta-anthropology sets this “transcending” aspect of metaphysics into relief, within a somewhat different sense of the cosmos (and a very different sense of “physics,” which, in the modern world, means merely the cosmos taken in its material aspect): “For us, the cosmos perfects itself in man, who at the vame time sums up the world and surpasses it. Thus, our philosophy will be essentially a meta-anthropology, presupposing not only the cosmological sciences, but also the anthropological sciences, and surpassing them toward the question of the being or the essence of man.”° The key phrase in this text is the simultaneity of “summing up” and “surpassing.” Perhaps we should reverse their order. In any event, this simultaneity recalls Hegel’s incontrovertible insight that no limit, and therefore no determination of a definite whole, can be established except in passing beyond that limit in some respect.’ Moreover, it echoes a “pattern” we have encountered often in our analyses thus far, especially in our discussion of the meaning of Gestalt, and it reiterates this pattern, as it were, on a cosmological level. As we have seen, whenever we wish to grasp something that constitutes a genuine whole, some sort of leap is required.

Every whole is an intersection of irreducibly different orders; it is a continuous whole only in the context of a radical discontinuity. This is true for the wholeness of any particular instance of truth, but it is equally true for the truth of the cosmos in general. The task of founding the truth of the whole and making it manifest will therefore necessarily entail in some

5. This explains the otherwise strange fact that Balthasar’s first volume on philosophy in the trilogy, entitled “The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity” (GL 4), deals at great length with the ancient poets and tragedians, and that it reads the pre-Socratic

philosophers and Plato as standing within this tradition. Now, it is true, as Robert Sokolowski has shown, that the ancient world had an imperfect sense of the “essential difference” of the divine with respect to the world: as he puts it, the ancient mind was ignorant of the “Christian distinction”: see Te God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of Amer-

ica Press, 1995), 12-30. It is therefore true to say that ancient thinkers were unable to articulate the analogia entis in an adequate manner. Nevertheless, an authentic “lived” sense of the essential difference between the divine and the cosmos, between the gods and men, is unmistakable in the piety of the ancient poets (in Homer and Aeschylus, for example). The authenticity of Homer’s piety and of his awe before the difference separating gods and men, for example, becomes especially clear when we contrast it with the “religion” of the Hellenistic age, which tended to degenerate into a worship of the cosmos or even a self-worship. 6. RT, 3 (emphasis mine). 7. One of Hegel’s most decisive criticisms of Kant was for his use of reason to determine the unsurpassable limits of reason.

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sense a leap beyond the whole. Now, we have also seen that the fact that it is the joining of discontinuous orders means that no whole can be established without movement, and that this movement requires concrete engage-

ment and decision in time. In this respect, a meta-anthropology (no less, indeed, than a metaphysics if we understand the term in the way Balthasar uses it) cannot be constructed abstractly as a system of propositions or ideas, but it is essentially an event. If it is not an event, then it does not — structurally speaking —concern the meaning of the whole av a whole. To say that meta-anthropology is an event, however, does not mean that it is not a matter of thought. Rather, along the lines we saw at the end of the last chapter, it is a ved thought, a thinking that emerges from active engagement, and an activity that is intelligible, that is, a bearing of truth in analogy with the act of knowing. In dramatic terms, meta-anthropology is a role given to man; it is the call to make the tensions of existence concrete, and in this way to serve as the foundation of the ontological truth of the world. It is in this sense that the person is the “actor of truth.” We should note right from the outset that meta-anthropology is precisely not anthropomorphic in the sense of reducing the meaning of the whole to the meaning of man in himself. Balthasar insists, in the term metaanthropology, we “cannot neglect the meaning of ‘meta’ in any way,” indicating that an inquiry into the meaning of the world through man cannot come to an end in the human.® As Bieler has said, “Balthasar... makes a case not simply for a metaphysics in the conventional sense, but for a metaanthropology that takes man in his freedom as the key to understanding being —without, however, slipping into an anthropological reduction.” Thus, the object of meta-anthropology, as we will treat it in this chapter, is not, as one might at first suppose, to consider the particular region of human being, set off against other possible ways of being; it is not to investigate the ethical dimension of human behavior in relation to the question of truth. Although such an investigation is valuable in itself, 1t would represent a digression with respect to our central theme, namely, the vtructure of truth. Instead, “meta-anthropology” implies that by virtue of a special relationship between man and being, essentially /uman structures are able to illuminate the meaning of being in itself, particularly in its truth

8. TE, 25. 9. Bieler, “Future of the Philosophy of Being,” 472. On the role of meta-anthropology in Balthasar’s thought, see also M. Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology,” 129-46; Pérez Haro, El musterto del ser, 99-100; and Scola, Hans Urs von Balthasar,

84-100. See also Juan Sara, Forma y amor, 238-40.

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aspect. The focus on man in this chapter, then, is not in the first place an attempt to understand man but to understand the world. We saw in chapter 2, and specifically in the fourfold difference, that man and being illuminate each other reciprocally. Meta-anthropology is a thematizing of that mutual illumination. Now, it is especially the dramatic aspect of meta-anthropology that focuses this point. An “anthropology” in the conventional sense is an analysis of the essential structures of /uman being, what

man is in himself, considered abstractly. However, Balthasar argues that we cannot get to the heart of the meaning of man through such an approach: “if we wanted to ask about man’s essence, we can do so only in the midst of his dramatic performance of existence. There is no anthropology but the dramatic.”!9 To get to the heart of man, we cannot “remain” with man, but we must go beyond him (meta-anthropology), essentially because he has his meaning in a task that serves something greater than himself; in this case, it is the task of revealing the meaning of being. In the last chapter, we saw that freedom takes the form of being called to decision because it is essentially other centered. Meta-anthropology in general likewise has the form of being called to decision —that is, it has a dramatic form — because it is rooted in this ontological task. We thus see several points converge: man is “caught up’ in the tensions that lie at the core of the world’s existence, and he reveals both his own meaning and the meaning of the whole in his living out of those tensions. The more deeply he enters into this specif-

ically human task, the more dramatic his own existence becomes and the more he thereby bears the meaning of what lies beyond him. This is what allows Brock-Sulzer to define man as “the being of whom too much is asked.” In a discussion describing how human life finds its place at the intersection of the world’s tensions, Balthasar points to Kierkegaard as one who, in more recent times, recovered the ancient theme of man as the confinium, the one

who stands at the place where the world’s tensions meet: “I live on the confintum of existence, like a night watchman, close to the powder keg, a loaded weapon in my hand, in the midst of the storm.”!! Meta-anthropology, thus conceived, carries a certain ontological presupposition, namely, that human being is so to speak the place wherein the cosmos is both “summed up” and “surpassed.”!* This theme is, of course, 10. TD 2:336. 11. Kierkegaard, cited without reference in TD 2:362, n. 49. 12. This is not to say that the whole cosmos (lotus et totaliter) is “contained” in man such that he has nothing any longer to receive from other beings, i.e., that the cosmos does not likewise represent an irreducible positivity with respect to him (in other words, a “more” that is not contained by him). The qualification of this notion is, indeed, the matter of the present paragraphs.

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not new with Balthasar but has its roots in the tradition, ° even if Balthasar interprets it in a particularly dramatic way. He elaborates this fundamental presupposition of meta-anthropology in the Theodrama, under the title of man as “rooted in the cosmos.”!4 There is an essential polarity that we can pick out of this rather dense and complicated section, which serves as a nice summary of this basic presupposition. On the one hand, Balthasar explains, in reference to many thinkers in the philosophical tradition, the basic forces of the cosmos come to expression in man. The human being represents “the epitome of the cosmic tensions and oppositions.” In this respect, man is wholly immersed in the cosmos; indeed, he is a part of it, even if a very peculiar part. According to Balthasar, it is therefore possible to understand man in terms of the cosmos, that is, “from below,” as the highest (or one of the highest) links of the chain of being. He does not stand apart from the tensions of the cosmos, but is always already involved within them, and is even in some respect a function of them.

On the other hand, it is also possible to look down “from above” in order to understand the human being. Man is not only an expression of the forces of the cosmos, but is a being capable of fashioning these forces in a certain sense from outside of them, as one who transcends them. As

Aristotle and Aquinas put it, the soul of man is quodammodo omnia.!° There is a sense in which man can comprehend the universe “inside” himself. If we wanted to formulate man’s being “rooted in the cosmos” but not being reducible to that cosmos as a succinct polarity, we could say that, on the one hand, man lies within the cosmos, and on the other hand, the cosmos lies within man. This polarity is essentially what is expressed in the classical notion of man as the “recapitulation” of the universe, which is a notion Balthasar affirms at several points in his aphorisms: “The Fathers

like to stress the fact that man sums up and sets free all of nature and beings in himself. ”17 Moreover, to describe this mediating position of man,

in and beyond the world, Balthasar refers to a formulation by John Scotus Erigena, who spoke of man specifically as a fertium mundum, a “third

13. This theme was especially common in the Church Fathers, and in particular, Maximus the Confessor. Balthasar discusses this theme in Maximus at great length in KL, 171-75, under the title, man as “microcosm.” 14. TD 2:346—-55.

15. Ibid., 354. 16. Balthasar refers to this text in both authors in ibid., 353. 17. GW, 17. See also GW, 19: “Dead nature (the mineral realm) attains to its qualitative variegation and depth only in the life of the vegetable and animal realms, and this life attains to its objectivity only in the spiritual realm. Here we have the basis for the possibility of nature’s being redeemed along with man.”

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cosmos.”!® This polarity is the necessary presupposition for Balthasar’s meta-anthropology, and in fact it is another way of expressing its fundamental principle, namely, that man sums up and surpasses the world. Man must do both—he must be a “function” of the cosmos, but in a way that transcends it —if, through his activity, he is to reveal the meaning, not only of himself but of the whole. Neither side of the polarity can be reduced to the other, even if they are intrinsically related. Once again, such a polarity can subsist only dramatically; it must be carried out as a task. How are we to understand this task? There are, of course, countless possible ways we could approach an answer to that question. However, since we are dealing most basically with the problem of truth, I will approach it in the specific sense of its being an “epistemological” task, or a function of establishing the foundation that makes the truth of the world possible. Nevertheless, it is important to keep the “cosmological” scope of meta-anthropology in mind as we proceed, insofar as the epistemological dimension is embedded within that context. Indeed, what especially characterizes Balthasar’s philosophy in general is a refusal to separate particular issues from the whole that comprehends them, to the extent that this relation to the whole brings out certain dimensions in the particular issue that would otherwise have remained hidden. And this is what is going on in the present case. Thus, we will see, in the first main section of this chapter (“Body and Soul in Human Being and Knowing’), that the “cosmic tensions and oppositions’ that man epitomizes are most directly expressed in the irreducible body-soul polarity that constitutes man’s being. I will discuss this polarity in itself, and then in relation to the reciprocal role of the mind and the senses in the act of knowing. The polarity of spirit (mind) and senses, indeed, cor-

responds to the irreducible polarity that characterizes the phenomenon of truth as Gestalt. Specifically, Gestalt is a complex interrelationship of visible and invisible elements or, we might say, sensible and intellectual elements; correlatively, man as a knower is himself a complex relationship of senses and spirit. This interrelationship will be characterized as a dynamic played out between transcendence and immanence in relation to the world. These two aspects are radically irreducible to each other and at the same time intrinsically related. In a sense, the whole of this chapter will be an attempt to resolve this relationship in a nonreductive manner. On the one hand, we will see that the two anthropological principles, body (senses) and soul (spirit), need to be intrinsically mediated, which

18. John Scotus Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue of St. John, cited in TL 2:206.

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is a role that will be played by the imagination or heart (as we have already

briefly mentioned in the last two chapters). On the other hand, we will see how these principles cannot be resolved “internally” unless they are also resolved “externally,” in terms of what Balthasar refers to as dramatic engagement.!? This will be the topic of the second main section (“Death, Martyrdom, and Drama: The Foundation of Truth”). We could describe the engagement as the attempt, anthropologically, to bring “inside” (soul) and “outside” (body) to adequation; or we might say it is the work, or the act, of resolving transcendence and immanence in a concrete unity. In a sense, we have seen many analogous examples of such a resolution, everything from language and logic to simple motion. The point here, however, is that the analogous examples, precisely because they are analogous, need

to be grounded in a paradigmatic instance. Through comparison with insights from Plato and Heidegger, I will look at the epistemological implications of the dramatic art form as well as the phenomenon of martyrdom. In the section “Status Vitae as Paradigm of Dramatic Gestalt,” then, I will present what can be called the fundamental instance of existential drama in the thinking of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the choosing of a state of life, a definitive life-form (Lebensgestalt). In particular, I will look at marriage as a Gestalt. Again, the focus will be on the human institution not for its

own sake, but rather as it is one of the paradigmatic foundations for the real experience of truth. What would otherwise seem to be a phenomenon utterly heterogeneous to the question of truth —namely, the definitive commitment of freedom to another human being for the sake of founding an institution of communal life —will be seen to have an indispensable epistemological role once we make the move from truth understood as the coordinating of propositions to truth as the coming to view of the infinite in a concrete Gestalt.

This chapter in a sense represents the completion of chapter 2, the “anthropological” chapter on consciousness. If the governing image of that

chapter was birth, the predominant image guiding this chapter is death. Indeed, Balthasar shows that historically speaking, death has always presented the horizon that makes drama possible.*? Moreover, he claims that the phenomenon of death most directly illuminates the paradox of spirit and senses, transcendence and immanence, that lies as an irreducible polarity within man, since it reveals in a dramatic way that this polarity is not

19. “[T]he unity of the contrary movements can only arise out of a dramatic engagement.” TL 2:364. 20. In laying out the fundamental themes of a “theodramatics,” Balthasar accords ample space to the role of death: see TD 1:369-408.

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a static ordering of principles, but a tension-filled mystery that is both veiled and unveiled when man confronts his ultimate limits: “Man seems to be built according to a polarity, obliged to engage in a polarity, always seeking complementarity and peace in the other pole. And for that very reason, he is pointed beyond his whole polar structure. He is always found crossing the boundary, and thus he is defined most exactly by that boundary with which death brutally confronts him.”*! Death illuminates the anthropological tensions because it is the point where flesh and spirit both come together and come apart. In addition, insofar as death represents so to speak the final frontier of human existence, any question of ultimacy must eventually reckon with the question of death. Since truth, as we shall see, cannot finally be truth unless it has its roots in the ultimate, the question of truth necessarily runs up against the question of death. Kierkegaard once wrote: “every man is more or less afraid of the truth, and that is the voice of his humanity. ... Between man and truth lies death —that is why we are all more or less afraid.””” Between man and truth les death: there is something literally true about this phrase, not because truth comes only in the “afterlife,” but because the inner structure of truth has within it a radical rupture or discontinuity, which in a genuine sense means death. To “cross over” this radical rupture without reductively closing it is to grapple with, and indeed in some

sense internalize, the question of death. When we say, then, that the person is the actor of truth, that he, being himself an intersection of transcendence and immanence, has the task of bringing about a coincidence of inside and outside in a nonreductive way, and thus of bearing fruit in an “absolute” sense —that is, of bearing fruit that is infinitely greater than he is—it means that he must confront death and establish a relationship to it. The confronting of death, or, better, the being-confronted by death, is an essential aspect of the dramatic structure of truth. And yet this beingconfronted by death is not (merely) a violent imposition on man, but stems 21. TD 2:353. In this passage, Balthasar is speaking about not only the spirit/body polarity but also about that between individual and community, and then the most central one between man and woman. (On the centrality of the man/woman polarity, see Gardner and Moss, 76—79. Balthasar himself affirms this centrality in TD 2:365. Although they agree with the pivotal position of this polarity, Gardner and Moss raise strong objections to Balthasar’s understanding of woman in relation to man, and they use their objection to unravel fundamental aspects of his theology.) Because my concern is in the first place with the epistemological dimension of anthropology, I will

focus on the first polarity between body and soul, and I will address the other two only in an indirect manner. 22. Kierkegaard, Zagebiicher, vol. 4 (Diisseldorf and Cologne: 1970), 213, cited in Bieler, “Future of the Philosophy of Being,” 457.

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from the essence of the human being, which means from the essence of his meta-anthropological role —indeed, it stems from the simple fact that man is a knower. The passage from Mechtild of Magdeburg that I cited at the head of the final section of chapter 3 was incomplete. It ran: “Love without knowledge is as darkness to the wise soul. / Knowledge without its fruition she likens to the pains of hell.” The final line from the passage is “Fruition short of death she cannot lament enough.” Dramatically speaking, a fruitfulness short of death would not be genuine fruitfulness, inasmuch as fruitfulness means the gift of self and gift of self is not complete until the w4ole self is given, that is, until the gift reaches the boundaries of existence. Truth, if it is indeed related to fruitfulness, has the same scope.

Body and Soul in Human Being and Knowing The theme of the relationship between body and soul is one of the most basic in the history of philosophy, and there are, indeed, countless aspects under which this theme has appeared: there is the anthropological issue in itself, namely, as the question of the unity of the human being as a bodysoul “composite”; the ethical question of bringing the two “parts” into harmony; the theological question of the disorder introduced into the bodysoul relationship through sin; the Christological issue of the relationship

in the person of Christ between the divine and the human nature, which is made up of body and soul; or the question of the role each plays in man’s perception of reality. Balthasar himself takes up all of these various aspects of the theme in many places in his corpus. It is clear that in a certain respect, none of these aspects are simply indifferent to the others. However, because

of the nature of our theme, and the scope of the book in general, I will focus on one particular issue, which has two dimensions. The first is the nature of the body-soul relationship in terms of man’s general relation to the world. The background of this discussion is man’s simultaneous rootedness in, and transcendence of, the cosmos, which I have just presented above. The second dimension is the corresponding relationship between the spirit and the senses in terms of man’s specifically “cognitive” relation to the world.”°

23. I will use the term vpirit and, less often, intellect or mind, to translate the German term Geist which embraces all of the English uses at once. It is one of the great poverties of the English language not to have a single term to unify man’s intellectual nature with all of the rich aspects associated with the term vpirit. We tend, consequently, in English to have a rather abstract sense of the “mind” and a rather “irrationalistic” sense of “spirit.”

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It is helpful to note from the outset how these dimensions belong together.

If truth is of its essence a “nonsensible” reality, then the body cannot but be conceived as a hindrance to the soul, or at least as something that does not represent a positive “aid” to knowing. Given a basically “abstract” sense of truth, the general ethical approach one will take will either be to find the way best to “free” the soul from the body or to seek an ideal of “untroubled rest” in the soul’s domination of the body.*4 Conversely, it may be the case that the universal experience of the “opposition” between the soul and the body —which, according to Balthasar, not only Plato but also Aristotle, the “eudaemonist,” observes~” —as well as the difficulties in the nonChristian world, which I mentioned in chapter 1, of conceiving of a unity that is non-reductive, has led to a tendency of body-soul dualism, which in turn has encouraged a more abstract sense of truth. Thus, Balthasar says, “Extra-Biblical religious philosophy professes a dualism, which, in spite of all its ideals of harmony and kalokagathia, when it does not actually consider the body a ‘tomb’ (Pythagoras), is at heart ready to cast it off like Socrates and with Menander looks out for a ‘better lodging.’ 26 The point, in any event, is that there is a necessary correspondence between how one understands the body-soul relationship, and how one conceives the object of knowledge —and, therefore, the nature of truth. If truth finally occurs

“in the mind,” then the body is most ideally left behind, or at best it is included as an afterthought. If, by contrast, truth finally occurs in the concrete Gestalt, which represents a paradoxical relationship between the hidden and the visible, then it will follow that one cannot participate in it except “body and soul.” In other words, it will follow that the more the body is left behind, the more the vision of things as they really are will be impaired, even if it is equally (and far more obviously) true that vision is impaired if

the soul or the mind is somehow improperly subordinated to the body. Since we spoke of the relation between the visible and the “more-than-visible” elements of the Gestalt in terms of the relation of transcendence and

24. Plato is the one who most clearly ties the ethical issues of the body-soul relation to the question of achieving a clear perception of reality: see, for example, Phacdo, 65c. 25. Balthasar refers to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 7.1145al16—-1145b21, where Aristotle concedes man’s “wicked, uncontrollable nature,” even in the context of an ethical system founded on the intrinsic “informing” of the passions rather than their elimination: see TD 2:359. 26. TL 2:204: “wahrend erst recht aufSerbiblische religiése Philosophie einem Dual-

ismus huldigt, der trotzt aller Harmonie- und Kalokagathie-Ideale den Leib wenn nicht geradezu ftir ein ‘Grab’ der Seele halt (Pythagoras), so ihn doch wie Sokrates gern abstreift und mit Menander nach einer ‘bessern Herberge’ Ausschau halt.”

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immanence, I will here describe the body and soul in terms of man’s transcendence and immanence in the world.

Body ano Soul Because the intelligence (soul) is ordered to the act of being, Balthasar says, man experiences a kind of inner infinity with respect to the things of the world that he contemplates: just as the act of being transcends the totality of particular beings, such that it can never be exhausted or even barely “tapped into” by them, so too is man, as capax entts (having the capacity to apprehend being), the home of endless possibilities, stretching infinitely beyond what is actual.’ In this, Balthasar says, there arises the almost overwhelming temptation in man to identify himself, or this aspect of himself, with God. However, all things created are caught within polar tensions. The act of being is thus incomplete in itself because it does not subsist in itself but can come to subsistence only in something that is really other (distinctio reals), namely, the essence or the concretely existing being. By itself, in spite of its superactuality (which indeed is impossible to conceive by itself), being would be sheer emptiness. We might think of the related phenomenon of the emptiness of human freedom, considered in isolation from its being crystallized through a determinate object.“ In a manner analogous to the actus essendi requiring an “other” in order to subsist concretely, the human person does not “subsist” as pure (infinite) spirit, but rather finds himself always already embodied. If the first aspect in a sense reveals man’s transcendence of the world, this second —man's embodiment — shifts the accent to man’s being a part of the world, and in this respect his immanence within it. In TL 1, Balthasar puts it thus: “Simply in order for man to be at all, there could never be a moment

when he was not already taken out of himself into the world. His body belongs in equal degrees to the world and to him; from the very outset his senses are just as much at home in things (indeed, in a certain sense are these things themselves) as in him; and it is only thanks to the surrounding world that his spirit awakens to itself.”*?

27. See TL 2:209-10. 28. Balthasar gives a brief account of Aquinas's notion of freedom in relation to his metaphysics in TD 2:224—-27. 29. TL 2:210: “Um iiberhaupt zu sein, [ist er] immer schon der an die Welt EntaufSerte.

Sein Leib ist ebensosehr zu ihn wie zur Welt gehGrig, seine Sinne sind vom vornherein ebensosehr bei den Dingen (ja in gewissem Sinn diese selbst), als sie bei ihm sind; und einzig von der ihn umgebundenen Welt her erwacht sein Geist zu sich selber.”

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Balthasar here suggests a point we already saw in the last chapter, namely, that the spirit never has to find a way to externalize itself as something that is already complete in itself. Rather, it always finds itself already externalized, and finds its inner completion in that externalization, since the spirit is always embodied. Moreover, because the body, as the externalization of the spirit, belongs “in equal degrees” both to the surrounding world and to the spirit, the body represents a kind of expropriation of

the spirit. The fact that the spirit is always already externalized in some way in the body, since the body, as external, has a certain “belongingness to the world,” or perhaps “worldliness,” the body itself, from the beginning, is an intersection of tensions. It is in this sense the place where self and other encounter each other. We will return to this aspect shortly. For the moment, it is important first to see that corporeality represents the spirit’s voledness or immanence within the world. This is, of course,

a classical theme, and Balthasar expounds aspects of it in his treatment of the spirit/body tension in TD 2. We would be tempted to formulate the tension of the body-soul relationship, in light of what we just saw: thus, man, as spirit, transcends the world, but as flesh he is 2 the world. However, in this all-too-obvious formulation of the body-soul relationship, there is in fact no tension, to the degree that tension involves some genuine mutual interdependence. Here, the soul is not dependent on the body, but relates

to it as a (temporary) obstacle. Specifically, in order for there to be a genuine body-soul polarity, there must be some way in which the soul needs the body in order to be soul. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle’s notion of soul as forma corports, has asserted that the soul is joined to the body, not for the body's sake but for the soul's sake,*"” and moreover he has affirmed that the soul is more like God with the body than without the body.*! The

reasons he gives are that it is the nature of the soul to be embodied, and, more specifically, the soul has a certain dependence on sensible images, and therefore on the body's senses, in order to know, which means that the soul needs the body to accomplish what is most proper to it as soul. These explanations would remain unconvincing, however, without a further context, not least of all because they offer more a negative explanation (that is, they do not show the soul's iztrinic need for the body: to say simply that the body is necesvary to the soul and nothing else does not preclude the pos-

sibility that it is merely a necessary evil or a faute de mieux instrument) than a positive explanation, that is, one showing the povitive contribution

30. See Aquinas, ST 1:76, 1, ad 6. 31. Aquinas, De pot. 5, 10 ad 5. Balthasar cites this quotation in TL 2:207.

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the body makes to the soul. Balthasar’s philosophy, in fact, presents certain principles that serve just this purpose. Accordingly, I will briefly mention the points Balthasar makes in terms of the nature of the body-soul relationship, and then follow this in the section “Spirit and Senses” with a discussion of their relation in the act of knowing.

If the spirit and body, according to Balthasar, are not to represent merely externally related principles, then it must be the case that the emergence of spirit amidst the natural forms of the world —that is, the emergence of spirit in man—is not something that occurs simply from above, as something added from outside nature; it must have some anticipations already within the material world. In other words, we must be able to see, not only that the (human) spirit always finds itself embodied, as mentioned above, but in fact that matter itself is always “ensouled” — that it always already has something analogous to spirit in it. In The Truth of the World, Balthasar characterizes these analogies at great length in the various ‘stages’ of being —mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and angelic

being — under the rubric of the “freedom of the object.”*” It is thus possible to see man in a sense not merely as a “new” kind of creature, but also as the “recapitulation” of prior stages.°° In this context, Balthasar refers to Aquinas'’s notion that the human soul recapitulates ascending cosmic forms, and he refers to Augustine's teaching (borrowed, apparently, from the Stoic notion of logo spermatikot) about the rationes vemtnales, the seeds of reason in all things, which means that there is nothing

in itself that is simply foreign to the spirit. Yet, Balthasar goes on to say that the human capacity for reflection (reditio completa) and self-presence is utterly unique,” and it divides man from everything else he will encounter in the cosmos by an insuperable chasm.°® If, in the first case, spirit lies «2 matter —and therefore the soul

lies in the body ~in the second case, the spirit stands over matter, and the soul stands over the body, such that it can relate to the body as its instrument. Balthasar characterizes these two, irreducibly different principles by saying that while the first represents the “higher” being produced

52. TL 1:84-102. 33. TD 2:356. 34. Ibid. Incidentally, if we admit something like rationes seminales, there is a way that we can affirm the attempt in modern philosophy to see the mind as an epiphenomenon of the body without leading to a materialistic reduction: specifically, because matter itself is not “materialistic.” This is not to say, however, that, by itself, “mind as epiphenomenon of the body” is an adequate formulation of the reality, as we shall see.

35. TD 2:207-10. 36. Ibid., 356.

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by the “lower” as its goal, the second represents the higher as “producing” the lower, insofar as, being the final meaning of the lower, it is what first sets it in motion. These two principles give rise, then, to different ethical “shapes.” Soul “in” body suggests the “spiritualizing” of matter by “ethicizing’ it, that is, informing it with reason from within; while soul “over” body suggests the “control” of the passions “from the outside.”*” Now, these principles on their own are far from sufficient to provide an adequate anthropology. The first, the notion of ascending forms from “nature to “spirit,” is unable to account for the “teleology” of this evolution, while the second, the affirmation of a radical discontinuity between spirit and matter, cannot account for their intercourse at all except in terms of some kind of fall. Furthermore, while these two principles might affirm on some grounds the (negative) necessity of the soul’s being united to the body, we have yet to see a positive reason for that unity, and to that extent we have yet to see a genuine body-soul polarity or tension. In order to affirm a real tension, in fact, we cannot remain with the formulation that spirit represents man’s transcendence and matter represents man's immanence. Although Balthasar does not raise this point in his dis-

cussion of the spirit-body tension in TD 2, he offers resources for a further step in other places. We already saw in the passage quoted above from TL 2 that the body itself is not merely the place where man is wnmanent within the world, but it in fact already contains within itself the tension of encounter and therefore of both transcendence and immanence. This point comes out even more forcefully in the Epclog: My body is an ungraspable border-zone [wnbegretfliche Zwtschenzone |

between me and the world. It belongs to me not in the manner of an object, but “as if it were a part of me’ —and yet at the same time it resembles a piece of the external world, a fact that is constantly being called to my attention (as for example in the case of an amputation). Insofar as it belongs to me, it is that by which I — often clumsily — run up against other bodies and only thereby become aware of the fact that the world, and other beings in their free otherness, are things that my spirit cannot bring under its control (“Thoughts live lightly alongside one another. / But things knock gruffly against each other in space”).°®

37. Ibid., 363. 38. E, 81: “Mein Leib ist eine unbegreifliche Zwischenzone zwischen mir und der Welt. Er gehért mir nicht wie ein Gegenstand, sondern ‘als war's ein Stiick von mir’ — und doch ist er auch so etwas wie ein Stiick der Aufsenwelt, was mir immerfort (zum

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This seemingly simple idea has enormous implications in relation to classical philosophy. First of all, Balthasar describes the body as a boundary or border zone and, what is more, as ungraspable. The body is, in a certain respect, the place where the person becomes immanent to the world. However, it is so not as an “instrument” of the soul, but, as belonging in a certain sense as much to the surrounding world as to the person whose body it is (although, of course, this “mutual ownership” is by no means symmetrical), it “extends” in a sense further than the soul. It is unbe-

gretfliche because it “transcends” the soul for exactly the same reason that the body represents the “expropriation” of the person, his “externalization” into what is not he. Thus, the body is the transcendence of the person so that he may be immanent to the world. But that is not all. There is another sense in which the body is not only immanence within the world, but also transcendence with respect to other things in the world. In contrast to spirit, it is the particular characteristic of matter not to allow two things to be in the same place at the same time. The “externality” of matter in fact in some respect excludes the possibility of two things lying wvive, 1.e., being immanent within, one another. By virtue

of matter, things remain veparate from and thus ofer than one another. Indeed, Balthasar points out that it is precisely the “running up against” another, which occurs only because one has a body, that one comes to be aware of the otherness of the world. This awareness is, in fact, simultaneously a recognition that the other is other than “me” and that “I” am other than the other. Thus, the mediation of the body is essential for the affirmation we saw Balthasar make earlier, namely, that self-consciousness and consciousness of the world grow in tandem: they do so because they turn, as it were, on the same point. In any event, we could sum up by saying that the body represents in an indispensable sense the means by which man

makes contact with the world, establishing both its transcendence and immanence to him, and his transcendence and immanence to it. Moreover, as we have begun to see, it is likewise an oversimplification to say that the soul represents man's transcendence of the world; it would

not be false to say that spirit is even more immanent within the world than matter. If matter is “other-excluding” externality, spirit is “otherincluding” internality: in spirit, two people can be in the same “place”

Beispiel bei einer Amputation) in Erinnerung gerufen wird. Sofern er mir gehG6rt, ist er das, wodurch ich —oft unsanft—an andere Leiber stofSe und dabei erst innewerde, dafS die Welt, die Andern in ihrem freien Anderssein fiir meinen Geist unbeherrschbar sind. (‘Leicht beieinander wohnen die Gedanken, / Doch hart im Raume stofen sich die Sachen.’)” Balthasar does not give a reference for the verse.

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at the same time. It is in fact precisely the spirit’s transcendence of the world that allows it to be immanent within the world. As we have seen before, one of Balthasar’s most commonly cited phrases from Aquinas is the one Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle: the soul is in a certain sense all things. It is this “elasticity” of the soul that allows it not only to gaze at the world, but to penetrate and thus in some sense to become its objects. In Platonic terms, it is the transcendence of the nous that allows it to have

a perfect identity with its objects.°? In Heidegger's language, it is the spirit’s nihilating (mchten, “not being” or “nothing” as a verbal noun) which

is both its “transcendence” and what allows it to be radically receptive to the other, to let it be.7? Citing Helmut Plessner, Balthasar explains that man, as opposed to the animals that are “centric,” is always “ex-centric” precisely because of his spiritual nature. He can be in himself only by

simultaneously being in another.*! Spirit means having a center both inside and outside, as it were. In fact, we already saw something similar in chapter 2. Analogous to what Balthasar said about how the body belongs

simultaneously to me and to the world, we saw that the same thing can be said about the “structure” of consciousness: it too belongs simultaneously to me and to the world because of its intentional nature. Moreover, just as being embodied means that man is always already outside of himself, so too is the spirit an always already being with another. It, too, as we saw earlier, represents the “expropriation” of the self, because the most fundamental act of the spirit, the act that in fact constitutes the spirit as spirit, is ek-stasis. Thus, it is not simply the case that spirit is (nner) rest while the body is (external) motion;“” rather, the situation is far more complex: there wa sense in which spirit is rest and the body is motion, but there is also a sense in which the body is rest and the spirit is motion. In short, far from merely

identifying the body with immanence and the spirit with transcendence, it would be more appropriate to characterize their relation in terms Balthasar

uses in another context: the spirit is indwelling transcendence (mmanenierende Transzendenz) while the body is transcending immanence (franszenoterende Immanenz).*°

39. See Balthasar’s account of this notion in Plotinus in GL 4:292-93. 40. See GL 5:435-38. 41. TD 2:339. 42. We see this notion, for example, in Aristotle, De Anima, 1.3. 43. Of course, we could just as legitimately reverse the designations, 1.e., soul as transcending immanence and body as “immanenting” transcendence, depending on the perspective. Balthasar uses these phrases in his brief elaboration of the God-world relationship in TL 2:76—79, as a way of overcoming a dialectical dualism.

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Sptrtt and Sended We have just seen that even in their difference, the body and soul do not simply stand over against each other as dialectical opposites, but rather they represent in principle analogous movements. I will now sharpen the sense of their interrelationship by looking at how they function in relation to each other in the act of knowing. In the last chapter, we saw that truth involved a paradoxical simultaneity of mediation and immediacy, transcendence and immanence, and sensibility and supersensibility. This sense of truth will provide the guiding thread for our discussion. The argument is basically that a simple separation between the mind and the senses leads to a false immediacy on both sides — both an intellectual immediacy in relation to a purely “ideal” object and a sensual immediacy in relation to a purely “real” or “material” object. Both of these immediacies conspire to undermine a real relation to the world as a genuine whole, a genuine “other.” To avoid this problem, it will be necessary to see that both the intellect and the senses make a positive contribution to the single act of knowing, and they are therefore mutually dependent on each other even in their irreducible difference.

In one of his aphorisms, Balthasar states that in a certain respect, ethical activity, in relation to the good, is more transcendent than intellectual activity, in relation to the true. While the good, in the end, calls for an expropriating deed from the one who loves, the thinker can remain “at home” even in his most daring intellectual adventures.“ In writing this, he has in mind, no doubt, Aquinas's notion that “knowledge is of things as they exist in the knower, but the will is related to things as they exist in themselves.”4° Aquinas, in turn, draws his insight from Aristotle's related assertion that sensation apprehends its objects outside while knowledge apprehends its objects inside the soul.4© Now, if we were to suspend for

44. GW, 41: “Thomas Aquinas says that truth resides primarily in the thinking spirit but goodness primarily in the thing strived for. It follows from this that ethical transcendence is much more radical than theoretical transcendence. When we are engaged in thought, we always remain ‘at home within us’ even in our most extravagant speculations. When we are engaged in action, however, our whole self risks being lifted from its hinges. It is not sufficient to know what lies beyond our self; everything in us must, so to speak, be thrown out of our windows.” 45. Aquinas, ST 1:19, 3, ad 6. 46. Aristotle, De Anima, 2.5.417b20—24. Relating the passage from Aristotle and the one from Aquinas requires that we connect somehow the operation of the senses

with the operation of the will. Although it would be out of place at this point to make an argument for the connection, we may at least consider the fact that, fundamentally, they both refer to the subject’s relation to concrete individuals.

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a moment what we saw in the last chapter, we would say that there is a certain plausibility to this assertion, especially given that one can know something in its physical absence, while sensing an absent object is impossible. Nevertheless, it is clear that if we leave the affirmation as it stands, it cannot avoid falling apart into a dualism. If it is the case that the senses

and the intellect apprehend their objects by moving in “opposite” directions, it would imply, for example, that the senses have no intrinsic need for the intellect whatever in order to reach their own object, because if they did, the senses would have to share in some fundamental respect in the intellect’s movement. Further, if the senses have no need for the intellect to complete their own movement, they cannot be said to be mtrinutcally related to the intellect. Indeed, they would be in this case merely extrinstically related; they would relate to the intellect, if at all, only in addition to the movement that is proper to the senses as senses. If the intellect

had any intrinsic relation to the senses, it would have to share in their movement. But this would mean that the movement proper to each could not simply be the opposite of the other. Rather, each movement would somehow have to include the movement of the other within itself (without reducing it to its own movement). To put it another way, in order to be intrinsically related to each other, each would have to mediate the other in the attainment of its proper object. Thus, on the one hand, the senses, insofar as they joined with their object, would in one respect have an immediate relation to that object, and on the other hand, the relation would not be merely immediate.

We are speaking about the operation of the senses and the intellect as movements; indeed, they would have to be movements of some anal-

ogous sort inasmuch as they represent the “joining” of things that are different from each other —that is, subject and object — whether that join-

ing takes place primarily on the side of the subject or on the side of the object. In either case, there is a starting point, one could say, and a goal. And because the two points are different, there must be something analogous to a movement connecting them. Now, the moment we remove the movement character of the operation, we are no longer able to speak of them as the joining of things that are different. But this is precisely

what happens when we take the relationship established in the exercise of the operation as merely immediate. In this case, once the senses reached the object, the object would no longer be an object that retains any otherness with respect to the senses; it would collapse into a mere identity. In fact, it would not make any difference in the end whether we understood this immediacy to be identically the object or identically the senses —in either case we would no longer have an object for the 274 « Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

senses. The same argument could, of course, be made with respect to the operation of the intellect. Now, to “reintroduce” movement into the operation of the intellect and the senses, it is not sufficient, on the one hand, to interpose a new object

of the same order, nor, on the other hand, to interrupt the movement through the intrusion of an object of an alien order. In the first case, the attempt would leave in place the assumption that the relationship is essentially immediate, and it would seek to overcome this static immediacy through another static immediacy. But a series of static moments is not movement: Zeno, as we saw at the beginning of the last chapter, demonstrated that such a conception of motion is in fact a logical impossibility. Our second case is hindered by the same assumption. Because it attempts to overcome a static immediacy simply by breaking it off in relation to an order that is simply alien, it likewise abandons the first to its immediacy for the sake of another immediacy. In other words, it is not enough, for example, to bring motion into the act of sensing by affirming first a completed act of sensing, and then an act of intellection, and then once again an act of sensing.“” Just like before, such an approach would fall into the pseudomovement of a series of static moments. Balthasar’s approach, by contrast, affirms that each intrinsically mediates the other vv its immediacy. The order of the senses, thus, enjoys a continuous motion in the exercise of its proper operation precisely within the radical discontinuity of its relation to the order of intellection. The leap beyond the senses, in other words, is immanent to the working of the senses w2thin its own order of activity. Similarly, the activity of the intellect does not simply float above the sensible world in a parallel world of separate ideas, but it, too, requires a leap, a radical disjunction — indeed, we could use the term expropriation again in this context —not in order to attain some object other than its own, that is, a sensible object, which would represent a confusion of orders, but precisely to be intellect. The radical disjunction of transcen-

dence into another order is what preserves its own integrity and graceful continuity. This transcendence, just because it is a rea/ transcendence, does not occur next to, but rather as immanent within, its own order. To summarize, then, we could say that the only way to affirm a real unity within difference and difference within unity of the intellect and senses in relation to their proper objects is to affirm that the senses mediate the intellect to itself while the intellect mediates the senses to themselves.

47. This example reveals the danger of thinking of the process of sensation, abstraction, and conversio as a series of separate moments.

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We are accustomed to think of the intellect as transcendent with respect to the senses. Although this is true in some profound sense, the argument thus far has led us to see that it is also the case that the senses are in some decisive respect transcendent with respect to the intellect. This means not only that they are “other” than the intellect, but that they are so in a way that is intrinsically necessary to the intellect. If the intel-

lect extends further in some respect than the senses, there is another respect in which the senses extend further than the intellect. It is worth emphasizing this point because it is not an aspect that has received much attention in the tradition, although we see how crucial it is. If the intellect were different from the senses, and the senses not different from the intellect, the intellect could “include” within itself everything that the senses might contribute to the act of knowing, without having to “step out” of its own order. The intellect would have everything that the senses have, “and then some.” Now, it is not that this claim is simply false. Indeed, the real paradox of the mutual transcendence of orders requires that we see what the senses add in knowledge, not as something “else” within the order of the intellect but as the transcendence of a new order. In this respect, “abstractly” speaking, within tts own order, the intellect “has” everything that the senses

have. What the intellect precisely lacks, however, is the otherness of the radically different order of the senses. Therefore, while it is true in some sense that the intellect has everything the senses have within its own order, and then some, it is equally true that the senses have everything the intellect has within their own order, and then some. However, as we have seen, neither the senses nor the intellect can remain “in their own order” in their concrete operation if that operation is to be a genuine movement, which means if the operation is to attain an object that remains an object. Or, to put it more adequately, the operations remain within their own order, but only within the context of a radical, discontinuous leap into another order. This is what it means to say that the senses mediate the intellect to itself and the intellect mediates the senses to themselves in their concrete operation. It is also what it means to say that the

intellect and the senses are mutually transcendent of each other within their mutual, but asymmetrical, interdependence. Thus, if the intellect could include the order of the senses vimp/y within itself; if, that is, the intellect transcended the senses without the senses likewise transcending the intellect, then the intellect would arrive at a “merely” immediate relation to its object, which, as we have repeatedly seen, is no relation at all. But this means that the transcendence of the senses within the operation of the intellect is precisely what enables the intellectual object to remain 276 « Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

transcendent in relation to the intellect even within the Gmmediate) union of the two in the act of knowing. The senses mediate the intellect's immediacy with its object. This is what makes the intellect’s grasp of an object in every case a mediated immediacy.*® It is not the case that the intellect

merely begins and ends with the senses, but, rather, the senses accompany the intellect through the whole course of its operation. As Gilson puts it, “the whole cycle of operations which begins in sensible intuition ends in the very same sensible intuition, and at no moment, supposing that it takes more than one, does it get out of it.” By the same token, the intellect accompanies the senses throughout the course of their own operation. The transcendence of the intellect to the senses is often taken to mean that the senses are operative alone at an early, primitive stage of the act of knowing, while the intellect merely builds on sense intuitions in order to articulate a more complex object. However, if the action of the intellect merely comes after the work of the senses, then they remain “unmediated”; this means that they could not in fact be relations but sheer, “opaque” moments. They therefore need the mediation of the radically other order of the intellect in order to apprehend their own object as a sensible object. While the senses make a positive contribution to the intellect as intellect, the intellect likewise makes a positive contribution to the senses as senses. Now, because they represent radically different orders, it follows that their reciprocal mediation is not symmetrical. The senses mediate the intellect to the intellect in a way that is radically different from the way the intellect mediates the senses to the senses. How are we to characterize this asymmetry? It seems, on the one hand, that while the senses are in some respect assimilated to their object, the intellect in some respect assimilates the object to itself. We recall Balthasar’s observation, quoted earlier, that the senses “in a certain sense are these things themselves”; that is, they “are” their objects. Aquinas's claim that the sense of touch lies at the root of all the other senses seems to confirm this idea.°? Because they are so to speak

48. This implies, in turn, that there is no act of the intellect that does not involve a joint act of the senses. The traditional formulation states that there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. What we need to recognize, however, is that this affirmation does not yet get us safely beyond a sense-intellect dualism unless we complement it with the further affirmation that the senses are involved with every act of knowing, not simply as a necessary starting point (which can be subsequently left behind) but as the accompanying mediator. 49. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 206-7.

50. In ST 1, 78, 3, ad 3, Aquinas adverts to Aristotle’s notion that touch forms the common genus of the senses.

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external, it is their essence to relate to their object —to be joined with their object, externally. They make contact, and in this contact, they “become”

their objects. On the other hand, the mind is also in a certain sense its objects, as we have already affirmed at many points. But since the mind, as spirit, is essentially “internality” or “interiority,” it becomes its objects by, so to speak, spiritualizing them and bringing them in. In this respect, the intellect or spirit is, to use Heidegger's notion, what accounts for man’s capacity to be wm the world, what accounts for the fact that he does not merely run up against objects but can “hold” them within himself. We could say, then, that the senses are what allow us to make contact with the world, and the intellect is what allows us to enter deeply nfo it. But what is depth without contact? And what is contact without depth?

Each alone would represent a gaping abyss, an emptiness. It is clear, in fact, from all we have said, that neither of these is ever simply without the other, and that each shares in some sense in what is proper to the other. Thus, even the externality of the senses is mediated intrinsically to the intellect, while the interiority of the intellect is mediated intrinsically to the senses. Given this complex mutual dependence, the following formulation of the relation between senses and intellect in the

act of knowing suggests itself: although both senses and intellect are simultaneously subjective and objective in both form and content, the senses

seem to have a priority of the object in form and a priority of the subject in content, while the intellect seems to have a priority of the object in

content and a priority of the subject in form. This is why we speak of the objectivity of the intellectual life, in spite of the fact that, considered abstractly, thoughts are “in the soul,” and we speak of feelings and sensible experiences as subjective in spite of the fact that a person has to go out to an object to have them. If we split the intellect and senses apart, then they both become simultaneously subjectivistic and objectivistic in different, but equally problematic, ways. But if we find their unity, then

not only is each restored to its full integrity within its own order, but they both work in consort to yield knowledge of a whole object to a whole subject, which remain irreducibly different to each other within perfect union. Before I go on to address the question of the unity of the senses and the intellect — indeed, it is important to realize that showing their mutual dependence is not yet to show their unity, but it is only to make showing their unity an even more pressing task — I will “flesh” out

a further dimension of their relationship that is particularly important to Balthasar’s thought on truth. We have spoken about the operation of the spirit and the senses as move-

ments, and, moreover, we have said that they cannot represent simply 278 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

opposite movements, but each must be a radically different movement that nevertheless includes the movement of the other somehow within its own. Thus, rather than being mere dialectical opposites, the spirit and senses acquire a relationship of analogy with each other: something of the externality of the senses will a/way be part of the intellect in its proper operation, while something of the interiority of the spirit will always be a part of the senses in their proper operation. Both of these points recerve emphasis from Balthasar in many places in his work. The first is often treated under the notion of the “spiritual senses,” which was a major theme in the Church Fathers, but which gradually disappeared in the “spiritual” writ-

ers of the late Middle Ages. It is important to see that the theme of the spiritual senses does not have to do merely with religious life and religious

experience, but that it must also have an analogous counterpart in intellectual life in general and thus must have a function in epistemology. The second point is one of the major themes of Balthasar’s aesthetics; it is one of Balthasar’s most decisive responses to Kant’s epistemology: basically, it amounts to the assertion that the “supersensible” dimension of all wholes, that is, all of reality, is not merely posited spontaneously by the intellect but is also receptively perceived in some analogous manner by the senses,

as paradoxical as it sounds. Here, we find a confirmation and development of what we saw in chapter 2 about how the perception of unity is both a spontaneous and receptive act. At first glance, it may seem that these are marginal points, but in fact they are both crucial, since it is possible to affirm that any epistemology that lacks either of them necessarily, on the subjective side, has not discovered a body-soul polarity and is therefore both dualistic and monistic, while, on the objective side, such an epistemology will have failed to grasp

the paradoxes that make up the appearance of a Gestalt. In other words, if the arguments of this book have any validity at all, we could say that an epistemology that does not affirm an analogy between the mind and the senses cannot avoid a problematically “identitarian” model of truth. Thus, when Balthasar delineates “the main concerns of a Christian anthropology founded on the “seeing of Gevfalt,” he draws on the works of four major thinkers from completely different perspectives —a theologian (Karl

Barth), a religious phenomenologist (Romano Guardini), a philosopher (Gustav Siewerth), and a poet (Paul Claudel) —in order to show how, in spite of their diversity, these four thinkers come to the same conclusions with respect to the joint workings of the spirit and the senses.°! I

51. GL 1:380-407.

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will not treat each of these individually, as Balthasar does, but rather take their testimonies as a whole, and draw out the most fundamental points in relation to our theme. It is primarily Barth and Claudel who emphasize the first point, that the working of the spirit (mind) has an inescapable and analogous sensible dimension. Thus, “for Barth, the soul does not lose its sensibility even in its reflection on itself. In scholastic terms, the soul cannot attain to reditio completa (or abstractio) without a conversio (per phantasma) ad rem.”°* This

is because a human being is not a “union of two parts or two ‘substances’ ” but rather a single whole, which is simultaneously an “embodied soul and ensouled body.”°* Because of the soul's essential connection to the body, Barth 1s able to affirm:

This act in which my soul is at once subject and object [is] also a wholly corporeal act ... for I do not exist without being this material body. ... Without having some command and making some use of [the senses], I cannot be aware of objects different from myself, I cannot distinguish myself from others as the object identical with myself, and cannot therefore recognize myself as a subject... . It may well be true that this act of knowledge is not seeing, hearing, or smelling or any perception communicated by my physical senses, but an inner

experience of myself. Yet it is just as much true that this experience ...18 also external and a moment in the history of my material body.™4

Now, some of this is infelicitously put: Barth seems to distinguish simply between the senses and the soul.°° Nevertheless, it is clear that he wants to insist on seeing the body and its senses as inwardly necessary to the soul’s own activity. Balthasar claims that in Barth’s thought, “both things —sensory perception and spiritual thinking —are constantly considered in their unity.”°© Similarly, Claudel dwells at great length on the “sensual” faculties of the soul, that is, the spiritual analogies of the senses, in his classic essay “La Sensation du Divin,”” in which he elaborates what is specific to each of the five

52. Ibid., 385. 53. The phrases are from Barth, Church Dogmatics W1/2 (1948), 327, cited by Balthasar in ibid., 384. 54. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 375, cited by Balthasar in GL 1:385-86. 55. He says, for example, that the self-presence of the soul is not a seeing or hearing, when it would be more adequate to say it is analogously so. 56. Ibid., 387. 57. Balthasar references this essay from Présence et Prophétie (Freiburg, Germany: L.U.F, 1942), 49-126.

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(spiritual) senses. Balthasar sums up the philosophical import of Claudel’s insights by saying “the body is a work of the soul, its expression and its extension in matter. Through the body, the soul experiences the world and has a shaping effect on the world.”°® It therefore follows that “it is the spirit-soul which hears, sees, and tastes; but in its nothingness and relativity it creates for itself the material organs necessary for perception.”°? Even if the senses are radically different from the soul, because of the particular nature of the soul's dependence on the senses, the soul possesses within itself the analogous movement that the senses imply. Thus, in its knowing, there is a legitimate sense in which we could say that the intellect “hears,” “sees,” “touches,” “tastes,” or “smells” its object. What is the significance of this affirmation? It brings home the fact that the essence of knowledge is not reductive abstraction, but a kind of concrete indwelling that does not remove difference. There is an ancient etymology that connects the word vapientia with the verb vapere, “to taste.” The perspective developed by Barth and Claudel points to the claim that the perfection of the intelligence lies in (concrete) wisdom more than in (formalistic) knowledge. One of the most immediate implications of this claim draws on our earlier discussion. If the intellect, from a formalistic perspective, lacks the mediation of the senses, its knowing becomes, as it were, instantaneous. It grasps its object “¢mmediately,” and thus has nowhere else to go and nothing else to do with it. Its knowing is essentially vfatc, such that the second it knows something, it is finished with it and can remain “moving” only by picking up with something else, something that will turn out to be equally abstract. Bonaventure asks, “To know much and taste nothing — of what use is that?”°! A “wisdom” perspective —an understanding of the intellect that possesses analogously the movement of the senses — by contrast, precisely because it is essentially mediated, is never finished with its object. Because of the mediation, there remains a “permanent” distance in its knowing, even if,

58. GL 1:402. 59. Ibid., 403. The “nothingness and relativity” of the soul Balthasar is referring to in this passage is the soul’s dependence on the body, which Claudel describes in his essay.

60. See Richard Onians, 61-63. Interestingly, Onians shows, contrary to the conventional interpretation, that the root connection is not in the first place the subjective one of “tasting” but the objective one of “being tasty”: he shows that there is a more fundamental relationship of wisdom to “sap,” i.e., the “juice” in a being that represents its concentrated “essence.” This sap is, in turn, what gives a thing its taste. Thus, wisdom is not only having a discriminating taste, but being fully ripe with one’s essence. 61. Bonaventure, Hexaemeron 23:21.

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as we have seen, this distance does not impair true intimacy. Thus, the intellect does not merely know its object in a lightning flash, but in its most perfect sense it vavory its object. It patiently allows its object to unfold itself

within its grasp. A wine does not have a “single” taste, but it presents a whole history, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if a discriminating palate is able to read this whole in its unity. So, too, a real object does not have, as it were, a single intelligibility, but rather it has an intelligible unity that is mediated through the diversity of its history. The unity is, therefore, not abstracted from that history, but is more fundamentally enjoyed within that history. It is precisely the analogy with the senses,

in sum, that allows us to see the perfection of the intellect, not in a nonmediate grasping of its object, which then moves on, but in a “staying with” its object, a remaining or an indwelling, and therefore a progressive deepening of its relationship.°” A knowing that perfected itself in abstraction would eventually lose precisely this depth dimension of knowing. Guardini and Siewerth develop in a particular way the second point, namely, that the senses are so to speak not (dialectically) limited to the sensible, but somehow have access to the transcendent whole precisely av senses, that is, without leaving their own order. In his summary of the joint

contribution of the four thinkers, Balthasar puts the point synthetically: “all the senses perceive the non-sensual sensually.”®* Guardini speaks directly to this point. As Balthasar explains it, for Guardini, one of the most lamentable traits of modern culture is the loss of the intrinsic depth dimension of the senses: “Seeing has become a matter of observing and verifying to which is afterwards added the activity of our abstract intellect as it orders and elaborates what is perceived.”©4 Guardini insists with force that this emptiness of the senses — or, to use the language we have been developing, their lack of an interiority analogous to the spirit —will eventually lead to the destruction of the human: “We no longer exist in images. Concepts have taken the place of images that can be contemplated. Machines have taken the place of embodied images, and segments of time the place of living rhythms. .. . Truly, if he follows this road, man can only become sick because his interior being can . . . live only in images.”°°

62. On knowing as “indwelling,” see David Schindler (Sr.)’s succinct presentation of the epistemology of Michael Polanyi in “God and the End of Intelligence: Knowledge as Relationship,” Communtwo: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 529-30.

63. GL 1:406. 64. Ibid., 389-90. Balthasar, in his treatment of Guardini, refers primarily to his book Dre Sinne und dte religiise Erkenntnis (1950). 65. Guardini, Die Sinne und de religiise Erkenntnts, 63-65, cited in GL 1:390.

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There is therefore not only a danger of abstraction with regard to the intellect, as we saw above, but likewise a danger of abstraction with regard to the senses. We tend to overlook this danger. We typically think of the

senses as inescapably concrete, and we illustrate this concreteness by pounding on a desk or slapping a wall. However, such gestures are utterly abstract. Sensation is not the brute “slamming” up against “opaque” things. Rather, as Guardini explains, normally speaking, sensation is the perception of concrete wholes, which are always more than “sheer” matter —

indeed, if we attend concretely to our experience, we see that we, in fact, always treat things as such, that is, as more than extension in space, but as meaningful “things.”°° Or, as Guardini himself puts it, what we sensibly interact with are forms (Gestalten): But form is not only corporeal. It means laws of proportion, a functional context, a developmental form, an essential image, value-figure —and all of this both spiritually and materially. The purely mate-

rial thing does not exist; the body is from the outset determined spiritually. And this spiritual element is not subsequently added to

the sensory datum, for instance by the work of the intellect; it is grasped by the eye at once, even if indeterminately and imperfectly at first.©”

Balthasar elaborates the significance of this passage by drawing attention to the fact that the inner reality, and thus the “supersensible” center, the mysterious ground or heart of a thing, is not something we merely infer from what we see; it is something we literally, physically vee: “The eye vees the vitality of the animal. In man, it vees (and does not ‘infer’) the soul in [his] gestures, expressions and actions; indeed, it sees the soul even before

the body, and the body only in the soul.”

66. Heidegger, too, has a very rich sense of the concrete meaning of fAingu. See his essay on this topic: What ls a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago:

Henry Regnery Company, 1967). 67. Guardini, Die Sinne und dte religiise Erkenntnis, 18ff., cited in GL 1:390-91.

68. GL 1:391. We could contrast the point Balthasar (and Guardini) are making here with the method Husserl adopts in the fifth Cartestan Medttation in dealing with the problem of grounding intersubjectivity phenomenologically. Here, with respect to the “experiencing of someone else,” Husserl speaks of an apperception of what is not simply intuitively present, which is not an inference or thinking act (Cartesian Meottattons, 108-11). Nevertheless, Husserl founds apperception wholly on my experiencing of myself as an animate organism —as having an inside so to speak —while Balthasar would insist that there is a fundamental sense in which my experience of myself is

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From a similar perspective, Siewerth dwells at length on the notion that the senses are not opaque, purely external, or closed entities, but rather, “openness is the essence of the senses. ©? This openness, he insists, does not extend to things in their materiality alone. If this were the case,

we could not strictly speaking talk of perception, but we would rather have simply the knocking together of Humean billiard balls. Instead, he says, what the senses primarily perceive is Being itself, as it manifests itself in sensible objects. Thus, Siewerth’s position has two aspects: first, the openness of the senses is not merely the openness of man’s body, but it is rather the openness of the whole man zm his body: “Our senses are essentially the open heart of man." Second, when the whole man receives a thing through his senses and thereby “internalizes” it, what he is doing

is at the same time ek-statically transcending into Being itself: “‘To take something into oneself’ does not mean ‘to make it subjective,’ but rather to concentrate one’s vision on the depth of Being manifesting itself in the image. It means, in other words, to empty oneself out more deeply into the stream of light of the real. It means to receive the ‘ground and foundation’ which is in Being itself.””! We saw that the senses’ mediation of the intellect is what “slows it down” and allows it to penetrate gradually and deeply into its object. The same thing holds conversely: since the intellect mediates the senses’ grasp of their object, this contact is not merely a contact with surfaces. The senses do not merely brush past their objects in their immediacy on the way to something else, but they rather have an “interior” openness to their object as part of their basic structure. In other words, they “touch”

not only surfaces but also and, even especially, depths. We thus end up as far as one could get from a conventional Kantian epistemology. Whereas Kant, in the usual interpretation, simply divides the sensible and the supersensible, the a posteriori and the a priori, Balthasar sees all these aspects as interpenetrating each other from the beginning. From

founded on a more primordial experience of another (the mother’s smile). The reason

this distinction is significant is that if my experience of another av transcendent other is derived without remainder from my own experience of transcendence, we lose any basis for an analogous perception (apperception) of the other’s transcendence, and make it instead something that I project onto the other from my own subjectivity. The point, in short, is that in order to affirm what Husserl’s means by apperception in this context, we have to move beyond his own presuppositions, and affirm something like the phenomenon of the mother’s smile. 69. Siewerth, Die Sinne und das Wort (1956), 8, cited in GL 1:394. 70. Siewerth, Wort und Build (1952), 25, cited in GL 1:395. 71. Siewerth, Wort und Bud, 15, cited in GL 1:396.

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his perspective, then, the senses do not perceive only the sensible object, leaving what lies beyond sensibility to be supplied by the intellect, but

rather they perceive the whole object, which is simultaneously sensible and supersensible, from within the order of the senses. Accordingly, the intellect does not merely grasp an abstract, nonsensible object but cognizes the whole object in its intelligibility and its sensibility, from within

the order of the mind. Each grasps the whole but from a different perspective, as it were. Again, if we affirm anything less, we lose the possibility of a Gestalt approach to truth, which posits a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and we end up instead with a mere series of parts or partial elements. We would thus face the regrettable task of fitting them together: regrettable because impossible. The Untty of the Person

If the soul and body and, particularly, the spirit and the senses, are not dialectical opposites but enjoy a genuine analogy and a mutual dependence, it is because they are always already, from the outset, interior to one another within a radical difference. By now, we have become familiar with the fact that such an affirmation cannot stand on its own but immediately presents a task: to avoid both a dualism and a monism, we have to

find a “third” in which the two are simultaneously identified with each other and distinguished from one another. But we should note, before we address this point, the great significance of Balthasar’s recognition of the irreducible role of the senses in the act of knowing. Often, knowing is taken to be an affair of the mind alone, and the senses, if they have any role at all, tend to be instrumentalized as the disposable “vehicle” that initiates the process or the “matter” to which knowledge is applied once it is finished. Such an approach, however, is dealing with something other than the knowledge of the human person, who is irreducibly both body and soul, to such an extent that neither can be separated from the other. But once we acknowledge this polarity, we are faced with a difficulty that conventional (dualistic) approaches never encounter. If, conventionally speaking, we associate knowledge with abstraction (i.e., abstract ideas, whether or not they are joined to equally abstract sensible experiences), we never have to find any way of bringing the body and soul together. However, as we have constantly seen, such an abstract sense of knowing in the end turns out to be inadequate, and in fact impossible. We thus eventually have to see how the body and soul can, not just “overlap” but genuinely come together in a union that is in some sense identical, without removing their difference. Up to this point, we have Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m 285

casually affirmed that each is dependent on the other. But the possibility of this mutuality is far from obvious. How can things so radically different as spirit and matter ever in any real sense internalize one another? We might be able to imagine that spirit internalizes matter, but what we imagine would be inadequate to the extent that we were unable to conceive of the converse, the genuine internalizing of spirit by matter. As Balthasar puts it, “the demand set before us, in its present form, is that we should realize spirit in body, and body in spirit, and this contains a contradiction.” Indeed, we have claimed in this section that it is in some sense necessary to affirm that the senses sense what is nonsensible and that the spirit grasps what is nonspiritual, and that the capacity to do so is not a marginal aspect but the essence of the their operations of sensing and grasping. But we

have not yet shown how such a thing can be possible. The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated: there is little in this entire study that would survive if this possibility cannot be found; on it depends the unity of the Gestalt and therefore the unity of both being and consciousness. It

is not enough to insist on the mutual analogies between the spirit and senses, and it is not enough to affirm that they both grasp the whole object differently, since both of these affirmations leave in place the possibility that the two operations might simply run parallel to each other. But there is an infinite difference between the state in which the operations merely overlap one another, and that in which they are genuinely joined in a real unity. Balthasar claims that “the unity of these contrary movements can only arise out of a dramatic engagement.” 5 Indeed, if it is the case, as we saw with Barth, that reditio completa is complete only through the conversio, and it is likewise the case, as we saw in the long quotation from Claudel in chapter 1, that we come to know something when we see it in action —in demanding, concrete engagement — then the unity of the “contrary” movements of body and soul must in some basic respect be achieved. The human person must have some way of communicating his whole being, of “externalizing” and making visible “everything that he is,” that is, of bringing the inside and the outside to adequation (without dissolving their difference). Only thus can he be said to be a unified whole; only thus can he be said in a genuine sense to come to self-presence. And if self-presence (reditio completa) is a condition of possibility for all knowing, then this possibility is also necessary for the possibility of truth at all. At the same time, however, as we have seen many times before, such a unity can be achieved only if it is simultaneously “given.” This section will therefore 72. TD 2:364. 75. Ibid.

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conclude with a brief discussion of the “inner” condition of unity, before turning in the next section more generally to talk about the “external” realization of that unity in action, 1 the deed. In chapter 2, we discussed the fact that if consciousness is truly to be consciousness at all, it cannot be a “single part” of the human being, which so to speak means it leaves the other parts at rest, but it must be the whole person moving at once (within a particular order).“4 Moreover, we saw that such can be the case only if the soul moves itself in being moved: if its movement is how it actively responds to being addressed in its very being by the whole of Being, as mediated through the love of the child's parents, which comes to concrete expression in the mother’s smile. In order to affirm such a thing, we had to discover a sort of center of the person. We are now in a position to speak a little more to this issue; however, it is

the very nature of the issue, like all truly simple things, that it defies simple systematic treatment. What I wish to do here is no more than list some of the basic characteristics that converge at this center. The point is to suggest that the “ethical” issues in relation to the body-soul problem; the “epistemological” issues in relation to the spirit-senses problem, as well as the problem of the unity of consciousness; the “aesthetic” issues in relation to the perception of beauty; and the “dramatic” issues of personal decision in light of ultimate meaning, are all in the end inseparable from one another.”® I will deal at greater length with the question of beauty in the next chapter, though I mention it here in order to mark its connectedness with the other issues. As for the rest, the reason that they all converge is that the polarity between the body and soul, because it concerns the whole person, must simultaneously have its root in a certain “third,”

within the person, as well as in a “fourth,” in a point within the order

74. I specify “within a particular order” because it is sufficient to say that the whole person moves without having to move in every possible way. In other words, consciousness is the movement of the whole as totus sed non totaliter. Indeed, the movement of the whole person in every possible way would be scarcely different from an explosion. 75. To say that they are inseparable does not mean that they are the same thing. Nevertheless, in a philosophy such as the one that comes to expression, for example, in Plato’s Republic, one sees how much each particular issue benefits from its being treated in relation to the others. One can regret, in light of this fact, the sort of parceling of philosophical issues that occurs in Aristotle’s various treatises, which address, for example, the nature of tragedy or drama (Poetics) in isolation, more or less, from ethical (Nicomachean Ethics) or epistemological (De Anuma) questions. A recovery of the necessary interrelation of these various themes may legitimately be said to be one of the major achievements, for example, of Hegel (The Phenomenology of Spirit), Heidegger (Being and Tume) —and Balthasar.

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that transcends the person. This is the reason that Balthasar claims the problem can be resolved only dramatically: the person must be called, in the center of his being, to engage himself in a decisively meaningful action in the world, an action that both presupposes his personal identity and gives rise to it. At the same time, if such dramatic engagement is a precondition for the unity of the person, if such unity is the precondition for self-presence, and if self-presence is a precondition for any full grasp of truth, then it necessarily follows that the epistemological prob-

lem itself cannot be resolved outside of this engagement. However, the self-transcendence of the person in drama can be a genuine transcendence if there is a whole person there to transcend. In other words, such activity cannot only give rise to the body-soul unity but must also paradoxically presuppose it, as the point in the person on which such engagement calls. This will become clearer as we proceed. Now, though there is no need to find a univocal term for this center of the person, perhaps the most comprehensive name, with deep resonance in the tradition, is the “heart.””© Balthasar expresses this concrete center thus: “man enters into existence at a point (which he never leaves behind) where from the outset the spirit was already slumbering in the flesh, and still does so, where it ‘awakens’ to itself through the call of another and where it finds its center not in the head, but in the heart, in which spirit and body, inseparably intertwined, are ‘one flesh.’””’ There are several things to note about this passage. First, Balthasar distinguishes the heart from the head, which is the seat of the spirit (Gewt = mind), and he insists that it is the heart that unifies the person. Indeed, if there is in fact a polarity between the spirit and the body in the human person, to say that the two poles had their unity in one of the poles is necessarily to reduce

76. Indeed, the great variety of anthropologies in the philosophical tradition, in a positive sense, discourages any attempt to reconcile them all in a single system. There would be, for example, another obvious term for the issue at hand, namely, vpurit itself. There is, in fact, an extensive tradition in the Church Fathers of a “tripartite” anthropology, which distinguishes spirit from soul, and which gives the spirit the role of mediating body and soul. Balthasar, in the context of a different problem, quotes a relevant

text from Kierkegaard that recalls this point: “Man is a synthesis of soul and body, however a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit”: CA, 83. Henri de Lubac is responsible for recovering this patristic theme in more recent times: see “Tripartite Anthropology,” in Theology and History, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 117-200. 77. TL2:211: “[D]er Mensch ... [tritt] an einer (nie verlassenen) Stelle ins Dasein, wo Geist immer schon und noch im Fleisch schlummert, durch sinnlichen Anruf zu

sich selber ‘erwacht’ und seine Mitte nicht im Gehirn hat, sondern im Herzen, in welchem Geist und Leib, untrennbar ineinanderliegend, ‘ein Fleisch’ sind.” 288 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

the one pole (the body) to the other (spirit) utterly without remainder, insofar as the least “excess” of the body in relation to the spirit would suggest that the body has its being in something other than the spirit. This would indicate that the body exists either because of a fall from unity (which we

would have to rule out if we would speak of a genuine polarity), or that there is vomething else in which the two are both united and distinguished. Thus, to perceive a polarity, we have to affirm the seat of the whole person residing in something other than the spirit in itself or the body in itself: this is, according to Balthasar, the heart. Yet, it is crucial to see that this does not imply an anti-intellectualism.

Often, when one speaks today about the heart rather than the head, one means something that has nothing to do with the mind. Balthasar means just the opposite: for him, the heart has everything to do with the mind. It is precisely the distinction of the heart from the mind that allows it to include the whole of the intellect in its complete integrity. Indeed, if the spirit subsists concretely within a polar relation with the body, and therefore has its integrity only by including a relationship to the body, then affirming a distinct “third” as the seat of the person is the only way to preserve the full integrity of the spirit or mind. And since it likewise includes the whole body, as a distinct “part,” it allows the legitimacy of the body's whole life in cv integrity. Affirming the unity of each in something that is mutually distinct from both allows each to be internal to the other without having to decome the other.

I note, as well, that what Balthasar says here about the heart is nearly identical to what he said forty years earlier, in The Truth of the World, about the imagination (Einbildungskraft).’ 8 Here, we recall, Balthasar had indi-

cated that the imagination, which is simultaneously productive (spontaneous) and receptive, is the seed out of which the spirit and the senses grow and further differentiate. Indeed, we could say that the imagination, as the point in which the intellect and the senses “coincide,” is not simply something other than the heart but is in fact the heart itself, considered in its epistemological role. But once we make this connection between the heart and the imagination, we take another step further. In the previous chapter, I proposed that there is an intrinsic link between the imagination and the operation of the conversio ad phantasmata, inasmuch as they both contain the intellect and the senses in a unity (perhaps we could say that the conversio is the imagination in action, or the proper operation of the imagination). Moreover, we saw that the grasp of the whole object that

78. TL 1:163-64.

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the conversio implies occurs only in the complex event in which the object “inspires” the subject (rapture), and calls the subject outside of himself to commit himself in judgment.

If we relate this point to the one we made above concerning the fact that both the intellect and senses, in irreducibly different ways, imply a complex interrelationship of transcendence and immanence in relation to the world, we see that the heart, which is the point in which the person comes together in his own unity, is not merely the place in which the person is most perfectly at rest within himself but at the same time the place in which the person is most perfectly expropriated in his transcendence and immanence into the world. Thus the heart, in a certain sense the seat of wisdom — that is, the place where an object is grasped in its wholeness and thus “savored” in its intelligible sensibility —is at the same time the seat of self-committing judgment.’ ? Tt is in the heart, then, that the person is most directly related both to self and to other (the world, but also the absolute other, God, as we will see more fully in the next section). This formulation, in addition, recalls the way we formulated the phenomenon of consciousness in chapter 2. Although we cannot develop this pos-

sibility here, there is reason to think that consciousness itself is another dimension of the heart. While we generally associate consciousness with “the head,” experience suggests quite forcefully that it is not an “exclusively” intellectual affair. Rather, there is a real sense in which we could say that the body, as body, has a certain “awareness” of the world — Barth, in fact, goes so far as to say that “it is certainly not only my soul but also my body which thinks.”°° We can justify this assertion, and justify as well

the notion that the senses have an intrinsic and indispensable relation to the meaning of consciousness, without making it any less a strictly “spiritual” phenomenon, by rooting consciousness in the center of man, the heart, which includes all these things in their difference. The text that we have cited from TL 2 has a footnote in which Balthasar refers to Siewerth’s “almost hymnic’” discussion of the heart in Der Mensch

und sein Leth (1953), then to a study of the role of the heart in Augustine’s thinking, by Anton Maxsein.®! The list of the various aspects of this

79. We will not speak directly about the heart as, so to speak, the organ of beauty until the next chapter, but it is worth pointing out, in this context, the extremely interesting fact that the book Kant called the Critique of Judgment discusses, as its primary concerns, the judgment of beauty and the judging of organic wholes (or perhaps we could say “Gestalts”). These functions, for Balthasar, have a direct relation to the heart. 80. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 400, cited in GL 1:386. 81. Anton Maxsein, Philosophia Cordts: Das Wesen der Personalitét bet Augustinus (Salzburg, Austria: O. Miiller, 1966).

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role that Balthasar draws from the book serves nicely to summarize what we have just seen: “For [Maxsein] (in harmony with Augustine) ‘cor,’ the heart, represents ‘the center of the person ; he likewise sees in the heart the mediating organ of sense knowledge (194ff.), ‘the impulse power of intellectual cognition’ (203#.), the organ of intellectual illumination (215ff.), [and] the link with God and the openness of the person to the world (246ff.,

28 1ff.).”8? The heart, too, was mentioned by the thinkers Balthasar discussed in his development of the spirit/senses polarity, as the place wherein they are unified. Here, we see both the receptive aspect and the active aspect emphasized. Thus, on the one hand, Siewerth observed that the heart is where man is most receptive to the world: “the heart (in the openness of the senses) is itself in its own way an enveloping womb.”*° On the other hand, this same heart is the concentration of man’s most spontaneous and productive “energies”: “So, too, the ‘heart’ [in Barth] is made to be the very center of man, and this naturally means the bodily heart as well, not only as the ‘seat or center of the spiritual and psychic forces,’ but as the quintessence and crossroads of man’s total corporeal and spiritual realities. ‘With all one’s heart’ is necessarily identical with ‘with all one’s soul’ and, thus, also ‘with all one’s strength,’ 54

Let us note a final element in the text from TL 2. The image that Balthasar uses to describe the union of the spirit and the senses in the heart of man is marriage: they are “two in one flesh.” At the end of this chapter, we will discuss in greater depth the philosophical significance of marriage in Balthasar's thought, but we can already observe, at this point, that the image suggests that the union is not just an abstract correlation of principles, but a dramatic event, something that is given even while it needs to be achieved. We have just elaborated the reasons we need to affirm

a sort of third that serves to unify the spirit and senses. But we have also said that this unity is not only presupposed, as an element within the human person, but is at the same time something that arises only with man’s dramatic engagement of activity in the world. Now, to put the problem in these terms recalls to mind something we saw in the last chapter, particularly in the brief passage on logic: in order for a third to function as a real unity of two principles, it must somehow come both before and after 82. N. 28, TL 2:211: “fiir den (mit Augustinus zusammen) ‘Cor als personale Mitte’

gilt und der im Herzen das vermittelnde Organ der Sinneserkenntnis (194f), ‘die treibende Kraft der intellektuellen Erkenntnis’ (203f), das Organ der intellektuellen Erleuchtung (215f), der Verbindung mit Gott und der personalen Offenheit zur Welt (246f, 281) sieht.” 83. GL 1:395. 84. Ibid., 389. Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m= 29/

the two. It is clear why the same point holds in the present case. If the unity of the two principles, spirit and senses, were achieved merely outside, in the world, it would be impossible to speak of the unity of the person. Something that has its center merely outside of itself has no center: the distance between “it” and its center would be such that anything else could indifferently take its place, and thus we would have no abiding identities.8> However, if the unity of the person came simply before the spirit and senses and their constitutive relation to the outside world, then it could not be said to be ¢er union, since it would represent a “third” merely juxtaposed to the “two,” something already complete in itself and therefore having only an extrinsic relation (of superaddition) to them. We have seen that the only way to account for a unity that is both prior and posterior is in terms of event, that is, as the transcendence of the whole intoa wholly other order, a movement that represents at one and the same time the crystallization of a triadic unity and its being surpassed. These two aspects occur af once, even if the whole takes time and space to unfold. Thus, if the heart unifies the mind and senses in their full integrity, this means it is not only an (abstract) principle of unity but a concrete whole that embraces them in their historical operation, that is, in their simultaneous ek-static transcendence beyond the self into the (wholly other order of the) world. This is, of course, perfectly in line with the fundamental character of the heart as we described it, designating the unity of the per-

son not in opposition to his relation to the world, but rather simultaneously iz the person's relation to the world. If the senses, with their roots in the body, are somehow a “hinge” between the person and the world, that is, as something which, belonging simultaneously though asymmetrically both to the world and to the self, is the place where the person is both always already expropriated and at home —and if the mind, as rooted in the soul, is likewise in a different way a hinge with the analogous movements —it is because they are both rooted ultimately in the unity-in-difference and the difference-in-unity of the heart: the heart is the most perfect form of this dual transcendence and immanence, the place where the movements both crystallize and open up. We might, therefore, call the heart the veat of drama, and it is thus that

the heart functions most characteristically in Balthasar’s thought. This

85. This, we recall, was the problem with the “neutral monism” theory of consciousness, criticized by Manfred Frank, which affirms that “consciousness” does not refer to anything within a “sphere of psychic life” but merely designates a particular relationship between external events: see, once again, “Subjectivity and Individuality,” 13-14.

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name suggests itself because of the meaning the heart acquires at this stage of the problem: we have seen that man is essentially “ex-centric” because of his inescapably polar nature. In chapter 2, we spoke at length about the fact that the unity of apperception, which is the condition of possibility of all knowledge, is itself a function of self-consciousness, and that self-consciousness itself arises only in the self’s ek-static movement in being called by another, but we left the problem, as it were, suspended “in mid-air.”*° It is only now that we are in a position to see the fulfillment of the problem involved. If the “polarity” of the heart, as both the inner unity of the person as well as the external manifestation, or mediation, of that unity in action, is not to fall apart into a dualism, there must be some way to bring these two poles, the interior unity and the external manifes-

tation, to adequation. In other words, if, as we have seen many times, man’s self-knowledge increases in tandem with his knowledge of the world,

which is another way of saying that his self-possession (or reditio completa) is necessarily mediated by relation to the other (or the conversio ad phantasmata), even if it is likewise the case that the former in turn mediates the latter, then there must be a comprehensive deed that crystallizes the whole of man tna concrete form, which tn a paradigmatic manner mirrors hunself to himself and thud, for the first time, tells him who he really ts. The charge is a heavy

one, given the inexhaustibly rich diversity that constitutes the heart in its unity, as we have seen. In a certain respect, Descartes was aiming at an analogous deed with his cogtto. While it represented, for him, the foundation of all other knowledge, it could not be left as an abstract principle but had to be “achieved” by going through the process of doubting everything, which is undeniably a dramatic act. Only thus could the “principle” be grasped and made real, and everything that then followed from this principle, “depended” on and as it were participated in the perfection of this initial act. However, we saw in chapter 2 that Descartes sought its perfection in the exclusion of all content, an approach that was echoed in Kant and led to a whole series of fundamental problems in German Idealism. Now, much of recent philosophy, especially deconstruction, has rejected the possibility of having 86. It would be more adequate to say that we established several principles (i.e., the unity of the whole in being, and the implicit perfection of the whole in the mother’s

smile), but that these principles require a ground. It is not the case, therefore, that these principles are incomplete and in need of fulfillment (which would be in fact a Hegelian interpretation that Balthasar rejects); rather, they are in a certain, relative sense already complete in themselves. Nevertheless, we will see that they were “already”

complete only when we arrive at the end. The meaning of this assertion will become clear at the conclusion of this chapter.

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any “foundations” at all. However, such a rejection is not only inwardly inconsistent, insofar as any rejection of foundation requires a basis for that rejection, but it undermines the possibility of any truth at all. It is, ultimately, and in spite of its (unjustifiable) “ideals” of justice, a nihilistic gesture, destructive of the world and of the whole human being. But to say that some foundation is necessary does not yet show how a foundation can be realized. Indeed, the way we have formulated the problem in some sense exacerbates it. The adequation of inside and outside seems at first glance impossible. What is, after all, the heart of man, this Realyymbol of the whole human being, in all of his tensions? What is this hidden point of unity that lies deeper than all his knowing, willing, and sensing, inasmuch as all of these are particular acts of the person, acts that presuppose the center and therefore do not seem capable of taking that center as an object? Is it not a simple, straightforward contradiction to make a subject an object, or to make interiority appear externally? But, in drawing attention to these difficulties, are we not simply returning to the problems we saw in our discussion of the problem of the self in classical German philosophy, problems we thought we had overcome by introducing the intrinsic necessity of self-knowledge being mediated by an other? For Balthasar, the heart, the whole of man, because it is both “rooted in the cosmos” and transcendent of the cosmos, that is, rooted in some sense in the “divine,” finds its fulfillment only in the total surpassing of itself (again, it is a meta-anthropology). In other words, as Pascal famously expressed it, “l’homme dépasse infiniment l'homme” (man infinitely transcends himself) the whole is a whole only in radical transcendence. Moreover, genuine transcendence, as we saw in chapter 3 and repeatedly since then, must always be twofold, both vertical and horizontal. And so, man

embodies the limits of his polar structure, that is, he realizes the constitutive tensions of the cosmos, only in somehow arriving beyond them, even while this movement beyond must be simultaneously the attainment of the “Absolute” and the relation to the “relative absolute” in a

concrete form. In short, the “dramatic engagement” that Balthasar said was necessary to resolve the tensions that constitute the human person is in the end the drama of trying to give an adequate answer to the question, How can the absolute appear, av absolute, in the relative? How can the “beyond” become manifest within the world? How can the eternal enter time? The claim is that if this question is left without an answer, then truth is left without a foundation, and everything that has been said up to this point would fracture back into the problematic pieces we have been trying to bring to unity. 294 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Death, Martyrdom, and Drama: The Foundation of Truth A theory can be refuted by another theory. But who can gainsay a life? — Evagrius Ponticus

From the outset, it is important to affirm that there is not a single answer to our question, even if, as we will see, it is the case that we seem to be

able to find a paradigmatic answer in Balthasar. If I single out particular aspects here, I do not mean thereby to say the final word. There are aspects I will not address: Balthasar’s theological notions of election and mission are particularly important, especially when we read them not only in terms of a “personal” event, but in terms of their relation to his notion of the divine idea or exemplary identity, which in a certain way “mediates” between God and the world.®’” Nevertheless, I will attempt to draw out some basic principles, which would have to be present in all the various and analogous expressions. In her book After Writing, Pickstock makes an argument from a more theological perspec-

tive, along lines similar in some ways to the ones we have been following, that liturgy, and especially the Eucharist (which does not come to be “outside” of the liturgy, even as it gives rise to that celebration, and indeed to the church as a whole), is the condition of possibility of all meaning.°® There is much in the works of Mircea Eliade, and in his notions of ritual (liturgy) as the actualization of myth, to support this

idea through more general analogies with non-Christian cultures.°? While not denying the importance of myth and ritual,” and even affirming that a specifically theological response, such as the one Pickstock proposes, will have to be the final one in the end, it is essential to see that an exclusive emphasis on myth, or on a theological response, if it is not “mediated” by a specifically philosophical response, could degenerate into irrationalism or positivism. In the present discussion, then, I will turn first to Heidegger and to Plato, in order to focus on the philosophical 87. See TL 1:238-40, where Balthasar discusses the divine ideas by analogy with imagination. See, also TD 4:61 and TD 5:391—92, where he associates the divine ideas with their incarnation in Christ, then specifically connects them with mission. 88. See Pickstock, After Writing, 261-64, among other places. 89. As he explains, in “primitive” cultures, ritual, as the actualization of myth, was essentially an epiphany of the divine. As such an “inbreak” of the beyond, it served to establish an absolute center, which was what gave the rest of the cosmos meaning: see, for example, Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard Task (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1987). 90. Indeed, Balthasar himself insists over and over on the importance of myth (and

its relation to ritual) and on the fact that Christianity, which in a certain sense perfects myth by realizing it, does not for all of that replace it. See, for example, GL 4:243-44.

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aspects of the basic human drama, and conversely, how the dramatic event is essential to philosophy.

Heidegger: Being-unto-Death*! There is a tendency to split Heidegger's first great (and unfinished) work, Being ano Time, into the first part, which seems more rigorously philosophical, and the second part, which seems more “existential” or even psychological.?? But splitting the book in this way undermines one of Heidegger's most fundamental arguments.” 5 Indeed, the book becomes particularly compelling when we grasp the connection between the two parts, although, admittedly,

the full implications of the connection become clear only in light of later works. I cannot attempt an interpretation of the book in general, or even any particular section, in this forum.” Instead, I presuppose a certain basic famillarity with the book’s insights as the context for drawing particular attention to a few points. What I wish to show, “in a nutshell,” is that there is an essential relation between the authentic facing of one's own death and the revelatory experience of Angst, and that this latter, in turn, is what opens up the

ontological difference. In short, it is the facing of one’s death that allows beings to appear in their “strangeness,” that is, in their objectivity or real difference from me, and thus mm their truth. This is why the “dramatic engagement’ of facing death plays an indispensable epistemological role.

One of the best-known Heidegger commentators in the United States, William Richardson, formulated the philosopher’s principal insight as “finite transcendence.””” This term captures, in condensed fashion, the

91. Setn-zum-Tode is generally translated as “Being-towards-death.” However, “Being-unto-death” seems more adequate, not only because it makes more immediate sense but also it recalls the term’s indebtedness to its source. Like many key notions in Being and Time (authenticity, the moment [Augenblick], Angst itself, repetition [Wieder-

holung], conscience, the “they,” and so on), the phrase Sein-zum-Tode seems to have been inspired by Kierkegaard and his analysis of “sickness unto death” (which is translated into German as Krankhett zum Tode). 92. See the observations made by Hubert L. Dreyfus, Betng-in-the- World: A Commentary on Heweggers Being and Time, Dwtston I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), vi-vii.

93. Heidegger himself says that the analysis of Being unto death, in the second part of the book, is indispensable to the “insufficient” previous analysis of Dasein in the first part: see Being and Time, sec. 46, 219-81. 94. It is worth mentioning, too, that this speculative interpretation, which is not uncontroversial, would require a much more thorough study for a full justification. Here, it is merely offered as a proposal, its primary purpose being to “set up” the significance of Balthasar’s position. 95. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 4th ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), esp. 85-93.

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point we will try to articulate here by looking back to Being and Time in light of the important later essay “What Is Metaphysics?” This essay treats the experience of Angst as that which frees space for the disclosure of beings in their ground. Balthasar gets to the heart of the matter in a passage from Der Christ und dte Angst: “The point of the overwhelming of sub-

jectivity through the pure ‘being-in-itself’ of the object, the exclusion of all rose-colored wishes and strivings through the majestic objectivity of the ‘thus-and-no-other-way’ of Being is .. . the point of angst.”?° According to Heidegger, a grasp of the Being of beings, or the “presencing” of that which is present — and in this sense the objectivity of beings, or their otherness from me, which Heidegger speaks of as a “being overwhelmed” by the “total strangeness of beings”?’ —is possible only on the basis of wonder. And wonder, as we saw in chapter I, is itself possible only if one grasps — or, better, is grasped by —the radical discontinuity between Being and beings, which is expressed in the question, Why are there beings

rather than nothing? Now, this question is not a casual one, which could be posed in abstrac-

tion or out of idle curiosity, but rather one that can be genuinely asked only as arising out of an experience that is so fundamental, it has the sui generis character of being an experience that is paradoxically greater than the “experiencer.” Specifically, it is the experience of the possibility that all things Gncluding myself) might not have been. We might say that the radicality of this experience by definition means that it cannot lie circumscribed within a person’s own horizons, for such a limitation would contradict the content of the experience. The absolute radicality of the original questioning means that the vulyect of the experience is deeper and more comprehensive than the uman subject; we would have to affirm, in this case, that the experience itself experiences the experiencer. For Heidegger, it does not suffice to experience the possibility that this or that thing might not be, to project the possibility of not-being on one being after another. Indeed, the real difference between Being and beings can come to light only if “beings” are experienced as a fofality — and there is literally an

96. CA, 70-71: “Dieser Punkt der Uberwaltigung der Subjektivitat durch das reine An-sich des Gegenstandes, der Ausschaltung aller die Schau farbenden Wiinsche und Strebungen durch unbekiimmerte, majestatische Sachlichkeit des So-undnicht-anders-Seins ist auch der Punkt der Angst.” 97. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?” 111. Objectivity is not the term Heidegger himself uses in this context (indeed, one of his translators, Joan Stambaugh, uses the term obyective presence to translate Vorhandensein, which is for Heidegger precisely the “opposite” mode of being from the one he intends here); nevertheless, we will use this term for the sake of continuity with Balthasar’s terminology.

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infinite difference between beings taken as an endless series, and beings taken as a totality. Because of the infinity or radical discontinuity of this

difference, the fundamental experience cannot be the assemblage of partial experiences but must have an “all at once” character. What is this all at once experience? If something can be grasped only through its distinction from what it is not, the totality of beings in their totality can come into view only against the horizon of radical nothingness. At this point, a paradox emerges: since this nothingness is what allows

beings to emerge as a whole, it is not “something” that is merely juxtaposed to beings as a whole; it represents precisely their most fundamental determination. It therefore follows, Heidegger argues, that this Nothing is ultimately “the same” as the Being of beings.’® By virtue of this association, Heidegger is able to affirm that it is just this nothingness that lets beings be, and that therefore lets them be most truly what they are, lets them stand out in presence: “Only in the nothingness of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their proper possibility —that is, in a finite way —come to themselves.”””

But in describing wat the experience is, we have yet to see how it is possible, how the human being can have “access” to an experience that implies his own nonexistence or, as Heidegger puts it, how we can ask a question that “puts us, the questioners, in question.”!0° In “What Is Meta-

physics?” Heidegger further elaborates this experience as an “Angst,” which he had introduced in Being and Time. In a word, Angst designates the “slipping away of the whole,” not the anxious fear of losing one thing or another but the basic calm that watches as the totality of beings is rendered “superfluous” and engulfed without remainder in the looming shadow of the nothing.!°! But there is a strange problem that arises with this notion, which Heidegger himself does not explicitly mention. How is it possible to experience one’s own nothingness as included in that of the totality of beings in the world? Moreover, would not the most radical form of this experience be more akin to the paralysis of despair and depression, which, far from making wonder possible, seems to wipe it out altogether? The experience of the “strangeness” of beings implies that they are “other” than “me” and thus that “I” am other than them: but nothingness, lacking any positivity, is the complete elimination of otherness. Heidegger himself talks about Angst, not so much in the negative sense of depression but in more 98. Ibid., 110. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 111. 101. Ibid., 102-5.

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positive terms as a kind of heroic “daring.”!” Indeed, it seems that we are best able to make sense of this “positive” interpretation of Angst only in light of the notion Heidegger developed in Being and Time, namely, Seinzum-Tode, “Being-unto-death.” In the first part of Being and Time, Heidegger criticized Descartes’s determination of the “world” as rev extenva, that is, a “thing” that stands before man as an objectified “presence-at-hand,” insofar as the world, for Heidegger, is not something Dasein possesses as object but is rather a constitutive mode of Dasein’s own being. While Descartes believes that man, in a second moment, has to find “access” to the world by means of abstract ideas, Heidegger insists that “worldliness” is the very meaning of man: Dasein uw being-in-the-world.! Heidegger later shows, in a related way, that temporality (and thus finitude) is the fundamental mode of this being. But this raises the question, if temporality and worldliness is the being of Dasein, how is the transcendence possible by which Dasein manifests the truth of beings? Heidegger rejects the more traditional view that affirms transcendence as a function of the immortality of the soul, which he believes compromises the finitude or worldliness of Dasein and leads to the sort of false abstraction we find in Descartes. Against this view, Heidegger affirms transcendence as ewenttally a function of man’s finitude. It is not the overcoming of contingency, as it were, that makes man transcendent, but rather his plunging into it, nasmuch as the relation to nothingness that contingency implies is a relation to the nothingness that lies beyond beings as a whole. Man is transcendent Jecause death is, for him, an issue. The evasion of this issue, then, is a failure in the basic human task — indeed, it makes genuine transcendence impossible. The issue can be avoided, Heidegger explains, not only through facile ideas of immortality, which he insists do not secure a genuine transcendence but merely extend a kind of ontic understanding of Dasein into a projected “afterlife,’!9 but also through the inauthentic, or “fallen,” way of being, which refuses to penetrate to the ontological depths of existence. For this mode of being, the

end or the border of existence (death) and wholeness or totality do not come together, because death always takes such an existence by surprise. Death, in other words, becomes “immanentized” as a moment that will occur somewhere further along the continuous line of fallen existence in the average, everyday world.

102. Ibid., 108. 103. Being and Time, sec. 21.

104. Ibid., sec. 49, 292.

Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m 299

The question for Heidegger thus becomes, Is there a way that man, in his worldliness, can grasp himself as a totality (Ganzheit)?'°° If man cannot find

access to himself as a whole, then he cannot be finite transcendence. But this means —1n light of the developments in “What Is Metaphysics?” —that he cannot pose the fundamental ontological question, he cannot wonder at the difference between Being and beings, and he therefore cannot become the open space in which beings come to themselves in their most profound

and proper depths, in their Being. Heidegger thus proposes that Dasein ought to anticipate (an “running ahead” = Vorlaufen) his own death; that he —we might say ek-statically — ought to confront or face the possibility that he himself absolutely and definitively might not be. Doing so, Dasein comes to stand resolutely before his “ownmost possibility of Being, ”106 because it is only in this moment (Augenblick) that he opens up to himself in his totality and at the same time becomes the placeholder of the essentially creative “noth-

ing.” It is thus, Heidegger says, that Dasein exists most authentically and moreover becomes a sort of light that frees others into their own existence. The facing of one’s own death appears to embrace the paradox of finite transcendence more decisively than Angst alone does, although it clearly has an intrinsic relation to this basic “mood.” While Angst alone would seem to run the danger of losing the possibility of wonder, the facing of one’s own death implies a positive, or ek-static, running out to meet nothingness, and not merely getting overrun by it, even if it remains essentially a “ being overwhelmed.” In this respect, there is a clear “standing out” into the difference, and thus a transcending beyond beings as a totality that does not deny man’s finitude and even the hermeneutical situation of perspective, but in fact for the first time genuinely constitutes it, since it determines man in his finality —that is, simultaneously opens him up (in relation to nothingness) and determines him in his totality. Balthasar affirms, in principle, everything Heidegger argues here, although he places it in a profoundly different context.!°” Heidegger seems to be one of the few recent philosophers who has seen that the problem of the consti-

tution of man in his wholeness as a “knower,” which is a necessary aspect of truth, can be resolved only dramatically. Like Balthasar, he sees that this 105. Ibid., sec. 46, 279-80. 106. Ibid., sec. 50. 107. Balthasar gives a positive account of his points of agreement with Heidegger, as well as his decisive points of difference, in his early essay “Heideggersphil.” In essence, while he embraces Heidegger’s emphasis on man’s finitude, with everything it implies, he shows that such an understanding of finitude is possible only in relation to the infinite, just as Heidegger’s emphasis on temporality is possible only in relation to the eternal. Finitude and temporality cannot be simple “nothingness” but must alo have a positivity.

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is the case because man, in the core of his being, is an irreducible tension. While Heidegger describes this in terms of finite transcendence (a concept, we will see, that is somewhat problematic for Balthasar), Balthasar sees the tension as a complex interrelationship between transcendence and immanence, finitude and infinity, which is concretely “incarnated” in the bodysoul polarity. Moreover, Heidegger sees that the dramatic engagement with the issue of death is not a mere “anthropological” problem, but that it has to do with the very meaning of Being, inasmuch as it has to do with the possibility of the truth of Being. The “total strangeness” of beings, and therefore transcendence — because there can be no transcendence at all without absolute transcendence, that ts, without transcending the totality of things as a whole —depends

on facing the limits of existence, and in this on sense bringing the “absolute-

ness’ that the limits imply into the “relativity” (temporality or worldliness) of experience. Balthasar does not hesitate, therefore, to affirm in principle Heidegger's sense of death as revealing the limits of the finite and thus opening an “absolute light.” 108 Finally, Heidegger confirms a fundamental point that we also saw in Balthasar, namely, that transcendence is simultaneous with wholeness, that man’s grasp of himself is in some basic sense simultaneous with his “infinite” surpassing of himself.

Nevertheless, there are fundamental problems that emerge from Heidegger’s approach.!" According to Balthasar, the most basic difficulty it

108. TD 4:122. On Balthasar’s use of this point from Heidegger in his own (theo) dramatic theory of action, see Mario Imperatori, “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 193-94. 109. The criticism of Heidegger that is prompted by Balthasar’s philosophy, which I am about to develop, is very different from the criticism that Pickstock offers in After Writing, 112-13. While I would agree with her that Heidegger seems to presuppose, without justification, that there can be no sense of eternity other than a “spatial” or “ontic” one, I take issue with her criticism of the “totality” that Heidegger is seeking in the facing of one’s own death. For Pickstock, such a desire for a kind of totality brought into the experience of the present moment betrays a residual modern preoccupation with “essences” or “things.” Moreover, it seems to want the “mastery and light” of the now, at the expense of the possibility of unforeseeable future events. But Pickstock herself seems to allow only a modernist understanding of totality or essence. We will see at the end that from Balthasar’s dramatic perspective, not only is determinate, finite essence (Gestalt) not exclusive of openness to the future, but it is in fact ultimately what makes such openness possible. If she denies what Heidegger was trying to affirm, namely, the achievement of a kind of wholeness of the person, Pickstock must find some other way to account for the role this plays in Heidegger’s thought, namely, the grounding of the possibility of truth by allowing the “absolute” to irrupt, nonreductively, into the world. If such a possibility occurs exclusively in the liturgy, which Pickstock seems to suggest, and does not have any philosophical analogies “in the world,” then the liturgy itself gets, in turn, emptied of philosophical depth. Liturgy thus turns out to be not the “consummation of philosophy” but its sublimation, or indeed simply its ersatz.

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presents lies in one of the aspects that Heidegger most positively highlights. Heidegger affirms a radical difference between the experiencing of other people's death and the experience of one’s own death.!!" The death of an other is a painful loss, Heidegger says, but it does not disclose the ontological sense of the possibility of not-being, that is, the loss of beings in their totality, insofar as the one who experiences the death of an other remains, as it were, in the world. It is thus only one’s own death that is sufficiently radical, and this experience is one in which, by necessity, I am absolutely alone. No one can go through this experience in my place. For Balthasar, by contrast, while “facing one’s death” seems to be the most radical experience —to the extent that it concerns a death that is mine and no one else's and indeed, touches me in the depth of my being (or even deeper!) —making it fundamental, he says, cannot avoid “instrumentalizing’ my relationship to everyone and everything else.!!! In other words, absolutizing one’s own death implies a kind of ultimate solitude and even solipsism. But such a solipsism means that authentic transcendence, understood as relationship to the other as other, is in the end an illusion.

If we begin, by contrast, with an affirmation of relation to the other that is simultaneous with my own existence as a self!!* —if we begin, that is, with the mother’s smile —then we can affirm a certain solidarity in death, and therefore an experience of the death of the other as radically as my own “facing of my death.”!!* Because of the structural dependence of the self on the other, there is a sense in which I experience the death of the other, to whom I am bound in love, even more radically than the anticipatory thought of my own death. History is fraught with examples of those who have chosen to die in place of another, thus revealing a reversal of Heidegger's principle. In light of the radical experience of an other’s death, 110. Being and Time, sec. 47, 281-85: “No one can take the Others dying away from him.

... By its very essence, death is in every case mine.” 111. TD 4:96. In a footnote on the same page, Balthasar shows how Heidegger’s presuppositions prevent him from “reaching” in any genuine sense another person. 112. Balthasar’s sense that a relation is as fundamental as substance in his understanding of person has come under heavy criticism from Josef Seifert: “Person und Individuum: Uber Hans Urs von Balthasars Philosophie der Person und die philosophische Implikationen seiner Dreifaltigkeitstheologie,” Forum Katoltsche Theologte 13 (1997):

81-105. Seifert does not acknowledge any possibility at all of a paradoxical relationship between substance and relation, which would make each prior to the other in a different order, and would thus allow a complete affirmation of both. Thus, he is forced into the claim that Balthasar denies that “person” is something that exists in étself (90), which, in light of what we have seen here and in chapter 3, is untenable. 113. See Balthasar’s reference to Marcel’s ideas on this topic: “Marcel is right: the death of the beloved w a threshold, the threshold. But we ourselves cannot cross it.” TD 1:392.

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Balthasar claims that we must speak of both “my” death and “our” death; though these two are irreducibly different, they both need to be affirmed.!14 The solipsism that is implied in the absolutizing of “my death” is immediately related to the other major problem in Heidegger’s approach, which

was mentioned in the introduction and chapter 1, namely, the identification of the Absolute (Being) with nothingness. Thus, Heidegger's notion of Dasein’s transcendence is not in any genuine sense a being with an “other” but rather a projection, a standing-out into the nothing, which, in the end, is always my own nothing — “nothing” other than me. The Angst that arises in the facing of one’s own death in this case loses its radical character. It can no longer be called the “uncanny,” because it is now perfectly

familiar since it is my nothing. In other words, the unetmlich (uncanny) is exhaustively transformed into the 4etmisch (native; familiar). If “my death” gets absolutized, in the same moment it gets tamed. From this perspective, the heart of Dasein is not left vulnerable to the otherness of the other and exposed to the end by the gaping wound of the ontological difference, but finally it shields itself. The radicality that Heidegger sought can be affirmed, it seems, only when we interpret the ontological difference in terms of the fourfold difference. And this brings us back to the first point. Because Heidegger does not permit a positive, w/timate otherness (since Being is nothing), he has “no room” for any relative other. The transcendence he wanted to affirm in the radical experience of fini-

tude, since it cannot finally affirm a real mediation by an other (“our death”), will have to collapse into an ummediacy, which is no transcendence at all. In the end, to embrace Heidegger's profound insight that death brings to light the paradox of wholeness, we have to look elsewhere for its ground.

Plato: Dying for the Truth We have begun to see that the making immanent of the transcendent, which alone is what allows the possibility of truth, cannot be an abstractly fixed

principle; nor, however, is it simply contrary to determinate, intelligible form. Instead, it is an intelligible form, a wholeness, that emerges only within dramatic engagement. Furthermore, inasmuch as it concerns a paradigmatic form that grounds, in some sense, all the others, this dramatic engagement /must involve the very limits of existence, that is, death and the ground of being. This perspective opens up an extraordinary access into

114. TD 4:129.

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the philosopher “for whom death is an issue” in an even more comprehen-

sive manner than for Heidegger: namely, Plato. Indeed, a certain unity among the major dialogues emerges once we take the dramatic significance of death as an interpretive key, not only to Plato's moral teaching, but in an even more fundamental sense to the epistemological dimension of his philosophy, which is as inseparable for Plato from the moral dimension as reason (logos) is from love (erés), or as truth is from the good. Death is not only the constant theme in all the early dialogues, but it provides the basic horizon of meaning of the middle dialogues (e.g., Phaedo and Republic), and even the later ones (e.g., Theatetus).''© But the meaning of death in Plato, from the beginning, has a different “tone” from the one we see in Heidegger. Whereas, for Heidegger, death is primarily an “issue” for the authentic individual, for Plato, it is the “place” where relation to an other most perfectly comes to expression: for Plato, death is always connected to martyrdom, bearing witness (and bearing witness always refers to an “other”). At the heart of the Republic, in the midst of a discontinuous break with

the main topic of the dialogue, there emerges precisely the question we have alluded to as essential content of the task of meta-anthropology: How can the transcendent (in this case, the Good), be made visible so as to pro-

vide the ground of meaning for all else? Plato’s primary response to the question of an “adequate” immanent image of the transcendent Good, I propose, is neither the sun image, nor the divided line, but finally Socrates himself.!!© He images the Good by dying for its sake. Although it would require more space to elaborate than we have here, a basis for the proposal of Socrates as the image of the Good in the Republic can be seen already in the relation Plato draws between Socrates and the central cave analogy. It is possible to illuminate this relation in terms of the meta-anthro-

pological problem we have been discussing. 115. I can do no more than assert these claims at this point, for a discussion in any

detail would take us far from the theme. One of the Plato commentators, next to Balthasar (see, for example, Balthasar’s lengthy discussion of Plato in GL 4:166—215,

which begins with this theme, 166-75), who has repeatedly drawn attention to the importance of death in Plato is Eric Voegelin: see Order and History, vol. 3: Plato and Arwtotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985; originally published 1957). In relation to the Theatetus, for example, Voegelin points out that the allusion to the dying Theatetus (who is explicitly taken as an “image” of Socrates: Theatetus 143e, Statesman, 257d—258a) at the beginning of the dialogue is the necessary context

for understanding not only this dialogue, which is, interestingly enough, Plato’s most thoroughly “epistemological” dialogue, but also the meaning of the two that are connected with it, the Sophuwt and the Statesman. 116. For a further elaboration of this in the Republic, see D. C. Schindler, “Going Down: Founding Reason in the Republic,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studtes (September 2003): 81-132.

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The clearest expression of the transcendent beyond not “left” separate from the world of senses, but breaking in to that world, is the moment that Socrates breaks in to the image that he was drawing of the cave, in order to compel the philosopher to go back down for the sake of the other prisoners. The cave represents the immanence or life of immediacy of the prisoners, who are not only stuck underground but even more emphatically trapped in themselves. Indeed, it is even too much to say that they are trapped in themselves, since they, in fact, have no access to themselves for the same reason they have no access to one another, as Plato indicates.!” The point here, which is in a certain sense the point of this whole chapter in relation to the theme of truth in general, is that the moment a genuine connection between transcendence and immanence is sundered, there is nothing to prevent immanence from becoming infinite. That is to say, without the connection, transcendence and therefore any kind of whole that remains “other” is undermined at every single level, and so by logical neces-

sity there arises the compelling movement toward pure immanence (of sensible images, to use Plato's language) or, in a more comprehensive sense,

toward the pure abstraction of abstract formalism, which includes both the abstraction of sensual immediacy and intellectual immediacy. However, the moment a genuine connection is established between immanence and transcendence, there is nothing to prevent the opposite movement of increasingly comprehensive and transcendent wholes, until we reach the moment of the in-breaking of the absolute: this is the “ascent” of the philosopher through various stages out of the cave and into the light of day. But the movement cannot end there. Even though there is a fundamental difference between the sensible and the intelligible realms, for Plato,

which is analogous to all of the “relative infinities” we have seen in the Gestalten formed at various stages in the structure of truth, there is a sense in which these differences all remain within a continuous order. We see this not only in the fact that the cave image Socrates draws lays all these stages out within the same basic, sensible reality (1.e., the whole image is drawn in “representational” figures) but also in the fact that what ultimately distinguishes sense appearance from the being, the proper “object” of the soul, is the radically other order of the good,!!8 If the absolute is to be shown in its absoluteness, the “ascending movement’ has to be interrupted. There has to be in some sense a /eap into a radically different order, which entails

a fundamental “reversal,” such as the one we saw Balthasar describe in relation to Heidegger’s notion of Angst as the experience indispensable 117. Plato, Rep. 7.515a. 118. Ibid., 505d.

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for “setting up” the “objectivity” of things, and therefore indispensable for their transcendence. This reversal is, alone, what simultaneously secures wonder, transcendence, relation to the other, and obyectivity.

We begin now to see how many themes in the Republic— many more than we can indicate in this context —converge in Socrates’ sending the philosopher back down into the cave. He is, indeed, sending the philosopher to his death. This is why it is so important that Socrates sends him down, since it is Socrates who, in Plato's eyes, stands as the martyr, the one who died for the truth, thus making the ground of truth manifest and at the same time making philosophy, that is, the love and knowledge of what truly is, possible. The notion of the deed of martyrdom as the ground of truth moreover accounts for the explicit self-reference, the first-person singular speech, at the very beginning and end of the dialogue, which is rare in Plato.!!? The first, pregnant word of the Republic is katabén: “J [Socrates] went down.” At the end, after relating the myth of swdgment, Socrates once again “breaks into” the image, and he contrasts being “persuaded by” the image (which, as we have seen, can persuade concerning a reality that is deeper than mere image only by virtue of an absolute ground)

with “being persuaded by me”!?°— and we are meant to understand this “me” not only as the flesh-and-blood person telling the story but also as the unsurpassably real (1.e., transcendent and objective) person who was put to death for the sake of reality. He is the one who opens the immanent to judgment, and therefore to truth. Now, both Heidegger and Plato affirm that genuine transcendence, the transcendence that makes truth possible, cannot be simply an abstract principle of anthropology, but it must be achieved through a dramatic event. For Heidegger, we saw, the transcendence ultimately gets compromised precisely to the extent that it is not an other-centered transcendence, that is, to the extent that it is rooted, not in a positive other but in an absolute nothing. We thus see the reason for Balthasar’s claim that Heidegger essentializes the ontological difference: his “facing of one’s own death” or Angst opens up the difference between Being and beings, but he fails to see how this transcendence can also, nonreductively, bring them 119. The other dialogues that begin in the first person are the Jaw, the Statesman, the Apology, and the Charmides. While there does not seem to be a clear reason why Plato chose to narrate these other dialogues thus, we will argue that the first-person perspective of the Republic is crucial. In a footnote to the Loeb text (trans. Paul Shorey [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930], 2), Shorey mentions an anecdote about how this passage was found in Plato’s tablets in many variations, which suggests that the final version was not haphazard. 120. Plato, Rep., X, 621c.

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back into relation.!2! For Plato, by contrast, the genuine otherness of the transcendence is preserved. The radical difference of the good is vimultaneously what accounts for both the ascent (or the difference between being

and image) and the descent (or the re/ation between being and image: the philosopher returns to the cave of images), to the extent that as the good appears as the object of all striving as well as that which, embodied in Socrates as the one who went down to Hades for its sake, sends the philosopher back down into the sensible “world.”

This return, however, does not make the discontinuity between the orders any less radical. Heidegger affirms the complete withdrawal of all beings as a totality in the fundamental experience of the nothing, but he oscillates between a being overwhelmed by the nothing in Angst and a sort of preempting of the nothing in the heroic “staring down” of death. Plato echoes the same radical withdrawal in the act of dying for the good — we recall that the terms set for the rest of the dialogue in the story of Gyge’s Ring called for the “just man” to sacrifice every possible relation to appear-

ance!” and yet, the act that makes the absolute really manifest in the relative does not thereby reduce it to the relative. The otherness is truly held open. This is why the dramatic engagement with death in Plato, in contrast to the engagement in Heidegger, is weighted from the beginning in the direction of otherness. Socrates speaks of the great danger involved in seeking truth, because, in doing so, one is responsible not only for oneself but even more basically for others;!25 the total isolation of the prisoners in the cave is most perfectly contrasted with the philosopher who does not live the “better life” for himself, but who sacrifices it in order “to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens in harmony with each other. "124 Thdeed, Plato goes so far as to say that 121. This is a point we elaborated in our discussion of the fourfold difference in chapter 1. 122. Indeed, Heidegger’s withdrawal of all beings in the experience of Angst fades into a mere “psychological” experience when compared to the radicality Plato intends. Plato could not put the point any more forcefully: after being scorned and stripped of all possible honors (all relation to appearance), the just man “will be whipped, stretched on a rack, chained, blinded with fire, and, at the end, when he has suffered every kind of evil, he'll be impaled.” Ibid., 2.361e—362a. And after being abandoned by men, he will finally be abandoned even by the gods, who prefer the unjust man, the one who, to all appearances, made “adequate sacrifices” and “magnificent offerings to them” (362b-+). 123. Ibid., 450e—451a: “But to speak, as I’m doing, at a time when one is unsure of oneself and searching for the truth, is a frightening and insecure thing to do. I’m not afraid of being laughed at —that would be childish indeed. But I’m afraid that, if I slip from the truth, just where it’s most important not to, I’d not only fall myself but drag my friends down as well.” 124. Ibid., 519e.

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this transcendent act is what constitutes the whole as a whole, that it is what “bind[s] the city together.”!*° We thus see a confirmation of what was affirmed about the task of meta-anthropology in relation to truth: the truth of any part both gives rise to and is consequent upon the truth of the whole —the community —that this polarity requires a founding act, which is man’s task of becoming paradigmatically a whole by surpassing himself toward the absolute in a dramatic engagement with death. Balthasar, after laying out the significance of Socrates’ death for Plato's philosophy, writes that “the question as to how far Plato's picture of Socrates is idealized plays no role here, only the fact that the philosophical act consists in the decision to die, which springs from his absolute dedication to the truth.”!2© Indeed, Balthasar integrates the point that Plato is making here, without reservation, into his own philosophy. In The Truth of the Worlo, he argues that it is the very nature of truth to require a witness, and that this does not make it “dependent” on man in a way that reduces truth to subjectivity, but in fact most profoundly secures its utter obj ectivity./*/ It does so because the perfect act of witness, martyrdom, is an unsurpassably objec-

tive act. And yet, at the same time, this pure objectivity, which anchors truth in a transcendence beyond any subjective limitation, does not thereby exclude subjectivity but rather requires the whole of it. This act, then, establishes a foundation for truth that is total and yet nonreductive, that has an

essentially “transcendent” character, which implies that at every single level —from the most supreme of personal truths to the most formal of logical truths and the most common of acts of perception —there is no reductive access to the object, no way of reaching the truth of the object without participating in some way in the act that founds it, and therefore “committing” oneself in a manner analogous to the act of martyrdom.

Thus, Balthasar insists, even “logical truth cannot be abstracted from personal truthfulness,”!*> granted that we take personal truthfulness to mean remaining true (fidelity) or bearing witness to truth. He fills out the meaning of this claim when he elaborates the “conditions of possibility” for the meaning of human language in Theologik volume 3. “Human understanding,” he explains, “begins with being addressed by a Thou, that is, a foreign freedom, who draws my attention to a determinate state of affairs.” 12? 125. Ibid., 520a. 126. GL 4:171 (translation slightly modified). 127. TL 1:120-30. 128. TD 2:252. 129. TL 3:331: “Menschliches Verstehen beginnt mit dem Angesprochensein durch ein Du, das heifSt durch eine fremde Freiheit, die mich, auf einen bestimmten Sachverhalt hinweisend, aufmerken lafst.”

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At the same time, he continues, the “I” can grasp this state of affairs, regard-

less of what it is, only insofar as it is illuminated by a comprehensive horizon. Thus, “language, which is always a referential gesture, occurs — in every conversation —within two open spheres: one is the commonality of

an absolute (pre-linguistic) horizon of meaning that embraces both interlocutors, and the other is the freedom of each speaker, which can never be presented, and thus one whose expressions one always has to ‘trust,’ even when it is more often accompanied by empirical proofs of its correctness.”!°" These two spheres, however, would remain precariously poised, if it were not for the possibility that they might be brought together in a single expression of freedom that embodied or, rather, manifested that absolute horizon:

“Nevertheless, behind [this horizon that transcends all human activity] there stands a choice and decision to posit the whole (beyond my interests) as valid: an option for a meaning that cannot be further constructed, which

bears all of the indissoluble contradictions in the world and in existence through an affirmation of a meaning that comprehends them all, a meaning without which one could not even speak of the meaning-lessness of the contradictions.” !5! Martyrdom presents, as it were, the ideal form of this expression of freedom: it permits the withdrawal of the totality of beings precisely for the sake of that totality. Nevertheless, once we grant the fact that Balthasar affirms the significance of literal martyrdom, we are confronted with a new question. Does not the extremity or “ideality” of martyrdom raise a certain question as to the role it serves epistemologically? Is there not a certain contradiction in

the fact that the content of the act that is supposed to ground the manifest truth of the cosmos, the world, is precisely the loss of that reality? But, on the other hand, if it is not the loss of that reality, then, as we have seen with Heidegger, it is not sufficiently radical to ground the truth of the whole. What are we to make of this dilemma? Now, in spite of the “epiphanic” depth of insight in the Republic, it seems as though Plato himself is not able to hold the tension; he often lets go of 130. Ibid., 332: “Sprache, die je eine hinweisende Handlung ist, welche auf etwas zeigt, ereignet sich —auch in jedem Gesprach —nur innerhalb zweier Raume: der eine ist die Gemeinsamkeit eines beide umgreifenden Horizonts von (vor-sprachlichem) Sinnverstehen iiberhaupt, der andere ist die nie vorzeigbare Freiheit jedes Sprechenden, dem man jeweils sein GedufSertes ‘glauben’ muf’, auch wenn es 6fter empirische Beweise ftir dessen Richtigkeit gibt” (emphasis mine).

131. Ibid., 332-33: “Dennoch steht dahinter eine Wahl und Entscheidung: das Ganze (jenseits meiner Interessen) als giiltig zu setzen: Option ftir einen nicht mehr konstruierbaren Sinn, als Ertragen der unauflésbaren Widerspriiche in Welt und Dasein aus der Bejahung eines sie umgreifenden Sinns, ohne den man nicht einmal von der Sinn-losigkeit der Widerspriiche reden kénnte.”

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one of its essential sides. The key basis for assessing this issue in Plato would seem to be the question of the body-soul polarity in relation to the “structure” of transcendence. We saw earlier in the chapter that genuine transcendence requires the body (senses) to mediate the soul (spirit) to itself and vice versa. Without this mutual mediation, we will collapse the structure of man’s relation to the world into different variations of a reduction to immediacy. This mutual mediation, in turn, has as its indispensable presupposition a polarity between body and soul, and this polarity itself is impossible unless we affirm that the body represents in some fundamental respect a povitive excess or “more” with respect to the soul. It must, in other words, make a genuine, intrinsic contribution to the soul’s knowledge, not merely (negatively) as an indispensable occasion for knowing —the point from which the act of knowing begins and then fo which it is applied — but (positively) as the conveyor of objectivity in form and subjectivity in content.

A basic ambiguity in Plato on this point is undeniable, and no doubt one of the most important things about Pickstock’s After Writing is its com-

pelling demonstration that the notion that Plato simply rejects the body, and all it implies, is shortsighted: what he rejects, she says, is a “mundane apprehension of physicality.”!** Nevertheless, we can ask whether Plato’s integration of the body from a nonmundane perspective, that is, from above, sufficiently appreciates the soul's good dependence on the body, as possessing in some ultimate sense something more than the soul can possess itself. Without this recognition, there will inevitably be a tendency to emphasize the ascending movement of abstraction from the senses, which is clearly a major theme in Plato, and at the same time to collapse the transcendent into the immanent, which seems to occur especially in the “late” Plato: as Balthasar points out, the last dialogues present an “aesthetic ethic immanent in the world,” wherein “it is no longer a matter of ‘erés yearning for wisdom’ (philosophia) but of wisdom itself, which is one with the cosmic-human consonance.”!% A consequence of this dual tendency, then, will be an exclusive positing of literal martyrdom, a “negation” of life, as the founding philosophical act. This exclusivity is connected to a setting of the ideal or absolute in oppovition to the real or relative, which then can dialectically either subsume the latter or reduce itself to it.

132. Pickstock, After Writing, 15.

133. GL 4:213. Balthasar is referring, here, to the passage in the Zawy, 3.689d, where Plato speaks of the “perfectly rational life” and identifies it with “wisdom,” rather than the love of wisdom.

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Since, as we have seen, the problems that arise from dialectical opposition can be avoided only through the discovery of a polarity, we are led to the fascinating question: Does martyrdom have an trreducthly different pole? If martyrdom, in other words, is the integration of the relative on the basis of the Absolute or the manifestation of the truth of the relative through the concrete expression of the radical discontinuity between the cosmos

and the divine, what we need to find, as paradoxical as it may initially sound, is an image capable of integrating the Absolute within the relative. With respect to the different but related problem of avoiding a dialectic between finite and infinite freedom, Balthasar says, “not only must the

Infinite take the finite into itself... but the finite must also be capable of taking the Infinite into itself. ”154 And this is another polarity.

Balthasar: The Dramatic Foundation of Truth La créativité dramatique, c’est d’étre vrai avec le corps et l’Ame.!% — Francois Mauriac Nicht der Schmerz ist der letzte Sinn des Tragischen, sondern die Wahrheit, die freilich nicht ohne Schmerz, die nur als Schmerz gesehen kann. 156 — Gerhard Nebel

Because this “polar” integration must take place in an /mage, I will first turn to Balthasar’'s notion of art, specifically, the dramatic art: drama itself. “Since man can neither throw off his vertical relationship to the absolute,”

he says in TD 4, “nor entrap the absolute within his own finitude by his own (magical) efforts, he becomes, right from the Start, a figure of pathos on the world stage.”19/ The very fact of man’s polarity sends him to the

stage. Balthasar goes on to elaborate the nearly impossible tensions expressed in the fact that man is both rational and finite: “The paradoxes associated with a rationality that is embedded in a transitory existence are indissoluble.”!8 Rationality means relation to the true and the good, which are not true and good unless they are rooted in an absolute foundation and yet which demand to be embodied in the poor, ephemeral creature, man. He will have no choice, in the end, but to give himself up. However, 134. TD 2:201. 135. Dramatic creativity is being true with body and soul. 136. The ultimate meaning of the tragic is not suffering, but truth —although to be sure the truth cannot happen without suffering, but, indeed, only as suffering. 137. TD 4:73. 138. Ibid., 81.

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this surrender finds expression in man’s drive to make a judgment that remains valid, to speak a word that is permanent, a word that “says every-

thing.” The human being knows that his pledging of himself occurs in time, and that time means that both the circumstances in which he pledges himself, and even he himself who pledges, are bound to suffer change: nevertheless, “as he moves through this volatile element, through these shifting sands, such knowledge does not stop him from taking his pilgrim’s staff and inscribing with it some word that is ultimate.”!°?

According to Balthasar, this fundamental tension at the heart of the human being is not only what is portrayed on the stage in the world’s greatest dramas, but it also accounts for the existence of theater in the first place. Drama, in other words, as the “tension-filled” manifestation of tensions,

reveals a remarkable convergence of form and content, which is precisely what we are seeking as the fulfillment of the role of meta-anthropology. That the form of drama itself is an expression of polar tensions, and thus of the “content” of meta-anthropology, is a basic theme in Balthasar’s thought. This convergence of form and content in drama is negatively con-

firmed by Plato, who, as we have just seen, simultaneously lets slip the anthropological polarity and banishes the dramatic poets.!4 In a similar fashion, Hegel, though he has accorded drama an importance that was unprecedented in the history of philosophy, eventually claims on the basis of epistemological presuppositions that drama must ultimately be superseded and left behind.'4! In other words, because Hegel does not affirm an ultimate polarity/analogy of being, but rather an identity of identity and difference, he likewise rejects the perduring “otherness” carried by drama in form if not in content. Balthasar, by contrast, affirms polarity as the inalienable mark of created being, and so of man, and he therefore gives drama a centrality that appears to be unique in the history of thought. !47 Balthasar works out the form and content of a “theodrama’” in its historical, philosophical, literary, and theological aspects over the course of 139. Ibid. 140. Balthasar discusses the historical tension between philosophy and drama as expressed in this moment in Plato, in ibid., 73-75. 141. Hegel’s “objection” to drama, as one that Balthasar says, “touches the nerve of our endeavor ata... central point,” is presented in TD 1:54-70. 142. One might want to offer Nietzsche as an example of one who preceded Balthasar in affirming the centrality of drama (and especially tragedy), since Nietzsche, in his first book, presented tragedy as the basic form of philosophy, because it is the key to understanding the human being, the creature who embodies the tensions between the infinite (Dionysus) and the finite (Apollo). While Nietzsche’s profound treatment of this theme in The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), has many things in common with Balthasar’s own approach,

312 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

five volumes. The immensity of Balthasar’s work on this theme will force the present discussion to be rather abstract and schematic, and to leave out much that would be illuminating for the problem of truth. Thus, for example, Balthasar goes into great detail exploring the philosophical and theological significance of every aspect of the form of drama: the tensions of time and place in plot; the staging; the distinctions between actor and role, performer and director; and the Gestalt formed from the combined work of the author, the actor’s and producer's interpretation, the contribution of the audience, and so forth. As for the content of drama, Balthasar discusses in concrete detail almost every one of the major dramatists of the Western world, and he draws from these the most significant themes in relation to his theology. 143 Our interest here is very specific, and so our discussion will be regrettably far more narrow. I will first note how the

themes we have been discussing in Heidegger and Plato are integrated into what Balthasar takes to be aspects of the essential content of drama, and then I will show how these themes are in a sense expressed in the form of drama itself. According to Balthasar, the fundamental purpose of the theater in world history has been not merely to describe one or another aspect of the essence of existence but to reveal man to himself, to display in a concrete image

who he is. It does so by presenting man engaged in “significant action.” In order to get at the heart of drama, we have to see the mutual implication of these terms, that is, why significance is not significant unless it unfolds in action, and why action is not a “transcendent act” unless it “has” significance. First, a meaning that is isolated in itself, taken abstractly and

thus as unrelated to the concrete order of existence, cannot be said to be significant. It is significant only when it is the meaning of that order, only when it brings itself to bear on that order, when it is manifest in its relation to that order. Although there are many analogous ways that sucha manifestation can occur, the most decisive way it actually happens is through

an action or deed. One of the first dramatic poets said, “Not with words, but with deeds we seek to confer a ray of light on life.”!44 As we saw in

there is a great difference between the two. Although there is no room to elaborate this point, it seems that among other things, Nietzsche did not have a metaphysics that allowed him to sustain a tension, and so it is not surprising to see that before long in Nietzsche’s work, the tension between Apollo and Dionysus disappeared, and Nietzsche was left, finally, with Dionysus alone. 143. Most of the formal aspects of drama and their basic themes find elucidation in volume 1, the Prolegomena, and volume 4, the Action. We will be referring primarily to these two books in what follows. 144. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1143-4, cited in GL 4:131.

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the chapter 1, action serves in a particular way to “concentrate” the whole of a being by directing it to a goal beyond itself. There is something essentially “self-surpassing” in the acé, and that is why it functions so powerfully to sum up, to bring out the meaning of a whole. However, at the same time, an act is not genuinely self-surpassing (horizontally) except in relation to a (vertically) transcendent meaning. With respect to the transcending function of action, Balthasar cites a passage from Max Scheler: “In every act, the conscious person franscends the given insofar as that given represents a ‘limit’ on the part of the body —which is ‘given’ him along with the experience.”!4° The act that Scheler describes here differs from mere mechanical movement insofar as mechanical movement does not transcend the limits of corporality, but it merely displaces corporality within the same horizontal order. !4© For the movement to be transcendent, it has to be capable of gathering together the “manyness” of the elements in the immanent, horizontal plane “all at once” into a whole, and it can do so only in relation to a meaning. Such a gathering of horizontally extended moments occurs whenever the action is the fruit of a decision; this is why Scheler describes it as the act of a conJclous person. In making a decision, a person gathers up what is given by judging it in relation to a meaning, and this meaning is both absolute and relative; it is not only a “what is best in itself” but also “what is best in relation to the

circumstances.” The “hinge,” therefore, between the vertical transcendence of the meaning and the horizontal transcendence of the action, is the concrete decision. 4” Man emerges as a whole between these points of

145. Max Scheler, “Tod und Fortleben,” in Schriften aus dem Nachlass I, Werke 10 (1976): 42, cited in TD 4:96. 146. The notion of “mere mechanical movement” that I use here to contrast with action, however, is an abstraction, and in reality an impossibility. Merely mechanical motion would be a sequence of discrete moments within a vétrictly horizontal plane. But, given what I said at the beginning of the previous chapter, the most “mechanical” of movements that may occur concretely cannot avoid being, to some extent, a

whole greater than the sum of its parts, and therefore to the same extent “more” than the merely “horizontal.” 147. To illustrate the significance of decision in establishing a relation between irreducible poles, I refer to the “synthesizing” role of prudence in Aquinas’s moral theory, inasmuch as prudence “unites” the speculative and the moral order. The content of “what is to be done” in given circumstances cannot be deduced from universal principles, but it is not thereby left unrelated to them. Rather, the universal and particular are “creatively” synthesized by practical wisdom, and they cannot be brought together otherwise than in such a creative synthesis, in which a person is called on to commut himself in judgment. On the operation of prudence in the thought of Aquinas, see Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, et. al. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 10—22. See also, Robert Sokolowski,

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transcendence. Man can be “summed up” as a whole only in being “surpassed,” and he can be surpassed only in being summed up in his free action. The transcendence in which he seeks fulfillment is, in other words, a tension stretched out in the vertical-horizontal polarity, and if either of its poles is denied, the tension that gives rise to the whole is lost, as we will see shortly. The more transcendent the meaning is in relation to which the action unfolds, the more vignificant the action becomes —the more, that is, it is able

to gather up the elements of the horizontal order into a meaningful whole. Action becomes ewentially dramatic when it plays itself out not merely in relation to some “relative” meaning among other more or less valid possibilities, but in relation to a meaning that can embrace the whole immanent order at once; in other words, in relation to a definitive meaning: “Against all [that tries to gainsay it], contrary to all objections and yet borne out by the facts, we must assert that dramatic action is ultimately only meaningful when seen against the background of a given, absolute meaning —albeit in the wake of Hegel such meaning can no longer be rationally adumbrated and demonstrated in concepts.” /45 The ab-solute meaning is thus paradoxically not un-related, as an abstract idea, but it is the meaning that comes to light in the dramatic tensions of action, even while it is precisely the absolute transcendence of the meaning that can allow the various parts of the drama to unfold in their tension ~a tension that can reach the point of violent extremity — without falsifying or simplifying them. This is the notion lying behind what Balthasar calls a summary, “sideglance definition” of drama, in TD 4: drama is “an action of ultimate significance that takes place within a finite framework.”!4? The tension of the definition itself should not be overlooked. How can something of u/tumate significance occur in a finite situation? It is not without paradox, and the paradox shows up in what Balthasar takes to be the fundamental themes of drama: “The Theme of Death,” which he elaborates within a larger section called “Finitude,”

The Good of Faith and Reason, 66-67: “The ability to emerge as an agent requires the abil-

ity to think about the situation that calls for something to be done. Such thinking is not the consideration of maxims and the placing of a case under a general rule; it is more elementary, more of a raw articulation of what is really going on. It is an appraisal of a concrete situation. It involves generalities, but the focus of the thought is not on the general but on the situation. It is a recognition that something should be done, and it is a projection of what can be done. In the immediacy of a situation such thinking lets ends emerge and unravels arrays of means. It exhibits insight into what is at issue and shows imagination about what can be done.” 148. TD 1:74. 149. TD 4:88 (translation modified).

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and “The Struggle for the Good.”!5° These themes receive further elaboration in TD 4, under the heading “The Pathos of the World Stage.”!5! It bears remarking how similar these two themes are to what Heidegger and

Plato illuminated concerning the fundamental philosophical act. The similarity is not accidental; it arises from the fact that the purpose of drama,

like the purpose of the basic philosophical act that these two thinkers describe, is to shed light on human existence as a whole, and thereby on the meaning of being, by setting it in all of its finitude in relation to an absolute. I will treat, in turn, Balthasar’s dramatic sense of confronting death and his understanding of the striving after the absolute good. For Balthasar, as for Heidegger and Plato, death is an event of literally absolute significance because it is not merely one occurrence among others in the course of life, but represents the very boundary of life in the full extent of its horizontal unfolding. It is therefore a point in which the ver-

tical and horizontal intersect. The event of death cannot but reveal an absolute meaning, whether that meaning is the ultimate meaninglessness of all things, or that the whole is definitively embraced by something

greater. Either way, the theme of death is by its nature one of the most constant in the history of drama. In TD 1, Balthasar lists some of the basic ways this theme has appeared, offering numerous concrete examples for

each: as “destiny’; as the great “interpreter of life,” in which all masks come off; as lying “immanent in life” and saturating life with its meaning; as representing ‘the borderline”; as the means of “atonement”; as connected with love; as undertaken on “behalf of someone else”; and in rela-

tion to the “unmaking of kings” in classical tragedies.” As I mentioned, Balthasar integrated Heidegger's sense of time, finitude, and death into his own sense of drama;!°9 indeed, we see that the absoluteness that it expresses for Heidegger comes to light in Balthasar’s dramatic theory with the same purpose: it presents the “final frontier” of life and thus the place where the depths of existence come to view. Because

it touches these depths, it does not eliminate but rather reinforces “the paradox of existence, namely, the endeavor to express the absolute through

the relative.”!°4 But the diversity of forms in which the theme of death appears in Balthasar reveals an essential difference from Heidegger. For

150. TD 1:343-481. 151. TD 4:71-201. 152. TD 1:369-413. 153. On some elements of this integration, see Imperatori, “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar,” 191-210. 154. TD 4:95.

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Heidegger, death is a “wholly vertical” issue; it brings to concrete expression the fact that man “ek-sists,” or stands out in a nothingness that concerns himself alone, even if, in a second moment, this nothingness of Dasein

is what lets beings be. For Balthasar, by contrast, the transcendence of death is both vertical, a “direct” relation of self to the absolute, and — precisely because this absolute is not negative, as it is for Heidegger, but (negative and) positive, as for Plato —it also represents a horizontal transcendence in relation to others. This duality is why the engagement with death,

for Balthasar, is not in the first place the private act of an individual but takes place horizontally within a communal and concrete order, that is, on the “world stage” through the interaction of individual persons who find themselves in precise circumstances. The “deed” of the engagement, thus, is not an arbitrary act that “comes out of the blue”; it is concretely provoked precisely through the particularity of the circumstances. In this respect, the “facing of death” can acquire a much richer meaning than it has for Heidegger; it can, for example, embody the ultimate tensions of existence through the suffering of the death of a beloved, or, as in Euripides’ Alcesti, the acceptance to die in his place. In these examples, the person gathers up all of the elements of his life as a totality (Ganzheit) in a single gesture, and yet that gesture has the positive meaning of a gift.

Furthermore, and because of that positivity, not only is the “totality” thereby achieved, that of the person who carries out the meaningful deed,

but at the same time the deed itself confers a final meaning on him for whom the deed was undertaken —in fact, it brings meaning to all of the characters and the events of the drama that conspired to bring the action to that fateful point. The whole of the dramatic piece, and therefore the horizontal line of persons and things involved, thus receives its meaning through the ultimate significance of a single character’s decision. If the radical seriousness of dramatic action is revealed most directly in the theme of death, the real paradox of dramatic action comes most clearly to light in the second theme Balthasar treats at length, namely, “the struggle for the good.” It is significant that the theme concerns a value,

a good, which is something to be pursued, and yet does not for all of that lie “present at hand” but requires a difficult approach toward it, a struggle. In fact, the primary aspect under which Balthasar discusses this theme is “The Good Slips Away.”!*° The essentially “elusive” character of the good is indispensable to drama. Why is this so? As we have seen, action requires both a vertical and a horizontal transcendence; that is, it

155. TD 1:413.

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must relate to a meaning but one that is pursued in freedom. We saw in the last chapter, in the discussion of the simultaneity of vision and rapture in the subject’s free, ek-static movement toward the object, that ek-stasis cannot be transcendent freedom if it is sheer discontinuity, that is, if it excludes the continuity of “vision.” To be transcendent, it must be simultaneously, though asymmetrically, continuous and discontinuous. This “figure” of transcendence was confirmed later in the chapter specifically in relation to desire and the good. One cannot genuinely move (in transcendent action) unless one is moved dy another. This general figure is most paradigmatically expressed in drama, and with the paradigm comes the paradox. On the one hand, Balthasar affirms that “in every case, the goal of the [dramatic] decision is the Good.”!°° The action of drama has to be motivated; there must be something vought. But one cannot seek something except when one experiences it as good: “finite freedom, the openness to all being, can only strive for something it perceives as good (having a value) — even if in fact it is evil.”!©” Thus, the

Good that is sought must necessarily be in some respect re/ative, that is,

“for me.” The criteria of the dramatic choices in pursuit of the Good, Balthasar says, “are grasped, not in the either-or of a purely objective and a purely subjective scale of values, as if man were able abstractly to choose either the ‘good-in-itself’ or the ‘good-for-him,’ but in the intertwining of both points of view that arises from fellowship with other human beings, from the dialogue character of existence.”!°®

What may seem a minor point has great significance. An abstract approach determines “beforehand” what is good in itself and therefore needs no movement; a concrete approach knows, at first, only the good that initially ca/ls one into the action, and it is through the action that the depth of the good comes to light. At first, the person sees that it is good for him but does not yet know if it is good in itself. Only in this way is the movement toward the good tranvcendent, and this is why action, work, deci-

sion, uncertainty, and suffering are required: hence, the vtruggle for the good. In other words, the “absoluteness” of the good cannot appear right from the outset, but it must remain hidden under the aspect of a relative good.!°? It the absolute were there at the outset, there would be no free-

156. Ibid., 414. 157. TD 2:21 1. 158. TD 1:415. 159. Ina discussion of the relation between finite and infinite freedom, Balthasar says that the only way infinite freedom can appear without destroying finite freedom is by “going incognito.” TD 2:373.

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dom and therefore no movement: freedom requires relation (a being-moved by a good) and the simple ab-solute is by definition wn-related. The good

in its absoluteness would thus have no relation to the horizontal, and in its sheer discontinuity it would be present only either as a violent intrusion, or in its sheer “in-itself-ness” 1t would paradoxically reduce to being just one among the many objects in the horizontal order.!°” Therefore, Balthasar says, “the Absolute does not make itself present simply, in a bodily way: it announces itself only in the relative goods and values.”!®! However, the good does not allow itself to be reduced to relativity pre-

cisely to the extent that it w really good: “but eventually [the Absolute announces itself] so clearly that no hesitation is legitimate.”! If the meaning pursued exhausted itself wholly in its being relative, that is, “meaningful for me,” there would likewise be no real movement, and the action would collapse into insignificance. The good that is (relatively, continuously, or horizontally) pursued must at some point show some sort of vertical discontinuity or in-itself-ness, or the drama ceases once again to be interesting. An action is not significant unless it gathers up a “many” into a “one.” The wholeness of dramatic action, that which distinguishes it from being a merely random sequence of basically unrelated events, is therefore possible only if there comes a moment of decision. And since this decision is the relating of a horizontal “given” to a meaning that lies above it, the decision does not come to pass except as a being-judged. In the moment of decision and judgment, the immanent order therefore breaks open to that which definitively transcends it. If the absoluteness of the good is at

first necessarily hidden, it must also necessarily be unveiled. The real movement of drama occurs only when the first condition is fulfilled, and only when the second follows.

It is important to see, moreover, that the unveiling of the in-itselfness of the good after its relativity cannot simply be the contradiction of that

relativity. This would once again slacken all tensions. /® Instead, it must be a moment that is simultaneously discontinuous and continuous, both a reversal and a fulfillment. Once again, we see what Aristotle basically

160. This is one of the reasons that “didactic” art, which presents absolute norms without showing their relatedness, that is, their desirability, is so boring: it lacks dramatic tension. 161. TD 1:418. 162. Ibid. 163. Ina sense, this would be the problem with a deus ex machina ending: the resolution does not emerge from within the play itself in an organic fashion; it intrudes gratuitously on the plot. In other words, it is sheer discontinuity, and therefore it cannot stand in any relationship of tension with what went before it.

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meant by the “discovery” and “reversal” that is essential to good drama, which we discussed in the introduction, particularly in relation to David Yeago’'s essay on the theme. The moment of discontinuity is why Balthasar describes the struggle for the good essentially as “the good slips away.” The greatness of tragedy is that it achieves such a moment of transcendence in decision and judgment powerfully and explicitly, but Balthasar shows how something analogous happens in every comedy or tragicomedy, in short, in every play in which an interesting action takes place.!4 The point, in any event, of the “slipping away” of the good is that though the good is by necessity relatively received, it is nonetheless not measured by tts reception. What is received may begin by being received in the mode of the recipient, but in the end, precisely because it w really good, it spurs the reception to grow into the mode of that which is received. Perhaps we could therefore describe the heart of dramatic action thus: a person commits himself in a decisive movement toward what he considers meaningful for him and seizes it. As the plot unfolds, and the layers of meaning are stripped away one by one, he finds that the meaning Is, in fact, what

has seized him. It is thus that drama affirms both the relative and the absolute at once and nonreductively.!© That judgment, if it is to be true dramatic judgment, must have the character of an absolute means that great drama tends to be the carrying out of a significant action under the divine sphere: it is no accident that drama was “born” under this sign, in the great Greek tragedians. But the relation to God does not have to be explicit; the vertical transcendence of the divine sphere, as we have seen, is simultaneously reflected in transcendence horizontally. Thus, the in-breaking of the absolute can occur analogously, any time that the “struggle for the good” is taken to the point where the person posits the good as a value greater than himself: “Anyone, even outside of Christianity, who is willing to break out of his egoistic narrowness and do the good simply for its own sake is given a light that shows him the way he can and should go; such light both uncovers truth and communicates life that is more alive.”!©° This “doing the good

164. Ibid., 414. 165. Here we see again why Plato is more dramatic than Heidegger. For Plato, it is the Good that accounts for both the continuity of desire (ascent) and the discontinuity of real transcendence (descent) at once. Heidegger’s affirmation of only the discontinuity seems to be related to the fact that he gives so little attention in his philosophy to the good and to eros. 166. TD 3:529. We point out the reduplication of verb and noun at the end of this passage: the truth (a&theia = “unhiddenness”) is uncovered, and life is “livingly” communicated. To put it straightforwardly: disclosure is disclosed and life is enlivened.

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for its own sake,” in a manner that breaks action open to a meaning that transcends it and is in the end final, reveals the dramatic possibility of a host of fundamental experiences that Balthasar “inventories” as “basic gestures.” Basic gestures, he explains, “are those made in the light of Being as a whole, which is also the light of the good, the true, and the beautiful. ... This light, however, also illuminates a process that is extended in time, imparting to it a meaning that is regarded as ultimate. This light that comes down from the absolute can only be received by man’s free reason, which

is open to the whole of Being, through an act of decision without which we cannot speak of drama at all.”!° In this passage, we see once again many of the elements we have been elaborating, particularly the simultaneity of an absolute that is received by the finitude of man’s freedom. The various basic gestures that gather all of these elements together, which Balthasar finds in the history of drama, are the following: there is conversion, or the inspiration to change one's life in the encounter with a particular event or a person; there is the being-called to an act of justice or forgiveness; there is the world-changing experience of love; the movement of positing an ultimate hope beyond all ambiguities and doubts; or the resolute openness of a fundamental yearning. /©8 The defining characteristics of such a basic gesture, which opens the relative to the absolute, are that it involves a decision in being inspired by Being, or the good, as a whole —that is, as final and definitive —and that it reveals this definitiveness by showing that the in-itselfness of the good has in the end a priority over the “for me,” even though it includes this relationship. Because of the relative priority of the in-itself-ness, the “reversal” of the discontinuity must find expression in the drama, for example, in a moment of self-sacrifice, proven or made manifest in a concrete deed. As we have seen, this reversal can occur powerfully in the vertical breaking open of the engagement with death, but it can also occur horizontally when, say, a person remains faithful to a loved one who has disappeared. In either case, a certain discontinuity comes to expression, and the drama acquires a compelling tension: the finite event unfolds in a comprehending light, and indeed it makes that light for the first time luminous. But in this case, even these analogous forms, in their most compelling examples,

There is something about essentially dramatic action, as we are arguing, that brings together form and content “in a seamless whole.” 167. TD 4:111. 168. Balthasar gives a brief account of each of these basic gestures as they occur in a number of dramas, in TD 4:1 11-17.

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confirm the fundamental insight of Greek tragedy, as both Balthasar and Nietzsche have expressed it. In tragedy, the search for meaning, which finds itself facing frustration and even outright contradiction, is not for all of that in vain but, precwely tn tts vanity, finds what it was after: a mean-

ing that arrives as a gift, a meaning that shows that all of the gravity of life “can be embraced and kept safe by God's sphere” and that, therefore, the whole is gathered up in an affirmation and a “great amen.”!©? Now, we have seen that the in-itself-ness of the good appears only in the dramatic event of a decision in light of the ultimate, which comes fully to expression in the discontinuity of sacrifice, brokenness, and even death. Granted that the horizontal manifestation of that discontinuity can give

it a positive meaning and save it from the sheer vertical transcendence of Heidegger's Angst, does it not still retain a predominant note of negativity, at least for the character who is left broken or sacrificed? In this case, have we in fact progressed any further in the question of meta-anthropology? At this point, the perspective takes a sudden turn. The wholeness that comes to light through the events of the drama is not, in the first place, that of the individual character or characters in the action, but rather that of the play tteself.

In a well-constructed plot, the various elements work together through time and space in the making of decisions and the struggling for the true good, to arrive at a moment that “retroactively” and “proleptically” confers a meaning on all that preceded and will follow. The deed that breaks the action open to judgment thereby gives that action a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Balthasar points out in reference to Aristotle.!”8 Once again, we see that a wholeness (which we might even call triadic) “arrives” only in a radical discontinuous movement of transcendence into another order. But how, exactly, is the decisive act transcendent if, for all of its discontinuity, it remains one act among the others in the course of the drama? The key is that the decisive judgment is literally transcendent to the play; the moment of judgment comes, In a certain sense, from the play's author,

169. Ibid., 134. The “vanity” of the struggle for the Good can in fact become just the “transparence” that allows the transfiguring absolute most directly to “shine in”: “Human existence, even where it is stripped of all its power, is still able to bear witness to the Good that has been glimpsed in and through all the conflicts.” TD 1:418. Nietzsche, for his part, began with the thesis that all the world’s contradictions were transfigured and embraced in an ultimate affirmation in Greek tragedy, a view he echoed later in Zarathustra’s “Great Amen.” 170. “This very act gives a shape to the continuing stream of events (which is actually unforeseeable); it gives drama a beginning, a middle, and an end, as Aristotle required.” TD 4:111.

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whose idea transcends the play as a whole —which allows the end to be already implicit, or immanent, in the beginning — even if, as we saw in the introduction, the author himself depends on the horizontal unfolding of the idea in the play itself. But in another sense, the “transcendent” judgment is brought by the “spectators”; the final judgment is one in which they actively participate. Spectators do not (ideally speaking) merely stare at a passing sequence of events; they follow the story, they make venve of it through the conferring of judgment, and the drama does not have a wholeness (for them) until judgment is made. In this respect, the spectators find themselves in a position not unlike that of Socrates with respect to the cave image he “staged” and later the myth of Er that he “judged.”!”! They participate, as it were, in the transcendence that both judges the action and gives the drama a wholeness precisely because they are not themselves on Stage (at least in vome respect):/” 2 they represent a “wholly other”

order with respect to the drama. But if the “living” spectators are “other” than the drama, the drama itself, in turn, represents an order different from that of “real life.” It is thus crucially important to Balthasar (in contrast to Plato and Hegel) that the theater retain a certain relative autonomy. The otherness is what gives the drama itself a wholeness —that is, it allows the whole tensions of the human “condition” to unfold in their integrity through events that have unforeseen consequences even as they find unexpected fulfillment — but it is conversely what allows this “whole” to be played out defore man, showing him who he is. We said that the carrying out of the meta-anthropological role requires that man objectity himself to himself in a comprehensive

deed that is crystallized in a concrete form. The understanding of drama that has been emerging fulfills this function in certain clear ways. As we saw briefly in the introduction, drama is a Gestalt. It is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and as such it allows these parts to exist in real tension with each other: the “parts” themselves, that is, the characters, their actions, and so forth, particularly in a good drama, have a remark-

able individuality and freedom with respect to each other, and even with respect to the basic meaning of the plot, even while their meaning and the sense of their actions always await the responsive actions of the others

171. We recall here a point we noted in the last chapter: namely, that Plato deliberately describes the “drama” of judgment in the myth of Er in terms of watching a play. See Rep., X, 620a.

172. Clearly, there is another sense in which they are also participating: to the extent, that is, that what is being played out before them is the meaning of existence in general and therefore also their own.

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and await the consequences and events that arise from the joint meaning of their decisions. Both the independence and the dependence of the parts are secured by the “transcendent” meaning. Moreover, drama is a supremely concrete Gestalt. Not only does it depict a transcendent meaning that cannot dispense with a temporal and spatial unfolding, but it is performed in a particular space and time. The characters are not (only) the author's imaginative ideas; they are embodied by real actors, who lend to these figures their souls and bodies and do so more compellingly the more totally they commit themselves, the more completely they “enter into” their

roles. Hence, the appropriateness of Mauriac’s statement quoted as an epigraph to this section: “Dramatic creativity is being true with body and soul.” The various tensions involved in the staging of a drama are, in a sense, the incarnation of the tensions that are being portrayed. Form and content thus converge in a manner that we might say finds no comparl1son in the world, and, as we saw 1n the last chapter, sucha convergence, in giving rise to a Gestalt, gives rise to an inexhaustible — literally infinite — meaning: it is creativity itself. In Balthasar’s understanding of drama, we see a genuine polarity emerge

between life (the human being who is an unfathomable mystery to himself) and art (the dramatic portrayal, and thus in some sense, the interpretation of that mystery in a form that is itself mysterious, 1.e., infinitely meaningful). On the one hand, each has an essential autonomy with respect to the other. The author, the actors, and the spectators stand in an order that transcends the play and makes it possible. The play also has a certain autonomy with respect to life. Balthasar insists strongly that there be no instrumentalizing of drama for the sake of “social edification.”!/% The reason he gives is that a merely ethical or didactic play remains within

a kind of immanent order (of ethical success or failure), and lacks the “breaking open” into the grace of a transcendent and comprehending meaning. Thus, paradoxically, the more directly art attempts to influence life, the more “partially” it speaks to man, since it thus misses the fundamental tension that constitutes him anthropologically. An art that is free, Balthasar says in reference to Schiller, most deeply influences man, because

it can thus educate him in freedom.!“ On the other hand, there is a genuine life-art polarity because each stands in need of the other. Balthasar argues that drama would be empty 173. TD 1:266. 174. Ibid., 267. We recall that freedom means, in this context, not just self-possession or determination but more fundamentally a call to man, who is a finite being related to an absolute beyond the cosmos, to dramatic decision and deed.

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except for what it can draw from life itself: “if a tension of this kind [L.e.,

between the divine and the human] is to be built into a performance, it must already be part and parcel of existence.”!”° Drama is, after all, a playing out of the meaning of man, for man, and it would not have endured so long as an art form if it did not translate existence with some “fidelity.” At

the same time, life needs art precisely because of its capacity to translate, and thus illuminate: “Existence [Hxwtenz] has a need to see itself mir-

rored (speculari), and this makes the theater a legitimate instrument in the pursuit of self-knowledge and the elucidation of Being ~an instrument, moreover, that points beyond itself.”!”© We have seen the phenomenon of reciprocal illumination at many levels already —in, for example, the illumination of being and person in the fourfold difference, and in the phenomenon of an a priori and a posteriori unity of apperception — and we see it here in its most direct and explicit form: a mysterious image of the human being, which in turn reveals the human being to himself.

Status Vitae as Paradigm of Dramatic Gestalt The reference in the last text from Balthasar to the elucidation of Being recalls, however, that what is most profoundly at issue is not man merely anthropologically, but meta-anthropologically, in relation to his task of embodying and interpreting the tensions of the cosmos in a paradigmatic manner. These tensions, we saw, are manifest in the body-soul polarity, which in turn finds expression in the senses-spirit polarity of man’s “cognitional” relation to the world. In order to ground that relationship, it became necessary to find not only a static principle of unity (which would lead back to the sort of foundationalism often criticized in Descartes) but also a dramatic event, in which man “infinitely surpasses” himself. This transcendence, discussed earlier, is not only necessary to allow man to appear as a whole and thus to become present to himself in a nonreductive way, but it is moreover necessary for Being as a whole and beings in general to appear, insofar as the “reversal” or discontinuity of the dramatic event opens up the space, not only of the ontological difference but of the fourfold difference in Being. We saw essential elements of this dramatic event in both Heidegger and Plato, and yet each seemed to lack a

175. Ibid., 260. 176. Ibid., 86. See also the section entitled “The Loss of the Image,” 76-79, where Balthasar writes that “life manifests a fundamental urge to observe itself as an action exhibiting both meaning and mystery. This urge is no more extinct in adults than in children” (78-79).

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crucial aspect of the meta-anthropological tension. It seems that Balthasar has been able to gather up everything affirmed by these two thinkers, and moreover has integrated them within a more comprehensive context in his dramatic theory. Yet, our exploration of this theory has brought us, one more time, to

a polarity that is irreducible, that between art and life. What are we to make of it? Is there not, this time as well, a danger of fracturing into a dualism? Indeed, the danger is great, and in fact common. We are perhaps even more familiar on the one hand with a drama that is so detached from life that it has no interest in a revelation or in making a judgment on existence, and on the other with a life that is so detached from drama it is content to understand itself as an unconnected sequence of events, with no relation to Being, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness as a whole, and therefore no need to come to a fundamental decision. In fact, pointing to the “play” of drama as a kind of solution to the meta-anthropological tensions, for whatever it gains with respect to Heidegger and Plato, seems to run the danger of losing precisely their absolute “seriousness.” However, I have already noted that drama is not Balthasar’s final answer to the question, but is itself grounded in something more ultimate. I mentioned above that watching a drama in a certain sense puts the spectators in the same position Socrates stood in with respect to the cave. This has an immediate consequence: just as this position leads, with Socrates, to the “going down” that comes from total dedication to the Good, which is expressed in a central decision to commit oneself to a “single goal at which

all [one’s] actions, public and private, inevitably aim,”!”” so too, with Balthasar, it means being called to make a single, definitive “life-determin-

ing’ choice. I thus turn to look at the philosophical and epistemological implications of Balthasar’s teaching on the form of the “states of life,” the Gestalt that Balthasar refers to as the primal or paradigmatic form (Urgestalt): “The primal form is not a form among others, but a form which ts Wentical with extstence, a form beyond ‘open’ and ‘closed,’ beyond ‘I’ and

‘Thou’ (since it, and it alone, encompasses both), a form which is even beyond autonomy and heteronomy since it unites God and man in an unimaginable intimacy. "178

One of the best-known and most fully articulated aspects of Balthasar’s

theology is the divine election and response that crystallizes in a person's definitive choice either to “leave everything” in the following of

177. Plato, Rep., 7.519c. 178. GL 1:25 (emphasis mine).

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Christ through the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, or the analogous leaving of one’s father and mother to cleave to one’s spouse in the vows of marriage. !/ ? In either case, what is at issue is not just a decision but the realization (“making real”) of that decision in a comprehensive

life-form (Lebensgestalt). Now, the ground of this decision is clearly theological, and it would require a theological exposition to unfold the full depth of meaning of the states of life.!®° Nevertheless, his theology,

on this point, has vast philosophical implications, and a brief look at these implications is indispensable for the problem at hand, namely, the task of meta-anthropology. It is important to note that I will be approaching this issue from a very particular perspective, and so I will leave much

unsaid that would both broaden and deepen our own analyses. Specifically, because of the nature of the problem at hand, I will focus almost exclusively on marriage, although it will be shown that an important analogy exists between the two states, which serves to shed light on the problem of finding an immanent correlate to martyrdom that we saw raised by Plato. The definitive choice of a state of life is different from other choices a person makes over the course of his life because of its “once and for all” character, and it has such a character because it concerns a form that makes a claim on a person's whole being and whole history: “We are speak-

ing here of an absolute that engages our whole existence, hence the call to a state of life is ‘once and for all.’”!5! Such a notion may seem a somewhat arbitrary proposal in relation to our general theme, and so it is helpful to indicate some of the “necessities” in light of foregoing discussions. We saw in chapter 2 that consciousness, and the unity of apperception itself, cannot have the unity that is necessary to it unless it is possible to “move itself” as a whole, and, moreover, this motion is possible only through a call from another, which cannot address a “surface” aspect of the child’s existence, but which must penetrate to the core of his being and “lay claim”

to him as a whole. I showed how this occurred as a foundational principle, but I left open the explicit realization. Later, in the last chapter, we saw that if the subject is truly to reach the object through freedom and judgment in a genuine transcendent unity, he must be “laid claim to” by 179. Balthasar’s most comprehensive treatment of the issue is the book The Cérwtian State of Iufe [= CSL], trans. Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983). 180. Balthasar’s theology, in particular, concerns the state of life of secular institutes. For a presentation of this theology in light of Balthasar’s trilogy, see Juan Sara, “Balthasar y los institutos seculares,” Proyecto 30 (1998): 238-52.

181. CSL, 19-20.

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the object's inspiring him. We saw several relative stages of the need for transcendence at the various levels of the epistemological act. Now, the

relative cases of such a transcendence remain in a certain twilight — until the dawn breaks, until, that is, such a movement occurs 1n a defin1tive and comprehensive way. It is in this context that we approach the question of the states of life in Balthasar.

The first thing to point out, therefore, is the fact that such a definitive “movement” cannot but have the character of a being-called, a “being-

laid-claim-to” as a whole. Balthasar always insists on the moment of “election” in the establishing of a state of life, which has a direct form in the call to the “counsels” of poverty, chastity, and obedience but cannot

do without an analogous form in marriage. In either case, however, the call, if it is to be a total laying-claim-to, must address man at the center of his being, such as we described it above. This means, as we will see more at length in the next chapter, that it must come by way of beauty.

It is beauty, for Balthasar (as for Plato), that most comprehensively addresses the human being: “How cowardly a flight from the world would the Apostle’s act of forsaking all things in order to follow Christ be if he were not moved by the folly of that enthusiasm which even Plato knew in his own way, and which every person knows who for the sake of beauty gladly becomes a fool without giving it a second thought.”!® To embrace such a form of life, one must therefore first be able to see it and be moved by it: “But if man is to live in an original form, that form has first to be sighted. One must possess a spiritual eye capable of perceiving (wahrnehmen) the forms of existence with awe.”!®* These texts echo, in fact, a text we saw in chapter 2 on the child’s awakening to consciousness in already-being moved and finding himself moving, and the coincidence is not accidental. We must above all avoid the assumption that such an event takes a univocal form, in the single experience of a “beautiful object.” For this, the brief discussion of drama is helpful; it suggests that there are infinite ways that such an event comes to pass, and inevitably it is at first clouded by all the vicissitudes of historical living, illusions, false seeking, and so forth. But at some point, beauty will inevitably appear and bring with it a call to decision. Understanding the event dramatically keeps us from interpreting the event somewhat abstractly, like Heideg-

ger, as the “sheer verticality” of Angst and the facing of death. For

182. GL 1:33. 183. Ibid., 24.

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Balthasar, because transcendence is not ek-stasis into the nothing but comprehends this discontinuity (without making it any less discontinuous) in being moved by another, the event always takes place concretely, through the unfolding of a person’s existence in time. Now, this movement of transcendence that is inspired by beauty prompts a comparison with Plato. It is often, in Plato, the experience of beauty that sets transcendence in motion, and in the Sympovium, we see that it begins with the beauty of a person.!*4 Because the beautiful is also the good (both for Plato and for Balthasar), !®° the first inspiration entails, ultimately, a movement leyond the world, but at the same time, and precisely because of the positivity of the radical discontinuity, a movement into the world “from above.”!®° Plato, it has been argued, does not reject the world, but so to speak seeks to integrate it into the divine. As we have also seen, some such understanding is absolutely essential in order to bring together

the absolute and the relative in a way that preserves their radical discontinuity — in order to hold the “ontological difference” open, in contrast to the tendency we saw in Heidegger.

Nevertheless, I pointed out that this movement tends in Plato as well to a dualism, and this is the case because of his failure to see the bodysoul relationship as an irreducible polarity. I therefore proposed that

in order for this movement in Plato to be sustained, we had to find a polar analogy: if the first movement is the integration of the relative into the Absolute, we saw, with Balthasar, a need for the analogous movement, integrating the Absolute into the relative. Balthasar’s under-

standing of the two, irreducible, and analogously polar states of life presents just such a possibility. While, for Balthasar, the state of the “counsels” has its roots in the “eschaton,” that is, in the radically other order beyond the cosmos, it relates analogously to the state of marriage,

which is rooted zz the world. For Balthasar, this relationship is genuinely polar, such that each is irreducible to the other, even as each at

184. Plato, Symposium, 210a. 185. Whether the good and the beautiful are formally the same for Plato is, to be

sure, a controversial question. But no one would dispute that he closely associates them with one another in at least some respect: see, for example, Diotima’s instruction of Socrates, in which she substitutes the good for the beautiful without apology: Symposium, 204e.

186. Of course, the “return” movement is most clearly expressed in the philosopher’s “going down” in the Republic, but one can also see a glimmer of the same movement in the Sympovtum: the “lover” does not come to a standstill in the perfect transcendence of the Beautiful, but is as it were becomes eternally fructful in the Beauty, begetting and giving birth to “ideas,” “theories,” and “virtue”: 210d, 212a.

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the same time serves to illuminate a decisive aspect of the other. By virtue of the polarity and ensuing analogy, the religious state is kept from becoming, in dualistic fashion, a “flight” from the world (purely other-worldly), but is rather, like Plato’s philosopher, completed only in “going down,” while the married state is kept from becoming mundane (purely this-worldly), and is shown to be completed in the order of grace (i.e., to be a sacrament).!®” It would be out of place here to develop this aspect further, !®® but it is worthwhile to point out a surprising confirmation of this point in Plato, which also confirms our criticism of him. In order to characterize the content of the perfect transcendence of the philosopher (which we might see as an image of the “eschatological” religious state of the counsels),!®? the best analogy he can find is not just to the sexual relationship but to the full, dramatic “institution” of marriage: in the Symposium, the eternity or immortality of life in the “Beautiful-in-itself” considered absolutely, as transcendent of any worldly instances, is expressed most clearly in the world in the love between the sexes, reproduction and the nurturing, care, and defense of the young, even if it means that the parents starve themselves to feed them or die in battle protecting them.!?? Only what Plato means here is not the marriage of human beings but of animals! It seems that because of his lack of a body-soul polarity, in a one-sided fashion he can affirm only the eschatological state as appropriate for the human being.

Contrary to expectations, perhaps, what Balthasar, the Catholic theologian, brings to Plato's view is not (only) a different understanding of the religious life but a justification of marriage. How is it, in Balthasar’s understanding, that marriage serves to “integrate the Absolute into the relative” or, as it were, to crystallize transcendence in a worldly —that is, immanent or horizontal —form? The key is

187. This relation is expounded —with infinite and subtle qualifications and developments —in CSL. See also the article, “Zur Theologie des Ratestandes,” published in two parts in English as “A Theology of the Counsels,” Crows Currents (Spring 1966):

213-36 and (Summer 1966): 325-37, where Balthasar describes the relationship between the two states specifically as a polarity: the religious state moves from God to the world to God, while the lay state moves from the world to God to the world: part 1, 220-24. 188. For an excellent development of the implications for marriage of the polarity between the states of life, see David Crawford, “Humanae Vitae and the Perfection of Love,” Communuw: International Catholic Review 25 (Fall 1998): 414-38.

189. In fact, in the essay PCM, Balthasar shows how, in the early Middle Ages, the monastic life was called “philosophy” and explicitly understood itself to be the fulfillment of the life Plato intended under the term philosopher. 190. Plato, Symposium, 207a—c.

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to see marriage as an indissoluble Gestalt. To get directly to the heart of the matter, we cite a large section of a paragraph from GL 1, in which Balthasar takes marriage, in fact, as a paradigmatic example (Urgestalt) of what he means in general by Gestalt:

What could be stronger than marriage, or what shapes any particular life-form more profoundly than does marriage? And marriage is only true to itself if it is a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to “break out” of its

bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence’s tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When

they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves —the shifting songs of their own freedom — but rather on the

form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons. As persons, the spouses entrust themselves not only to the beloved “thou” and to the biological laws of fertility and family; they entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life— from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and life in the Holy Spirit. And now, suddenly, all fruitfulness, all freedom is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery (as Claudel has shown powerfully in his “Fifth Ode”), which mystery is no longer accessible from the profane sphere of the general. But what are we to say of the person who ignores this form and tramples it underfoot, then to enter into relationships answerable only to his own psychology’s principle of “this far and no further”? He is but quicksand, doomed to certain barrenness.!?!

This paragraph contains, in condensed form, all of the elements of marriage’ s meta-anthropological implications for the question of truth, and so I will proceed by elaborating certain notions that are herein suggested.

First, I note, formally, the paradoxical formulation “the form that chooses them because they have chosen it,” which is not mere wordplay but philosophically precise. It brings to paradigmatic expression, in fact,

191. GL 1:27-28.

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a phenomenon we have seen many times, for example, in the notion of consciousness as self-moving in being moved, or vision (grasping in free judgment) as being simultaneous with rapture (being “possessed” by the object). Marriage is a Lebensgestalt that can be brought about only through freedom, that is, when spouses freely pledge themselves to each other in the vows, and, yet, that which is brought about is something that, in its objectivity, transcends in a sense the freedom that engenders it, not by excluding it but rather by including it completely. I mentioned something similar in the discussion of martyrdom in Plato, namely, that the unsurpassable objectivity of the act —since the act w the complete devotion of self to something greater and is therefore constituted only by the whole of the self and the whole of subjectivity —the nature of its objectivity is, as it were, saturated with subjectivity without ever reducing to subjectivity. So too in marriage: the form of marriage is nothing but

freedom. Marriage is a reciprocal gift of velf, because it is principally a mutual gift of freedom. In a certain sense, there isa convergence of form and content in any commitment, since freedom is what gives rise to a commitment — it is the formal, or forming, condition of possibility for any commitment —and at the same time freedom is the basic content of the commitment. A commitment is a pledge concerning the “use” of freedom. When that commitment is total and complete (in both a vertical and horizontal sense, as we will see in a moment), as when one freely pledges the whole of freedom, form and content converge perfectly. This gives rise to a certain paradox: the paradox of freedom itself, understood as transcendence. We said a moment ago that the “objectivity” of the Gestalt of marriage includes but transcends freedom. That was not precise; if freedom is self-transcendence, then the transcending of itself as self-transcendence is the most perfect expression of freedom. “The form that chooses them because they have chosen it”: another way to put this is that what they choose is no longer to be able to choose. If they chose any less, the capacity to choose would reveal not its sovereignty but its impotence, insofar as it would reveal its incapacity to choose something definitive and total—so total, indeed, that it includes itself (and here we should hear an echo of similarity with Heidegger’s fundamental ontological question — why are there beings rather than nothing? —which is so radical, it places the questioner himself in question: the similarity is not an accident). The reason we can say that this is the paradox of freedom, however, is not only because of the radicality of the choice but because it discloses the essence of transcendence.

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We have seen that transcendence must of its very nature be relation to a concrete other.!?* Transcendence, as movement beyond, means being more than self, that is, being self wth an other. It does not mean simply the movement taken abstractly in itself in the sense of “transcendental” striving, or in the sense of moving foward an other that one has always “not yet reached”; in its foundations it must be always already rooted in the other, even while

it is simultaneously “not yet” there precisely to the extent that the other remains other (i.e., transcendent). It is for the same reason that transcendence is not possible unless it is relation to an other that is concrete. “Concrete” indicates, as we have seen, a whole that is not a whole unless it is at the same time a paradoxical polarity (Gestalt). And, if it is a paradoxical polarity, the relation will necessarily be simultaneously mediated and

immediate, which is the only way to affirm a unity that is not reductive (nto a monism and dualism). Relation to an other that is abstract and not concrete will be unable to avoid reduction to immediacy, that is, to self, and thus will lose transcendence. As we have seen in many different contexts and in various formulations, real relation to an other (and therefore transcendence) necessarily involves a radical discontinuity, which is not (dualistically) left as an inaccessible “beyond” but is precisely bridged, even while this discontinuity is not (in a monistic sense) eliminated. Such was, we saw, the paradoxical structure of consciousness understood as intentionality. In order to arrive at that point, we had to see that the thing most central to the child as a conscious self—and one might say that this is the most “spontaneous’ aspect of that selfhood —lay precisely beyond the childs meand, and so it could come about only as a gift: this is the core meaning of the mother's

smile awakening the child to consciousness. This structure is “perfected” in the form of marriage as Balthasar describes it. Freedom is not freedom unless it can reach what lies beyond it (because it would therefore not be transcendence), and yet what it “aims” at does not lie beyond it unless itis a “more,” unless it lies beyond tts own capacity to reach tt. If it were within

its means it would not be more than it. This is why marriage vows cannot be vows that establish a Lebensgestalt unless they are a single, reciprocal act. In choosing marriage and therefore embracing a form that is

192. I leave aside the question of transcendence in relation to God, who, of course, according to the Scholastics, is not concrete (insofar as concrete requires the relation of irreducibly different parts, and God is perfectly simple). But we must keep in mind that he is not abstract either. He is beyond the difference between abstract and concrete, just as he is beyond the “finite” meaning of simplicity: oneness in the world is always polar.

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more than one is, one “arrives” further than one could have possibly dreamed, and, if it were not so, it would not be a perfect act of freedom. Hence, Balthasar insists on the odyectivity of marriage (we will see in a moment how this is connected with its being a “third” distinct from the partners) as that which achieves this “transcendence,” because it “confronts with an iron hand all existence’s tendencies to disintegrate, and it compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined.” The objectivity of marriage is the reason it is saturated with freedom. As the crystallization of the transcendence that is freedom, the exclusion of “subsequent total choices” (which would be a contradiction) is what gives the spouses objective space to become themselves in becoming “perfectly” related; as freedom, the objectivity is as it were what frees them for freedom. Using an expression reminiscent of Heidegger, Balthasar writes that the objectivity of the form is what shapes the person, what “surrounds him inexorably like a coat of armor, and which nonetheless is the very thing that bestows suppleness on him and which makes him free of all uncertainty and all paralyzing fears, free for himself and his highest possibilities.”!9° This is what makes marriage a form that chooses the spouses because they have chosen it, and what makes the spouses both the authors and the servants of their love.!”4 But let us look more “materially” at what is given in the choosing of the life-form of marriage. It becomes quickly clear how the single form of marriage serves to “tie together” the various polarities I have shown to constitute man in his concrete existence. I will here pass briefly through each of them and then will expound further on certain aspects as we proceed toward the end of the chapter. First, and most obviously, marriage is nothing if not a complete gift of self, which includes both body and soul inseparably. It is not just a pair of biological, reproducing animals

that come together in marriage; nor is marriage merely the “union of true minds,” to borrow from Shakespeare. Rather, the choice made is the institution of the common life of two persons, a life that is at once bodily and “of the soul.”!?° Even more than dramatic creativity, marriage is ‘being true in body and soul.” 193. Ibid., 23-24. In this passage, Balthasar is talking about the Lebensgestalt, or state of life in general, and not only marriage. 194. In an epithalamium, appropriately titled “Dance Me to the End of love,” Leonard Cohen felicitously expresses this point: “We’re both of us beneath our love, both of us above.” 195. Balthasar discusses the “body and soul” dimension of the Lebensgestalten in CSL, 238.

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Second, marriage is just that, a /fe, and it is so because it is at once historical and “eternal,” or absolute.!?° Indeed, these two aspects reveal themselves to be completely distinct and yet inseparable. On the one hand, the

history of the relationship is not a “random” sequence of events with no connection to each other. Instead, this history possesses a determinate shape because it is included within the vow, which is not merely one moment among all of the others, but which “transcends” time precisely to the extent that it comprehends it. In this respect, the vow is not relative to that time, but it is in a decisive way ab-solute with respect to it. On the other hand, the “absoluteness” of the vow is not something detached that lies, floating, above the history of the marriage, but it is directly related to the history because the vow is precisely a promise to unfold that history, to “go through life together.” Third, this temporal-eternal polarity is immediately related to another,

namely, the transcendent-immanent or vertical-horizontal polarity. We have seen that mutual transcendence has a direct relation to death; death represents a “frontier” like no other in the world, since it marks precisely the difference between being in the world and no longer being in the world. It is of the utmost significance that marriage is of its nature “unto death,” but it is so in a way that we can contrast with both Heidegger and Plato. Heidegger's “Being-unto-death” is both reductively transcendent and reductively immanent insofar as it is not “other” related. In Plato, death is other related, but one might say it is insufficiently self-related to the extent that it is related univocally to martyrdom. In marriage, death is included éz principle (which does not mean it is not really included, as we will see in the next section); it is in fact “confronted” just as radically as in Heidegger and Plato,

with all of the implications this has for these thinkers, and yet it nevertheless remains in the world. Indeed, we can say more: the transcendence of death verves the “remaining in the world” because it has its meaning in the concrete, historical life with and for the spouse. Just as martyrdom includes the whole immanent, horizontal order of existence in itself as the compelling expression of a single, great deed, so too marriage includes the whole vertical radicality of martyrdom within the horizontal unfolding of life in the world, and it is therefore just as compelling. 196. There is no need, in this context, to address the theologically controversial question of whether marriage contracted on earth continues to exist in some form in heaven, 1.e., in the “beyond.” On this question, see Crawford, “Humanae Vitae,” 429, n. 34. The point here concerns only the assertion of a certain “more than time” element, which can be made regardless of how one answers the theological question. Marriage vows are more than time to the extent that they are capable of “gathering up” time at once.

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Finally, the movement that constitutes the dramatic Gestalt of marriage, considered as an objective form, is simultaneously spontaneous and receptive and, for that reason, simultaneously “generous” and “desirous.” One cannot give oneself definitively to an other in marriage without in that very gesture receiving that other just as definitively. It is not that one first gives (spontaneously) and then, in a second moment, receptively takes the other in. Rather, the single gesture contains both acts at once. If we wished to call erds a love that is predominantly “desirous,” and agapé a love that is predominantly “generous,” then we are forced to say that in itself, the objective form of marriage is numerically-identically both.'"’ It is true that no one enters marriage with such a perfect integration of these aspects, but the simultaneity of the two is what the objective form mean, and the objectivity of that meaning is what frees the spouses — dramatically —to embody it. There is a single, indispensable condition that allows marriage simultaneously to integrate all the elements we have been discussing, without thereby compromising in any way their irreducible differences, and that is that marriage forms a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If marriage lacked the objective dimension that carries with itself all of subjectivity, then the relationship would crumble into parts that have a (pseudo) completeness in themselves, a “completeness” that Balthasar calls “psychology’s principle of ‘this and no further,’” which, by its very logic and therefore in spite of all the best efforts, cannot build itself into a whole with the other completed parts. A relationship that tried to work itself out between two (mere) individuals would not be able to avoid an oscillation between various forms of reduction: one person would be “sucked into” the other in the attempt at self-gift, and then would react in the next moment by withdrawing defensively into oneself. The only way for the two to relate

197. Of course, the designation of erds as mere desire and agapé as mere self-gift or generosity is shown to be inadequate when we view the use of these terms in the tradition: see, for example, the article by Ysabel de Andia, “Eros and Agape: The Divine Passion of Love,” Communzo: International Catholic Review 24 (Spring 1997): 29-50, which shows that the Church Fathers even referred to God's love as erés. Eric Perl elaborates the identity of erés and agapé in Dionysius the Areopagite with great metaphysical detail in “The Metaphysics of Love in Dionysius the Areopagite,” Journal of Neoplatonic Studtes 6 (1997): 45-73, esp. 69-70. There would be reason, nev-

ertheless, to distinguish the two terms as representing a natural love and a Christian perfection of what is natural (see, on aspects of this suggestion, the article by Balthasar on Claudel: “Auch die Siinde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel,” Stiummen der Zett 69 [1939]: 222-37). In this case, however, we could call sacramental

marriage the Christian perfection of the simultaneity of desire and self-gift that characterizes even natural love.

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totally and unreservedly to each other in a manner that does not eliminate either one but, precisely to the contrary and given all that has been argued in this chapter, allows each for the first time to be wholly oneself, to be individually as a body-soul whole, is if the relationship is “sheltered” in a third that transcends and includes the two. Marriage is meta-anthropological because it allows the spouses to live “beyond” themselves and for that very reason to become themselves. The marriage vow itself, as in a certain respect distinct from the partners who make it, is what simultaneously unites and distinguishes them. Only when we see the vows as an objective “third” can we speak of marriage as a Gestalt, indeed, as an Urgestalt. The Gestalt character of marriage, according to Balthasar, is what can include the whole person because it transcends the person. It is this that makes a vow quintessentially human, by making the person who pledges himself or herself in it for the first time fully human: “What is a person without a life-form, that is to say, without a form which he has chosen for his life, a form into which and through which to pour out his life, so that his life becomes the soul of the form and

the form becomes the expression of his soul? For this is no extraneous form, but rather so intimate a one that it is greatly rewarding to identity oneself with it. Nor is it a forcibly imposed form, rather one which has been bestowed from within and has been freely chosen.”!?8 The way in which the form of marriage is “distinct” from the two partners is what gives the spouses room for the growth and the striving without which they would not be full human beings, but it is also what keeps them from having to reduce their fulfillment to that striving itself, and it brings their fulfillment to rest —in a way that would be incomprehensible to a merely “transcendental” approach —in a “sphere beyond their striving.”!?? At the same time, the relationship does not come to a final rest in the

vertical transcendence of the objectivity of the vows, but is compelled by the meaning of that objectivity to “incarnate” its meaning horizontally. We have seen that a Gestalt generally has, not three, but fowr points: in

this case, we find that the vows, though perfect in themselves, need to be “consummated,” embodied in a single union in the concrete order. Balthasar speaks of the child, as the gift of fruitfulness, who lies overagainst the two spouses as another human being like they; the child is both the issue of their union and a concrete whole that is more than that union,

198. GL 1:24. Here, Balthasar is speaking about life-form in general, i.e., intending both the state of the counsels and the state of marriage. 199. Balthasar speaks in TD 2:226, of how the life-form represents a sphere in which we find fulfillment “beyond our striving.”

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and thus forms a permanent Realsymbol of both their unity and their dif-

ference. Because he thus has a history of his own, he transcends the parents horizontally just as perfectly as the marriage transcends them vertically.* 00 Given this, one may ask whether the marriage of the spouses is more perfectly expressed in their bodily union or in the fruit of that union; perhaps it is best to say that each is best, in a polar fashion. In any event, there is no need to draw up a systematic framework for such a fundamental and dramatic institution; there are, after all, many analogous ways that spouses can live a common bodily life, and analogous ways that this common life can be fruitful. The point is just to insist that marriage cannot be merely an ideal entity (the vertical transcendence of the vows), nor can it be merely real (the horizontal transcendence of a common life), but it must be an ideality that is really embodied. Only in this way is it transcendent both vertically and horizontally, and only thus is it a concrete Gestalt, a worldly form that manifests the absolute.

Conclusion: Marriage and the Task of Meta-anthropology Whenever two people love each other, the whole world is at stake. — Hans Urs von Balthasar

Although we have dwelt for a while with the theme of marriage as a state of life, our “analyses” would be pale, indeed, if they intended to bring to light the mystery of that reality, which is known best by those who live it.

The purpose of the foregoing was to show the paradigmatic manner in which marriage fulfills the task allotted to meta-anthropology. I must now show how it does so in relation to the problem of truth more generally. It goes without saying —although we say it once again — that the focus on marriage is not meant to preclude other “modes of meta-anthropology.” Marriage itself cannot be understood as a state of life, first of all, except in its analogical relationship to the other state, an analogy we mentioned but which we cannot develop without going far beyond the scope of the thesis. Moreover, it does not “supersede” but rather grounds and enables,

in a sense, the relative autonomy of the dramatic analogy and of art in general. Likewise, myth, ritual, and liturgy play an analogous role. The point is that marriage, as a paradigm or “Urgestalt,” illuminates aspects of these other forms (and more), even while the greater whole that it points

200. See, on this point, for example, ibid., 211, or TL 3:40, where Balthasar shows that it is just the “element” of fruitfulness represented by the child that is lacking in Hegel.

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to requires the illumination of these other forms in reciprocal ways. I insist

on this point in order to broaden the context of the present discussion. The problem presented in meta-anthropology is the problem of reditio completa. According to Balthasar, this “self-intuition” or primal “selfpossession’ as the essential act, or even the essence, of the soul, is on the one hand necessary for the grasp of anything else,70! while on the other hand —since it is dependent on sense experience and the conversio ad phantasmata —it cannot grasp itself without simultaneously grasping the whole, of which it is merely a part.7°” But man cannot grasp the whole without both being a part of it and transcending it —and somehow bringing these together. I have thus argued that there must be some basic act that both “goes beyond” man and that crystallizes him as a whole, but in a way that “interprets him to himself” in a concrete form. This concrete form, then, becomes the “place” in which man for the first time is truly present to himself. It becomes the paradigmatic manifestation of the meaning of being; the basis for reading the sensible and supersensible aspects of reality in their unity; and, finally, the ground upon which to grasp any being at all as “objective,” that is, as both transcendently other and imma-

nent to self and therefore as really true. In other words, this concrete form is a “foundation.” To understand the significance of the notion of the Lebensgestalt as a foundation of truth, it is helpful to consider it in light of what seem to be three other possible positions with respect to the question of foundations. There is, first of all, the possibility of denying any foundation whatsoever, which is the deconstruction alternative. Because of the difficulties involved in the question of “self-presence,” some of which we have seen in this and in chapter 2, Derrida has rejected the possibility in principle, proposing that taking self-presence as a kind of ideal and ground for meaning is itself a groundless myth, to be relativized by other, more interesting myths. But such a rejection is virtually synonymous with nihilism and, moreover, rests on unjustified presuppositions.~?9 Second, there is the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian “transcendental unity of apperception” as a foundation (which is, in fact, the basic form Derrida criticizes). Here, the whole is given at once in the foundation in the form of a single principle or proposition. However, in order for this foundation to be, on the one hand, really transcendent and therefore unsurpassably first and comprehensive and, on 201. TD 2:207-10. See also TL 1:43-55. 202. TD 2:211. 203. I refer once again to Pickstock’s After Writing, which mounts a remarkable case against deconstruction as it is embodied in Derrida and Foucault.

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the other hand, to account for the irreducibly empirical aspect of human knowledge, this foundation is understood in purely abstract and formalistic terms as precisely the exclusion of all content, which then leaves all subsequent content, in a dualistic fashion, to be abstractly a posteriori. But the joining of abstractions does not make a concrete whole: I have shown in the preceding chapter, and in this one, that any time there is a

dualism there is simultaneously a monism, and that therefore such a perspective, which separates a priori and a posteriori parts, undermines the possibility of knowing an object without for all of that forcing it to cease

being an object, that is, a transcendent other. The third approach, represented by Hegel, is by far the most illuminating in relation to Balthasar’s own. For Hegel, the whole is given in the beginning. In a certain respect, this whole is perfectly abstract, as it is for Descartes and Kant, but, unlike theirs, it is not abstract as a single principle, but rather as the whole “material” totality considered most universally, that is, abstractly. Thus, for Hegel, the beginning is not yet complete in itself, but it has within its formal structure a drive to fulfill itself in the concrete. Although the whole is given in the beginning, it is more radically given in the end, and the meaning of existence is the movement between these two wholes. The great genius of Hegel is revealed in this brilliant attempt to overcome dualism in a manner one would almost wish to call dramatic, were it not that Hegel had already named it: dialectic. The dramatic aspect of Hegel is that he wanted to find a way to affirm a real whole at the beginning, which did not subsequently preclude the reality of the wholes that came later. The dialectical aspect of Hegel is that the latter in turn necessarily “outshines” the former; the reality of the concrete whole is bought at the expense of the unreality of the “moments” that went in to constitute it. In a word, the dialectic is undramatic to the extent that it represents a unilateral movement from abstraction to concreteness.704 And this serves to set into relief what is so dramatic about Balthasar’s approach to foundations. For Balthasar, the whole is given in the beginning in the form of a pledge, a promise, a vow. /t ls therefore, from the beginning, perfectly concrete. At the same time, the perfection and completeness of this starting point in no way compromise an openness to “what is to come” but 204. This is a point that Schelling, in his own way, had already seen; consider his profound assessment of Hegel in On the History of Modern Philosophy, 134—63. Schelling

points out that the foundation of Hegel’s system, in spite of all his protests to the contrary, is essentially “inert” insofar as the synthetic moment cannot possibly have any tension with the prior moments. The third, as we have seen, in Hegel, has everything in itself that the two constituting principles have, and in fact in a more perfect form, and so the whole collapses into a reduction. It goes slack. To put it in terms I have

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in a sense precisely perfect this openness so that what arrives is always a surprise, is always genuinely novel and “unforeseen.” This is why Balthasar calls the Lebensgestalt a primal form that is “beyond ‘open’ and ‘closed,’ ””" as if these two represented mutually exclusive alternatives. To put it another way, Hegel can allow an openness to the future only by positing an initial

indeterminacy that awaits further determination. But the indeterminacy is what makes the initial form abstract, and by the same token it is what makes it “inert” and “lifeless.” Ulrich, as I mentioned in chapter 1, speaks of the dialectic as an attempt to stir up through violence what is dead into life: the negation of a negation. Balthasar, by contrast, speaks at one point of an “infinitely determined super-form” (eine unendlich bestimmte UberGestalt), which lies beyond the alternatives, either limit/determination (petros) or formlessness/indeterminacy (apetrin).°°°

A determinate indeterminacy seems a simple oxymoron, and it goes against much that is common in the tradition of philosophy.”°” Yet, it finds

clear confirmation in experience. In pronouncing wedding vows, the spouses both grasp the complete meaning of marriage all at once, and yet they must wait to find out what it means. For better or for worse, in sick-

been using, the reason that what I have called the “unilateral movement” of the dialectic, from the abstract to the concrete, is not dramatic is that there is nothing at all to be lost in the movement forward but only something to be gained. This is why the “kenosis” (the negative moment of self-emptying) of the dialectic turns out to be the relatively painless working out of logical necessity. There is no moment of decision, which, I have shown, occurs only against the background of a radically transcendent meaning, only when there is something to be lost in the very moment something is gained, only, that is, when everything exists in polar dependency on everything else. 205. I refer again to GL 1:25. 206. Ibid., 432. Here, Balthasar is speaking specifically of the form of Christian revelation, but it is clearly analogous to what he means by the vows. 207. The most obvious exception is, of course, Aquinas’s notion of esse, which is not indeterminacy with respect to the determination of formal act but “transcends” that act as the “(super-) determinacy of all formal determination” [actualitas omnium actuum, perfectio omnium perfectionum |]: De pot., 7, 2, ad 9). On a comparison of this point in Aquinas to the presuppositions in German philosophy, see Schmitz, Gift, 98-103, 109. On the other hand, the analogy with the vows (as we will see) brings to light an aspect of Thomistic metaphysics that is easily overlooked: namely, that the perfection of esse is paradoxically more perfect in concrete things (in which it is “mited, i.e., determined), as we have already discussed in chapter 1. In other words, it is not a matter of choosing between the perfection of the beginning or the perfection of the end/result, but of affirming both, without being able to say, in fact, which is more perfect. We have to say, that is, that both Hegel (“The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk”) and Péguy (“Every beginning has a quality that will never again be recovered”) are right. In all of this, we see a confirmation of the notion that being and person illuminate each other, which is a key principle of meta-anthropology, and which I will elaborate in the next chapter.

Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m= 34/

ness and in health: there is no way to “foresee” beforehand which concrete alternatives will be the case in reality; there is no way to predict how the “risky venture” will indeed turn out. In this respect, the events that occur in the unfolding of the history of the marriage come as a complete surprise. However, the newness of the events that occur is not, as it were, an irrational novelty. The events are not a “random” and senseless series of one thing coming after another. Rather, even though they are not in one respect anticipated, in another respect they are: whatever it is that may happen to come about in the history of the marriage has always already been included from the outset; it has always already been embraced and affirmed — “unto death.” What is more, the vows are not “abstract and empty’ principles that drop out of the sky, which in this case would embrace

the whole deterministically, but they are freely willed, they are choven, and they are thus constituted concretely, at a precise moment z7 history. There is a real sense in which the living out of the vows in concrete, real history is absolutely everything: it ws the marriage, the whole history of joys

and sorrows, brokenness and reconciliation. But the only way that the partners can truly suffer the history of these experiences and thereby enter

into their depths is by embracing them beforehand in a comprehensive objectivity that gives space for both doubt and wonder. They can be “ready”

for the unexpected occurrence of the historical events of the marriage in all of their free integrity only because ~in a concrete, actual, “all at once” way — they are ready for anything. In short, one can be surprised by history only because one has “anticipated” it, that is, embraced and affirmed it in advance. Perhaps this is something of what Heracleitus meant by saying “The one who does not expect will not discover the unexpected.””¥8 Thus, marriage is for Balthasar essentially dramatic because it is not the easy passage from abstract to concrete, but it is rather a concrete vertical totality that precisely forms the condition of possibility for the “complete surprise” of the horizontal unfolding of that totality in the historical order. Marriage can have a history (reality) only because of the eternity of the vows (ideality), while the eternity of the vows do not have their meaning except in their being lived out in history. Each, as it were, frees the other. The whole is embraced at once in a nonreductive manner. And this leads us to the crucial point: we can affirm the need for a foundation in the question of truth, without falling into the modern association of

foundation with “system,” because there is no essential contradiction between determinateness and openness. Indeed, quite to the contrary, the

208. Heracleitus, in DK B 89.

3542 a Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

moment we take a dramatic approach to the problem, we see that far from excluding each other, the clarity and even the “rigidity” of form and the incessant movement of openness require, confirm, and give rise to each other. They increase in proportion to each other. The paradoxical mutual dependence of rigidity and movement allows us to see the gravity of Quash’s misunderstanding of Balthasar’s dramatic theory, which we addressed briefly in the introduction. Quash suggests that Balthasar’s occasional (and seemingly unwitting) tendency to refer to “relatively stable forms” or to “transcendent wholes” is the residue of Hegel and modernism, from which Balthasar, in spite of his efforts, could not shake free. It is this tendency, Quash goes on to say, that undermines

his otherwise praiseworthy attempt to introduce a dramatic mode into thinking. Often, when we wish to overcome a “false rigidity,” we try to do so through setting things in motion. But from Balthasar’s perspective, the movement that arises in reaction to a false rigidity is inevitably itself a false motion. Thus, for him, false rigidity is overcome only by deepening the sense of the objectivity of form, and this necessarily brings with it true movement. The recommendation is perhaps as “counterinstinctive” as the command to “turn in the direction one is spinning” when one has lost con-

trol of a car on the ice. But, for Balthasar, form and movement stand and fall together. Defense of one requires defense of the other. There is no drama without Gestalt and no Gestalt without drama. In terms of “foundations,” then, it is the rock-solid certainty of the starting point that guar-

antees surprise and novelty, because only such a certainty allows one to be open, and indeed vulnerable, to the truth that is to come. The foundation is what makes truth in every genuine case something that inspires deep wonder. The notions of drama, Gestalt, and meta-anthropology, which Balthasar developed through the course of his intellectual life, cast a decisive light on what is arguably the central theme of The Truth of the World, namely, that all real truth is mystery and that all real mystery is truth.*°? I will close this chapter by noting some of the implications of this foundation in relation to themes from earlier chapters.

The most obvious way the Lebensgestalt of marriage is a foundation concerns the development of consciousness. I spoke in the last chapter about the word (not only the spoken word but any physical gesture intended to communicate a meaning), which is the simultaneously sensual and spir-

itual medium in which the child comes to consciousness. This notion of 209. One of the best, succinct presentations of this theme in TL | in the secondary literature is the section entitled “Wahrheit als Geheimnis” in Jorg Splett, “Wahrheit in Herrlichkeit,” 414-17.

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word was connected with the discussion in chapter 2 of the event of the mother’s smile, which has to be a personal word of love addressed to the child if it is to lay claim to his very being and thereby allow his conscious-

ness in a “whole” manner to be both receptive and generous, self- and other-centered. In both discussions, I pointed to the fact that the event can occur only when the being of the speaker, that is, the mother in her basic gestures toward the child, is perfectly visible in the word or, conversely, when the word is perfectly transparent to her being. In this way, the word has “to say infinitely more than it says.” We are now in a position to see how this is concretely possible paradigmatically in the context of a vow. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of people who have taken religious vows, says: “They may be compared to those who do some particular good work as the infinite is compared to the finite. Whoever gives himself to another to do all the other may command, gives himself infinitely more than does one who gives himself to do some particular work.”2!9 What creates the difference is, of course, the vow: in a vow, one sets no limits to what one gives, and this makes the gift literally infinite, limitless. What Aquinas says about the religious can clearly be said about those in

marriage. Because of the definitive gift of self in the vows, any word that is passed from one spouse to another is spoken out of the totality of the existence that was handed over, and so it bears within its shallow physical surfaces a depth that transcends it infinitely. Now, we said that the relationship between the mother and child, just

as that between the father and child, is not a matter strictly between the two of them, but is itself the fruit of the primal form (Urgestalt) of marriage. The word the mother speaks to the child is an expression of that Gestalt, and she addresses the child Aumvelf as an expression of that Gestalt. Because she has, so to speak, poured her existence into the form of marriage, the word that she speaks on the basis of this form expresses

the totality of her existence without her even having to think about it. This is what makes the word say “infinitely more than it says,” and this is what allows the child to vee the mother’s being in her gestures, to vee a

perfect unity of “inside” and “outside,” which is what interprets to the child the unity of his own self-consciousness and provides the foundation for every later experience of truth. Understanding marriage as Gestalt allows us to see that the ground or origin of consciousness is a concrete and superdetermined fullness open to the other a/vo as future, rather than being an “abstract” potentiality that awaits, with a necessary impatience,

210. Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales, 3, 7, ad 6 (emphasis mine).

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its actualization. Only now do we see the significance of calling conscious-

ness donum doni, the fruit of the mutual self-gift of the parents symbolized in the Gestalt of marriage. But we also have to relate this event of the child awakening to consciousness to what was said about the child’s fundamental experience in chapter

1 on the fourfold difference. The Gestalt of marriage must in some sense allow Being itself to be seen. How is this the case? Self-presence, if it is understood as the circumscribed grasp of self as an object, is not ontological, inasmuch as Being is precisely the “always-more’; that is, it is in every case greater than any object or any subject. But this does not therefore necessarily mean that self-presence is merely ontic. We have seen that something intrinsically greater than a subject can be in a certain sense paradoxically grasped by a subject to the extent that the subject “transcendently” immerses himself in it, which means that he allows himself to be grasped by it in his own grasping. One can grasp one’s very foundations only when one grasps in being grasped; and this, we recall, is the very nature of a Lebensgestalt, which chooses me because I choose it. It follows, then, that vows manifest Being.*!! And since they make Being visible dramatically, that is, without reducing it to any particular being, they manifest Being in leaving wide open the ontological difference. This is why Balthasar says that, in a “luminous Gestalt” uchtgestalt), the “Being of the existent [dav Sein des Seienden| becomes perceivable as nowhere else.””!* When a child is born into such a Gestalt, the open difference within the manifestation both affirms him, and leaves him free. The child experiences both the contemplative indifference (disinterestedness) of Being at the same time as he sees being as worth striving for (it is interesting). It is thus that the mother's smile represents an invitation to a totality that does not overwhelm him. In a word, the child experiences existence, in its ontological foundations as well as in its ontic presence, as a gift. The paradoxes that are “reafzed” in the primal life-form resonate through all of the stages and aspects of the problem of truth that we have discussed

up to this point. I mentioned earlier that all relative instances of truth — even as formal as, for example, the principle of identity: A = A—stand in a kind of twilight. Lacking a straightforward and obvious sense of urgency themselves, they get decided or “clarified” one way or the other (..e., either dramatically or reductively) on the basis of a fundamental experience. In 211. Vows become an instance of the reciprocal causality that I will elaborate in the next chapter, a reciprocal causality that alone is capable of manifesting the ontological depths of reality. 212. GL 1:153.

Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m 445

other words, any time at all that there is a “whole” involved in a cognitive act, in any grasp of a logical proposition, in fact in any perception at all, a decision has to be made: Am I projecting the unity, or is it greater than me, even as it requires me? But if it is something I both give rise to and participate in, it can only be because I can relate to something that remains other, that is, because both I and the object “transcend.” But, further, such transcendence is not possible unless I transcend wholly — absolutely — because only an absolute transcendence has room for the discontinuity of real otherness. Thus, when that act is completed in its most decisive instance,

it sets into relief the transcendence of every relative instance. Where it is basically denied, this failure is likewise communicated to every relative

instance, and we fall back into what Plato called the world of (mere) appearance. It is a world in which the deep serenity of objectivity, of Being in itself and of the Being of beings, is lacking, and thus a world in which

the mode of relating and communicating is making one mere appearance more forceful than another (modern politics). At issue, then, in meta-anthropology is grounding a genuine ontological

locus of truth (the central theme of the next chapter), which is what Balthasar says can happen only when reality is seen in terms of Gestalt.*!° Recovering the ontological depths of truth, in this sense, does not mean, however, being disabused of the senses’ illusions. Rather, it means grounding their validity once and for all while at the same time not substituting them for the “spiritual.” Balthasar insists that “form (Gestalt) is a meaningful unity in a multiplicity of organs”; 4 it can be grasped as a transcen-

dent whole only throug’ the irreducibility of the organs that perceive it, and this means, in the present case, the irreducible difference of sense and intellect. But this diversity can grasp the meaningful unity only if they are not simply separate from each other, but mutually necessary, and therefore analogous. They must thus themselves be rooted in a concrete unity. At every point of our argument, we have seen something similar. Every aspect of the problem has presented a polarity, a gap, which both needs to be overcome and yet cannot be removed: rest and motion, unity and difference, finitude and infinity, determinateness and openness, subjective and objective, sensible and supersensible, essential and existential, and so on. The alternatives are always the same: either we affirm the irreducibility without the unity, in which case we have a chaotic dualism, or we affirm

the unity without the irreducibility, in which case we are left with a dull

213. Ibid., 152. 214. TD 2:87.

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monism. Or, finally, there is the ‘Aird alternative: we affirm both. This final possibility can occur only dramatically. That is to say, according to Balthasar, it can occur only in an event that is dramatic in both form and content. We

will have access to the truth of Being only if we are willing to receive it with the whole of our Being. At some point, we will be faced with a truth that asks everything of us, the whole of ourselves, without remainder. But should we be surprised? What sort of truth would it be if it did not demand, and promise, everything? If truth called on only a part of ourselves, only tem-

porarily—what would we do with the rest? What use would it be? ... The response to truth and consequently the manifestation of truth — crystallized in martyrdom, religious vows, marriage vows, the arts that depict the “pathos” of the human being as a whole, culture-forming work, and any other Gestalt to which a person devotes himself — are thus the foun-

dations of all knowledge, both abstractly as a form that illuminates the meaning of the Gestalt, and concretely as the embodiment and actualization of that meaning. They give rise to the community we spoke of at the end of the last chapter. Meta-anthropology is man's surpassing himself in order to bring a luminous whole into being. Marriage and family carry this task out concretely in the constitution of any community. But any deed that bears selfless witness to the truth gives rise to a whole that is greater than itself. Truth is always fruitful. Now, the emphasis on meta-anthropology in the revelation of the mean-

ing of being leads once again to the conclusion that truth has its roots in community. One may see here in Balthasar a reflection of the modern turn to language, an approach that seeks to ground “truth” in intersubjectivity. The suspicion that such an approach is not sufficiently “objective” because it cannot distinguish itself from a solipsism that is merely shared generally has some grounds. While Balthasar affirms the fact that man is an essential mediator of truth and that language is an essential medium, he differs from the general form of this position in that he views man not merely anthropologically (or sociologically, psychologically, etc.), but meta-anthropologically: man as mediator of what goes beyond (meta) man.

This is so because the language in question is not just any collection of words in general, but the unsurpassably objective word of a pledge, in which man gives himself without looking back and shows thereby that he serves

a reality greater than his own. The dramatic character of the meta-anthropological act may seem to lead to a kind of esotericism, to allow only those capable of an extreme act of heroism to have access to truth, and thus to deprive truth of its most characteristic property: its universality. The response to this objection has two aspects, which I mention in conclusion. The first is that the objectivity Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m= 347

of meta-anthropology possesses an inner richness (it is analogy and not univocity or equivocity) that comprehends and illuminates all areas of human experience without forcing them into any homogeneity. Heidegger, so to speak, polarizes authenticity (heroism) and inauthenticity (everyday life) into opposites. For Balthasar, these aspects, by contrast, stand inwardly

related as a bipolarity. The objectivity of the meta-anthropological act includes both the most extreme forms of heroism and martyrdom and the most everyday reality of married life. These do not compete with each other;

instead, they reinforce each other in profound ways, even as they mutually illuminate each other. There are few martyrs, but there are many marriages. Of course, those who marry do not think of themselves in the first place as “actors of truth,” fulfilling the meta-anthropological role, but the reality is there nonetheless, and it is brought to light with a radical clarity in the rarer occasions of true martyrdom.” 15 Th turn, the “unself-consciousness’ of married life —the fact that in so many instances of marriage a person commits an entire existence so subtly, so unnoticeably — brings to light

a depth of objectivity that even martyrdom cannot make known. Secondly, and more directly, Balthasar’s understanding of the dramatic act of foundations has an essentially “for-others” character. The act itself radiates beyond itself. In this way, a single person who pledges his existence and remains faithful to his pledge makes manifest an objectivity that frees others. It frees others even as it makes a claim on them: or Jecauvse it makes a claim. Such existences “release” an ontological depth beyond themselves, and thus create an “atmosphere” of truth, a certain cultural horizon or ethos. Doing so, they provide the soul of a community. We should note that even art serves this end. A particularly dramatic work, which brings to light the depth of human existence because it illuminates that existence against that which is infinitely greater, can ground a community in an unsurpassable manner: we might think, in this context, of

Homer's epics, which gave unity to the incredible diversity of Greek culture, for centuries on end.”!© The point is that the few “epiphanies” of the foundations of truth make truth more generally “available.” It is like a large, motley group of people who have assembled to sing. The invariably few strong voices that are able to find the right key immediately make

215. In fact, in the Orthodox wedding ceremony, the bride and bridegroom are “crowned to each other” with crowns of martyrdom in the act that brings about the sacrament of marriage. 216. On this point, see Werner Jaeger, Paideta: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1: Archatc Greece: The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 35-56.

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it easier for the weaker voices; the ones who were never able to carry a tune before find themselves singing steadily and confidently in harmony with the rest. At the same time, the stronger voices do not simply substitute for the weaker ones, but rather they blend with them in order to produce a whole that is greater than any of the parts alone. It was said at the outset that meta-anthropology is characterized by the definition of man as the creature “of whom too much is asked.” Indeed, what is asked — the joining of the finite and the infinite, time and eternity, in order to provide the foundation of truth —is not something that any one person can do. It can be done only by everyone, and by all things together.

Meta-anthropology: The Person as Actor of Truth m= 349

The Transcendentals Nihil igitur vacat, omnia inuunt, sed intellectorem requirunt.! — Augustine

Truth rests finally in community, as the last chapter proposed, only because its roots lie in something more profound than mere intersubjectivity: they lie in being. Cornelio Fabro is therefore correct to insist that the adequate

“ground of metaphysics” cannot be sought in any Kantian transcendentalism, but only in the unfolding of being in the transcendentals, such as we find them described in the opening question of Aquinas's De verttate.” Yet, at the same time, Aquinas himself affirms in this question that being’s truth depends in some way on its relation to the cognitive soul. A certain ambiguity thus lurks in the notion of transcendentality, insofar as it implies simultaneously a rootedness in being and a fundamental dependence on the soul. This chapter's first section, “The Transcendental Paradox,” briefly traces the history of the notion of transcendentality in order to show its ambiguity and to bring the inherent paradox to a sharp point. The chapter will then show that the ontological dimension (or “transcendentality” in the classical, not the modern, sense) of truth becomes manifest only in the dramatic encounter between beings. Truth, in other words, is an event that objectively embraces the mutuality of beings, of the knower and the known. As we saw in the Gestalten of the two previous chapters, mutuality is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The exces in mutuality, indeed, is what reveals most clearly that truth is not just a predicate of human knowing, but that it belongs first to being itself. Since it belongs

fundamentally to being, truth is related “circumincessively” to the other transcendentals (goodness, unity, and beauty), and it cannot be understood 1. Therefore nothing is still; all things make meaningful signs — but they require an interpreter. 2. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Ens-Ewve,” 407.

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in a profound sense except in its relation to these. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate, in fact, that the relationship to beauty in particular — or,

more precisely, the relationship to goodness in beauty —is what most fundamentally undergirds the dramatic structure of truth. To make this argument, after pointing out the paradox inherent in the notion of transcendentality, the next section, “The Transcendentals in Balthasar,” gives a synthetic account of Balthasar’s understanding of the transcendentals, primarily as he elaborates them in the pilog but also with reference to TL 1 and GL 1. Then, in the most substantial part of the chapter, “Truth and Goodness in Beauty,” I bring out some of the philosophical implications of Balthasar’s understanding through dialogue with recent interpretations of the transcendentals in Aquinas, particularly with regard to the transcendental status of beauty. While the status of beauty is somewhat questionable in Aquinas, beauty is arguably the most important of the transcendentals for Balthasar. It will be shown that beauty is in fact what ensures the transcendentality of the other transcendentals, and that transcendentality is reciprocity or reciprocal causality, that is, the mutual engagement of irreducible principles. In other words, transcendentality, at its core, is drama. By ensuring the transcendentality of the other transcendentals, and therefore of truth, beauty is what makes them inherently dramatic. This will lead, in the last section, “The Transcendentals and the Meaning of Being,” to a concluding discussion of the meaning of being as a whole in light of the transcendental paradox.

The Transcendental Paradox According to Balthasar, the “transcendental properties of being [are] those ... which transcend every species and belong to every existent as such.”” The verb transcendere means, literally, to stand over, to pass beyond,

to overstep, or to be outside of. Used metaphysically, it means “to go beyond real or logical categories.”4 While the (Aristotelian) categories are “finite,” the more fundamental transcendental determinations of being

are so to speak infinite. Thus, the former are by their nature mutually exclusive, while the latter necessarily include one another reciprocally: “The transcendentals are not categories. Categories have a finite content and so can be de-fined over against one another. The transcendentals, by contrast, are all-pervasive and, therefore, mutually immanent qualities

3. GL 4:372. :

4. Francis Kovach, Dre Avthettk des Thomas von Aquin: Eine genetische und sydstematis-

che Analyse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1961), 183-85.

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of being as such.”° The depth and comprehensiveness of the transcendentals make them vulnerable to a certain ambiguity. As fundamental characteristics of being, the transcendentals are the most basic way the world is perceived. Because there is nothing more basic, it becomes difficult at this level to decide whether the transcendentals in the first place describe deing or whether they describe the experiencing of being. This ambiguity has allowed

for a shift of emphasis in the understanding of the notion over the course of history. The ancients viewed the transcendentals as concerning the meaning of the world;® the scholastics viewed them as “that which is first

known” or most evident to the intellect;’ in late German Scholasticism, the transcendentals come to refer to essential concepts that have the property of logical necessity;® and, finally, in Kant, the notion transcendental means the a priori conditions of possibility for all knowledge and experience of the world.” The Kantian sense of transcendental is what is intended in the term transcendental Thomism,'® and it is the primary inheritance of phenomenology.!! Balthasar’s own understanding is, as we will see, explicitly metaphysical rather than critical or epistemological, and so in this chapter I will present his understanding primarily

in dialogue with that of Aquinas. At the same time, his approach is by no means “naively” objectivistic; it fully integrates the “subjective contribution” to the meaning of being. As we proceed, I will take up the

5. TL 1:15. See also Aertsen, Hedteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 92-96.

6. GL 4:19-21. It should be noted, however, that an explicit doctrine of the transcendentals occurred only in the thirteenth century. 7. See Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 42-44, 56, 73-84, etc. 8. Nikolaus Knoepffler, Der Begriff “transzendental” bet Immanuel Kant (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 1996), 13-18. 9. Knoepffler, Der Begriff, 62. Cf. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Homund Husserls Phenomenology (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), 200-203.

10. More precisely, the Thomistic notion of the intellectus agens is interpreted along the lines of Kantian a priori conditions of possibility. On this point, see Nikolaus Knoepffler, Der Begriff “transzendental” bet Karl Rahbner: Zur Frage setner Kanttschen

Herkunft Unnsbruck, Austria: Tyrolia-Verlag, 1993), 42-57. 11. Itis clear that “transcendental” means primarily “conditions of possibility” for Husserl, although Kockelmans makes the claim that Husserl’s interpretation of the term resembles Descartes’ more directly than Kant’s, since Husserl takes the (transcendental) ego to be the ultimate ground for all conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience: Kockelmans, 203-5. As for Heideggerian phenomenology, it is possible to read the exwtentialia of Being and Tume as an attempt to combine the Kantian with the more ancient tradition: they are, for Heidegger, not so much conditions of possibility of knowledge but as it were ontological conditions of possibility, ie., the fundamental structures of being in the world.

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question how it is possible to do so without reducing being to subjective a priori conditions. The historical “roots” of the notion of such nonfinite determinations

that reciprocally interpenetrate and apply to anything that exists lie deep in the tradition. Before the notion was philosophically articulated, it constituted the essence of the ancient experience of the world. While

most scholars point to Aristotle's discussion of the “extracategoriality’ of being as the origin of the doctrine, Balthasar, from a more “existential” perspective, sees the transcendentals—the notion that being as a whole is one, good, true, and beautiful —as expressed first in the poetry

of Homer and the Greek tragedians, and as coming to a flourishing point in Plotinus and Virgil. The first articulation is most clearly to be found in Plato,!° and Aristotle speaks of the “convertibility” of one and being in the Metaphysics. 14 The theme of the one, the true, the good,

and the beautiful was a major one in Neoplatonism, and it passed into the Middle Ages through Boethius, !® through the Arabic philosophers, !©

and in a basic way through Dionysius the Areopagite.!’ Nevertheless, it is not until the first half of the thirteenth century that the doctrine of the transcendentals is explicitly formulated, and, in fact, the name franscendental first appears even later.!® Aquinas himself uses the term but “only sparingly. ”19 According to Jan Aertsen, the reason the teaching emerged explicitly at this late date is that the idea of transcendentality requires a different notion of causality than the one operating, in general, in the ancient world. Specifically, if categories describe being considered fundamentally as substance or essence, the transcendentals, lying as they do beyond the categories, describe being in a “more than substantial” mode —in other words, being considered in the light of

12. GL 4:21: “In Virgil and Plotinus the mutual indwelling of the transcendentalia has become complete.” 13. The idea of Being, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, and the One (as well as other notions that were not picked up in the later tradition: i.e., Sameness, Difference, Rest, and Motion [see Sophwt, 254c—255c.]) are constant themes in Plato. One of the most direct expressions of their inseparability is Philebus, 64e—65a, a text Balthasar refers to in TL 1:7. 14. Aristotle, Weta., 11.3. 15. See Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 423-25.

16. Ibid., 81. 17. See ibid., 425-27; cf. GL 4:373-74. Balthasar claims, in fact, that the “posing of the question of transcendental philosophy in general, especially as it applies to the beautiful, is bound up with the Dionysian Renaissance.” 18. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 24; GL 4:372-73. 19. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcenoentals, 104.

The Transcendentals m 353

ex nihilo causality.~° For Balthasar, Aquinas (interpreted in the light of Dionysius the Areopagite) represents a sort of kairos in transcendental philosophy particularly because of his metaphysics of creation.*! Whether there is an “official canon” of transcendentals is a disputed question. Unity, truth, and goodness, at the very least, are accepted by nearly all medieval thinkers. In what is generally taken to be the most fundamental text on the transcendentals, De veritate, 1, 1, Aquinas lists five transcendentals in addition to being (ens) itself, namely, the above three, plus “res” and “aliquid.” According to Aertsen, these latter two seem to have a source in the Arabic philosophers, who tended to present more “logical” concepts as primary in the thinking of being.*? Although

he varies the number from time to time, Aquinas most often refers to unity, truth, and goodness as basic,7° although later and in particular after writing his commentary on The Divine Namev, the beautiful is sometimes included in discussions of these others.*4 Although the De veritate

text lists five transcendentals (in addition to being itself), it is generally thought that the terms rev and aliquid can be logically reduced to others: res to ens itself, because Aquinas states explicitly that res, which describes essence, follows even etymologically from being (eve); and aliguid to unum (unity), because aliquid is simply the unity of a being in relation to other

20. Ibid., 155. This notion is supported in principle by Gilson, who holds that the development of a philosophical understanding of the doctrine of creation is what enabled the Middle Ages to get beyond a strictly “essentialistic” notion of being: see Being and Some Philosophers, 74-107. Fabro, too, insists that the key to the notion of the transcendentals is the ens-esve relationship: “Transcendentality of Ens-Esse.” Although Neoplatonism, outside of a biblical context, does not speak of creation ex nihilo, it is

important to note that it affirms a ground of reality that is beyond substance, as it were, which perhaps accounts for the great importance of the transcendentals in general in Neoplatonic thinking. 21. GL 4:400-407. 22. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 102.

23. According to Mark Jordan, these three make up the “irreducible list” of transcendentals in Aquinas: see “The Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,” /nternational Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 393.

24. Whether Aquinas ultimately thought of beauty as a transcendental is controversial. He never calls it such explicitly (although it is true that the word was far from being a technical term), but on the other hand it seems to fulfill all of the requirements for transcendentality as Aquinas enumerates them in other contexts. Francis Kovach has shown textually how beauty fills all the requirements for transcendentality in “The Transcendentality of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,” in Jfwcellanea Medtaevalia, vol. 2: Die Metaphystk im Mittelalter, ed. P. Wilpert (Berlin: 1963), 386—92. In his book, Die Avthettk des Thomas von Aquin, Kovach makes the argument that Thomas became convinced of the transcendentality of beauty as he wrote his commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite.

554 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

beings.”° Thus, in the end, there seem to be three “primary” transcendentals in Aquinas, and these are the three accepted most generally in the Middle Ages. Balthasar claims that the limitation of the transcendentals to three properties (unity, truth, and goodness), which was fairly common but by no means exclusive in the Middle Ages, is partly due to the fact that the transcendentals were almost always approached explicitly as a reflection of the Trinity.*° The relation to the Trinity is, indeed, not accidental but is already suggested by the nature of the transcendentals: if they are by definition able to be attributed to all being, they are also “predicable” of divine being; a “triad” of transcendental attributes, which are all attributes of being, serves most appropriately to describe the three divine Hypostases that are one in substance. In spite of the Trinitarian analogy, Balthasar points out that, nevertheless, beauty was also widely addressed in medieval discussions of the transcendentals, and moreover it was among the first transcendentals to be introduced.*’ Abstracting from the historical aspect of the question of beauty,

what concerns us foremost is where beauty would “fit in” to the ordering of the primary transcendentals if it were indeed a transcendental attribute. Now, beauty clearly has an analogy to the good and the true since all these in different ways represent a relationship between a subject and an object.*® This relationship, in general, already carries with it a profound

25. See, for example, J. B. Lotz, “Zur Konstitution der transzendentalen Bestimmungen des Seins nach Thomas von Aquin,” in Die Metaphystk der Mittelalter, 334-A0;

Gilbert, “L’articulation des transcendantaux,” 617; and Winfried Czapiewski, Dav Schone bet Thomas von Agun (Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1964), 88. 26. GL 4:377. See also TL 2:159-64. 27. GL 4:373. To support this claim, Balthasar refers to an “important collection of texts” on the beautiful in the Middle Ages: H. Pouillon, “La beauté, propriété transcendantale chez les scholastiques (1220-1270),” Archives 0’Htstotre Doctrinale et Iuttératre ou Moyen Age 21 (1946): 263-329. According to Balthasar, beauty is explicitly called a transcendental in one of the earliest texts on the transcendentals, called Tractatus de transcendentaltbus entis condttiontbus (Assisi: Biblioteca Comunale Codex 186), ed. Dieter Halcom, in Franzwskanische Studien 41 (1959): 41-106. It is generally assumed to have been

written by the young Bonaventure. Aertsen, who makes the claim that beauty was never a significant transcendental until the eighteenth century, passes over this text when he presents the original three treatments of the transcendentals. Only much later in the book does he mention it and, along with this text, the fact that another of the three original discussions of the transcendentals, the Summa Fratris Alexandrt, discussed the beautiful at length. His book thus gives a misleading impression about the understanding of beauty in the Middle Ages. See Aertsen, Jledteval Philosophy ano the Transcendentals, 347-51.

28. Giinther Péltner says that beauty, in Aquinas, concerns the unity between the soul and being, in a manner analogous to goodness and truth but not identical to them: Poltner, Schénheit: Eine Untersuchung zum Uresprung des Denkens bet Thomas von Aquin

(Freiburg, Germany: Herder, 1978), 20.

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problem that relates to the very possibility of the transcendentals. This prob-

lem, as we will see, bears an analogy to the absolute-relative polarity we have been discussing throughout this book, and particularly in the last chapter. It is helpful, therefore, first to focus on this problem in itself, as it appears in the “classic text” on the transcendentals, De veritate, in order to set into relief a remarkable aspect of the transcendental relation. Toward the end of the chapter, I will raise this question once again in relation to beauty.

In De verttate, 1,1, Aquinas begins right from the start with the problem that the notion of transcendentals presents by its very nature. The problem, in a nutshell, is how there can be properties of being av vuch if properties indicate a specificity and if being av vuch would seem to brook no such differentiation. This problem, as Aertsen has explained, does not arise with the categories but only with the transcendentals themselves.*? This is because, while the categories describe being as “contracted” into some finite mode and are thus distinguishable from other modes, the transcendentals describe being av being, insofar as it is being at all. The problem is that on the one hand, the transcendentals have to be “exactly the same’ as being, while on the other hand, they have to “add” something to being, at least enough so that it is not meaningless to say, for example, that “being is true.””” If either part of this affirmation is surrendered, the transcendental ceases to be a transcendental and, indeed, ceases to be of interest. Kant would therefore seem to be right to reject the “transcendental philosophy of the ancients,” which is expressed in the “Scholastic proposition” “quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum” (every being is one, true, and good) inasmuch as this principle “has proved very meager in consequences, and has indeed yielded only propositions that are tautological.”*! But he is right only if we neglect the other aspect, namely, that the transcendentals “add” something to being. At the same time, to say merely that the transcendentals add something to being, whatever gain it would seem to promise, would make them no longer transcendentals, that is, attributes predicable of being as being, but it would rather turn them into finite determinations analogous to the categories.°” Since being is the first thing to fall into the intelligence and is that to which all other concepts can be reduced, 29. Ibid., 158. 30. Aquinas, De ver, 1, 1, ad 1. 51. Kant, CPR, B 113.

32. Asa matter of fact, even the categories pose an analogous problem, which Aquinas does not address. It is claimed that the categories are unproblematic because as they vpecify being, that is, because they add a vpecial difference. But they can do so only with respect to a genus. However, just several sentences before Aquinas justifies the categories as special modes, he adverts to Aristotle’s proof (Weta. 2.3.993b23) that

556 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

there is nothing at all that can be added to being that was not always already included within being: outside of being, there is precisely nothing. Aertsen presents this issue under the title “The Problem of the Addition

to Being,” and he says it is one of the fundamental issues that has to be addressed in classical transcendental philosophy.*’ The problem becomes particularly acute in relation to the true and the good, although none of the other transcendentals is exempt. The reason the problem becomes so clear in these two is that while the other transcendentals refer to the relation of being to itself (res and unum) or merely add a “negation” (aliquid: one thing is not another), goodness and truth add a relation to something “other,” and indeed a relation that Aquinas calls pouvitive (affirmative) rather than negative. This other, according to Aquinas, is the intellectual soul, which, as quodammodo omnia, is the only thing with a scope as universal as being itself. Since the good and the true are transcendentals, however, the “rela-

tion” to this other that they necessarily imply cannot itself lie outside of being. We can therefore formulate the problem that emerges in the following way: how can there be a “positive addition” to being, and therefore the introduction of something “more,” that is nevertheless not more than being but something that has always already been included in being? The basic answer that Aquinas gives to the problem, both in the open-

ing pages of De veritate, and also when he returns to the problem as the first question to be raised in relation to the good (21, 1), is that the transcendentals do not represent a special mode of being, which would require the addition of a real difference but rather a common mode and then, more substantially, that the relation that is povitively added to being in the good and the true is not a real relation but a conceptual one. In other words, we might say that it does not add anything to being itself but only to our grasp of being. This is the solution, in fact, that Aertsen presents when he initially introduces the problem. This solution would seem to have resolved the problem without paradox and to have saved the transcendentals from tautology without making them any less “tautological”: the properties are

being (whether substance or ousia) cannot be a genus (see corpus of De ver, 1, 1). It would seem to be more appropriate, then, to say that the resolution of the problem of addition in the advolute case, i.e., in the case of the transcendentals, will provide by analogy a resolution for the problem in the relative case of the categories. Aertsen passes over this problem (see Aertsen, Jledteval Philosophy and the Transcendental, 87). 43. Ibid., 84-97. Cf., Péltner, Schdnhbeit, 61-66. Gustav Siewerth likewise addresses

this problem, in relation to De ver, 1.1, dealing with it at length and offering a very speculative solution inspired by Heidegger and Hegel. See “Die transzendentale Selbigkeit und Verschiedenheit des Ens und des Verum bei Thomas von Aquin,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Sein und Wahrheit (Diisseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1975), 621-35.

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identical to being but different in the mind, and because of this intentional

difference, the conceptual movement from being to the transcendental attributes is in fact a positive one. In this way, it would be legitimate to speak of the transcendentals as so many conceptual unfoldings of the constant meaning of being. According to Aquinas (and following Aristotle), the difference between a “real relation” and a “rational relation” is that in the former, there is a mutual dependence between the two re/ata, while in the latter, the dependence is unilateral: A is dependent on B in order to be A, but B has in turn no reciprocal need for A in order to be B.™ Calling the transcendentals merely “rational relations” would therefore seem to allow them to be relations and yet not add anything to being. However, as Aertsen points out, this approach immediately raises a further problem, a problem that in fact relates to the aforementioned ambiguity inherent in the notion of the transcendentals.*° If the transcendental relations are merely intentional and to that extent nonreciprocal, how can we call them transcendentals of being? In other words, in relation to the question of truth specifically, if it is only the intellect that is “affected” by the relation, why do we not say simply that the cfellect is true? Is it in fact possible at all to say that being ttuelf is true if truth cannot do without relation? But if we deny the possibility of ontological truth, then in the same gesture

we deny the transcendentality of truth, insofar as the transcendentals describe being as being. Because this problem touches the main nerve of the argument we have been making in this essay in general, it will be illuminating to consider specifically how Aertsen answers the problem on the basis of the texts from Aquinas. First, Aertsen distinguishes between being in its primary, “extramental” sense, and “mental” being, and says that what is true is indeed being, but it is being in this latter, secondary mode.°© This affirmation, however, makes “real” being true, not essentially but only per accidens,*” and moreover it remains the case that Aquinas affirms that the truth in “extramental” being is what cawses the truth of the intellect.*® Thus, it turns out that the situation is more complex: if an adequatio between mind and thing, which Aquinas takes to be the primary definition of truth, is possible, the measure of truth must “be located in either term 34. Ibid., 270. 35. Ibid., 271. Aertsen refers to other authors who have noted the same problem: J. Van de Wiele, “Le probléme de la vérité ontologique dans la philosophie de saint Thomas,” Revue Philovophique de Louvain 52 (1954): 521-71; and J. P. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics 43 (1989): 295-326, 543-67. 36. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 250.

37. Ibid., 272. 38. Ibid., 253.

558 mw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

of the adeguatio formula.”*? In theoretical reason, the measure is given by the thing, and in practical reason it is given by the mind. The mind is called true when, theoretically, it conforms to the thing, but the thing itself is said to be true when, practically, it conforms to the mind. The truth of the thing in conformity with mind occurs most radically in creation, in which the deing of things arises from their “conformity” to the divine mind. This divine “practical” conformity is what accounts for ontological truth, and this in turn is what makes possible the transcendentality of truth, that is, the truth as a “rational” relation between being and the soul (intellect).

Aertsen’s response to the problem, though it is adequate in principle, remains unfinished, and to the extent it is unfinished, it is problematic. The real difficulty has yet to be addressed. The core of the “transcendental paradox” is to account for the pouttive relation of being to the human soul as, in some respect, a genuine addition that at the same time does not “add” something to being. As Aertsen articulates the response, the only “addition” to being is the act of creation, the relation of being to the divine mind.

Human truth, that is, the truth to which the human mind has access, remains — unless more is said — only the truth of “mental being,” or in other

words the truth of the mind itself. 7w truth remains a merely “rational relation, which means, according to Aertsen, it is related to the truth of being “per accidens.” But, strictly speaking, it is not even possible to grant the truth of mental being an accidental relation to real being. We hit the nub of the problem only when we see that purely rational relations cannot even be accidental, precisely to the extent that accidents are real. We would rather have to say that “created” truth is absolutely unrelated from the side of being and that the relation occurs only on the side of the intellect. But this, in fact, brings to light a profound difficulty inherent in the notion of a “merely” rational relationship that is w/o/ly unreal: a relationship that is in a vtrict, metaphysical sense absolutely one-sided is no relationship at all. The implications of this assertion will begin to unfold only gradually, as we enter more deeply into the meaning of the transcendentals. In terms of the problem at hand, what we see is that the proposed solution makes being true ontologically only in relation to the divine intellect, and it makes the human intellect true only in relation to itself. The question remains, What is the relationship between ontological truth and the truth of the mind? In

order to find a way to relate the truth of being as it is brought about in God's creative knowing with the truth of the human intellect, we need to get beyond both a univocal and an equivocal sense of truth. These amount,

39. Ibid., 272-73. The Transcendentals m= 359

in fact, to the same thing in the end: if something is only the same as itself, it can only be different from what is other. If we have no alternatives other than univocity or equivocity, relation is impossible, and therefore so is transcendentality. What we need, then, in technical terms, is a genuine analogla veritatis (analogy of truth), an understanding of a genuine human participation in the divine knowledge, which w ontological truth. Aquinas himself opens up this possibility by affirming that God's creative knowing is mediated by his will (because creation is a work of practical reason inasmuch as it is creative) as well as by the secondary causality of the mutual relations of creatures.*° It is possible, I propose, to affirm the transcendental relation —in its complex structures, as I will elaborate

over the course of this chapter —as a paradigmatic form of this secondary causality. If secondary causality is an active participation in “first” causality, and if, according to Aquinas, the first causality is not “merely” theoretical, but is perfectly mediated by the divine will, then transcendentality, or human participation in God's creative knowing, implies that man’s knowing of things is also not “merely” theoretical but is in an analogous way creative. In other words, it will have to be the case that any instance of knowing whatsoever is mediated to some degree by the vpontaneous quality of the will.4! In order to justify the existence of the transcendental deter-

minations of being at all, we have to reject a simple opposition between rational and real relations. I will return to this issue only after discussing Balthasar’s view of the relationship between being and the soul implied in each of the transcendentals (goodness, truth, and beauty) and setting his view in dialogue with some recent interpretations of Aquinas. For now, it is important to see the paradox implied in the notion of tran-

scendentals in general, which we can now bring to a sharp point. There are two ways to formulate the problem. One is to see that the notion of transcendental requires the simultaneous affirmation of three things, which seem

to exclude one another: (1) the transcendentals cannot add something to 40. Aquinas, De ver, 2, 14, corpus. 41. To make the point ina summary fashion: Aquinas claims that the only way there can be an “active effect” of knowing (and therefore a certain “reality” to the otherwise rational relationship) is if knowledge is mediated by the will (De ver, 2, 14, corpus). The question arises, then, whether there is ever a case of knowing that is not mediated by the will. Aquinas’s negative answer to this question is clear: for a series of texts in which Aquinas insists that the operation of the intellect is always necessarily mediated by the will, see Czapiewski, Dav Schine bet Thomas von Aquin, 105, n. 294. It is, then, a matter of interpreting what the mediation of the will in knowing can mean (i.e., does it positively add something to knowledge in some respect, or is it merely what occasions the self-contained act of the intellect in knowing?), and what this implies with respect to the possibility of conceiving truth as a “purely” rational relationship.

360 uw Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

being essentially, (2) they cannot be accidental, and (3) they cannot be merely synonymous. Another way to formulate the problem is to say that the transcendentals are in some respect conceptual relations, which means that they

must necessarily pass through the mediation of “soul,” and yet they are for all of that not transcendentals of the soul but of being. Both of these formulations point in the same direction. The only solution that these various stipulations seem to allow is to see the transcendentals as expressing that what is always already there in being as such nevertheless requires the soul in order to come about. In other words, the soul represents the indispensable condition for being to fave the meaning that it w. This is the transcendental paradox.

The Transcendentals in Balthasar The transcendentals occupy a central place in the thought of Balthasar, a fact brought out strongly by the book recently published by Mario SaintPierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité chez Hans Urs von Balthasar’” According to Saint-

Pierre, the idea of ordering his thought most fundamentally in relation to the transcendentals arose early for Balthasar. We see it already in his “first trilogy,” on the Church Fathers, published between 1936 and 1941, which consists of a study on Origen (who primarily represents truth), Gregory of Nyssa (beauty), and Maximus the Confessor (goodness).** The ordering of the transcendentals at this early stage is somewhat different from the way they appear in Balthasar’s most mature writing, which begins

with beauty and ends with truth. (It may be possible to see a relation between this early conception of the transcendentals and the approach taken by Przywara, whose influence on Balthasar was particularly strong at this point.)“4 The idea came to fruition, of course, with the great trilogy 42. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité. This book was originally presented as a thesis under the title “Les transcendantaux dans la trilogie de Hans Urs von Balthasar” in the University of Laval, Quebec, 1996. 43. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 143-55.

44. Przywara’s conception of the analogia entis is grounded by the relation of the transcendentals. By means of them, Przywara attempts to bring together the ancient “meta-ontic” (being transcending itself toward noetic structures, or what he calls “transcendental metaphysics”) and the modern “meta-noetic” (the mind transcending itself towards being, or what he calls “metaphysical transcendentalism”). From Przywara’s perspective, beauty primarily represents subjectivity, truth primarily represents objectivity, and (Augustinian) goodness is the analogical movement that brings them together. See his book Polarity: A German Catholtcs Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C. Bouquet

(London: Oxford University Press, 1935), which uses these structures to develop a philosophy of religion that brings together transcendence and immanence. On the general shape of Przywara’s thought in relation to Balthasar, see Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, véruté, 130-35; Juan Sara, Forma y amor, 66-72; and Balthasar’s own essay, MetaPrz.

The Transcendentals m= 36/

Balthasar wrote over the course of the last thirty or so years of his life (with the exception of TL 1, which was first published in 1947, and then included later among the other volumes). The first part (Herrlichkeit), seven

volumes (in English), deals primarily with the beautiful (and with the related term glory); the second part (Theodramattk), five volumes (in English), concerns the good; and the last part (Theologtk), three volumes (the

first of which is in English), focuses on the true. Saint-Pierre adds that the concluding Epilog can be seen as dealing with unity because it explicitly takes up the question of the relationship among the transcendentals together, and it shows how, by virtue of their circumincession, unity is intrinsic to each.*° Balthasar’s ordering the trilogy around the beautiful, the good, and the true, rather than wawmn, verum, and bonum, has prompted Henrici to observe that Balthasar draws his understanding of the transcendentals more directly from classical German philosophy than from Scholasticism or Neoscholas-

ticism, although Henrici points out that even in relation to German philosophy, Balthasar presents them in a different order.‘° The similarity of Balthasar’s “triad” to that which emerges after the Middle Ages should nevertheless not obscure the differences between his and the classical Ger-

man understanding or the similarities of his understanding with that of the Scholastics, and Aquinas in particular. There are three things to point out in this regard. First, the fact, which Henrici indicated, that Balthasar has a different ordering of the transcendentals is already deeply significant. For Kant, beauty comes last; it thus confers a unity on the other two Critiques that is “regulative” and explicitly not metaphysical. Balthasar’s placing beauty firvt is the result of a conception of unity that is closer to that of medieval tradition than that of German philosophy generally. Second, we recall Balthasar’s observation that the medieval approach to the number and ordering of the transcendentals was tied to their understanding of the Trinity. If Balthasar therefore does not follow the Scholastic triad of “unum, bonum, et verum,” it does not necessarily mean that he chooses Kant over Aquinas; it can also be interpreted as a consequence

of his “freeing” the transcendentals from a one-to-one correspondence with individual persons of the Trinity. As Balthasar claims in his intro45. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 230-34. One of the most interesting parts of the book is Saint-Pierre’s discussion of the structural relation of the Epilog to the trilogy, 215-32. He suggests that one of the strongest models is the ancient dramatic triad, which was followed by a satyr play: 225-26. 46. Henrici, “La structure de la trilogie,” 15-17. Saint-Pierre claims as well that Balthasar’s primary dialogue partner in the development of his own understanding of the transcendentals is German Idealism: Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 109.

562 a Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

duction to the Theologtk, the three parts of the trilogy are not meant to correspond to each of the divine Persons separately, but rather the whole tri-

une God is present in each part.” Third, and perhaps most important, though Balthasar’s “triad” initially looks more German than Latin, his understanding of the fundamental meaning of the transcendentals is in one decisive respect clearly more medieval. “Transcendental,” for Balthasar, is not intended first in the Kantian or even the phenomenological sense, but it is rather a metaphysical notion.*® The transcendentals describe, not the most basic ways we know things but the most basic “modes” of being itself, even if it is true that as we mentioned above, these basic modes have a certain reciprocal dependence on relation to the (cognitive) soul.

Although Balthasar makes constant reference to the transcendentals in his writing, the two most explicit and sustained treatments of what they are and how they are ordered with respect to each other occur in TL 1,7?

and in the Epilog.°° The thorough and well-researched study by SaintPierre eliminates the need to address the gradual development of Balthasar’s thinking on the transcendentals. Since our interests, in any event, are more thematic than historical, I will focus on the presentation in the Epilog and

mention aspects from TL | only in relation to this. As we saw in chapter 1, the central metaphysical part of the Epilog deals with the structures of being. This central part, in fact, has an extraordinarily compact and harmoniously articulated structure. After raising the issue of the “thinking of being” in section 1, Balthasar discusses the polar structure of Being in itself (“2. Being and beings”), describes the relationship between being and its appearing for another (3. Appearance and hiddenness’”), and then shows how the polarity in being opens up to the divine identity (“4. Polarity in Being”). After these four sections, Balthasar engages a discussion of the transcendentals: first, he discusses beauty under the title “Self-manifestation” (Sich-Zeigen), then goodness under the title “Self-gift” (Sich-Geben),

47. Significantly, Balthasar raises this point in response to an objection made by Karl Rahner. The introduction of beauty among the transcendentals, Rahner claims, can only serve to confuse our understanding of the Trinity, because, in the Trinity, there are only two processions: see TL 1:19—20. 48. This statement is not by any means intended to set phenomenology and metaphysics in opposition to each other in principle. Rather, granting a unity between them, it is no less the case that there is an irreducible polarity between being in itself and being as it appears. To insist that it is being that appears does not necessarily entail the identification of being and appearance, as we saw in chapter 3. Balthasar insists that these two aspects can neither be separated from each other, nor reduced to each other. Given this polarity, Balthasar roots his thought more fundamentally in being in itself. 49. TL 1:216—25.

50. E, 45-66.

The Transcendentals m 363

and finally truth under the title “self-expression” (Sich-Sagen). Each of these sections on the transcendentals is, in turn, broken down into three further subsections, which echo exactly the structure of the three previous sections: (a) each initial subsection elaborates the polar structure of the transcendental in itself; (6) each presents the polar relationship implied in each transcendental as being in itself and as being for another; and finally, (c) each shows how the irreducible polarity expressed in the transcendental opens it up from within to comprehensive theological dimensions. The part of subsection c that discusses truth does so in a more general way that recapitulates the prior sections.*! In what follows, we will not deal explicitly with any of the theological aspects. Moreover, most of what Balthasar says in relation to each of the transcendentals has already appeared at some point in our discussion, so I may be brief and synthetic.

I. Beauty Balthasar never tires of insisting on two things: first, that the transcendentals are by their nature indefinable,°” since they represent fundamental determinations of that which is fundamental — being itself —and a thing

can be defined only in relation to what is more universal or more funda-

mental; and second, that the transcendentals are convertible with one another, and so they can be understood only in relation to the others.°° There is therefore something artificial about taking each one discretely. I do so, then, only as a way of entering into the problem, but we note that what is truly deepest in each will begin to emerge only when we address their interrelation. What the transcendental “beauty” most basically expresses is the fact that “all worldly being is epiphanous, 4 as we saw in chapter 3. Epiphany, being’s “self-manifestation,” is the movement of inner ground to outward

51. My reading of the structure of this part of the Epdlog is different from that presented by Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 234—38, who attempts in an interesting way to coordinate the Epilog with Aquinas's deduction of the transcendentals in De veritate.

Moreover, Saint-Pierre suggests that the logic followed in the three subsections on the transcendentals is (a) objective dimensions, (b) subjective reception, and (c) an anticipation of the integration of the transcendental in Christological revelation (237). In addition, he does not draw much attention to the issue of polarity. This issue, however, seems to me to be the most crucial, and it helps avoid a misunderstanding of the “b” sections: they do not concern the “subjective” reception of being as much as a paradoxical event that is simultaneously subjective and objective, 1.e., a polarity.

52. GL4:411. 53. See, for example, TL 1:7, 15. 54. FE, 45: “Alles weltlich Seiende ist epiphan.”

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appearance, aspects that are not to be taken dualistically as two separate things that need to be put into relation but as a single whole. In other words, the fundamental phenomenon of reality, than which nothing more basic can be found, is Gestalt. Because the movement of epiphany is itself an affair of being, the seeing of the whole that is greater

than mere surface (sensible) appearance is not left up to the beholding subject as a task he must carry out on his own; it is in part undertaken by the self-manifesting being itself: “In every case, even in those that are purely natural, the epiphany of the essence is self-interpretation [Se/bstdeutung |; it is significant [be-deutend|, even if the significance is only intimated [an-deutend|. And since it unfolds its meaning [Bedeuten] in a subject, it charges the subject with the task of interpretation [Aws-deutung | 95 Ng we have already seen, the tensions that make up the Gestalt of being’s appearance give rise to a polarity-in-unity in the phenomenon of beauty itself. The same light that irrupts in the movement of epiphany simultaneously illuminates the inner harmony and proportion of the outer form itself, and it points back beyond this form to the transcendent beauty of Being itself. What we take to be an opposition between classical aesthetics (Apollo) and romantic aesthetics (Dionysus) is but the polar expression of the same irreducible phenomenon.”® This polarity in the epiphany of being entails a polarity in the perception of being. The outward appearance of being is not merely the matter awaiting the form of cognition, but is itself a spontaneous whole. The subject’s perceiving the epiphany is at the same time the experiencing of himself as a whole. The Gestalt is therefore a communion of the “I” and the particular being in the depths of reality (Wirklichkeit = esse).°” 2. Goodneds

The inseparability of the transcendentals shows itself in the fact that being does not make itself manifest without in that very act giving itself. This self-gift within manifestation is the foundation of all goodness and value.°® Because goodness has its roots in beauty; that is, in being’s self-manifestation, it too has an irreducible polarity. The good is what all things desire

55. Ibid., 46: “In allen Fallen, auch in den rein naturhaften, ist die Epiphanie der Wesen ihre Selbstdeutung, ist sie be-deutend, wenn auch nur an-deutend. Und da sie ihr Bedeuten in ein Subjekt hineinlegen, obliegt diesem die Aufgabe der Aus-deutung.” 56. Ibid., 46-47. Cf. TL 1:224-25. 57. E, 48-49. 58. Ibid., 52. Cf. TL 1:219-21.

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and strive after, according to Aquinas, °9 and yet things are not good because

they are desired but are rather desired because they are good. To put it in terms we have used before, because the good is a “self-gift,” or in other words because the goodness of the good is founded on the original phenomenon of beauty, the good’s being receptive to the subject’s spontaneous striving is simultaneous with its giving itself (spontaneously) to the subject's receptivity. This means, Balthasar says, that being can be good, that is, can gwe itself, only to one who gives himself in return. We see this most clearly, he continues, in the paradoxical human situation in which each person has a right to be loved, and yet love by its essence can only be offered freely.©° Thus, while every person desires love, love cannot be simply an object of desire; it must be received in love, which means that love must be given. This basic polarity of goodness comes to expression in count-

less forms: in the fact that moral action involves both (subjective) conscience and (objective) absolute norms; in the conflict between power and love; in the opposition of various rights; and in the tension between justice and mercy. The same paradox that obtains, he says, in the subject's striving after the good (which has to give itself and be received “freely”) can be viewed from the perspective of the self-giving object: by the very nature of goodness, the object's self-gift to the subject can be received in freedom. To make the gift, then, the object must in some sense await the free reception by the subject, and in that respect in its very freedom in giving it has a certain dependence on the freedom that receives.°! The good can therefore le good, not through force but through “persuasion” and vulnerability to rejection. At the limit, this rejection can be a mortal hatred. But if perishing in the vulnerability of freedom is itself an expression of goodness, the failure to communicate goodness can in fact turn out to be the most profound communication of goodness. Thus, Balthasar points in this context to the intuition of ancient tragedy (in Oedipus at Colonus, for example), where the perishing through self-gift turns out to bring “grace” and “healing” (or “salvation”: Heil) to an entire country. 35. Truth

Before Balthasar presents truth, he observes that in a certain respect, truth is final, even while in another respect it should be first. The reason for this 59. Aquinas, De ver, 22, 1, cited in FE, 52.

60. E, 52-53. 61. Ibid., 54. 62. Ibid., 55. 3566 ww Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

ambiguity that he offers here is that while the truth seems to be final inso-

far as it represents a certain perfection of a development we saw in the other two transcendentals — namely, a movement from mere showing of self, to gift, and finally to articulate self-expression —there is a sense in which the other transcendentals first come to be what they are only in light of truth. In other words, true goodness and true beauty require the reception by a self-conscious subject.°? This first-last tension, in fact, points in some ways to the meta-anthropological tension we spoke of in the last chapter. Moreover, it illustrates something analogous to the transcendental paradox itself, such as I described it above: in a certain way, truth presupposes the other two transcendentals, but in another way, they presuppose truth. I will comment on this when we address the relation among the transcendentals towards the end of the section “Truth and Goodness in Beauty.” In the Epilog, Balthasar approaches truth as “self-expression” (SichSagen), and therefore he turns first to the phenomenon of language. Language becomes possible only where Being as a whole has been grasped in the reflective act of self-conscious being. The Being that is herein grasped

is esse, which is always more than the totality of beings. It is that outside of which there is nothing at all. All particular beings are illuminated themselves only in the light of this Being, a light that finds itself first reflected only in the human spirit. However, this spirit is itself dependent on the senses, and therefore on the sensibility of particular beings. All knowing thus requires a grasp of what is beyond the senses (esse), while at the same time it achieves this grasp only through the senses. Balthasar then shows how this polarity relates to the Thomistic affirmation that all knowing is a vaying; that is, all our thinking and judging occur in the medium of sensible language.®! This means at the same time, however, that language is not a mere end rationts but attains to “ontological reality.” We grasp the relation to reality best, Balthasar claims, when we see the freedom of speech on the basis of the “organic” movement already expressed by the beautiful and good, namely, as a communication of ve/f. Now, the polarity intrinsic to language as a medium of self-expression points to an even more fundamental mystery: the subject can “disclose” being in his reflexive act only to the extent that he is himself simultaneously disclosed by being.®° This opens up a deeper insight into the polarity of truth in the

63. Ibid., 59. 64. E, 60-61. 65. Ibid., 61. In this context, Balthasar refers to the study by Theo Kobusch, Sein und Sprache: Grunolegung einer Ontologte der Sprache (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1987).

66. E, 63.

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world: the freedom of the act of judgment in any instance of knowing can be carried out in its freedom only in dependence on the self-unveiling of the particular being that is known, which is what grants the light of being to consciousness. The heart of truth is the irreducible polarity of grasping in being grasped, knowing in being known.

4. Unity and Circumincession Such as I have quickly run through them, the transcendentals appear to be a series of characteristics that serve to describe the various ways in which things relate to each other. But if that is what they are, then they are not transcendentals, because only “finite” modes can be juxtaposed to each other thus in a series, and transcendentals are not finite modes but “infinite”; that is, they describe being as being. To grasp any transcendental at all is to grasp paradox, because their infinite character makes them inseparably interwoven with each other without allowing them to fall, as it were, into an inert synonymy. The theme of the circumincession of the transcendentals is a major one for Balthasar, and he connects this theme in a special way with beauty, on the one hand, and unity on the other. As Balthasar says in GL |: “[Beauty] . . . dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. .. . [S]he will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.”°’ The importance of beauty, for Balthasar, cannot be overstated, and I will point out in a moment some of the ways in which beauty allows truth to be true and goodness to

be good. The theme of the interplay between the beautiful, the good, and

the true, as we said above, is the fundamental ordering principle of Balthasar’s thought. But it is crucial to come to terms with the role unity plays in relation to beauty and the circumincession of the transcendentals generally. Balthasar himself says that we are “led by the very nature of the object itself —in this case the fact that all the transcendentals equally determine the whole of being —not only to underscore their inseparability . . . , reciprocal interpenetration, and mutual implication, but also, and for the same reason, to highlight the fundamental transcendental quality of unity.”°> If unity, in Balthasar’s discussions of the transcendentals, does not “fall into line” with

67. GL 1:18. 68. TL 1:7.

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the triad of beauty, goodness, and truth, and if it does not have a number of volumes devoted to it in the trilogy like the others, it is not because it is the least significant transcendental, which receives occasional mention only for the sake of tradition, or because it does not fit into an otherwise fixed schema. Rather, we wish to argue that unity is in a sense the transcendence that makes the circumincession of the three possible, and this is why it cannot be simply included among them. It is the most hidden in Balthasar’s work, one might say, because it is in a sense the deepest. At this point, I will only indicate certain general aspects of the circumincession of the transcendentals in general in line with what Balthasar says in the Epilog. The heart of the matter will be brought out only through philosophical engagement with Aquinas.

The circumincession, or mutual interpenetration and implication, of the transcendentals means that they subsist within a definite order. In other words, they do not stand “side by side” in a symmetrical series (which would make them finite, as we said above), but instead they are asymmetrical, which means they relate to each other in terms of subordination. At the same time, however, precisely because it is circumincessive, the order is not simply unilateral, but it is asymmetrical in the sense of mutual sub-

ordination according to a more complex set of possibilities. Thus, for Balthasar, there is clearly a “fundamental” order among the transcendentals, which is the order of the trilogy itself, and yet he insists that there is another sense in which each of the three has a certain primacy within a different order. Saint-Pierre has described the fundamental order of the transcendentals clearly at the conclusion of his study: Beauty is essentially the first transcendental; it is connected with the primal phenomenon of Gestalt, and thus it is what makes all the transcendentals concrete without reducing them to the particular. Goodness is the central transcendental; it represents the “hinge” of the transcendentals in the order of action, which results from the basic meaning of gift. Finally, truth is the w/timate transcendental. It is as it were the place where the relation implied by the other two transcendentals is consummated in a fruitful way, and thus it

ensures that the whole crystallizes in a mysterious unity.°? Balthasar expresses the “organic” unfolding of the transcendentals in this basic order

69. Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 349. Saint Pierre places particular emphasis on the fact that truth preserves beauty from fading into a bland aestheticism and, moreover, that the centrality of self-gift implied in the Good could lead to an absolutizing of negativity —a kind of gnosis or idolizing of “kenosis” (self-emptying) —were it not

for the positive light of truth. In this, he agrees with the interpretation Paul Gilbert offers: “Larticulation des transcendantaux,” 628—29. I will return to this point later. The Transcendentals m= 369

succinctly in the Epilog: “The being [or essence: Wesen] presents itself in appearance. This presentation [Dar-vstellung] gives the being a Ge-vfalt in the world, in which it makes out its meaningful (full of logoy [logovhaft])

content [Ge-/alt] as something able to be intuited as a whole. Thus, it thereby makes itself available to a world-context so that it can, as a gift, be used (wf) or enjoyed (fru), wherein it finally shows its truth.””°

The notion that truth comes last can, moreover, be supported by a consideration of grades of being, wherein all beings can show themselves (beauty) and living beings can give themselves (goodness), but only selfconscious beings can exprevs themselves articulately (truth). Nevertheless, this order is not static but circumincessive, and we would upset the circumincession if we allowed them to move, as it were, only in one direc-

tion. Once we have grasped in principle how they relate, and that they can be by no means separated from each other, we are freed in a certain way in the concrete order to begin with any one of them in particular, or to lay a special emphasis on one rather than the other. Indeed, it is significant that while Balthasar often points to beauty as that which ensures the unity of the rest,’! in this summary presentation of the transcendentals in the Epilog, Balthasar does not give beauty any special status, but in fact he shows how each of the transcendentals contains the others. Thus, he says, objectively speaking, beauty can be seen to contain truth and goodness in the phenomenon of a great work of art, in which the very givenness (Hingegebenhett) of the meaning is so fully handed

over, it places itself beyond any definite discrete articulation. But the good can also be seen to have a certain primacy, and thus to contain the others: a dramatic act of self-gift has an overwhelming beauty and at the same time makes a “statement” that is unmistakable. Finally, he says, the truth of genuine human speech has a beauty in its images and expressions, and this truth can be the most profound gift of self, the disclosure of one’s heart. Subjectively considered, Balthasar continues, the “dominance’ of beauty corresponds to wonder, which only increases the more the object is known. The dominance of goodness corresponds to gratitude, which never grows “accustomed” to the gift. And the dominance of truth corresponds to faith or trust (Glauwbe), which does not disappear 70. E, 64: “Das Wesen stellt sich in seiner Erscheinung dar, diese Dar-stellung gibt ihm in der Welt eine Ge-stalt, in der es seinen sinnvollen (logoshaften) Ge-halt als etwas ganzheitlich Anschaubares hin-stellt, sich damit auch in den Weltzusammenhang hinein-gibt, so dafs es als Gabe verwendet (uti), aber auch genossen (frui) werden kann, worin sich schliefSlich auch seine Wahrheit erweist.” 71. In addition to the pages cited above from GL 1, we might consider TL 1:221—25, where Balthasar more or less defines beauty as the unity of the good and the true.

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in genuine knowledge.’ 2 None of these aspects, either from the subjective or the objective side, is meant to replace any of the others. Indeed, it would be difficult, and even somewhat foolish, to try to say which is more important.’® And yet, directly after showing the “relativity” or relative primacy of the transcendentals among themselves, Balthasar points to a kind of primary primacy of unity, which he calls the “first of the transcendental modes.” The “firstness” is expressed in the fact that it “undergirds” (unter-

greift) the others, or, as Balthasar puts it at the beginning of the second part of the Epilog, unity is what “pervasively accompanies” (or “accompanyingly pervades”: mitfolgend durchwaltet) the other three.’° The reason it

both pervades and accompanies the others comes to light when we consider that each of the transcendentals is constituted by an irreducible polarity. If the polarity is not to fracture into a dualism, we cannot think of the poles as separate parts, but as an “wnunited unity” (nicht-einen Einheit) that has its ground in something deeper. But the primacy of unity means that

it cannot be treated first, or even “in itself.” If Balthasar had considered unity first, it would not have been able to appear as the unity of poles or as a “polar unity.” Instead, it would have appeared as a “monistic” one. And for the same reason, it would no longer have been the “accompanying’ and “undergirding” first of the transcendentals —that is, as the unity in which their polarity is preserved — but it would have fallen simply in line with the rest. Thus, Balthasar says, “we can talk about unity as a transcendental only after having dealt thematically with the other transcendentals first.””© The depth of the meaning of unity cannot be unfolded for its own sake, but only as implied by the meaning of the transcendentals, that is, as the unity of the transcendentals, in themselves and in one another. Thus, if it is the case that beauty, goodness, and truth show themselves in

the end to have a certain dependence on the transcendence of unity, this one, in turn, has need of them for its own meaning. | will return to this problem toward the end of the chapter.

72. All of these objective and subjective aspects are presented in E, 65. 73. In fact, in Balthasar’s final summary presentation of his thought, he describes the unfolding of the transcendentals in the following order: unity, goodness, truth, and beauty (RT, 3). This order seems to be unique in his writings, and underscores the fact that even if there is an “ultimate” order, it is always “relativized” according to context. 74. E, 65. 75. Ibid., 37. 76. TL 1:8.

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The relativizing of the three transcendentals and the “privileging” of unity here in the Epilog, however, do not render null Balthasar’s more common claim of a special primacy for beauty. In fact, there is a certain way in which they support this claim, although we will see how they do so only at the end. Before we turn to a discussion of beauty, goodness, and truth in Aquinas, however, it will be helpful to point out specifically why beauty has such importance for Balthasar. Next to his observations in the opening pages of the trilogy, the clearest case Balthasar makes for the central-

ity of beauty isin TL 1. There, Balthasar describes beauty as so to speak the place where goodness and truth meet, are joined, and become different because of the relation. On the one hand, he says, “the light of truth could seem cold and joyless if it did not also have the warmth of the good.””” In GL 1, Balthasar says further that the “very conclusions” of truth, once it has been sundered from beauty, and therefore its intrinsic relation to goodness, “are no longer conclusive.””® There will be much more to say on this point later, but we

should see that the “warmth,” attractiveness, or “conclusiveness” that beauty’s relation to the good brings to truth is not the addition of something new —something extra that does not belong to truth proper — but it is rather something that is part of the nature of truth av truth. It would be

an “extra” addition only if truth were taken to be primarily a matter of abstract propositions. But we have shown that such propositions, in their abstraction, ceave in fact to be true if they remain merely abstract and indeed

if they have truth only when understood as part of an ek-static event of a life-giving relationship between subject and object. If attractiveness is essen-

tially related to ek-stasis, then the persuasiveness or conclusiveness that Balthasar speaks of is part of the native structure of truth. In this case, then, its being severed from beauty leads to the dissolution of its own structure and not merely the loss of something accidental. On the other hand, it is only by virtue of beauty that goodness is seen to be valuable —which is so little the addition of a new item that it is almost like saying it gives flavor to salt. The reason beauty reveals the goodness

of the good is that it mediates truth to it. It is undeniable, Balthasar remarks, that goodness is essentially relative, namely, that it is by its nature a good “for me,’ a good relative to a subjective appetite. However,

if it were only relative (which is in fact impossible to conceive) or if it were exhaustively measured by the coordinated appetite, it would “be at

77. TL 1:221. 78. GL 1:19.

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the mercy of a total subjectivism and relativism.” Indeed, a wholly relativized good would collapse into the subject and could not even be objective enough to be an object of desire. It would lose all value the same moment it lost any degree of in-itself-ness. In this case, Balthasar says, “man stands before the good and asks himself why ct must be done and not rather its alternative, evil.’”°° The mystery of beauty that we will try gradually to penetrate is hinted at in the convergence of the problems that arise in the true and the good when they separate from the beautiful and therefore from each other. There are a number of ways we could describe this convergence. On the one hand we could say that they both reveal an extrinsic relationship between the “in-itself” aspect and the “for-another” aspect of being. Another

way to put it is that they both represent a sort of breakdown of relationship into sheer immediacy. The good collapses into an unmediated subjectivity that does not have to go “outside” itself in a genuine openness to an object, insofar as it is not mediated by truth, while the true collapses into an unmediated objectivity, which does not of its very nature make a claim on the subject, insofar as it is not mediated by goodness. Or, finally, we could say quite simply that without beauty, what both the true and the good lack is precisely transcendence. Beauty has a key role in the fact that the transcendentals are transcendentals. In TL 1, Balthasar characterizes the fundamental primacy of the beautiful in terms of groundlessness. In both the true and the good, being manifests itself in the self-communicative movement of ground to appearance (and the falling away of appearance into ground). Beginning with the appearance, we might be able to give a reason for the ground; beginning with the ground, we could even more clearly give a reason for the appearance. But if we understand them as a polar relation in which each finds fulfillment in the other, and we thus take the phenomenon asa whole, then the “ground of being becomes bottomless.’”°! This is the groundlessness of beauty, according to Balthasar: not that there is 20 reavon (Grund), or that it has irrationally been held back or dissolved in an endless regress, but that the ground has been so perfectly communicated, it cannot be grounded in something else. We will see at the end the far-reaching implications of this point, and we will see, too, that Balthasar’s philosophy provides the resources for

79. TL 1:222. 80. GL 1:19. Sl. TL 1:223.

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giving the insight a broader base.®” For the time being, we note that groundlessness is the mark of ultimacy. As we saw above in the Epvlog, Balthasar connects beauty with wonder, and, in TL I, he explicitly relates it to the fundamental question “why,” which is the open marveling at the existence of an object. And, finally, he relates it to the unsurpassable phenomenon of joy.®° The fact that Balthasar uses all these notions to characterize the experience of beauty points to a question: Is there a particular relationship among them all? In other words, what is the connection, if there is one, between joy and beauty, between beauty and wonder, between fundamental questioning and groundlessness, and so between groundlessness and joy? In order to approach these questions, we need to enter more deeply into the philosophical structures operative in these phenomena.

Truth and Goodness in Beauty The best way for us to unfold the philosophical structure of the transcendentals is to engage Aquinas's notion of the relationship between the soul and being that is implied in the transcendentals of goodness and truth, to see how these relate to the experience of beauty.

The Multiplicity tn Unity of the Good ano the True Against a growing number of claims to the contrary, Jan Aertsen seeks to show that Aquinas never thought of beauty as a transcendental. The entire question, Aertsen asserts, turns on a single point, namely, whether beauty expresses something about the soul-being relationship that is not already expressed by truth or goodness. Beauty may fulfill every other requirement for transcendentality —that is, convertibility with other transcendentals, universality of application, and the like®4 — but if it can be reduced in some way to one or more of the other transcendentals such that it does not make itself indispensable precisely as beauty, then it ought not be included in the list of principal transcendentals. And so the basic question comes down to this: does beauty, as beauty, “add” anything to

82. Specifically, I will show how this “groundless ground” is the very character of any instance of genuine reciprocity. 83. Ibid., 224. 84. In a brief but dense series of pages, Kovach lists the conditions of transcendentality for Aquinas and cites texts to show that beauty fulfills all of them: “Transcendentality of Beauty,” 386-89.

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being that is not already added by truth or goodness, or by the relation between them that is already implied by convertibility?®° Aertsen’s question will be the one that drives the present discussion. The question is important for us because what is at stake is the logic of the dramatic Gestalt. If beauty, as the union of goodness and truth, does not add anything that is not already added by the two taken individually or together, then we cannot affirm in this paradigmatic case that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Nor, as a consequence, can we say that the parts are somehow transformed because of their union. Furthermore, some of the fundamental assumptions undergirding the present study thus far are that the order of intelligibility bears an intrinsic relation to the order of action (or the will) and the order of the senses. If truth is not somehow different in relation to goodness or beauty, then we have no grounds to argue that it has a “dramatic structure.” Finally, this same dramatic struc-

ture requires the sort of subject-object reciprocity that, as we will see, forms the special characteristic of beauty precisely as the distinct union of goodness and truth. For all these reasons, if beauty does not add anything that the other transcendentals already have in themselves, then truth cannot be said to be dramatic. My argument will be that a “transcendental” relation between the soul and being is possible only if that relation is itself a complex tension, a multiplicity in unity. This tension, I will argue, is best conceived as a polar-

ity, and a polarity requires not merely two but three elements. I will approach the relationship between the soul and being primarily in terms of the order of the good and the true as Aquinas presents it in the beginning of the De veritate. My procedure will be to show why there must be more than one positive transcendental, then why the fwo that Aquinas discusses have a “fittingness” inasmuch as they give rise to a certain whole made up of relatively opposed “parts.” It will be argued that these parts must be mutually dependent and yet remain distinct. To understand this relationship, we will consider a model proposed by Winfried Czapiewski in his study of beauty in Aquinas, and then the model of “reciprocal causal-

ity’ of the intellect and will that Rousselot offers. Affirming this latter approach in principle, I will show how Balthasar’s understanding of the circumincession of the three transcendentals —truth, goodness, and beauty — provides a ground for an interpretation of reciprocal causality that removes

the pitfalls that Rousselot himself cannot avoid. We will then, in the last 85. Aertsen himself puts the question thus: “If the beautiful is really a transcendental, then it must add a value to being conceptually that cannot be reduced to another transcendental.” Medieval Philosophy ano the Transcenoentals, 336.

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part of this section, return to see how the mutual relationship among the transcendentals reveals what is most profound about each and, specifically, brings to light an aspect of the structure of truth that is indispensable for our thesis in general. This will allow us to take up the question of the transcendental paradox once again in a more meaningful context.

It is important to note, for what follows, that in dealing with Aertsen’s question (What does beauty add?), we do not intend in any way to try to answer the (historical) question of whether Aquinas himself accepts beauty as a transcendental, which is the primary context of the question for Aertsen. Rather, it is clear that the question has implications beyond Aquinas, and so | approach it as the more general question of whether beauty is necewary as a transcendental, irrespective of whether Aquinas took it to be one or not.®° I will nevertheless take the “classic text” from Aquinas as our basic reference point, which will allow us to frame the terms of the issue. As we have already seen, the true and the good are for Aquinas the two transcendentals that represent a “positive” (affirmatio) relationship of being to the soul. That there are two such transcendentals follows from the fact that the soul has essentially two faculties, intellect and will. The true, of course, is the relationship between being and the intellect, and the good is the relationship between being and the will. According to Czapiewski,

Aquinas never gives an account of why there must be more than one “power” of the soul, or even why there are these two, since the fact of the

intellect-will duality is a fundamental “given” that cannot be further analyzed.°” Nevertheless, it seems that more can be said about why a plurality of powers is necessary. Given the fact that a certain duality between the intellect and will (mamely, that one can know something without doing it, or that one can will something more or less blindly) is a matter of everyday experience and that we have a dwstinct experience of goodness and truth, it may seem at first glance that this question, if not “merely rhetorical,” is at least “merely theoretical” and therefore meaningless in relation to the way the world actually is. But the question is valuable because it

86. Balthasar’s own position is nuanced. While he agrees in principle with Kovach’s conclusions that after commenting on Dionysius’s Divine Names, Aquinas was persuaded to the transcendentality of beauty (GL 4:373), he nonetheless admits that “beauty is seldom a central concern for St. Thomas Aquinas, and for the most part his discussion is dependent on material presented to him by tradition” (ibid., 393). Balthasar

claims that Aquinas does not make a significant contribution to aesthetics per se, although in the end, his metaphysics becomes the key for the development of a “transcendental aesthetics” (ibid., 407-12). 87. Czapiewski, Das Schéne bet Thomas von Aguin, 101.

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allows us to bring into relief what is essentially good or even necessary about the irreducible difference between truth and goodness, intellect and will. Why can it not be the case that the soul is wholly intellect, and nothing else, or wholly will, and nothing else? If it is not so now, why can it not be so ultimately? Why can it not be the case that being has only a vingle

positive relation to the soul, be it under the aspect of truth or under the aspect of goodness? It will be necessary to give a positive argument for the appropriateness of the existence of the two orders of the good and the true, but first it is worth explaining schematically why there cannot be only one. To affirm a single power of the soul, and by implication a single positive relation between the soul and being, would be to posit a conception of unity that is opposed to differentiation. If unity does not have, av unity, a dependence on difference in order to be unity, then it is more unified the more it either excludes difference or reduces difference to itself. But if this is the case, then, there are some points to consider. The inner differentiation of being that is implied by the notion of the transcendentals would be excluded by the unity of being, or else the unity of being would be excluded by the differentiation of the transcendentals, and so we are left with the alternative, either there are many transcendentals (i.e., more than one), or there are none at all, and being becomes the Parmenidean monolithic sphere. Furthermore, the unity of the soul, if it excluded inner differentiation, would also exclude the difference of relation to the world. If “power of the soul” or faculty means that by which the soul relates to what is other than itself,

then it cannot be the case that the soul has (or rather w) only one “faculty.” Finally, given a “nonrelational” soul and a “nonrelational” being, it

is clear that there can be no connection between them. It therefore follows not only that there must be more than one “affirmative-relational” transcendental — that is, more than one way that the soul relates to being —

but that there must be more than one for there to be any transcendentals at all, or any faculties of the soul at all, since both of these necessarily imply relation. If it is the case that there must be more than one positive transcendental, it remains to be seen why, for Aquinas, it is appropriate that there be two, namely, goodness and truth. To see why they are appropriate, we must see how these transcendentals complement each other. If the true entails the relationship between being and intellect, and the good entails the relation between being and the will, the first question we should ask is, What

is the relationship between these two relationships? Evidently, these two relationships cannot simply be irrelevant to one another: they cannot have their own completion merely outside one another. If this were the The Transcendentals m= 377

case, they would be wholly extrinsic to each other. But such an external juxtaposition would have two immediate implications. First, if the two relationships were simply indifferent to each other, it would imply that the objects of the intellect and the will were “parts” of being that are separate from one another. But if these aspects are thus “set off” from one another, they are no longer transcendental attributes.°® Second, if the two faculties could operate independently of one another, it would compromise the unity of the soul. They are faculties of one soul. It is not the intellect that understands, nor the will that wills, but the per-

son (with a will) who understands through the intellect and the person (with an intellect) who wills trough the will. The whole, in other words, operates as a whole in each of its parts. Therefore, Aquinas affirms that any power arising from the essence of the soul is mediated by the other.*? At the same time, the fact that the faculties of the soul and the corresponding transcendental attributes of being are inseparable from each other cannot mean that they reduce to one another. If the faculties could reduce in essence to a single unity, or correspondingly, the transcendentals could reduce to a single attribute, we would fall back into the undifferentiated

notion of unity we spoke of above. In order to affirm the transcendentals as representing a positive relation between being and the soul, it seems

that we need to find a way to affirm an intrinsic and necessary relation between the multiple orders (of the true and the good) that nevertheless does not turn the one into the other. To put it another way, we must discover a genuine /ension between them. Tension is possible only if there is a whole made up of irreducible parts. It is in light of this notion of tension that we can best see the significance of Aquinas's description of the corresponding movements of the intellect and will. In De verttate, Aquinas refers to Aristotle's notion of a “circle” of the soul's relationship to being, that is, the circle formed by the soul's basic acts in relation to what is other than it: “a thing outside the soul moves the intellect, and the thing known moves the appetite, which tends to reach the thing from which the motion originally started.”?" We note, first of all, the significance of Aquinas's speaking of how the two relatively opposed movements come together to form a single, two-dimensional whole, rather than dealing simply with each separately as a single, unidirectional, onedimensional ray. We saw in the last chapter, with respect to the spirit-senses

88. Aertsen makes a similar observation: Hedteval Philosophy and the Transcendentate, 288.

89. Aquinas, ST, 1:77, 7. 90. Aquinas, De ver, 1, 2, corpus. The reference is to Aristotle’s De anima, 3.8.431b29.

3578 wm Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

relation, how a movement between the soul and a thing that is unidirectional and one-dimensional cannot sustain itself as a genuine movement, because it falls into immediacy. Within a single order, an object at any given

moment can only be either not (yet) identical to the subject and therefore just so far out of union with the subject, or (merely) identical with the subject and therefore no longer an object for the subject. For the subject to be able to have a union with the object that does not collapse into immediacy, the single unidirectional movement must be revited. But this resistance cannot be a mere opposition from without, which would return us to a dialectic of identity/nonidentity, but must occur within the movement as part of its own order. Here we see how important it is that the will and intellect represent two relatively opposed movements that make up a single whole, and this is what Aquinas means when he says that the intellect is mediated by the will and the will by the intellect. This mutual mediation is what gives each an inner resistance, and therefore a depth, within its own order, and what makes every union a mediated immediacy. But this also implies that we cannot define the movement of the intellect simply as that from object to subject, and the movement of the will as

simply the reverse. Rather, each must include the movement of the other analogously within its own movement.”! We will come to see how this inner

analogy is possible only at the end of this section, when we address the meaning of beauty. For now, we ought to see that the internal relatedness between these two relatively opposed orders gives rise to a relationship that is not an abstract one-dimensional ray but a circle, a two-dimensional whole. This phenomenon is similar to that of vision: it takes two eyes to see things as wholes and not as mere flat images.

In order to see how beauty is necessary to the relationship between the intellect and will, we must first enter more deeply into the issue of their mutual dependence. The issue is in itself immense, and many studies have appeared on it in the last century. For reasons of space, I will not discuss the issue in itself but will depend on two studies in particular: first, the thesis by Winfried Czapiewski on beauty in Aquinas, and

91. In his analysis of this opening text of De veritate in the context of a study on Aquinas's understanding of the good, Mark Jordan comes to exactly the same conclusion: it is impossible, given other substantial positions Aquinas takes, to read the acts of the intellect and will as two separate motions, one coming after the other. Rather,

we must see them as analogous to each other when we take those movements to be operating concretely. See Mark Jordan, “The Transcendentality of Goodness and the Human Will,” in Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics ano Philosoph-

tcal Theology, ed. Scott MacDonald (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 129-50, here: 137.

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then Rousselot’s Eyev of Faith. These two works will help us to set into relief the important aspects of Balthasar’s understanding.

Reetprocal Causaltty: Intellect and Will In his study on the notion of beauty in Aquinas, Winfried Czapiewski frames the issue precisely in terms of the interrelation between the intellect and will. Czapiewski’s analysis is helpful because he thinks through the intellect-will relation in the context of the more fundamental question of the relation between the soul and being as implied by transcendentality in general. In other words, it represents a specific attempt to respond

to the central question that Aertsen raises about beauty, namely, What does it add to the other transcendentals, or what does it indispensably contribute to our understanding of the soul-being relationship? According to

Czapiewski, the human soul is by its essence ordered to the totality of being as a whole: the soul is “quodammodo omnia,” which Czapiewski interprets as “to be spirit means the same as to dwell with Being.”?” Czapiewski frames his discussion in terms of the scholastic distinction between a being’s firvt act, essence, and its vecond act, operation. There is a certain sense, he continues, in which the soul in its “first act” (which establishes its essence and therefore “defines” it most basically) already possesses Being, since it is by its essence quodammodo omnia. What distinguishes

the human soul from God and the angels, however, is the fact that this “already” being in the possession of the totality of Being is “not yet” realized. The spirit therefore has a “second act” by which it transcendu itself

toward the actualization of what it is by essence. The soul’s operations are what enables it to actualize itself. Thus, for Czapiewski, the human being represents a sort of tension of opposites: he is a potential infinity but an actual finitude, and the project of human existence is the movement from potency to act, by which one becomey what one, in a sense, already is.?° It is important to note that Czapiewski conceives this relationship between the infinite and the finite in the human person as a dtalectic,”4

92. Czapiewski, Das Schéne bet Thomas von Aquin, 96: “Geist-sein bedeutet soviel wie Beim-Sein-sein.” 93. It should be noted that Czapiewski assumes what may be called a “German,” as opposed to an ancient or medieval, sense of the terms finite and infinite, which associates finitude with materiality. The medievals, by contrast, recognize “pure spirits” that are not absolutely but are only relatively infinite —namely, the angels. The existence of angels, however, does not immediately affect the point under discussion in this section. 94. Ibid., 98: “Geist-sein, d.h. Alles-sein, und Endlich-sein, d.h. Nicht-alles-sein, stehen sich so im endlichen Geist dialektisch gegeniiber und pragen seinen Selbstvollzug.”

3580 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

which is profoundly different from Balthasar’s understanding. I will elaborate the implications of this difference shortly. Now, it is precisely this “anthropological” dialectic that accounts for the fact that the human soul is not a single unity, nor a mere multiplicity, but is rather a unity that unfolds itself into a multiplicity. To explain this unfolding, Czapiewski refers to Rahner's notion of the human spirit as a

ground that, by its nature, “gives rise’ to the multiplicity of the faculties out of its unity in order to achieve the end proper to it by nature.?° The key to this notion is the verb “to give rise” (entypringenlassen); it expresses the fact that the faculties are not separate, self-contained “things,”

but are expressions or extensions of the soul, and so they arwe from the soul not by virtue of their own activity, but by virtue of the act of the soul itself that allows or enables it. In other words, we have to view the multiplicity of the faculties wholly on the basis of the unity of the soul, since it is impossible, according to Rahner (and Czapiewski who affirms the observation), to move to the unity of the soul on the basis of the multiplicity of the faculties. Aquinas, Rahner says, never fails to affirm the primacy of unity over multiplicity.”° Czapiewski concludes that the purpose of the faculties is to enable the soul to become the unity that it potentially is. This means, however, that the two faculties cannot have a final formal completion in themselves, but they must be ordered in the end to an actual unity that corresponds to the potential unity of the soul. He will therefore eventually view the formal objects of the two faculties as converging into an identity, namely, beauty. To this end, he will have to show that the intellect and the will cannot carry out their distinct operations independently from one another but are rather reciprocally dependent. Czapiewski formulates the reciprocal dependence thus: the intellect can be the instrument of the soul's self-actualization only through the mediation of the will, and the will can be the same only through the mediation of the intellect.?” Having posited this mutual mediation as a thesis, Czapiewski supports it through a consideration of an abundance of texts from Aquinas. Aquinas confirms the reciprocal mediation of the intellect and will in their opera-

tion, he claims, under four different aspects: first, the two functions 95. “Der menschliche Geist existiert dauernd im Entspringenlassen seiner Vermégen und nur so.” Karl Rahner, Gewt in Welt: Zur Metaphystk oer endlichen Erkenntnts bet Thomas von Aquin, 2nd ed. (Munich: Késel-Verlag, 1957), 264 f£., cited in Czapiewski, Das Schone bet Thomas von Aguin, 102.

96. Rahner, Gewt in Welt, 258, cited in Czapiewski, Day Schine bet Thomas von Aguin, 102-3. 97. Czapiewski, Das Schéne bet Thomas von Aguin, 106.

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have a reciprocal priority: each presupposes the other. As Czapiewski shows, Aquinas affirms in various places a priority of the intellect over the will and the priority of the will over the intellect. He claims that the reciprocal priority 1s not a contradiction, because it is neither a temporal nor a causal priority (this will be important later); rather, the reciprocal priority is the expression of the unity of the common source of the faculties.?° Second, the faculties reciprocally implicate or include one another. Because the true and the good are both convertible with being, the proper object of the other is included within the act of each. Specifically, the formal object of the one is necessarily the material object of the other.?? Third, the two faculties necessarily interpenetrate. Each informs and therefore

leaves its stamp on the character of the other. 19 Finally, the intellect and will are ordered to one another. When the act of the will attains its object, it offers that object to the intellect, and vice versa. This means, then, that neither act reaches completion in itself without passing over to

the other act.!! Czapiewski's elaboration of the reciprocal mediation of the faculties seems, prima facie, to express exactly the intrinsic relationship between the faculties that we said was necessary for the transcendentals in general, and it is especially helpful because Czapiewski catalogs dozens of fit-

ting texts from Aquinas under each aspect. Granting the importance of the texts he cites, we must nevertheless ask how he relates them to the question of beauty. According to Czapiewski, if the multiplicity of the faculties is due to finitude and represents an instrument for the soul to “return” to its more fundamental unity, then it follows that the “lower” the (mediated) act of the soul is, the more “independent” the two faculties are from one another, and, conversely, the “higher” the act is, the more the two are

involved with each other. The most perfect act, he says, is therefore the complete identity of the intellect and will.!92 Because of its finitude, however, the soul is always caught between the perfect identity of pure spirit, which is complete self-actualization and therefore being completely “athome” in oneself, and the other extreme of pure matter (materia prima),

wherein the soul is completely outside of itself, and its faculties utterly without relation.

98. Ibid., 107-9. For a list of a great number of relevant texts, which Czapiewski says is only a “selection,” see nn. 297, 298. 99. Ibid., 109-10. Relevant texts from Aquinas are listed in n. 302. 100. Ibid., 110. Texts from Aquinas are listed in n. 303. 101. Ibid., L11. See n. 304. 102. Ibid., 116.

582 ua Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Czapiewski draws several basic conclusions from his analyses. He points

out that Aquinas affirms in many texts an “identity” between beauty and goodness insofar as the latter is related to truth,!°° and an identity between beauty and truth insofar as the latter is related to goodness. !™ But if goodness and truth “touch” beauty to the extent that they relate to each other, they will 4ave beauty —they will be nothing but beauty —to

the extent that they are completely identical with each other. However, according to the logic of the analyses, such an identity is reserved for pure, infinite spirit alone; that is, beauty belongs properly to God. It will belong

to the human being only in the eschaton.!" Prior to the eschaton, the human being can catch only glimpses of beauty, when it is refracted in the momentary “identities” of intellect and will in their highest acts (primarily in their “value-response” to other persons). Two general points follow. First, and in contrast to many other commentators, | Czapiewsk1 is able to affirm both the importance of beauty

for Aquinas and the philosophical completeness of the “deduction” of the transcendentals in De ver. 1, 1, which omits any reference to beauty. Strictly speaking, beauty is eschatological; it does not lie next to the other transcendentals as one of a series, but it is the synthesis of the good and the true.!°” Thus, the intellect and the will have distinct objects only because of the soul's finitude. The proper object of the soul itself, in its native énfinity, is beauty, which is the vdentity of goodness and truth. This leads to another point, which will be important for us later, namely, that Czapiewski rejects any notion that there could be some “third” faculty next to the intel-

lect and will, such as “feeling,” as some have proposed.!0 He rejects it because if there were a distinct faculty that had beauty as its distinct formal object, beauty could no longer be the relation of the good and the true, and therefore the object of the soul as a whole. Although he does not

elaborate this point, we see its significance in relation to the rest of his argument. If we thus “immanentized” beauty by giving it a faculty “alongside” the intellect and will, it would cease to be the transcendent (eschatological) unity that the two faculties essentially seek, and thus the whole dialectic of finite spirit would lose its most basic impetus. 103. Ibid., 122. 104. Ibid., 125. 105. Ibid., 132-33. Here Czapiewski presents the true experience of beauty as the visto beattfica.

106. Czapiewski points out his difference on this point from Kovach, who is the other main author to have treated this subject in Aquinas: ibid., 142-48. 107. Ibid., 24—25.

108. Ibid., 121. See n. 315.

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The great merit of Czapiewski's study is that it is one of the few works that has developed, through substantial argumentation, the notion of beauty in terms of a relation of interdependence between the intellect and will 1% But there are four basic ways that Czapiewski's approach is different from

the one we are arguing in the name of Balthasar, and these four ways are all related to one another. First, Czapiewski “eschatologizes” beauty, while Balthasar includes it among the other transcendentals, goodness and truth. Second, and closely related to the first, Balthasar affirms a kind of third faculty of the soul, which Czapiewski rejects. Third, while Balthasar

conceives of the mutual implication of the intellect and will in terms of a reciprocal causality (which we will see shortly), Czapiewski denies this possibility in favor of a dialectic. These three points are related to one another, however, because they are an expression of the most fundamental difference between Czapiewski and Balthasar: Czapiewski identifies finitude with imperfection. He is therefore forced (with Rahner) to understand the multiplicity of the soul's

faculties as a fall from the soul's original unity. They do not, in their multiplicity, ad? anything in a povitive way to the unity of the soul; rather,

conversely, they are “nothing” in themselves but partial expressions of that unity, and thus mere means of the soul’s returning to itself.!!° For Balthasar, by contrast, the multiplicity of the faculties is paradoxically a more perfect unity. They therefore cannot be simply reduced back to an original ground or unity, even if that unity is in some sense prior. While Czapiewski speaks of a unilateral progression from potency (emptiness) to act (fullness), which is driven by a need, Balthasar affirms that the existence of the (multiplicity of the) transcendentals results from the fullness and perfection of being: “Now, the capacity that all finite things have to show themselves [1.e., beauty], to give themselves [1.e., goodness], and to

109. Giinther Péltner is another, though his work makes use of Czapiewski’s study. In distinction from Czapiewski, Péltner works out the relationship between the intel-

lect and will in analogy to the real distinction between esse and essence (relating will to esse and intellect to essentia). For Péltner, beauty is the unity of unities, i.e., the unity of the real difference between intellect and will in union with the unity of being in the real distinction: Péltner, Schénheit, 25. 110. It is interesting to note that Jordan, who spoke of an “analogy” between the orders of the good and the true, nevertheless affirms (like Czapiewski) that their multiplicity is itself an ¢mperfection and will disappear in the eschaton: Jordan, “Transcendentality of Goodness,” 150. For Balthasar, analogy is precisely a way of avoiding the identification of multiplicity and imperfection. From his perspective, then, there needs to be no elimination of difference between goodness and truth in the eschaton, even while this perduring difference does not in any way compromise perfect unity.

384 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

express themselves [1.e., truth], is due not to their need, but rather to their essential ontological perfection.”!!!

The dialectical understanding of the relationship between unity and difference that Czapiewski articulates explains the connection between the other points. The key to this connection is that this dialectical understanding excludes the possibility that there might be in an w/tumate and trreductble sense a whole constituted in genuine fenvion. If such a tension is

not basic, the very existence of the (multiplicity of the) transcendentals cannot be ultimate, but an expression of imperfection and therefore something that eventually must be overcome. If we put this point in terms of the “transcendental paradox” elaborated above, we could say that the transcendentals, for Czapiewski, are vynonymous with being considered ideally as infinite and are “additions” to being in its imperfect finitude. Rather than account for the paradox, Czapiewski's approach separates the aspects of the problem and affirms precisely what is meant to be avoided, one as an ideal and the other as so to speak a necessary evil, and then makes these two affirmations dependent on each other. There is, here, no ontological

surprise: what the transcendentals add is what being already anticipates in its need, and so the result is more relief than gratitude. The eschatologizing of beauty is a projection of this final relief into the “final end,” and it is significant that this end is the strict e/umination of the difference between the good and the true, the intellect and the will. Furthermore, if the intellect and the will cannot make a “positive” contribution to the unity of the soul, they cannot make a positive contribution to each other. Although Czapiewski insists strongly on the reciprocity of the intellect and will, it seems he excludes in the end an intrinsic dependence of each on the other.!!2 He affirms, for example, that each requires the mediation of the other, not within its own order, but only in relation to the unity of the soul. In other words, he does not affirm that intellect has a need for the irreducibly different order of the will in order to be intellect and thus in order to be different from the will ano irreducible to

111. E, 66: “Nun aber gehért das Sich-zeigen-, Sich-schenken-, Sich-sagen-K6nnen der endlichen Dinge nicht zu ihrer Not, sondern zu ihrer wesentlichen Seinsvollkommenheit.” 112. This is, in fact, a simplification of Czapiewski’s position. His argument is more complex and adds many new dimensions that I cannot bring out here. For example, he affirms that the intellect and will “sind (unbeschadet ihrer Verschiedenheit) innerlich miteinander verbunden”: Dav Schéne bet Thomas von Aguin, 110. The purpose of our

discussion, however, is not so much to criticize Czapiewski as it is instead to clarify a fundamental point, and it is a secondary matter how far Czapiewski himself holds the point.

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the simple untty of the soul itself. In order to affirm such a thing, we would have to take the will to be a (positive) principle of the intellect within the intellect’s proper order, and at the same time, in order to avoid reducing

the intellect to the will, we would have to affirm the intellect as a (positive) principle of the will. In other words, we would have to speak of a reciprocal causality, to affirm that in some sense the effect is a cause of its cause.

Czapiewski, as we saw, takes reciprocal causality to be a simple contradiction, and it is admittedly not immediately obvious how it could be possible. Nevertheless, we will see that reciprocal causality is, in the end, the only way to do justice to the phenomenon of the soul’s relation to being, to affirm an irreducible tension in the soul (and thus the goodness of finitude), to understand beauty (and thus truth and goodness), and finally, to justify the fact that there are any transcendentals at all. Ultimately, if the intellect and will are not intrinsically related to each other in the sense of reciprocal causality, which means being wimultaneoudly a positive principle of the other and dependent on the other, then they must be in certain respects (simply) identical to each other and in other respects (simply) different from each other. This excludes the possibility of a tension, that is, of a permanently “mediated immediacy” in their relation. There can be an immediate relation that is not a reduction to iden-

tity only if there is a “third” in which the two are both united and distinguished. Czapiewski's rejection of a third faculty alongside intellect and will is in fact a function of his identification of finitude with imperfection: they both stem from a notion of unity that excludes difference, and therefore one that does not regutre an ultimate and unsurpassable tension. To under-

stand how such a tension can be ultimate, we must first look more closely at the meaning of the curious notion of “reciprocal causality.” A brilliant presentation of the relationship between the will and intellect in terms of reciprocal causality can be found in Pierre Rousselot’s classic two-part essay The Eyeu of Faith. The major issue Rousselot sets himself to address in the essay is the problem of the reasonability of the act of faith: how can we avoid the dual errors of an irrationalism that would

reduce the act to a blind leap (“Just believe and then you will understand!”) or a rationalism that would remove any “leap” at all, and reduce faith to its objectively enumerable reasons (“Just understand and then you will believe!”)? In addressing this question, Rousselot shows that at issue is not only the question of faith, but also that this question is itself tied to an analogous problem for all knowledge at a “natural” level. Both questions concern the possibility of overcoming a merely extrinsic relation between the intellect and the will and at the same time not simply reducing them to each other. He puts the question concretely: What is the 3586 m Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

relationship between gravping reasons (the proper act of the intellect), and

giving one’s assent (the proper act of the will)? If we think of these as wholly veparate acts, we remove the dynamic aspect of the will from the intellect and thus cannot avoid conceiving of knowledge as so many discrete bits or “objective” items. However, according to Rousselot, not only is this a betrayal of Aquinas, but it also fails to account sufficiently for the facts of experience.!!° The act of knowing, he says, always has a dynamism “built into it”; it is always the grasping of a part in the context of a greater

whole. This means that the movement beyond the part to the whole is intrinsic to the grasping of the part itself. To illustrate, he offers a few examples. Two scientists or two detectives may be investigating the same situation when they are both presented with a new fact. For one, the new fact may become a “trigger” that so to speak releases, like a lightning flash, the meaning of the whole, while the other

is left completely in the dark, even though the clue itself is the same in both cases. On closer inspection, however, we see that the clue in a significant sense is not identical in both cases. It is only the first scientist or detective who has really grasped the clue w a clue, that is, has grasped it in terms of its significance for the whole. Thus, the moment of insight turns

out to be a fairly complex event. On the one hand, the whole cannot be seen except on the basis of the manifold elements that constitute it, while, on the other hand, these manifold elements can be grasped as elements only on the basis of the whole: We should also consider the reciprocal priortty between the affirmation of the law ano the perception of the fact that serves as a clue. Recent theo-

rists of the logic of discovery have highlighted this peculiarity. We do not first perceive a proof as such, and only then what has been proved. Rather, we see both conjointly, grasping the general law as it subsumes the particular case. Depending on one’s point of view, the particular is both cause and effect, proof and application, clue to and consequence of the law. The law is seen through the clue, but it is only wv seeing the law that the clue is seen as clue. The fact cannot be known av a clue unless we affirm the law.!'4

Rousselot refers to the movement beyond the specific objective content of the clue as the affirmation of a whole in order to show that it requires something more than what already belongs to the order of the intellect itself taken in isolation. 113. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 27.

114. Ibid., 29-30.

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Now, it is significant for us, especially in the light of arguments in chap-

ter 3, that Rousselot characterizes this paradox in terms of the relation between a whole and its parts. As he illustrated, the whole and the parts are not simply identical; there is, so to speak, a gap between them, a kind of discontinuity. But, to put the problem baldly, it is not the case that one grasps the whole first by getting a firm hold on one side of the gap, and then on that basis reaching over to grasp the other side. In other words, one does not first grasp the discrete parts intellectually, and then, through an additional spontaneous act of the will, posit the whole that embraces them; nor does one blindly posit the whole through an act of the will, and only then put together the parts. The first case would be rationalism, and the second would be irrationalism, but they are clearly two versions of the same problem. In order to get beyond these false alternatives, Rousselot says, we have to affirm that “perceiving the connection [among the parts and therefore seeing them as parts | and gluing ones assent are one and the same thing.”!!° Rousselot here associates the grasping of the whole with the giving ones assent, that is, with an act of the will, He does not explain the reason for this, except by alluding, in a note appended to this text we cited, to the scholastic distinction between predicamental being and the act of the intellect that composes and divides, that is, judgment. As we saw in chapter 3, because a whole is not simply reducible to its parts, but rather transcends them, a certain spontaneity is required to perceive it: to grasp a whole, a person must go out of himself toward the whole. Doing so is an act of freedom ~an act of the will —which we described as commutting oneself in jadgment. It is important to see how this act concerns the will. As we saw in Aquinas's (and Aristotle's) notion of the “circle”

of the soul’s relationship to being, the order of the good represents the motion of the subject foward the object. The point Rousselot makes here is that such a movement cannot simply be a matter of goodness alone, but it must belong in some analogous sense to the motion of truth itself precisely because the grasping of the meaning of anything is grasping a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The notion that there could be a positive movement of the subject toward the object is generally reserved to acts of the practical intellect alone,!!© but Rousselot insists we must assert something analogous for the speculative intellect as speculative.” Rousselot’s insistence, in fact, confirms two points I have already made. First, I said that an intrinsic relation between intellect and will requires 115. Ibid., 30. 116. See, for example, Aertsen, Wledieval Philosophy ano the Transcenoentals, 273. 117. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 50-51.

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the movement of the will to be analogously contained in the movement of the intellect. Specifically, when the subject takes the object into himself in the act of knowing, it must, if it is to avoid a collapse into immediacy, include a movement of the subject to the object, which is the movement proper to the will. In Rousselot’s terms, the avwent, the movement of the will from subject to object, is shown to be essential to the speculative intellect itself once we see that a true speculative grasp cannot avoid making a (spontaneous) judgment. Second, I noted at the beginning of this chap-

ter that the transcendental paradox requires that there not be a simple separation between the speculative and practical intellect in relation to the truth of being.!!® Having shown that there is an intrinsic relation to the positive causality of the will that belongs to the intellect av intellect, Rousselot shows in the second part of his essay how the intellect proves to be a principle for the will av will. If, in the first case, he explained how perception and assent go hand in hand, here Rousselot seeks to show that there is no contradiction between certitude and freedom.''? Now, Rousselot says much less about this issue than about the previous one.!”? Rather than elaborate how freedom and certitude are connected, such that an increase in certitude means an increase in freedom and vice versa, Rousselot deals at greater length in this second part with the question of having the “freedom to turn away” from assent given what he had said in the first part of the essay. Indeed, he articulates this issue itself in the specific form of being mistaken in one’s assent. I will, in a moment, suggest why his presuppositions would seem to lead him to shrink this issue to such a limited form, but it is first worthwhile to see the great importance of the point that Rousselot is indicating here. To common sense, and particularly to modern common sense, there seems to be an opposition between how compelling the evidence is and the freedom of the assent to that evidence: the more compelling the evidence is—or perhaps the more the object by its very nature makes a claim on me—the less free I am in my accepting of it. Although it lies outside the scope of our discussion to pursue this notion at length, this opposition seems to depend on the definition of freedom in the first place as “freedom to 118. Balthasar describes these two aspects, truth as potésis (creativity) and truth as theorta (contemplation), as subsisting inseparably within a polarity: TL 1:43. 119. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 45. 120. We might account for this fact by Rousselot’s self-avowed “intellectualism” (the aim of his “big thesis” was to prove Aquinas an intellectualist): his interest is primarily directed toward seeing how the will can be included in the intelligence. As we will see, this one-sided emphasis may be due to an inability to sustain an ultimate tension between the two orders.

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choose,” which Balthasar rejects if it is isolated from a deeper understanding of freedom.!! In any event, the opposition presupposes that the order of the will lies outside the order of the intellect, since the intellect is ordered to a grasp of the truth of the object. From this perspective, truth positively does not make one free; to the contrary, one’s freedom diminishes precisely

to the extent that things are “clearly defined.” Whatever other problems such an understanding of freedom may present, we can at least see that it excludes the notion of freedom as transcendence, such as we have been using the term in this essay, inasmuch as transcendence is by its character “other’-related, and so it is not hindered but helped through the inherent claim the object makes on the subject. Moreover, in terms of Aquinas's understanding, we could say that the view that sees an opposition between certitude and freedom dissociates the will from the good to the extent that it dissociates it from the intellect. As Aquinas always Says, the good presupposes the true because some form or another of cognition always precedes appetite. !+- This becomes especially clear if, with Balthasar, we take truth to be related to the “in-itself” aspect of a thing. A good cannot be good for me if it is not already good in itself (.e., to some extent is fruly good). Without such a rootedness in the objectivity of a thing, the motion of the will could not be a movement of subject to object. But this means that the basic structure of the will cannot be the unilateral movement from subject to object alone; that is, it cannot be pure

spontaneity. Rather, in its very roots, it must first be receptive to the object — precisely to the extent that the true has a priority over the good. Thus, if, above, we saw that the intellect must include within its motion the “opposite” movement of the will, here we see that the will, as movement of subject toward object, must include the opposite movement of the intellect — of object toward subject —in order to be will. This means, then, the true, in its 4ruenevs and not just in its goodness, must represent a kind of principle, and thus an effective causality, within the order of the will itself. Again, Rousselot does not make this argument explicitly as such, but he implies something like it in the examples he chooses and in his use of the term reciprocal causality in talking about the relation between the intellect and will.!?9 Why reciprocal causality? What is the significance of the reciprocity? A kind of reciprocity is, as we have seen at many stages of this book, a mark 121. TD 4:150. 122. Although Aquinas assigns a “relative” priority to the good, he says that, absolutely speaking, the true is prior: ST 1:16, 4. 123. See, for example, Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 30, 32, 50, etc.

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of real tension, since both reciprocity and tension express the fact of an inward mutual dependence of two things that cannot be reduced to each other. Through the course of this discussion, we have seen a number of possible ways of conceiving the intellect-will relation emerge. In the end, there are in fact only two: either reduction or tension. The reduction can take two difterent forms. It can be, on the one hand, a sheer extrinsicism, in which the two orders are related, if at all, only extrinsically or “accidentally” G.e., not as a matter of their ewence). On the other hand, it can be a collapse of the two orders into a single one. An example of extrinsicism would be Aertsen’s formulations. His interpretation of Aquinas is characterized precisely by a /ack of tension. To be sure, he recognizes that the orders cannot be separated, insofar as they are transcendental and therefore infinite, and he admits that the two orders must include one another, but he does not see this inclusiveness as a matter of dependence that does not reduce difference. When the good is included within the order of the true, for Aertsen, it is taken as true (and not paradoxically in its goodness), and vice versa. When it comes time to explain what the circumincession of the orders means in Aquinas, Aertsen thus concludes: “From this mutual inclusion it follows that the different formal objects of the two faculties . . . include each other. . . . The true is some good, or it would not be appetible; it is the object of the will under the aspect of the good. The good is something true or it would not be intelligible; it is the object of the intellect under the aspect of the true.”!“4 Although what Aertsen asserts here is no doubt true in some sense, it misses the heart of the matter: in order to show that they are cnwardly related, one must say that the true is good or it would not be intelligible; the good is true or it would not be appetible. Aertsen neglects the paradox that inescapably emerges the moment we say that the good and the true include each other, and he instead “disarms” it by breaking it down into its two parts (the true includes the good and then the good includes the true),

happy to affirm each, but only at a safe distance from the other. By contrast, Czapiewski collapses the two orders into one. Although he goes

much further in elaborating the complexities of the interrelationship between these two orders, in the end he rejects the ultimate tension implied in reciprocal causality, and he chooses instead to integrate the two orders

into each other in a final synthesis (identity). Although this seems the opposite of Aertsen’s extrinsicism, both problems are due to the same lack of tension.

124. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 288.

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It is in Rousselot that we see an embrace of reciprocal causality and thus a refusal to defuse the paradox. Once we see the mutual interrelationship, he says, we have to affirm that a person is not free in his assent to an object “until” he grasps its truth, and yet at the vame time, he cannot grasp that truth until he assents: “It is because man wills that he sees the truth. It is because man sees the truth that he wills.” If either of these is affirmed without the other, we run into error; the point is to show “that both statements are simultaneously true.” 125 Clearly, it is not possible to start with one affirmation, and then proceed to the other, because in that case they would simply be contradictory. However, if we simply take this contradiction as the final word, we lose a genuine mutual dependence of the two orders —and thus, we lose tension, and finally, we lose the transcendentals altogether. To avoid contradiction, Rousselot insists, we must therefore see the two “parts” as aspects of a single, irreducible, paradoxical act, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, !*° in which “each brings the other into reality as a condition of its own realization.”!*” Rousselot sees this single act as the simultaneity of love and knowledge, two irreducible aspects that make up a complex unity: “Love

arouses the faculty of knowing, and by the same stroke knowledge justifies that love.”!+5 But Rousselot's understanding of reciprocal causality is, itself, not without difficulties. If we affirm that the intellect and the will have a certain dependence on each other in their difference, within a single “paradoxical” act, we are brought to the crucial question, What is the nature of this act and is it adequately conceived? If we are to avoid compromising the integrity of the intellect and will within their union, this act itself cannot be merely an act of the intellect alone (which would reduce the good to the true), nor an act of the will alone (which would reduce the true to the good). In order to have each include the other analogously within itself,

there must be a distinct third in which they are both united and distinguished. But here we run up against the limitations of Rousselot’s proposal. He brings the orders of the intellect and will together in what he calls an “active power of synthesis.”!*? Although he says little about this “active power’ as such in this essay, it seems to belong strictly to the intellect. This

125. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 48.

126. Ibid., 70: “The synthesis cannot be reduced to the synthesized elements” (emphasis Rousselot’s). 127. Ibid., 48. 128. Ibid., 50. 129. Ibid., 27; see also 70.

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interpretation is confirmed by his other writings.!°” For Rousselot, in fact, the intellect is made to “do duty” for both orders: the intellect’s power of seeing (1.e., the motion of object to subject) wholly and reductively includes the “active” or spontaneous movement toward the object, which belongs strictly speaking to the will. Thus, Rousselot definev the intelligence ultimately as love (understood specifically as appetite): “reason itself is nothing other than a pure love of Being.”!*! Now, the point is not to reject the notion of reason as love of Being. Rather, it is to reject absolutizing of the converse notion that love of Being is nothing other than reason. The problematic consequences of Rousselot’s attempt to ground a reciprocal causality in one of the powers of the soul alone are just what one would expect, given the logic of his terms. He cannot avoid binding freedom to the intellectual order in a restrictive way. It is significant, as we mentioned above, that he treats the question of freedom, not for its own sake, that is, how freedom becomes free in relation

to truth, but in the negative and strictly intellectualist sense of how the freedom of mistaken judgments is possible. Indeed, this question becomes extremely urgent for Rousselot because of his presuppositions. If intellect and will do not have a ¢/ird that both frees and unites them, then there will be a certain “automaticism” in which comprehension automatically means assent and assent automatically means comprehension. But this makes it difficult to distinguish, for example, truth from conviction or even conviction from appetite. The least compelling part of his essay is the final series of arguments and examples that try to show how mistaken judgment is possible, and how assent to truth is different from common varieties of fanaticism. The point is that the room for argument in these matters disappears the moment we try to account for the whole —the paradoxical reciprocal causality of the intellect and will—in terms of one of its parts. But, if the intellect is “nothing but pure love of Being,” it gets paradoxically reduced to the will. If the will is the “spontaneous” movement of the subject toward the object, then the reduction of the intellect to the will eliminates all receptivity from this movement. This logic confirms what we saw in Rousselot in chapter 3: his “active power of synthesis” is not an act reciprocally shared by subject and object insofar as the act has no room within itself to receive from the object, but it is instead “projected” wholly and spontaneously by the subject. In short, if we view the mutual dependence of intellect and 130. See his The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, as well as the other articles by Rousselot listed in the bibliography. 131. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 52.

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will as a matter to be worked out between these two faculties alone, we end up reducing each to the other, and thus lose precisely the reciprocal causality that Rousselot sought originally to secure. To affirm Rousselot’s extraordinary intuitions without getting pinned by either arm of an unnecessary dilemma, we have to find a ¢4ird that is really “other” than the two.

Beauty ano Reciprocal Transcendence It is in light of this problem that we begin to see the great significance of beauty. A great many of the recent commentators who have discussed the meaning of beauty in Aquinas, whether or not they finally accord it “transcendental” status, view it as having a special relationship with both the true and the good. Aertsen, for example, views it as the “extension” of the true to the good, | We have seen Czapiewski's argument about beauty as the synthesis of goodness and truth. From very different perspectives, Kovach and Giinther Péltner come to conclusions quite similar to those of Czapiewski.!*° Others see beauty as comprehending all of the transcendentals.!54 What is particular about Balthasar’s understanding is that, as we have seen, the beautiful marks the appearance of the whole of being in the particular instance, which, in its wholeness, moves the whole of the person. And because it is simultaneously a wholly objective and wholly subjective experience (in the philosophical sense of the term Balthasar elaborated in GL 1, namely, as “insight acquired through traveling”), it can include the whole scope of the orders of the intellect and the will in their relatively opposed movements without foreshortening or reducing them. There are a number consequences that follow from this understanding of beauty. First of all, in relation to Czapiewski, we see a powerful reason

132. Aertsen, Medteval Philosophy ano the Transcendentals, 357-58. He also notes (356)

that Aquinas explicitly states that the beautiful adds to the good (adout supra bonum) a relation to the intellect (De diwvinis nonuntbhus, 4, lect., 5), but he insists that such a rela-

tionship already belongs to the good as good since the good follows upon and therefore presupposes the true (354). 133. Kovach, Die Authettk des Thomas von Aqguin, esp. 237-60. Giinther Péltner comes

to the conclusion that pulchrum must be thought as “die Einheit der transzendentalen Seinsbestimmungen,” since it “occurs” in the fundamental convenientia (fittingness) between the soul and being, which is articulated partially by goodness and partially by truth: Schénhett, 76. 134. Jacques Maritain voices this opinion in Art et vcolastiqgue (Paris: Librairie de l’Art Catholique, 1947), 225. See also Mark Jordan, “The Grammar of Huse: Re-reading Thomas on the Transcendentals,” Thomuut 44 (1980): 1-26, in which he shows how each of the other transcendentals represents an aspect of the “shape” of being that is included in Aquinas’s understanding of beauty.

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to affirm the existence of a “third” faculty “next” to the intellect and the will, namely, “the heart,” understood in its full sense, as we saw in the last chapter as the imagination, the seat of the person, of consciousness, and of drama. Czapiewski's primary objection is that positing a third faculty would undermine the attempt to see beauty as the unity of truth and goodness. However, this is the case only if mediation makes unity impossible. But we have seen that mediation, far from undermining unity, is indispensable for its preservation, inasmuch as a merely immediate unity does not unite truth and goodness but swallows them whole. The second consequence can be drawn in light of our discussion of Rousselot. In his understanding of reciprocal causality, what is missing is once again the mediation of beauty. Thus, the subject-object relationship breaks

down in the name of a subjective dynamism, which rests the wholeness of the whole on the sheer force of the “active power of synthesis.”!9° But if this relationship breaks down, what follows is the final closing of the “difference” between intellect and will, which is necessary to prevent an “automaticism” between love and knowledge, that is, to prevent a collapse into

“intellectualism.” Once we begin with a third that ensures both the unity and difference of intellect and will, they both acquire a certain relative freedom with respect to each other, which nonetheless does not imbalance the reciprocal causality or turn it into a fruitless dialectic. Lacking any “third,” the perception that is the condition of possibility for the activity of the will cannot be anything other than an intellectual grasp of truth, the vame truth that depends in turn on the will’s movement.

This problem, in fact, arises already from an ambiguity we find in Aquinas's ordering of the transcendentals. In general, Aquinas presents the desire for the good as following upon a grasp of truth.!°° But if the truth is grasped completely in itself before the movement of the will, then

the movement of the will, and therefore the order of the good, cannot be said to be intrinsic to the truth. Thus, in other places, Aquinas asserts that the movement of the will precedes cognition, /%” and so truth depends

in some intrinsic sense on the good. Czapiewski has shown that the mutual priority would seem to entail an endless regress if it did not have a basic ground. The problem is that Aquinas says at one point that this

135. After affirming the importance of Rousselot’s insights, Balthasar makes precisely this same critique: “For him . . . the synthetic power remains one-sidedly a part of the subjective dynamism.” GL 1:176. 136. Aquinas, ST 1:16, 4, ad 2. 137. See Aquinas De ver, 22, 12, where he argues that there is a way in which the intellect moves the will, and another way in which the will moves the intellect.

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“circular” movement ends in the intellect and another point in the will! Czapiewski tries to overcome the problem by having the whole end in a sort of third, that is, the soul itself, but since this is the vublimation of the two, it eliminates rather than solves the problem. Péltner has argued that in order for Aquinas to “end” the regress of reciprocal causality in the intellect, he has to neglect in this context the transcendental status of goodness, and reduce it to an ontic-categorial determination that can be finally comprehended by the true.!°? Mark Jordan, who speaks at

length about the “reciprocal causality” between intellect and will in Aquinas, short-circuits the problem by introducing a (reductively) theological solution: the otherwise closed circle of intellect and will is initially set in motion by the activity of God's grace, which moves the will to desire happiness.!49 Rousselot tries to resolve the circularity in an intellect that is “nothing other” than will. It seems that we can resolve this problem nonreductively only if we can avoid positing a unity of the orders of the intellect and will that is identical to one of the orders in itself, or in something else in which they are simply “fused” together. What we need is a ¢hird that mediates the two to each other in a way that preserves their relative autonomy and the integrity of their order. It will be helpful to review the basic ordering of the transcendentals that Balthasar proposes in light of the problem at hand, and, conversely, this problem will allow us a deeper insight into the significance of that ordering. The various difficulties of extrinsicism and reductionism cannot fail to persist if we attempt to work out the relationship between the orders of the intellect and will in terms of these two orders alone. We then have to begin with one or the other, and once we thus begin we can bring in the “second” only as an extrinsic addition. If we start with truth, and we understand truth as ending in the mind, the subject starts as it were in full possession of the object, at least in terms of its intelligibility. But this means that the subsequent movement foward the object, the subject’s first step outside of himself, has nothing to do with truth, which has so to speak already been finished in itself beforehand. If truth is the “receptive” movement of the object to subject, then this second movement, lacking all truth,

lacks all receptivity. It is therefore purely spontaneous, and this means

138. Czapiewski, Das Schéne bet Thomas von Agun, 109. The two texts from Aquinas are ST 1:82, 4, ad 3, and De ver, 22, 12, ad 2, respectively. 139. Péltner, Schénheit, 161-62. 140. Jordan, “Transcendentality of Goodness,” 147. My criticism is not that Jordan’s solution is incorrect, but only that it requires a philosophical mediation, which he does not provide.

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purely “arbitrary.” If we begin, instead, with the good alone, we are inevitably presented with the same series of phenomena; it is just that, in this case, the order has changed. We recall from chapter 3 that Balthasar refused to begin either with the intellect alone or with the will alone. The event of the mother’s smile, the child’s self-moving in being moved, was a simultaneous knowing

and willing. This insight is, for Balthasar, closely connected with the “epiphany” of beauty. The event of beauty —as we will begin to unfold it in the following pages — involves the intellect and will at once. However, it does not do so in a way that “preempts” their own distinct movements

and thus the integrity of their own order. Beauty is not the synthesis of the good and the true in their formal completion, such that, after beauty comes to pass, truth and goodness have nothing more to do. Instead, it is their “seed.” It contains them both implicitly, not explicitly. In other words, it includes them both simultaneously under a formally different aspect. If beauty contains both the true and the good, it does so as a dustinct third, and it thus allows the latter two to remain in a certain way distinct both from itself and from each other. Beginning with beauty as the union of truth and goodness has profound

consequences. It allows for a kind of priority of cognitive perception or grasp, and therefore a receptivity to the objectivity of the object, over the spontaneous activity of the will, even as this grasp has always already “set the will into motion” in a primitive way. (We will soon see how the experience of beauty is necessarily both receptive and spontaneous.) The beautiful draws the subject toward the object, which is what “frees” the subject to assent, to commit himself willfully in a certain way, to the object. And yet, since this initial act is not yet the fully mature act of the will in relation to an explicit good, that assent is not compelled. It does not have to be already complete in itself. Because Rousselot had only the good and the true, and no third term, he so to speak could not allow a grasp of any sort until the assent was given and the commitment sealed. It is thus precisely the dutinction of the beautiful from the good and the true that permits us to affirm, with Rousselot, the necessity of a kind of ek-stasis for the perception of an object, without forcing that movement to become a kind of automatic commitment. At the same time, it avoids precisely the opposite

danger of requiring the subject to have a total, “full-blown” intellectual grasp of an object before he can move toward it. If the movement toward the object is the subject's relation to the concrete order, where not only the will but also the senses come into play, and where what is of concern is not only the universal form that this

object has but what it shares with countless interchangeable others, The Transcendentals m 497

then an insistence that truth must be grasped in a formally complete sense before something is pursued as a good is the condemnation of truth to vapid abstraction. Beginning with beauty, Balthasar is able to affirm

a first “grasp” that is not truth in the formal sense, but is as it were an

invitation to truth. For the truth to be had, the subject must commit himself; he must go foward the object to find out /t/ meaning, on the object’s terms: we recall Goethe's observation that we cannot properly judge a person who has come to visit us, but only when we have been invited to come see him where /e lives, at fis home. Thus, in contrast to the two-dimensional “circle” that Aquinas posits as the soul’s relation to being in its basic acts, Balthasar has a “three-dimensional,” concrete event that arises from the triad of transcendentals: First, the subject is “inspired” by and brought over to the object in beauty; then the subject, in full freedom, can reject or give his assent (and in the rich dramatic sense of the good, he can strive, fail, sin, misjudge, surrender, sufter loss, and so forth) ; finally, then, as a result of the mutual acts of object and subject, truth is born. At the beginning of this section, I spoke of the necessity of an inward relation of relatively opposed movements in order for the relationship between the soul and being to be an organic whole consisting of tensions. We now can see how such a whole requires the “interplay” of not only two, but three distinct transcendentals. Moreover, if we take transcendence to mean an experience or event in which the subject is truly “beyond himself” and the object is likewise reciprocally beyond itself, then we can see why this interplay of the transcendentals is necessary for the very possibility of transcendence. The /envion that arises from the fact that there are three is what keeps any one of them, at any moment, from slackening into

immediacy (mere self or mere other). It is not only the fact of having a triad, but indeed the inner ordering of the three, which has a special significance when viewed in light of the question of transcendence. There can be no doubt that, in one respect, the most transcendent of the transcendentals is the good. In TL 2, in fact, Balthasar approvingly cites a passage in which Siewerth claims that the good is “more transcendental than being and truth.”!4! This is so because it is precisely the object gua good

that moves the subject beyond himself, toward what he is not, what he does not yet possess, in comparison, for example, to the true, which seems 141. TL 2:162: “So aber ist das ‘Gute’ transzendentaler als das Sein und das Wahre.” Siewerth, Grundfragen der Philosophie, 112. The question of the good being “beyond being” is a crucial one, and we will turn to it in the concluding section of this chapter.

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to represent precisely “possession.” If the good is the place of desire or eros, it 1s also the place of kenosis or expropriation. Indeed, there is an inalienable negativity associated with the good. I cannot address this issue here, but it is interesting to observe that there seems to be a relation between the privileging of goodness and the privileging of apophasis or the via neg-

ativa as the most fundamental mode of the philosophical act.!4? Nevertheless, Balthasar reveals that precisely the “beyondness’” of the good threatens to get lost if we do not see it as posterior to the beautiful on the one hand and as finding its completion in truth on the other. First of all, as we have just seen, the separating of the good from any kind of prior “positive” cognitive grasp, and thus receptivity to the object, makes the good arbitrary. It does so because, in this case, the motion of the will becomes pure spontaneity. But this means that the subject merely posits himself, and to that extent does not manage to get beyond himself, that is, does not transcend. The pure “negativity” that refuses an initial grasp reduces to the pure “positivity” of the subject's “self-positing.” 4° However, there are some who affirm the subject’s initial grasp of an object,

but make goodness rather than truth ultimate. There is something initially appealing in this approach, since the openness, the infinity, or the “beyondness” implied by the good seems the most appropriate place to “end.” However, in such a conception, the initial grasp gets reduced to the dialectical opposite of this infinite beyond; it becomes a closed finitude that needs to be “passed beyond” through the infinity of striving or the infinity of kenotic self-gift. I noted earlier the dangers of absolutizing the kenosis of the good and the negativity it entails, which Saint-Pierre and Gilbert both pointed

out. In addition to the fact that this affirmation falsely “immanentizes’ the initial, positive “given,” rendering it finite in a closed sense and juxtaposing it dialectically to an infinite “more” of one sort or another, there is a more subtle problem: self-gift cannot be the “last word” in the

subject-object relationship implied in the transcendentals. The good concerns the subject's acttve movement beyond himself. If this movement is made ultimate, even if it seems to be a movement ordered to the other ad other, we cannot avoid a kind of Faustian tyranny of the subject, 142. Balthasar does not reject the via negativa by any means, and yet he insists that this negativity can in fact itself fall into another kind of positivism if it is not rooted in a more ample context. Part of the meaning of this insistence will come to light in the present treatment of the ordering of the transcendentals. For a more thorough discussion, see Balthasar’s discussion of the via negativa in TL 2:80-113. 143. In TL 1:22, Balthasar talks of the importance of having the aesthetics come before the dramatics in terms of the priority of theoria over praxis.

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or a dynamism in the manner of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in which the striving itself takes precedence at every turn over any goal. In this case, transcendence once again gets lost. To put it oversimply, if the last word is the gift of self, the final accent falls on the ve/f. In other words, making the negativity of the good ultimate leaves the subject standing out into the nothing, and thus alone. Terminating the movement ultimately and reductively in the self can be avoided only if the movement terminates in something that is itself more than the self. This is, in our interpretation, the reason Balthasar ends the ordering of the transcendentals with the truth. 144 Since truth in this case comes last rather than first, it does not have to be understood as an abstract grasp, but it can be seen more fundamentally as the union of subject and object, as well as the fruit of that union. The franycendence of the transcendental relation —its being in every moment an event that is “more than self” —requires that the gift of self in the end be subordinated to the objective fruit of that gift. And here we see another way of understanding Balthasar’s observation that the last is in a sense the first: since truth is ultimately fruit in the sense of a Gestalt, or concrete whole (and not just the formalism of abstract propositions), it ends precisely where beauty begins. The tension in the subject-object relationship is thus, as it were, stabilized in that the orders of the good and the true are both united and “freed” in their difference in beauty. It is crucial to see that beauty can perform this function only if it is a transcendental in its own right, in distinction from the others, and only if it “calls” to a particular faculty in the human being, that is, the “heart,” which is the concrete center of the person, the Realsymbol that contains the whole. At the same time, it is crucial to see that if the union of truth and goodness were merely a third phenomenon lying beside the other two, that is, lying exactly within the same order they comprise, it would fall into line simply before them or simply after them, and, in either case, it could not be said to be their unton. To this extent, then, Czapiewski was right to want to posit beauty as a “transcendental” of a wholly other order. Because it is not within 144. Pascal Ide criticizes Balthasar in the end for his Augustinianism, 1.e., for the importance he attaches to the good rather than (Thomistically) privileging the true. The result, he claims, is a kind of endless restlessness that seems to render the finitude of creatureliness suspect, making it something that constantly needs to be overcome. Although it is true that Balthasar attaches a central importance to the good, Ide does not seem to have considered the significance of Balthasar’s making truth “ultimate,” and of his ending the trilogy not with the Theodramatic but with the Theologic.

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their order, he reasoned, it can be the place where they are joined, even while they can remain distinct within their own order. We have seen, however, that conceiving the relation thus cannot avoid making the multiplicity of the orders of the true and the good a sign of imperfection, that is, a fall from the “higher” unity. There is only one way to avoid these two impossible routes, and it is a way we have seen many times before: for the “third” term to be really the unity of the two, it must be both transcendent to them and immanent to them. In other words, this third term must itself have an irreducible polarity. It is precisely here

that we see the great importance of unity for Balthasar. If beauty is the unity of truth and goodness within the order of the true and good, unity itself is the transcendental that comprehends the whole. Once again, we see that an organic whole —in this case, the circumincession of the beautiful, the good, and the true, and the irreducible tension that results from it —is “crystallized” in the surpassing of that whole into a “radically other” order. If we wished to “sketch” this complex interrelationship, we could use the diagram we have used in different (though related) contexts:

Unity

Goodness 4 Truth Beauty Figure 4.

There are three further comments to make about the relationship between

unity and the other three transcendentals. The first is to note that there is no symmetry at all among the transcendentals, which might misleadingly be suggested by the diagram. Goodness and truth are united to each other in beauty, but because they are inwardly related, each gets subordinated to the other, at any given moment according to whatever order is primary. The Transcendentals a 40/

At all events, they never run simply parallel to each other. 145 Beauty itself has a general primacy over the other two; it has this primacy because it is the concrete appearance of unity, the comprehensive unity of the whole.

It is therefore not accidental that commentators often note a particular relationship between the transcendental of unity and of beauty.!4° Nevertheless, because beauty is not so to speak responsible for the unity of the

whole alone, but is itself a manifestation of a unity that transcends the whole, its general primacy, as we will see more thoroughly later, is not something that it has to snsist on at every turn in relation to the others, but rather, the transcendence of unity itself “frees” it to be subordinate to the other orders in a way that enriches both the true and the good. Once we

see that the order is an organic whole, and therefore a complex, manyfaceted order of parts in tension, it becomes impossible to bring these parts into a final, systematic order. The second comment is to note the importance of the fact that Balthasar tends to speak of unity only indirectly. If he elaborated unity itself first, as it is “in itself,” it would be impossible to see its own irreducibly polar char-

acter. Because of its polarity, it is both what undergirds the others (and thus what precedes them) as well as being what the concrete of the others in their complex circumincession in fact explicates (and thus comes after them). Unity cannot be understood in itself, but only in relation to the other three. The third comment, then, is to see that though we cannot view unity in itself, we can consider it from the other perspective, namely, as the selfsurpassing of the three transcendentals info the wholly other order. In the Eptlog, Balthasar closes the section on the transcendentals by showing that

the polarity that cuts through each of them opens each spontaneously to the divine unity, the absolute One, True, Good, and Beautiful. 4” Recalling our discussion of the divine identity in chapter 1, we must say that the polar nature of the unity we see implied by the transcendentals keeps us 145. It is interesting to note that both Czapiewski and Péltner, who share Rahner’s presuppositions that the faculties are produced out of the soul’s unity for the sake of its own actualization, make the argument that there is no (mutual) subordination of the intellect and will but that they are both equal (see Czapiewski, Dav Schéne bet Thomas von Aqun, 104, esp. n. 291; Péltner, Schénhett, 165-70). The insistence on “equality” of the faculties seems to be a function of a notion of unity as immediate identity, such that, in order to preserve distinctness on one level, the faculties have to be veparated from one another. They thus cannot be in any ultimate sense intrinsically related.

Intrinsic relation means genuine inclusion, and genuine inclusion means mutual subordination. Any time there is a real unity that is not reductive, but complex, the relation of parts is always asymmetrical. 146. See, for example, Kovach, Die Avthettk des Thomas von Aquin, 202.

147. E, 65-66.

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from absolutizing a single pole of the unity; instead, because we cannot synthesize the poles themselves or project the two lines into an infinite horizon in order to grasp their intersection, the way the whole comes together in God cannot be deduced but can only be received as a gift. The deepest meaning of the unity of the transcendentals is, thus, the expectant openness to the Ever Greater. We will return to this at the end. At this juncture, however, it is appropriate to spell out further what it means for the good and the true to have their unity in beauty.

Circumincesston and Transformation Beauty is the unity of the true and the good, not as their mere sum but as their perfection, as Kovach points out.!48 In other words, as was said in chapter 2, there is no unity without transformation: the fact that beauty mediates the true and the good to each other changes the nature of each, by virtue of the “new” nature of the whole. The question raised at the beginning of this section with Aertsen concerning the transcendentality of beauty, namely, whether beauty adds anything to being, finds here its most decisive answer. In a certain respect, what it adds is precisely everything; not only does it add something new, but it is what grounds the nature of the true and the good av they are in themselves. !*? To see this, we must first consider the nature of the “new whole” itself. Kovach himself elaborates the nature of beauty through texts in Aquinas, both from the perspective of the true (aesthetic knowledge) and, at far

greater length because of the more ample resources in Aquinas, from the perspective of the good (aesthetic enjoyment [Gefallen]). On the one hand, beauty “connects” the cognitive power with the venses (and in particular the “finer” senses: hearing and vision).!°° While the activity proper

148. Kovach, Die Authetik, 212; cf. Péltner, 173: “Wo immer Einheit sich als Einheit ereignet, geschieht Schénheit. .. . Das Wesen der Einheit, das bei Thomas in der kategorial-negativen Formulierung der indivisio in seipso verharrt, findet seine positive Auslegung in der Schénheit.” 149. If we recognize that the beautiful does not “add” anything to the true and the good by mediating them to each other without simultaneously bringing them thus to be what each most properly is, we get beyond a dilemma that Kovach introduces. According to Kovach, Aquinas at one point says that being ordered to the true belongs to the nature of the good av good (De ver, 21, 4, corpus), while in another place he says beauty ado precisely this ordering to the good (ST 1—2:27, | ad 3). Kovach argues one has to deny the former in order to make room for the latter (Die Avthettk es Thomas von Aguin, 206-7). Our argument, by contrast, affirms both by affirming that the relation to the true that the beautiful ads to the good is what makes the good ewentially good. 150. Ibid., 238.

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to the intellect considered in itself, Kovach says, is the abstraction of intelligible form from matter, aesthetic knowledge is the veeing of the intelligible form in matter: “the apprehensio pulchritudinis secundum ve tpsam is by no

means a complete intellectual abstraction, but rather the rational perception of aspects that are recognizable only by the intellect in the concrete-inatvidual material obyect, which is beautiful.”!©! Such a perception, Kovach

observes, is essentially contemplative, intuitive rather than discursive, although it is no less a matter of the intellect. Kovach’s definition of aesthetic knowledge recalls a stunning sentence Balthasar wrote in his first essay, “The Development of the Musical Idea,” published when he was twenty: “When ¢fruth, which is thought, is found in matter, it is beauty. 7152

Although Kovach does not give an argument w/y the beautiful connects the intellect with the senses, our previous discussion of Gestalt in chapter 3 presents a possible reason. Without elaborating further, it seems that, because the beautiful is the “constellation” of the good and the true, it is necessarily a concrete whole, and that means in some respect it is material.

If the perception of beauty, therefore, is the coincidence of the intellect and will, the act of perception must itself be concrete and therefore venvible. In this respect, beauty connects the intellect to the senses precisely because

it mediates the good to the intellect. On the other hand, beauty is not only a kind of intelligibility; it is also, and perhaps more immediately, related to the “rational appetite,” that is, the will. Whereas the good indicates the order in which the subject moves to the object, and rests in the “having” of the object, beauty is likewise a “delight” in the object, but it is a delight taken so to speak from a contemplative distance. This is why, with respect to the five senses, beauty relates more directly to vision and hearing, while goodness is more directly related to the other three senses, which require an immediate contact. As Kovach explains, beauty signifies the perceiving of the goodness of the object, and a taking joy in that perception, without having to possess that goodness. 9 Aquinas anticipates the later aesthetic notion of the essential disinterestedness of beauty, and also the connection between beauty and ek-stasis, since it 1s the very essence of the experience of beauty that one essentially forgets oneself. To the question whether the delight in beauty is, for Aquinas, 151. Ibid., 241: “die apprehensio pulchritudinis secundum se ipsam [ist] keine totale geistige Abstraktion, sondern das rationale Erblicken der nur geistig erkennbaren Aspekte in dem konkret-individuellen materiellen Objekt, das schén ist” (emphasis mine). 152. Balthasar, Die Entwicklung der nuwtkaltschen Toee (Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes

Verlag, 1999), 42: “Die Wahrheit, ein Gedanke, wird im Materiellen zur Schénheit.” This passage is presented and discussed by Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 96FF. 153. Kovach, Dee Avthettk des Thomas von Agun, 255.

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an act of the intellect or an act of the will, Kovach shows how it is simul-

taneously both.!4 But this simultaneity reveals one of the most extraordinary aspects of beauty. According to Kovach, and also to the nineteenth-century aesthetic philosopher J. Jungmann,!*° beauty is the only “transcendental” (assuming that it is one for Aquinas) that represents a relation with, not one, but two termini. Not only is the notion of a relation with two termini without precedence in the transcendentals, but it veemys to be unique in the whole thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas.'°° The importance of this “duality” cannot be over-

stated. It is, in a certain sense, the insight that the whole study thus far has been seeking. As we have seen, for Aquinas, the true, “abstractly” considered, represents a movement from object to subject; that is, it is a relation with its terminus ad quem in the subject. The good, by contrast, represents a move-

ment from subject to object; that is, it is a relation with its terminus ad quem in the object. What can it mean to have two termini? Here, we have to interpret. If beauty “contains” the movements of the true and the good, then, because these movements are “opposed,” its own movement is a paradoxical one, indeed: it is a single movement that ends in two places at

once, in both the subject and the object!!°” But this means that though beauty has a wholeness and unity in itself, it cannot have a single principle of motion. The only way of conceiving it is as one act with two principles, which are, as we have seen, not unrelated to each other but have a mutual interdependence. It is one act with two sources. Thus, another way of expressing that beauty is a relation with two termini is to say that beauty ws reciprocal causality itself. Not only is it, then, the simultaneous unity of the

intellect and the will, but if we take the intellect and the will in their full scope of movement without falsely subjectivizing or falsely objectivizing the movement, we can say that beauty is the union of subject and object in a whole that does not reduce them to each other. And, finally, since the union of the two wholly different “parts,” the subject and object, occurs

through reciprocal causality and therefore in a manner in which each 154. Ibid., 249. By means of an analogy with what Aquinas says about beatitude (Quaestiones quodlibetales, 8:9, 1, corpus), Kovach says it is “originally and substantially”

an act of the intellect and “formally and finally” an act of the will. 155. J. Jungmann’s Avthettk (1884) is mentioned in Kovach, 213. 156. Ibid., 212-13. 157. If truth in some sense has its “locus” in the subject, Péltner argues, and goodness has its locus in the object, the beautiful has its locus in the convenientia of the two: Schénhett, 135. It is thus the simultaneity of the two movements implied by the other transcendentals.

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aspect depends on the others for its own meaning, we could say that beauty is the core of drama. To say that beauty mediates the true and the good to each other means, at bottom, that it communicates all of these aspects in a certain analogous way to each. Before turning to look at each of these in particular, it is worth pointing out how the notion of beauty as reciprocal causality itself helps to bring together some of the characteristics that Balthasar has given beauty in various places in his work. First, we saw that, in TL 1, Balthasar described beauty essentially as groundlessness. When we speak of “ground” in phi-

losophy, we mean “reason” and “foundation,” that which accounts for a thing by answering its “why” (this is suggested in the English word ground but is even more clearly expressed in the German Grund). If, from this perspective, a final ground can be found for an event or a thing, it means that not only the necessary, but also the sufficient conditions are met, and the whole of the thing can be reduced back to its cause.!°° The point is that if

we have merely two terms, or have as it were only a linear or unilateral relationship, we are left with only two alternatives: either there is a wuftclient reason to which an event can be reduced —and in this case we embrace

a windowless, wonderless rationalism —or there is something in the event without any ground whatsoever, in which case we have a chaotic irrationalism. To avoid both rationalism and irrationalism, we have to affirm an inner relationship between the two terms, A and B, which is not unilateral but reciprocal and which is thus nonreductive without being the superficial addition of (senseless) novelties. By means of a //ird term, then, A and B are held in a meaningful relationship together (..e., an intelligible unity) even while an ultimate difference is never removed.!°? The term Balthasar chooses,

groundlessness, seeks to express precisely this reciprocal relationship. It is not meant to oppose being groundless to being grounded, as the term might suggest at first glance; rather, it is groundlessness in the sense of mutual groundedness, a “miracle of meaning” that can never be traced back to a single cause, in which to come to a final (static) rest. The difference between the good and the true in their mutual relation, which is held open in the groundlessness of beauty, is strictly analogous to the “wonder” that is born in the fourfold ditference. Wonder is related 158. See Heidegger’s discussion of Leibniz’s principtum rationis or Satz des Grundes in The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 11-33. 159. To be sure, this third term, in order to play such a role, must be simultaneously immanent and transcendent. The “order” of the triad beauty-goodness-truth is possible only in transcendence into a wholly-other order. This movement, as we saw earlier, is one of the aspects of Balthasar’s understanding of unity.

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to surprise at the way things happen to be. But fundamental wonder is surprise that things are at all. Such wonder is possible only if one can be surprised at the ground one “stands on,” rather than merely indifferently presupposing such a ground, “forgetting” it, and marveling at what follows

from it. But if beauty is precisely a nonirrational freedom from a “linear groundedness, it is precisely the experience of beauty that enables profound questioning, questioning of the depths. In TL 1, Balthasar talks about how beauty gives the beholder access to truth at its foundations so that one wonders, in the experience of beauty — not only at the essence of truth but at its very existence —at the fact that there is truth at all.!©° The same might be affirmed in relation to goodness.

But it would be too much to say that such a questioning is possible because beauty brings one beyond the good and the true; the “more” character of beauty is nevertheless not to be detached from its being the wnwon of the good and the true. If the good and the true imply a positive or determinate relation between subject and object, the difference between the good and the true —and therefore between the subject and object —is not simply a negation of their union. Even though, in the sovereign freedom of this difference, there is room for “untruth” and for evil, and the ugliness they imply, the negation does not contain the positivity. Angst and its negativity are therefore, once again, not the final word, even if they are in some

fashion indispensable. Greater than Angst is joy: and joy is especially tied to beauty, because joy is the ek-stasis and surprise of genuine mutuality.16! Joy, in other words, is itself another word for reciprocal causality.

Finally, and what is hardly to be separated from these aspects, there is the “grace” character that Balthasar says is attendant on every instance of beauty: “A moment of grace lies in all beauty: it reveals to me more than I had a right to expect, and therefore inspires wonder and admiration.”!°” The fact that, as reciprocal causality, beauty takes all reductive explanations by surprise, it is always essentially an event. It does not con-

nect aspects piece by piece but, even in a gradual unfolding, it shows that what comes unexpectedly later was in fact always needed. As the antithesis of reduction-deduction, without being in the least bit irrational, beauty is of its essence something that cannot be tamed. When Balthasar calls it that which “dances as an uncontained splendor around 160. TL 1:223. 161. In RT, 3, Balthasar explicitly connects beauty with joy. We saw this as well in GL 1:244. 162. E, 51: “Ein Moment der Gnade liegt in aller Schénheit: es zeigt sich mir mehr, als ich zu erwarten ein Recht hatte, daher das Staunen und die Bewunderung.”

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the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relationship to each other,” he is not merely indulging in lyricism, but is speaking in truth and precision about this “primal phenomenon.” Toward the end of the previous section I pointed out that Balthasar, on the one hand, accords a certain primacy to the beautiful and, on the other

hand, seems to relativize the transcendentals among themselves with a certain freedom. We are now in a position to enter more deeply into this matter. Although beauty for Balthasar is the place where truth and goodness come together, it is not the case that beauty relates in a simple and unilateral manner to the others; it is not so that truth and goodness depend on beauty, while it has no dependence on them. For one thing, we have often seen that any whole has a reciprocal dependence on its parts. Furthermore, and more specifically in this case, what we are speaking of is reciprocal causality itself, which is the general phenomenon of the triadic

structure of the transcendentals, which is brought about, as it were, in beauty. In other words, once we have secured the “mediated immediacy” of the two in a third én principle, we are freed to see it everywhere. There is therefore an important sense in which, as we saw explicitly in Balthasar, goodness contains both beauty and truth, and truth contains both goodness and beauty — precisely because beauty contains goodness and truth. The “event-like,” “grace-like” phenomenon of reciprocal causality belongs in an analogous way to each of the transcendentals in themselves. In other words, each of the transcendentals ts tn some respect a relationship with two ternunt, and therefore each of the transcendentals ts essentially dramatic. It cannot

be the case, then, that truth is wemply the movement from object to subject, a movement that ends simply in the mind; nor that the good is simply a movement from subject to object, ending simply in the existing thing. Rather, they must both end in different ways in the subject and object, and in this way form the reciprocal movement of circumincessive, dra-

matic encounter. Each of the transcendentals is a single act with two sources. In a certain sense, we have seen this from the beginning, but the reflection on the transcendentals in themselves has brought this fundamental phenomenon to light with a surprising clarity. We may thus point briefly to what follows from saying that each of the transcendentals has the character of reciprocal causality. As an instance of reciprocal causality, beauty can be seen to embody the paradox spoken of in chapter 3 in the relationship between “vision” and “rapture.” We see an analogy to this paradox in Aquinas, which helps to illuminate the point that Balthasar himself makes. According to Kovach, the “two termini’ character of beauty leads to an interesting phenomenon when Aquinas raises the question of the relationship between beauty 408 ww Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

and love. On the one hand, love is an effect of beauty, but, on the other hand, love is the cawe of the experience of beauty.!° In other words, beauty is an effect that is the cause of its cause. In order to avoid seeing a contradiction here, we have to interpret this in terms of the paradoxical relationship between truth and goodness. Beauty is the whole that allows each to be dependent on each other. Thus, in Balthasar’s aesthetic analyses, as we have already seen, vision, the cognitive grasp of an object, cannot occur unless the subject is drawn out of himself toward the object in rapture (1.e., the “object-orderedness” of goodness). As Aquinas puts it, love is the cause of beauty. However, the rapture is not possible unless the subject has caught sight of the luminous object; vision (truth) is what makes rapture (goodness) possible. As Aquinas puts it, beauty is the cause of love. Neither aspect of this phenomenon needs to be denied if we consider the whole as the unfolding of a “triadic” event. And, because this triad means that the subject and object are caught up with each other — without either separation or confusion — such that each awaits the other for its own meaning and helps produce that meaning, beauty is seen to be essentially a drama. As an instance of reciprocal causality, goodness can be seen to be the simultaneity of desire and self-gift. If we separate the transcendentals from each other, we cannot avoid a kind of subject-object dialectic, which could

be described, on the one hand, as a dialectic between self-centeredness (good-for-me) and other-centeredness (good-in-ttself) or, on the other hand,

as a dialectic between spontaneity and receptivity in freedom. In either case, at issue is an understanding of goodness and truth as “beginning” simply outside of each other. The “subjectivity” of the good and the “objectivity” of the true, however, have their home in the subjective-objectivity

of the beautiful Gestalt. This can be interpreted with an analogy to the Urgestalt of marriage, the phenomenon of the mother’s smile, or the form

of drama. What we see in these various instances is a mutual causality 163. Kovach, Die Asthettk des Thomas von Aquin, 257. See the whole concluding section on love and beauty, 256—66, in which Kovach says: “Wa&ahrend ndmlich die erste

Relation [i.e., in which beauty inspires love, which Kovach had just described] die Schénheit zu ihrem principium (als causa efficiens) und die Liebe zu ihrem Terminus (als causatum) hat, hat die hier zu analysierende Relation die Liebe als ihr principium und die geliebte Schénheit als ihren Terminus” (261). One of the key texts from Aquinas that Kovach uses to explain this affirmation is “illud enim quod summe diligimus, convententissimum aestimamud,” Aquinas, In IV. Sent. 49, 4, 5, sol. I.c. While Kovach ends up arguing, somewhat reductively, that love does not “cause” beauty in an objective sense, but merely the experience of correspondence that makes up the experience of beauty, a more ample elaboration of the notion of reciprocal causality would allow a far stronger interpretation. The Transcendentals m= 409

between the two aspects. In love, what one desires is to give oneself, and what one most deeply gives is one’s desire for the other. One loves best in revealing the other as supremely loveable. We are forced to set these aspects in opposition to each other, or to reduce one to the other, only if we deny that goodness is a relationship with two termini. If, by contrast, we see goodness as “containing” beauty and truth, we see that neither aspect excludes the other, but rather each has an inward dependence on the other. They both unfold within the “event” of an encounter between subject and object, an encounter that is once again, because of the reciprocal causality, essentially dramatic. As an instance of reciprocal causality, truth can be seen to embody a paradoxical relationship between union and fruit. We saw aspects of this paradox already in chapter 3, but we are now in a position to bring it more clearly into focus. If union (which we might see as truth in relation to goodness) is severed from fruitfulness (which we might see as truth in relation to beauty), we end up with an immediacy in opposition to mediation. But, if union essentially means the coming together of two and not the solitude of one, then union in fact cannot occur without the mediation of an objective third. As we saw at some length, mediation of this sort is what allows for an identity that is nevertheless not exclusive of difference. It is therefore necessary to say that fruit —the objective third —is the cause,

or the condition of possibility, of union. Yet, it cannot be simply the case that the fruit comes first, and only then the union. Obviously, it is not fruit at all if it is not fruit of union. If it does not have its inner source there, it will be merely extrinsically related to the union, and this means that it would not in any event be able to mediate that union. Union is the cause of fruit, and fruit is the cause of union, and these two objects do not simply follow one after the other. Such a paradox is possible only if we see truth as “containing” goodness and beauty. This paradox, in fact, sheds a decisive light on what I suggested was the core of the mystery of truth, namely, the event of knowledge asa life-giving exchange. We addressed in that context the question of whether the object (and the subject) were changed in knowing, which would seem to make knowledge impossible to the extent that knowledge is properly of what ws, or whether nothing changes, in which case it would seem to make knowledge impossible to the extent that knowledge is a concrete event. To see truth as the simultaneity, mutual implication, and reciprocal priority of these two aspects is to see truth as a relationship with two termini. And such a relationship is conceivable, as we have seen, only in the context of the “circumincession” of the transcendentals. Thus, the creativity of knowing in no way undermines its objectivity; what one knows objectively is the 410 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

object transformed in the knowing. The reason we can maintain the objectivity in fact is that the “transformed” object is what makes the knowing, and the spontaneity it implies, first possible. The creativity of knowing, as it were, takes place wholly within the objectivity of the subject-object union. In this encounter, truth becomes an event in which both the sub-

ject and object await the other for their meaning, even as they both in asymmetrical ways give rise to that meaning. Because of its intrinsic relation to beauty and goodness, truth is essentially dramatic.

The Transcendentals and the Meaning of Being We now turn to recapitulate what we have unfolded in terms of the meaning of being more generally.

Being beyond Betng

The mystery implied by the notion of the transcendentals, as we elaborated it in the beginning of the chapter, amounted to a single, strange fact: the transcendentals do not represent mere “redundancies” but genuinely add something to being, and, at the same time, what they add was always already “anticipated” by being. Looking at the mystery from the converse perspective, we could say that in the transcendentals, the meaning of being

is already given in advance, and yet it is given as something that awaits an affirmation that is indispensable to it. Where have we arrived with this problem? What I wish to argue in conclusion is that the notion of reciprocal causality as the essence of the transcendental relation, once we interpret it ontologically, is the best way to view the mystery of the transcendental paradox. To see how this is the case, we return once again to the problem implied by the notion of transcendentality as a question concerning being itself. We saw at the beginning of the chapter the fruitless contradictions and the equivocations that arise when we attempt to escape from the paradox by means of a purely “rational” relation, which says that the transcendentals are not an unfolding of being itself, are but merely an unfolding of our thoughts about being. But this does not mean that, instead, we are compelled to embrace the opposite notion of a “real” relation, where both sides of the relationship — being and the soul ~are unilaterally affected by each other. Such a relation presupposes a simple difference between the terms (which already represents a difficulty to the extent that the soul exwy and is therefore included in being); it implies that the terms are defined over-

against each other, and therefore in a finite manner. But the moment we The Transcendentals a 4//

speak merely about finite modes and finite relations, we are no longer speak-

ing of the transcendentals. It is possible to say that a particular thing is good in a particular respect without paradox (at least initially); it is another matter altogether to say that being as a whole is good — particularly because the one who says so is necessarily a part of that whole. And we can won-

der whether it is possible, in fact, to affirm the goodness even of a particular thing in a fundamental way without making a decision about the whole of being. We saw in chapter 3 that truth conceived merely as a relation between two particular things, subject and object, quickly reveals its inadequacy, and thus shows the need any particular instance of truth has for an ontological grounding. In other words, even particular instances of truth must be seen in relation to truth as a transcendental. The same can be said for the other fundamental attributes of being. Parts cannot make up a whole unless the whole is already given. There must be something “deeper”

than the parts that allows them in the first place to relate to each other ad parts; that is, they must presuppove a whole as that in which they themselves are rooted, and so a whole as something that is not merely dependent on them. However, having said that, it remains the case that the whole that the parts presuppose is constituted from particular beings, although in a way that includes them nonreductively, and that means in all of their particularity and historicity. This affirmation returns us to the point at which we began our exploration in the philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar; namely, it brings us back to the fourfold difference. We are now in a position to view this ontological difference from the perspective of the transcendentals. The question of whether and how the transcendentals reveal some addition to being, and thus represent a more with respect to being, places us before the “ancient and new’ issue of the good “beyond being.” Balthasar’s position on this question is complex. On the one hand, he affirms this “Platonic” insight in a basic way in several places. !® On the other hand, he does not do so without cer-

tain qualifications. The best way to understand his position is in relation to the question of the transcendental paradox. Clearly, the possibility of there “being” a “beyond being” is directly related to the possibility of the transcendentals in general, inasmuch as they imply in some respect a more than being. Usually, when the question is raised, it is addressed primarily in terms of the God-world relationship, that is, as God lying “beyond” created being. Such a way of posing the question inevitably identifies created being with finitude, which then must be juxtaposed to God’s inconceivable infinity.

164. See, for example, E, 70, and TL 2:163.

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Seeing the question first in relation to the transcendentals, however, saves us from the dialectic such a juxtaposition necessarily implies. If the transcendentals are possible, there is a more that already belongs to created being as such, and this means that created being does not represent a mere negative with respect to God. So the question, once again, is: How are the transcendentals possible? As Fabro has argued in his essay on the matter, the key to how the transcendentals can be ontological without being merely synonymous with being is that Aquinas roots them, not in a univocal or essentialist notion

of being (as Kant thought), but in the inwardly complex reality of ens: “end is not simply eventia or esse; rather, it is the self-givenness of their synthesis.”!©° The reason for the importance of this inward complexity is that it implies a difference that belongs to being av being. If there can be an “addition” to being that is part of being, it can only be because “being added to” belongs to the very meaning of being. This is precisely how Balthasar adju-

dicates the question of the good “beyond being”: the good is both more than being and being tout court. If this simultaneity is possible, it is only because to be “more than oneself” is what it means to be. In an important footnote in TL 2, to which Emmanuel Tourpe has called attention, !©® Balthasar contrasts Jean-Luc Marion’s interpretation of “beyond being”!®” with Siewerth’s interpretation of Aquinas on this

165. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Env-Huve,” 404. Fabro is referring to the real distinction between essence and esse, which Aquinas introduces into the discussion of the transcendentals already in the first question of De ver: see 1, 1, ad 3. 166. Tourpe, “La logique de l’amour,” 215. According to Tourpe, the subtle distinction that Balthasar elaborates in the footnote marks the far-reaching difference in the end between love without being, which Jean-Luc Marion affirms, and Balthasar’s central affirmation of being av love. 167. Balthasar refers specifically to Marion’s works [Toole et la Otstance and Dteu sans létre (Paris: Fayard, 1982). Having initially been critical of Aquinas, particularly in the latter book, Marion later tried to articulate a more nuanced interpretation of the Thomistic “esse”: see “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue Thomiste 1 (1995): 31-66.

In this article, he argues for a kind of “esse sans |’étre,” i.e., an understanding of being on the basis of the incomprehensible God rather than an understanding of God on the basis of the comprehensibility of being: see esp. 58-63. An argument that such an understanding remains all too dialectical and represents primarily a semantic development could find support in the fact that Marion’s more recent book, Reduction and Givennedd, once again shows an attempt to get “beyond being” in a simple sense. Here, he argues for a “third reduction” (after those of Husserl and Heidegger), which founds even Heidegger's fundamental ontological question on a more radical “ground” that lies wholly outside of being. The argument turns on an anthropology that sees man as capable phenomenologically of putting Being (and not just beings) as a whole out of play through the experience of boredom, rendering him purely receptive to a “call” that comes itself from beyond being: see especially the book's final essay, 167—205.

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point: “Marion seems... to have failed to notice the places in which Siew-

erth and Thomas himself describe the good as the inner ‘self-transcendence’ of esse, which nonetheless does not require us in addition . . . to leave esse (properly understood) behind as something penultimate, which in any event is something impossible for thought.”!°° In terms of the fourfold difference, being étve/f is beyond being insofar as an unbridgeable difference gapes wide within it, without compromising its unity. The wonder we spoke of at length in the beginning of chapter 1, as being essential to the structure of the being of the world, gets reiterated in a new way

here: all the drama that is implied in goodness —the striving, desire, and self-gift, and in a particular way the engagement with death, the pursuit of the elusive good, and the attempt to give one’s life a definitive shape, which we saw in the last chapter — for all of its surprise and novelty, is not something that comes “after” being, but is the expression of the deepest meaning of being. Chapter | reached its climax in the affirmation of “being in action” as the way in which being is received, inasmuch as being given is the way to

receive the gift of being. Here we see that the transcendentals are the “crystallization” of that action. Perhaps we might see them as the paradigmatic ways in which being is given. This paradigmatic action is possible, once again, only if there is within being itself a space “wide” enough for drama, which means only if being subsists in difference. While Siewerth calls the good “more transcendental than being,” as we saw in the previous section, he continues in the same passage by saying “and in such manner it is the coming-to-presence [Hervortreten| of the ultimate depths of being itself.”!©? But conceiving the transcendentals in light of the ontological difference has many implications, and I will touch on some of these by way of conclusion. We note that the phrase “beyond being” is typically associated exclusively with goodness. Viewing it, instead, more broadly as a transcendental phenomenon in general entails something that is of enormous consequence for one of the basic arguments we have been making in this essay. Reserving “beyondness’ for goodness, as we earlier observed, tends to assume that being and truth are strictly finite. Because they are finite, they

168. TL 2:125—26, n. 10: “J.L. Marion scheint... die Stellen nicht zu beachten, wo Siewerth und auch Thomas das Bonum als den innern ‘Selbstiibersteig’ des Esse kennzeich-

nen, was aber nicht dazu nétigt ..., das (recht verstandene) Esse als ein Zweitletztes hinter sich zuriickzulassen —was auch kein Denken kann.” 169. Siewerth, cited in TL 2:162: “und solchermafsen das Hervortreten der letzten Tiefe des Seins selbst.”

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cannot be ultimate; instead, they must “ultimately” be left behind in some way or another. Such a presupposition is even culturally quite common: Last year in Strasbourg there was an advertisement that depicted a woman with a wild look in her eye. Underneath, the billboard read: “Lamour n'est pas raisonnable.” There is an association of truth (and reason) with lifesmothering control, and it is usually regarded with a certain claustrophobia. Where, however, does this assumption lead? If truth is mere/y finite,

it is not a transcendental; it does not possess transcendence in its very structure. If this is the case, however, one cannot e with an other av other as a matter of truth. Transcendence means being more than oneself, having gotten beyond oneself, and if such transcendence is lacking to truth itself, the logic of truth locks one in immanence, in a sheer immediate iden-

tity. When one has attained the truth of an other, therefore, one cannot fail to be disappointed: the otherness of the other evaporates instantaneously in the grasp, and one is left embracing only oneself. Despite the difficulties inherent in this assumption, it strikes us as odd to think of truth as possessing an inward infinity, and thus to be essentially transcendent (..e., a transcendental). Perhaps this is because we tend to think of transcendence primarily subjectively, as a matter of the (human) spirit, in the dynamism implied in the order of the good. But we have seen that for Balthasar, there is an analogous self-transcendence that belongs to the object av vuch, in every case, no matter what the object might be. This is what makes truth a relation with two termini, a single event that requires the reciprocal positive acts of two irreducibly different “members.” Such is, in fact, in different ways what happens both in goodness and in truth, because it happens in beauty. It is therefore not only the good

that is in a certain way “beyond being,” but truth itself is also in a certain way “beyond being,” precisely to the extent that it is a transcendental. In other words, the experience of truth is an experience of transcendence; it is a genuine event, and therefore an occasion for wonder, without for all of that being any less a matter of being. If we can affirm this without implying endless contradictions, it is because there is a certain sense in which being itself is “beyond being,” that is, because transcendence is the inner meaning of being. And this is what we mean when we speak of the transcendentals as fundamental attributes of being.

Pointing out the inward complexity of being, as Fabro describes it, is not yet in itself to give a response to the problem of the transcendentals. Fabro himself shows that if the complexity of ens allows us better to understand the possibility of the transcendentals, the same inward complexity makes it more difficult to see how the soul can have an initial grasp of being ~a notio entis —which is the foundation, sine qua non,

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of everything else.!”° In a word, if being is itself self-transcendence, then why does it not simply transcend every grasp and leave the mind in every case with nothing more than an abstract representation? Since the notio

entis is a notion of being in its complexity, that is, of both essence and the actus essendi, Fabro explains, it cannot be attained either by abstraction (first act) or by judgment (second act), but it must arise in some much more fundamental way.!”! Fabro himself does not offer an answer to this problem, only to indicate that the initial grasp of the notio entis must be in some basic manner both a grasping of content and a concrete experience. But this is precisely what we saw in the discussion of the fourfold difference. The key, once again, is to see how the whole of being —

not just in an abstract formal sense but in a concrete totality —can be manifest in a particular experience. And when we consider the transcendentals as I have been elaborating them, we see they are what brings us to the heart of the matter. In chapter | (and 2), we said that the child’s initial experience of the world was the foundation of everything else. At the end of his life, Balthasar said that the ewence of that experience is the transcendentals: “The infant

is brought to consciousness of himself only by love, by the smile of his mother. In that encounter the horizon of all unlimited being opens up for him, revealing four things to him: (1) that he is one in love with his mother, even in being other than his mother, therefore all being is one; (2) that that love is good, therefore all being is good; (3) that that love is true, therefore all being is true; and (4) that that love evokes joy, therefore all being is beautiful.”!”* To understand how this experience is the manifestation of the whole of being, we need to return to the notion of the event of reciprocal causality that lies embedded in each of the transcendentals. Reciprocal causality is always an event; it is precisely the opposite of something that can be constructed out of the “materials” that are ready at hand.

An attempt thus to construct the experience reduces the whole to the sum of its parts. A “constructed” meaning would be something that I myself

170. Fabro, “Transcendentality of Ens-Evse,” 423-27. Fabro remarks on page 423 that Aquinas himself “says almost nothing on 4ow the human mind grasps such a notion.” 171. Fabro shows that abstraction misses the “actuality” character of ens, and judgment, which seems to reach precisely this actuality, that is, extwtence, nevertheless already presupposes a particular essence to which existence is attributed. The problem, of course, is that the notio entis cannot presuppose any essence, but it is in every case already the presupposition for any grasp of any essence whatsoever: see ibid., 425-26. 172. RT, 3.

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make. The event of a whole, with the paradox it cannot fail to bring with

it, is by contrast something that avoids reduction to what is “already there,” and so it can be received only from an irreducible other. It occurs structurally as a gift. The child’s first opening of his eyes, which is his recep-

tion of existence — or better, his being invited, being received into existence —is far more profound than the gift of some particular thing in the world, but is a gift of his being in the world. It is the most total gift, because it is the never-to-be-repeated gift of everything. Now, Balthasar describes the content of that experience in terms of the transcendentals. Each of the transcendentals, as a relationship with two termini, is a genuine unity between two beings that nevertheless preserves an irreducible, and therefore in a real sense infinite, difference between them, or we could say it is an experience of two completely different beings that are nonetheless embraced in a perfect unity. Being as such in its concrete totality emerges right in the center of the event of the transcendentals, since it shows itself to be the ground of both the unity and the difference of the beings: it is by being that I exist, and it is by being that you exist, and it is therefore by being that we have communion without having to merge into an abstract identity. This, then, is the manifestation of the ontological difference as a whole without reduction. And if the ontological difference comes to light, then the whole of being comes to light, not

as an abstract concept but as a dramatic event. In a nutshell, then, we could say that any real experience of the transcendentals is an irruption of the whole of being, insofar as the transcendentals are instances of reciprocal causality, which is the unity of parts that remain really distinct, and such a unity in difference and difference in unity is an entry into the ontological difference.!”° If we deny any part of this connection, we lose the whole. Reciprocal

causality, as manifesting the totality of being that comprehends it, is dramatic because it is ontological, and it is ontological because it is dramatic. The notio entis that Fabro sought as the foundation for the transcendentals (and thus, as he shows, the foundation of the philosophical act in general) is shown here to be given not before the transcendentals, but simultaneously with them, because it is given concretely, and the transcendentals are the concrete experience of the totality of being.

173. From a very different perspective, Péltner arrives at a similar conclusion in relation specifically to beauty. For him, beauty, since it has its locus in the convenientia between the soul and being (which we might interpret as reciprocity), discloses the “onto-logical” difference, i.e., the unity of the difference between being (ontos) and thinking (logos): Schénbett, 170.

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Anamnedts ts oudsiad and conversto ad rem (The recollection of being

ano the turning back to the real) But the child’s first experience, though “fateful” for everything that follows, is by no means where the drama ends. It is the nature of the transcendentals that the “matter” they express can never cease to be a matter of concern. To say that being is good, true, beautiful, and one — because

of the transcendental paradox —is not a mere truism that refers only to being in general, and not to the specific case at hand. If the transcendentals are ontological, they say something about being in its transcendent totality, but also about the historical unfolding of being in time. That is why it is impossible to speak “dispassionately” about the transcendentals. To detach oneself from them is to falsify them. I cannot say that being is good and true without making a concrete judgment about my particular historical situation. There lies, then, an inalienable tension within the transcendentals, which is implicit in the ontological difference discussed above. They are both universal and (mercilessly) particular. Both aspects receive attention from Balthasar.

On the one hand, as Saint-Pierre has shown at length, Balthasar approaches these fundamental attributes of being in an uncompromisingly concrete manner.!“4 Whereas Heidegger seems always to push past the “factical” instances of truth (the truth of the subject-object relation) in his

concern for the Wahrheit des Seyns (Truth of Being), Balthasar insists that we cannot say that being as being is true (or good, or beautiful) unless being is also true right here, in an irreducible way:

No metaphysics of being qua being and of its transcendental determinations is separable from concrete experience, which is always sensuous. The truth and the openness of being as a whole will be seen only where a judgment is made about some precise thing that is true; the goodness of being will be experienced only where something that is good meets one, something that simultaneously brings near the good and (through its finitude, fragility, lack of goodness) takes it away again. It is from the experience of the senses that we know that the beautiful exists: this experience makes it present to us and takes it away from us again, discloses it and conceals it in various layers of depth, freely and incomprehensibly — first of all as the individual attractive form or a particular mood and capacity to receive; 174. Saint-Pierre says that a concrete approach to the transcendentals is one of the most remarkable characteristics of Balthasar’s first dealings with the subject (Beauté, bonté, vérité, 109), and it is an approach he never abandoned.

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then in a more hidden manner, where something unremarkable... suddenly betrays a secret beauty; most intimately, when what is crude, what is explicitly ugly, what is painful to the point of meaninglessness, the experience of being handed over to what is vulgar and humiliating, can appear as assimilated into a totality which can and must be accepted positively — without artificial sweetening, just as it is.!7°

On the other hand, though it may seem simple enough to make a judgment about a particular thing as good or true, without having to judge the whole as such, it is not in fact the case that one avoids such a judgment. Rather, if one does not make it explicitly, one makes it implicitly. The sev-

erance of particular instances of truth, beauty, and goodness from the meaning of being as a whole would in some degree be a rejection of their “transcendental” status. But this means that they are removed from their ontological depth, and by the very same stroke, they are removed from their circumincessive relationship with one another. We have seen how the transcendentals flatten, dry up, and turn cold when they separate from each other. If in fact they have not done so in a particular case, it is because

their relation has been preserved implicitly: not that one has avoided a judgment about the whole but that one is “living off of the capital” of the judgment that has been made in fundamental experiences. This is what gives rise to the inalienable tension in the transcendentals, which is an echo of the ontological difference itself. The truth, goodness, and beauty of any particular being can be judged so only in light of the meaning of the whole, and yet if such is to be the meaning of being as a whole, it requires that I —part of that whole— make a judgment right here and right now. It is not uncommon to find the claim in commentators on Balthasar

that the ultimate mystery of the meaning of the whole of being dwarfs all attempts at grasping it, and that the greatest truth we can grasp is the humble knowledge that we do not know.!”° This is not altogether false, but the situation in Balthasar seems more paradoxical, and therefore more

dramatic. The real humility is not only this willingness to open oneself to the greater mystery of being, beyond all one’s grasping, but simultaneously the receptivity to the favk of affirming that meaning in a responsi-

ble way in history: “The incomprehensible coincidence [in being] of 175. GL 4:28—29. 176. See, for example, Saint-Pierre, Beauté, bonté, vérité, 341-42, who argues for a

reductio ad mystertum (reduction to mystery) in Balthasar. This is in one sense legitimate, but it is so only if we deal with the paradox that, for Balthasar, it is only the case that truth is mystery because at the same time mystery is truth.

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fullness and emptiness . . . demands, as the irreplaceable foundation of any metaphysic, a constant active humility which neither gives up all claim

to the truth nor in any sense whatever makes itself master of ultimate, quasi-divine truth.”!/7 The tension implied in the concrete “living out” of the transcendentals leads us to a final point: namely, that the transcendentals entail a risk. There are two aspects to this risk. The first aspect is that, along the lines of what we saw above, to affirm the transcendentals is to affirm a meaning that embraces all things, and this means that it must include not only whatever may come in the future and whatever there was in the past, but also all of the concrete realities that seem to contradict that meaning, sometimes in ways that seem absolute, ways that seem irremediably swallowed

up in boredom, and ways that are painful. What Balthasar says about beauty could be said about all the transcendentals: Let us be clear about what the intellectual decision in favor of such a supposition, that being as a whole is beautiful, presupposes. Is such

a supposition not contradicted a thousand times each day by the shrillness of all that is ugly, that is warped, that is hopelessly mediocre and vulgar? And is not there an act of transcending, a quality of transcendence, in this limitless supposition, which has something utopian,

heroic or indeed something of faith about it? For this is a commitment to that which exists av a whole, no matter how it presents itself to the individual.!”8 The affirmation of the transcendentals is inseparable, then, from committing oneself to the meaning of the whole, which is in some respect an act of faith, and in many cases an act of heroism. Insofar as being in its totality cannot be made manifest except in terms of its concrete meaning, the overcoming of Seinyvergesenhett (forgetfulness of being) and the recovery of the deep source of metaphysics, which Heidegger never tired of insisting on, are possible only through such an act. To be “guardians of being,” as Balthasar puts it, means standing for the meaning of being: its beauty, its goodness — and its truth. The subjective correlate, as it were, to the transcendentals is the soul's “readiness for anything,” a kind of a priori assent, which I have touched on in, for example, the concluding

section of chapter 2.!”? At this point, we see that this assent is not in the first place an achievement of something that was never there before, 177. GL 4:404_5. 178. Ibid., 20. 179. Balthasar makes this point in relation to the transcendentals in GL 5:608.

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but is more profoundly a recollection (anamnesis) of the original gift, an experience that will never cease to be new. The second aspect follows from this. Whoever is open to the meaning of being must remain open to the meaning of history. Since the meaning of being is transcendent and comprehensive only if it at the same time includes all the concrete particularities that are here and that are to come, standing for the meaning of being requires a certain vulnerability to the events of history, and endless patience in exposing one’s heart in openness to the truth, beauty, and goodness of whatever may arrive, in whatever guise. It is easy, in difficult situations, to “detach” oneself from the truth or goodness of particular instances because of a general affirmation of the truth or goodness of the whole, to think that, because one has affirmed the meaning of the whole, one does not need to “take the risk” of receiv-

ing the truth or goodness that lies even here, in a form that is perhaps fraught with painful ambiguities. For Balthasar, this vulnerability falls as a special task particularly to Christians: “Christianity by its own nature possesses the power and the responsibility of arming the spirit against this kind of abuse of detachment and to disarm the heart so that it becomes purely receptive —even, and precisely, to pain and deprivation.”!5° This task belongs especially to Christians because, in Christianity, God is not the being that is sought in abstraction from beings, but is different from

the difference itself between being and beings. God is thus free to be revealed in the “poverty and wealth” of the mystery of being in itself, but

is also free to enter into the particularity of beings and the vicissitudes of history. And, moreover, he is free in this movement to call those who wish to follow him there. The paradox of the transcendentals is the opening up of being, in man’s dramatic engagement in the world, to the God who is the lord of unity, beauty, goodness, and truth, because he is Trinity —in other words, because he himself is drama.

180. Ibid., 632-33.

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Conclusion The Dramatic Structure of Truth

The question that has been driving this book's thesis from beginning to end, as its accompanying measure and judge is: How do we get to the heart of things? The question is the question concerning the structure of truth, insofar as truth expresses the most profound relationship between the cognitive soul and reality. There is no other relationship that a human being

has to anyone or anything at all that is not mediated by a conception of truth. The nature of that conception, thus, brings itself to bear on all areas of existence, even, and perhaps especially, on those in which the question of truth receives the least explicit attention. The argument of this book can be summed up simply: The structure of truth is a set of relations. To the extent that those constitutive relations are not conceived as dramatic, the members of those relations will inevitably find themselves reduced. When they are so reduced, the relations are compromised and truth ceases

to be truth. In other words, to the extent that a conception of truth is reductive, it has the logical form of the forgetfulness of being and the forgetfulness of man. If violence is the fracturing of relationship, the rejection of the integrity of a relationship’s members, then truth so conceived is a subtle and yet profound form of violence. A dramatic model of truth avoids reduction because it designates a complex whole, a Gestalt. Drama is the inward relation of parts that resist one another, and at the same time a resolving union that releases into ever-greater difference. In a dramatic model of truth, no aspect of the known object remains a matter of indifference to the knower, and no aspect gets merely 422

assimilated to the knower in the cognitive act. The object, in its integrity, calls on the subject, in his integrity, and so the event of the relation comes to pass only through an inspiration, a decision, and a bearing of fruit. The dramatic resources in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar have possibilities that extend far beyond the problems that have been addressed

in this book. But there are three aspects of his understanding of drama that are significant for an adequate conception of truth. First, Balthasar expresses drama philosophically as the mutual implication of the two meta-

physical principles, esse sequitur agere and agere sequitur esse. Action both gives rise to and follows upon ontological depths. If action is engagement and relation, the coincidence of these principles means that subject

and object are both cause and effect of each other in a way that cannot finally be reduced to a single beginning or end. Instead, they are both embraced in an event that has the essential character of gift. Second, the encounter itself and its result must be accounted for in terms of both the subj ect and obj ect together, and so cannot occur finally in only the one or the other, but must occur in both, which means the encounter and its result have their place in a mutually transcendent third. Because this third transcends both subject and object, each can transcend the other even in their union. Moreover, because the whole transcends the subject, it must involve

not only the subject's “theoretical” reason, but his will, his committing himself in action. The place of truth, conceived dramatically, is the realm

of concrete action, the stage on which ideas are unfolded in space and time. Third, because truth is not concrete in the reductive sense, that is, not in the conventional sense of particularity av oppoved to universality, it

involves an intrinsic relation between transcendence and immanence, between absolute, definitive meaning and shifting, partial, and unpredictable circumstances. It thus requires a dramatic decision that embraces definitively the transcendent meaning and embodies it inmanently. This must occur not in a way that removes one from the gravity and ambiguity of historical circumstances, but in a way that exposes one all the more vulnerably to them. It is perhaps useful to point out explicitly how the preceding chapters have developed a concept of truth that is dramatic along these three lines. 1. For truth to be dramatic, there can be no element whatsoever involved in the truth relation that has a final completion “already,” merely, and statically in itself. Rather, each part must indeed find final completion in ctvelf, but only in relation to the others. This relation to others cannot be a temporary means to its own completion; it must subsist in the permanent tension that arises from mutual self-reception and -gift. For each element, then, the other remains prior within a simultaneity of self and other. This Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth m= 423

is what this book has called reciprocal causality. Often, the problem of truth is dealt with only after having already conceded a “static” understanding of the component members of the relation. The first task of a dramatic sense of truth is therefore to bring the basic components to life. Thus, in chapter 1 we began with the inner and irreducible difference that is constitutive of Being in general and all beings in particular. If we look at the fourfold difference particularly in the light of the transcendentals discussed in chapter 5, as an event of reciprocity that is both dramatic and ontological —dramatic becawe it is ontological, and vice versa—we can see that the otherness implied in the difference is primarily a perfection of being. Affirming a permanent and irreducible difference is what allows us to avoid Hegelian dialectic even while making “external” relation a matter of internal significance. Because of the “gift” character of the fourfold difference, then, action is not a subsequent, external addition to being, but the manifestation and in some sense the achievement of its very meaning. It follows that what is involved in any concrete instance of truth is not (only) the “ontic” or phenomenal surfaces of things, but the 4eart of objects,

their ontological depths. Correspondingly, we saw in chapter 2 that it is the whole of the person who is put in play from the beginning of conscious life. The person, and in particular his unity of consciousness, is constituted in the event of mutual giving and receiving in love. Such an event marks the birth of consciousness, and it therefore forms the inner character of every subsequent intentional act. As the source, so the fruits. Because the w/ole person is involved in this comprehensive activity, it is artificial to separate the intellect and will (chapter 5), or even the intellect and senses (chapter 4). Rather, the intellect itself always already has its own, distinct integrity only within its concrete relation with the will and senses. This means that the resultant “unity” of consciousness is always given simultaneously from above

and from below, a priori and a posteriori. Consciousness, then, is the gift of being to the soul and the gift of the soul to being. 2. In chapter 3 we saw that the event of these “reciprocal gifts” constitutes a single, fluid whole that is greater than their sum. This is, as it were,

the kernel of the dramatic conception of truth. It is dramatic because the subject must first await, and be receptive to, the spontaneous epiphany of the object. Such epiphany occurs, however, only in the context of the subject's ek-static judgment and committing of himself. Because the union of the subject and object happens where they Joth transcend themselves, it can never be reduced simply to the one or the other. Rather, it is (necessarily!) creative. The whole that is greater than the sum of its parts is what brings life to those parts— makes their relation a life-giving exchange — 424 wu Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

and involves them both in a fruitfulness that surpasses and surprises them horizontally and vertically. Thus, truth is never an immediate union that can dispense with an abiding mediation; it is never intimacy without a simultaneous distance. To say that truth ultimately is a Gestalt, then, is to say that it has its ewential locus in the concrete realm, which is as it were the intersection of vertical

and horizontal transcendence. Because of this twofold transcendence, truth cannot come to pass without action, and without the patience of space and time. In fact, what makes truth a gift is what makes it a matter (also) of action in time and space: if it is not something one simply already has, something reduced to one’s inner structures, then one must go outside of oneself to receive it. 3. To insist that truth must be, in every case, concrete, however, does not mean that we reduce it to a mere “ontic” occurrence. In order for truth to be truth, indeed, it must be the manifestation of the ontological depths of things, the appearance of their ultimate inner ground. How is it possible for deing to appear without being reduced to appearance? We cannot answer this question by means of a v/atic approach, which would inevitably place being and appearance next to each other as two different “phenom-

ena, two things of the same order. Nor can we say that the nonappearing ground, the depths of the being of things, is something that the knower infers or merely posits on the basis of a thing’s (mere) appearance. Rather, the unity-in-difference and difference-in-unity of ground and appearance can be revealed only by means of a dramatic event. I described this event in the last two chapters as the ultimate human act correlated to the ultimate act of being. In both “sides” of this event, it is the joining of the transcendent and immanent, or absolute and relative, by means of an exces that is given in a particular act. Thus, the foundational act that both reveals the ontological dimension of truth and invites the knower into those depths is the grasping of a whole that is both in and beyond the particular through the act of a subject that gives himself as a whole in and beyond the particular instance. In chapter 4, we viewed this gift of self in terms of the dramatic task of

meta-anthropology: one can give oneself as a whole only if one gives more (meta-) than oneself, and such can occur only in the definitive commitment to a whole larger than oneself. If it is only through such a deed that a person fully appears to himself as he most fundamentally is, and if

a grasp of self in self-presence is required in order to grasp anything else at all in its ontological truth, then the drama of meta-anthropology is the real foundation of epistemology. It is, in this respect, the fulfillment of what I took to be the form of self-consciousness in chapter 2. We have Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth m= 425

seen that, for Balthasar, the paradigmatic instance of the meta-anthropological task is the definitive decision for the Urgestalt of a permanent state of life. It is the epistemological role played by Being unto death in Heidegger and martyrdom in Plato that first reveals the philosophical implications of drama and the states of life in Balthasar. This choosing of a state of life, in turn, reveals the depths of the analogous forms in Plato and Heidegger, and moreover it gives the clearest interpretation of the indispensable role Balthasar assigns to art, and especially the theater. In every case, what is at issue is the revelation of the whole of man in his irreducible tensions (body and soul in particular) by being at the same time a revelation of what is more than man, and thus of 4eing itself. There is an excess in meta-

anthropology; it is that excess that makes it essentially communal, and relates it directly to ontology. A definitive decision about existence as a whole, insofar as such a whole must always be a “more” than the whole, can be made only against a greater

horizon. Meta-anthropology is thus in turn dependent on the ultimate meaning of being as revealed in the transcendentals, which is the theme of chapter 5. Against the tendency to reduce the intelligible aspect of being

to an inert finitude, and to juxtapose to that finitude (which one calls “truth”) an infinite striving in the good, which lies beyond being and there-

fore beyond truth, we saw that being is itself dramatic to its core, that its very meaning is self-transcendence. The excess that is the meaning of being is what allows the excess of meta-anthropology. This insight connects the end with the beginning: existence is the gift of being given. The key notion of this last chapter is reciprocal causality, a notion that serves In a succinct way to synthesize the whole inasmuch as reciprocal causality represents the inner logic of both Gestalt and drama. If we see truth as having its essential place within the event of beauty, and thus goodness, then truth itself acquires the character of being an instance of reciprocal causality. This has three immediate implications. First, it is reciprocal causality that makes truth a relation with two termini, which is what most clearly establishes its dramatic structure. The alternative is to posit truth as a relation with a single terminus, presumably in the mind or soul, a conception that cannot avoid various forms of false immediacies and reductions, and in the end falling into a kind of abstraction. Second, if reciprocal causality is what frees truth from becoming sheerly abstract,

it is because it makes it concrete: truth, precisely because of its transcendent depth, can occur always only in the particular encounter between subject and object, in which they each await the other for their own mean-

ing and thus grow together (con-crescere). Third, it is this reciprocal causality that most deeply secures the gift character of truth, what makes 426 wu Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

it an event, and therefore something that of its very essence inspires wonder. It does so by being the manifestation of the ontological difference, the

becoming-real of the meaning of being. In contrast to Heidegger, who affirms that Being reveals its truth most properly in negativity — the experience of the withdrawing of all beings — Balthasar affirms that Being is

most properly revealed in the joy of mutual, and thus dramatic, relation between beings. Reviewing the various aspects of a dramatic, as opposed to reductive, con-

ception of truth, we can say in sum that truth, in its fullness, requires as its point of departure not a skeptical distance or a parceling out of finite conditions of possibility, but an a priori yes to the whole, that is, an infinite positivity that allows all relative instances of truth to show their ontological depth. Furthermore, it requires a refusal to set the absolute aspects of truth in opposition to its relative aspects, a refusal to divide the transcendent from the immanent or the ontological from the ontic. Instead, it insists that truth is just as much a matter of becoming as of being: As Balthasar

puts it, “both being and becoming belong with equal justification to the full image of truth.”! Finally, a whole can be affirmed only by a whole. If a dramatic sense of truth requires on the objective side an affirmation of the whole of truth, the affirmation itself cannot be made in indifferent detachment in an abstract sense, but must be understood as the total commitment of one's being, body and soul, to a task, a readiness to stake one’s life for what is needed for the truth of the whole. In conclusion, looking for the point of intersection of these three require-

ments for a dramatic conception of truth, we return once again in the end to the child, whose heart alone is small enough to comprehend everything. In one of his earliest essays, Nietzsche spoke of the triumvirate of persons most responsible for the renewal of culture: the saint, the philosopher, and the artist, whom we might see as the “guardians” of goodness, truth, and beauty.” Almost by miracle, we find individual testimonies from each converging precisely on this same point. Thérése of Lisieux, the Little Flower, was presented with a basket of various items and asked which of them she would like most. As one who had decided definitively to be in the world in the mode of a child, she answered, “I choose all.” In the Sophist, Plato raises the question of whether the uw/timate intelligible reality has to be immutable or mutable (.e., a matter of being or becoming). After l. TL 1:175. 2. Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as educator (1874),” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), sec. 5, 156-61.

Conclusion: The Dramatic Structure of Truth m= 427

showing why each possibility would have to be affirmed in spite of the fact that they seem to contradict each other, Plato says that the philosopher “has to be “tke a child begging for ‘both,’ and say that that which ts — everything —is as many things as are unmoved and moved.”® F inally,

the artist, Claudel, presents the child Dofia Seven Swords as the fruit of the great love and the great suffering of The Satin Slipper’s protagonists Rodrigue and Dofia Prouhéze. Amid the waters (of the world’s mystery and truth) that flood the entire series of scenes for the duration of the last act, the fourth day, she is the only one that this immense sea does not threaten or overwhelm. Quite to the contrary, made light by the water, she swims effortlessly across the sea to join the armies of John of Austria, where she is needed: There's only one thing necessary, and the rest doesn't matter. What use is it to look idly around, to dawdle eternally like an amateur with a paint brush in hand, adding a little color here and there? And when you're done, to pack up your re-finishing gear and go doodle somewhere else? There's only one thing necessary, and that is having someone who asks everything of you and to whom you are able to give everything. Onwards! En avant!

3. Plato, The Sophist, 249d (translation modified; emphasis on the phrase “like a child” is mine). 4. Claudel, Le voulter de satin, 381.

428 w Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth

Bibliography

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Trilogy For the works listed below by Balthasar that have been translated, the English is given first (except in the case of Theologtk volume 1), and the German (or French) is given in brackets. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. 7 vols. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-

Merikakis, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, Oliver Davies, Francis McDonagh, John Saward, Martin Simon, and Rowan Williams. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982-91. [Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Asthetik. 3 vols. Ein-

siedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961-69. ] Vol. 1: Seeing the Form. [1. Schau der Gestalt. | Vol. 2: Theological Styles: Clerical Styles. (2,1. Facher der Stile: I. Klertkale Stile. | Vol. 3: Studtes in Theological Style: Lay Styles. (2,2. Facher der Stile: IT. Latkale Stile. |

Vol. 4: The Realm of Metaphysics tn Antigutty. [3/1,1. Im Raum der Metaphystk: I. Altertum. | Vol. 5: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. {3/1,2. Im Raum der Metaphystk: IT, Neuzett. | Vol. 6: Theology: The Old Covenant. [3/2,1. Alter Bund. | Vol. 7: Theology: The New Covenant. [3/2,2. Neuer Bund. |

Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory. 5 vols. Translated by Graham Har-

rison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988—98. [Teodramattk. 4 vols. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1973-83. | 429

Vol. 1: Prolegomena. [1. Prolegomena. | Vol. 2: Dramatis Personae: Man tn God. [2,1. Die Personen des Sptels: Der Mensch in Gott. | Vol. 3: Dramatis Personae: Persons tn Christ. [2,2. Die Personen des Sptels: Dee Personen in Christus. | Vol. 4: The Action. [3. Die Handlung. | Vol. 5: The Final Act. [A. Das Endsprel. |

Theologtk. 3 vols. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1985-87. [Vol. 1 has been published in an English translation: Theologic: Theological Logical Theory. Vol. 1: Truth of the World. Translated by Adrian J. Walker. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000. | Vol. 1: Wahrheit der Welt. [Originally published as Wahrheit: Ein Versuch. Bk.

1: Wahrheit der Welt. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Verlagsanstalt Benziger, 1947. ]

Vol. 2: Wahrheit Gottes. [Not published in English, but translation of title is The Truth of Goo. |

Vol. 3. Der Getst der Wahrhett. [Not published in English, but translation of title is The Spirit of Truth. |

Eptlog. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1987.

Other Works by Balthasar Cited in the Present Study “Abschied von Gustav Siewerth.” Hochland 56 (1963): 182-84. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studten zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. 3 vols.

3rd ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998. Vol. 1: Der deutsche Toealtsmus. Vol. 2. Im Zetchen Nietzsches. Vol. 3. Die Vergéttlichung des Todes.

“Auch die Siinde: Zum Erosproblem bei Charles Morgan und Paul Claudel.” Stimmen der Zett 69 (1939): 222-37. The Christian State of Life. Translated by Mary Frances McCarthy. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983. [Chrwtlicher Stand. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1977. | “Dank des Preistrigers an der Verleihung des Wolfgang Amadeus MozartPreises am 22. Mai 1987 in Innsbruck.” In Elio Guerriero, Hany Urs von Balthasar: Eine Monographie. Translated by Carl Franz Miiller. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1993. Der Christ und ove Angst. 6th ed. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1989. Die Entwicklung der mustkaltschen Idee: Versuch etner Synthese der Mustk (1925),

Bekenntnis zu Mozart (1955). Freiburg, Germany: Johannes Verlag; repr. Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1999.

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“Die Metaphysik Erich Przywaras.” Schweiz. Rundschau 6 (1933): 489-99. “Evangelium und Philosophie.” Fretburger Zeitschrift fiir Philosophie und Theolo-

gle 23 (1976): 3-12. “The Fathers, Scholastics, and Ourselves.” Communi: International Catholtc Review 24 (Summer 1997): 347-96. [“Patristik, Scholastik und wir.” Theology der Zeit 3 (1939): 65-104. ]

“Geist und Feuer: Ein Gesprach mit Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Interview. Herder Korrespondenz 30 (1976): 72-82. The Grain of Wheat: Aphorisms. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San

Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Das Wetzenkorn. Lucerne, Switzerland: Raber, 1944.] “Heideggers Philosophie vom Standpunkt des Katholizismus.” Stommen der Zett 137 (1940): 1-8. “Jenseits von Kontemplation und Aktion?” /nternationale Katholtsche Zettschreft Communwo 2 (1973): 16-22. Kosmtsche Iiturgte: Das Weltbuld Maximus’ des Bekenners. 2nd ed. Einsiedeln,

Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1961. Love Alone: The Way of Revelation. Translated by Alexander Dru. London: Sheed and Ward, 1968. [Glaubhaft wt nur Iaebe. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1963. | Martin Buber and Christianity. London: Harvill Press, 1961. [Ecnvame Zwiesprache:

Martin Buber und das Christentum. Cologne/Olten, Germany/Switzerland: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1958. | “Movement toward God.” In Explorations tn Theology. Vol. 3: Spiritus Creator. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993. [“Bewegung zu Gott.” Skizzen zur Theologte IIT: Spiritus Creator. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1967. ]

My Work: In Retrospect. Translated by Kelly Hamilton, et al. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993. [Mein Werk: Durchblicke. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1990. | “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time.” Translated by Brian McNeil. Communvwo: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 147-87. [Von den Aufgaben der Katholtschen Philosophie tn der Zeit. 2nd ed. Einsiedeln,

Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1998. Originally published in 1946. ] Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of Hts Writings. Translated by Robert

J. Daley. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1984. [Origineds, Getst und Feuer: Ein Aufbau aus setnen Werken. Salzburg, Austria: Otto Miiller, 1938. ] Parole et Mystere chez Origéne Paris: Ed. du Cerf, 1957.

“Pers6nlichkeit und Form.” Gloria Det 7 (1952): 1-15. “Philosophy, Christianity, Monasticism.” In Explorations tn Theology. Vol. 2: The Spouse of the Word. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. [“Philosophie, Christentum, Ménchtum.” Skizzen zur Theologte IT: Sponsa Verbt. Einsiedeln,

Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1960. |

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Presence and Thought: An Essay on the Reltgtous Philosophy of Gregory of Nyssa.

Translated by Mark Sebanc. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. [Présence et Pensée: Essai sur la Philosophie Reltgteuse de Grégotre de Nysse. Paris: Beauchesne, 1942. ]

“Regagner une philosophie a partir de la théologie.” Pour une phtlosophte chrétienne: Philosophie et théologte. Namur, Belgium: Culture et Vérité, 1983. “A Résumé of My Thought.” In Hane von Balthasar: His Life and Work, edited

by David Schindler. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. Test Everything: Hold Fast to What Is Good. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. [Priifet alles: Das Gute behaltet. Osthildern, Germany: Schwabenverlag, 1986. | Theological Anthropology. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967. [Das Ganze tm Fragment. Avpekte der Geschichtstheologte. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Benziger, 1963. | The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation. Translated by Edward Oakes. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992. [Karl Barth. 4th ed. Einsiedeln,

Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1976. ] “A Theology of the Counsels.” Pt. I: Cross Currents (Spring 1966): 213—36; pt. II: (Summer 1966): 325-37 [“Zur Theologie des Ratestandes.” Wagnus der Nachfolge. Edited by Stephan Richter. Paderborn, Germany: Ferdinand Schéning, 1964.] Unless You Become Like This Child. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. [Wenn thr nicht werdet wie dteses Kind. Ost-

fildern, Germany: Schwabenverlag, 1989.]

Select Books, Articles, and Dissertations on Themes in Balthasar Related to the Present Study Bauer, Emmanuel. “Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988): Sein philosophisches Werk.” In Chrustliche Philosophie un katholtschen Denken des 19. Und 20. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 3: Moderne Strémungen un 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Emerich

Coreth, Walter M. Neidl, Georg Pfligersdorffer. Graz, Austria: Verlag Styria, 1990. Bieler, Martin. “The Future of the Philosophy of Being.” Communvo: International Catholic Review 26 (Fall 1999): 455-85. . “Meta-anthropology and Christology: On the Philosophy of Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Communuw: International Catholic Review 20 (Spring 1993): 129-46. Brugnoli, Andrea. Hany Urs von Balthasar: La spontanetta delle cose. Rome: Casa Editrice Leonardo da Vinci, 2001. Campodonico, Angelo. “La filosofia di Tomaso d’Aquino nell’interpretazione di Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Rivwta 0¢ Storia della Filosofia Medtevale 18 (1992):

379-401. Capol, Cornelia. Hans Urs von Balthasar: Bibliographte 1925-1990. Freiburg, Ger-

many: Johannes Verlag E/insiedeln, 1990.

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Chantraine, Georges. “Lépilogue de la trilogie: ‘Une bouteille lancée a la mer.’” Transversalités: Revue de UInstitut Catholique de Parts 63 (1997): 24-36. Daigler, Matthew A. “Heidegger and Von Balthasar: A Lover’s Quarrel over Beauty and Divinity.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995): 375-94.

Danet, Henriette. “Le concept de figure dans la gloire et la croix de Urs von Balthasar.” Photocopy. Institut Catholique de Paris, 1979. Disse, Jérg-P. “Liebe und Erkenntnis: Zur Geistesmetaphysik Hans Urs von Balthasars.” MMtinchner Theologtsche Zettschrift 54, no. 3 (1999): 215-27. . Metaphystk der Singularttat: Eine Hinftibrung am Lettfaden der Philosophie Hans Urs von Balthasars. Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996.

Faber, Eva- Maria. “El ‘Apocalipsis del alma alemana’ de Balthasar como desvelamiento mitico de la verdad.” In Homenaje a Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Buenos Aires: Centro Salesiano de Estudios “San Juan Bosco,” 1998. . “EL SUniversale Concretum’ en Balthasar.” Proyecto 30 (May—August

1998): 223-37. Fares, Diego Javier. “Fenomenologifa de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar: Una gufa de lectura de ‘Verdad del mundo’ desde la perspectiva de la verdad como desvelamiento y velamiento del ser.” Stromata 51 (1995): 181-259.

. “Fenomenologia de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (2).” Stromata 52 (1996): 173-219. . “Fenomenologia de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (3).” Stromata 53 (1997): 45-117. . “Fenomenologia de la verdad en H. U. von Balthasar (4).” Stromata 53 (1997): 277-307. . “La configuracién de la verdad como desvelamiento y velamiento del ser en los primeros escritos de Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Stromata 51 (1995):

89-122. Faux, Jean-Marie. “Un théologien: Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Nouvelle Revue Théologtque 10 (1972): 1009-30.

Gabellieri, Emmanuel. “Ontologie de l’image et phénoménologie de la vérité (A la lumiére de H. U. von Balthasar).” Theophilyon 93 (1971): 225-4. Gadient, Lorenz. “Wahrheit als Anruf der Freiheit: Hans Urs von Balthasars theodramatischer Erkenntnisbegriff in vergleichender Auseinandersetzung mit der transzendentalphilosophischen Erkenntniskritik Reinhard Lauths.” Ph.D. diss., Ludwig-Maximilian- Universitat, Munich, 1997. Gardner, Lucy, and David Moss. “Something Like Time, Something Like the Sexes — An Essay in Reception.” In Balthasar at the End of Modernity. Edin-

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Gilbert, Paul. “L’articulation des transcendantaux selon Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Revue Thomuste 86 (1986): 616-29.

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. “Wahrheit und Spiel: Zur Philosophie und Ethik Hans Urs von Balthasars.” In Gott fiir dle Welt: Henri de Luthac, Gustav Stewerth, und Hans Urs yon Balthasar in thren Grundlagen: Festschrift ftir Walter Setdel, edited by Peter

Reifenberg and Anton von Hooft. Mainz, Germany: Matthias-GriinewaldVerlag, 2001. Greisch, Jean. “Un tournant phénoménologique de la théologie?” Tranuversalités: Revue de (Institut Catholique de Parts 62 (1997): 81. Guerriero, Elio. Hans Urs von Balthasar: Eine Monographie. Translated by Carl

Franz Miiller. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Johannes Verlag, 1993. Haas, Alois. “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s ‘Apocalypse of the German Soul.’” In Hans Urs von Balthasar: Hts Life and Work, edited by David L. Schindler.

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53-73. Ide, Pascal. tre et mystére: La philosophie de Hans Urs von Balthasar. Brussells: Culture et Vérité, 1995. Imperatori, Mario. “Heidegger dans la ‘Dramatique divine’ de Hans Urs von Balthasar.” Nouvelle Revue Théologtque 122 (2000): 191-210.

Kerr, Fergis. “Foreword: Addressing This ‘Giddy Synthesis.’” In Balthasar at the End of Modernity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999.

Lochbrunner, Manfred. “Gustav Sieverth im Spiegel von Hans Urs von Balthasar.” In /m Ringen um dte Wabhrhett: Festschrift der Gustav-StewerthAkademie zum 70. Geburtstag threr Griinderin und Letterin Prof. Dr. Alma von Stockhausen, edited by Remigius Baumer, J. Hans Benirschke, and Tadeusz

Guz. Weilheim-Bierbronnen: Private Printing, 1997. Lubac, Henri de. “A Witness of Christ in the Church: Hans Urs von Balthasar.” In The Church: Paradox and Mystery, translated by James R. Dunne. Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1968. MacKinnon, Donald. “Some Reflections on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Chris-

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Index

Action, 13, 30, 74—77, 217; as disclosing 692110, 71, 75, 78n142, 98n7, 107,

Being, 19, 127, 414, 424; as key to 116764, 126, 132, 133n115, 149-51, analogy, 144; as unity of Being, 166, 167, 171-72, 173, 174, 180, 181, 88-93, 163-64; as dramatic, 314-15, 184752, 191, 192-93, 195, 198, 201, 319; as place of truth, 423, 425; and 211, 218, 2192130, 220, 229,

judgment, 225 233n154, 2342157, 249, 2507196,

Actualism, 25n75, 76 251, 261, 267n28, 268, 269, 272, 273, Aertsen, Jan A., 1517159, 233n156, 278, 315n147, 3412207, 344, 350, 352nn5,7, 353, 354, 355n27, 356, 351, 352, 353-54, 556, 357-58, 360, 557, 358, 359, 374-76, 378n88, 380, 562, 364751, 366, 374-83, 388, 390,

588n116, 391, 394, 403 591, 594-96, 398, 403, 404—405,

Aeschylus, 2585 408409, 413-14

Agent intellect, 41, 130, 148, 150, Aristotle, 17745, 27, 59, 702113, 75, 83, 150n154, 154n167, 182, 190, 240-41, 92, 108-10, 116-17, 136, 148, 150,

552n10 160, 164, 166, 167, 168, 175, 191,

Ameriks, Karl, 102217, 103219 192-93, 198, 201, 206, 21172110, 228,

Anaxagoras, 148 234n159, 237, 2382167, 2402171, Andia, Ysabel de, 3367197 241, 248, 2542203, 261, 266, 268,

Analogy of being (analogia entis), 9, 272, 273, 277n50, 287n75, 320, 3523,

4849, 49n63, 53n71, 54-55, 72, 553, 356n32, 358, 378, 388

152-53, 244, 313, 36144 Artist, 427-28 Angst, 37, 45, 45n50, 87n172, 296-99, Attunement: of consciousness to being,

505-307, 322, 5328, 407 122-23, 123783, 199

Aquila, Richard, 103, 104226 Augustine, Saint, 29, 192 (epigraph), Aquinas, Thomas, 11, 28, 29, 36223, 40, 213, 216, 269, 291, 350 (epigraph) 47n58, 56, 59, 60, 61n91, 667104, Authenticity, 2112110, 236, 300, 304

447

Baader, Franz Xaver von, 133117 “Christian distinction,” 2585

Bacon, Roger, 147 Circumincession, 350, 368-74 passim,

Balzac, Honoré de, 216n121 410

Barth, Karl, 279-81, 286, 290, 291 Clarke, Norris, 7172119, 173226 Bauer, Emmanuel, 2873, 173, 200787 Claudel, Paul, 12, 74-75, 143, 164, 242, Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 169715 24344, 2492194, 255 (epigraph),

Beauty: as transcendental property, 279-81, 286, 331, 3367197, 428 124-25, 188, 234, 354-55, 355n27, Cogtto, 110, 133 361-65, 368-70; and call to decision, Cohen, Leonard, 3342194 328-29; as union of goodness and Communication, 63—66 truth, 397, 401, 407; as reciprocal Community (communion), 91-92, 120, causality, 405; as core of drama, 406; 142, 227, 252-54

as groundless, 406; as “beyond Co-naissance, 243

being,” 414-15 Confinium, 260

Beck, Heinrich, 2397169 Consciousness, 41, 62, 96-162 passim, Being: and action, 19-20, 76; and his- 292n85, 333, 343-44; and God, 121, tory, 30, 52; as esse / actus essendt, 30, 131-36; and Being, 121—22; as joy,

40, 47n58, 75-76, 82, 93, 172, 127; as rooted in the heart, 290; as 299-23, 267, 341n207, 416; as analo- pre-reflective, 144 gta entis, 49; as united to conscious- Contemplation: and action, 46, 115,

ness, 110, 132; as non-subsistent, 140 223, 250 Beiser, Frederick, 103n22, 154n167 Continental philosophy, 1, 8 Bieler, Martin, 35722, 53, 58n83, 259 Conversto ad phantasmata, 151 166, 181,

Blondel, Maurice, 3, 10222, 75, 91, 93, 183, 188-91, 205, 275n47, 286,

122, 138-39, 158-59, 242-43 289-90, 293, 339 Body, 262-63, 265-72, 310, 329, 334-35 Crates, 197

Boethius, 353 Crawford, David, 3302188, 335n196 Bonaventure, Saint, 9671, 176, 281, Creation, 41, 94, 354, 354220, 360

355n27 Creativity, 95, 203, 228; of the Gestalt,

Boredom, 4137167, 420 185; of space, 247; and objectivity, Bowie, Andrew, 106734, 119771 214; of speech, 236; of knowledge,

Brentano, Franz, 2472, 96, 205 410-11

Brock-Sulzer, Elizabeth, 255 (epi- Cusanus, Nicolaus, 173

graph), 260 Czapiewski, Winfried, 355725, 360n41,

Buber, Martin, 9979 375, 376, 379, 380-86, 391, 394-95, 400, 4027145

Cabada Castro, Manuel, 717115,

89n180 Daigler, Matthew A., 34720

Caputo, John, 34220 Danet, Henriette, 15-16

Categorial imperative, 94 Death: of the “I,” 106, 108740; and Categorial intuition, 166, 231 truth, 11, 263-64, 296-97, 300-303,

Causa sut, 68 506-308, 316-17, 414

Certitude, 389-90 Decision, 14, 87, 94, 166, 193-94, 201, Chantraine, Georges, 44747, 59286 225, 242, 246, 249, 257, 259-60,

Cherniss, Harold, 2517199 314-15, 315n147, 317, 319, 321,

Chesterton, G. K., 70 5325n174, 3412204, 423; and claim, Child, 36-39, 45, 50, 55, 57, 230-31, 196-97 544, 345, 416, 418, 427-28 Deconstruction, 294, 3397203 448 wa Index

Derrida, Jacques, 817153, 145, 230, Ek-stasts, 39, 50, 90, 95n192, 98, 118,

539 127, 127n98, 160, 164, 174, 193-94,

Descartes, René, 57n81, 110, 1312110, 245, 247-48, 272, 284, 292-93, 300, 133, 135, 147, 155-56, 157, 200n86, 317, 372, 388, 397, 404, 407, 424 246, 293, 299, 325, 340, 352n11 Eliade, Mircea, 295

Desmond, William, 373 Energeta, 92 Dialectic, 48-49, 49n63, 51, 54, 70, 134, Entelecheta, 92-217

143-44, 184, 220, 239nn169, 170, Ent-fernung, 246

244, 311, 340-41, 380-83, 413 Epic poetry, 21, 23267 Difference: in knowledge and truth Epoché, 157-58 relation, 1—6, 11, 26, 206, 215-16; in Erigena, John Scotus, 261, 262218 being, 11, 30-50, 165, 298; as “onto- Erlebnis, 157 logical difference,” 35, 44, 46-47, 52, = Eras, 206, 208, 304, 311, 3202165, 399;

56, 73, 176, 296, 303, 307, 326, 329, and agape, 336, 3362197 345, 414, 417, 4172175, 419, 427; as Erschlossenhett, 199, 200n86

four-fold, 31-58 passim, 135, 162, Euripides, 317 168, 187, 217, 232, 244, 303, 345, Event: -character of being, 13, 15-16, 412, 414, 424; and identity in logic, 18, 25, 30, 63, 116, 125, 152, 155, 238; between goods and men, 258n5, 186, 211, 222, 234, 259; -character of

as differance, 230 Gestalt, 16-17; of consciousness,

Diogenes Laertius, 197280 121, 123, 137, 153; of reciprocity, Dionysius the Areopagite, 28, 40733, 126, 407, 416; of unity, 137, 139, 68, 897178, 952192, 99n8, 174, 176, 292, 372; of being-called, 137; of

336n197, 353-54 mother’s smile, 141; of truth, 27,

Disinterestedness, 157, 218, 345, 404 164-65, 426-27; of expression, 178; Disse, Jorg, 30210, 59283, 1412131, of love, 231; of logic, 240; of space,

153n161, 1597180 247; of encounter, 350, 410

Divine ideas, 76-77, 88-92, 8921178, Evidence, 146, 155, 158, 161 180, 121, 245, 249, 295, 295n87, 360 Experience, 123, 297-99, 394 Drama, 11—27, 168, 226, 226140, 243, Existence: and essence, 13, 1329,

260, 263, 293, 296-97, 300, 308, 16n39, 66-69, 77-88, 782142, 234 311-25 passim, 351, 409, 421; as Extrinsicism, 391, 396 theme for philosophy, 8; and struc-

ture of being, 10-11, 26; as dramatic Fabro, Cornelio, 40232, 792142, engagement, 191—92, 257, 288, 291, 812152, 1517159, 1537162, 350, 294; as dramatic event, 307, 326, 417, 554n20, 413, 415416, 417 425; as dramatic foundations, 340-41, Faith: in Kant, 103; and knowledge, 347; of the transcendentals, 408—1 1 130, 1307105

Dreyfus, Hubert, 296292 “Family resemblance,” 79 Dualism, 40-41, 51, 79, 105, 116, 122, Faux, Jean-Marie, 79n142 129, 155, 175, 178, 182, 185, 233-34, Feeling, 2, 108, 119271, 123-25, 383; of

243, 279, 340, 371; of subject and dependence, 105

object, 112 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 147

Duns Scotus, John, 147, 200786 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 104725, 105, 108, 111, 115-16, 117, 125, 135, 137,

Ebner, Ferdinand, 999 147

Eckhart, Meister, 28 Finance, Joseph de, 75-76, 98n7, 107, Ehrenfels, Christian von, 24, 168, 170 19881, 2062101, 233

Index a 449

Finitude, 77n141, 201, 218, 221-22, 249, 317, 322, 338, 345, 369-70, 417, 299, 3007107, 312, 380, 383, 386; of 423-25; of self, 117, 119, 122, reason, 101; and form (Gestalt), 160-61, 179, 185-86, 206, 208-209, 173-74, 173n27, 188; of freedom, 212, 220, 265, 332-34, 344, 365-66,

521 399; as donum dont, 74, 141, 145, 345, 206 Gilbert, Paul, 176, 2097106, 35525,

Forest, Aimé, 652102, 662104, 116764, 494

Form: as edos, 77-78, 80, 82, 84, 172; as 369n69, 399

morphé, 77-84, 172 Gilson, Etienne, 40732, 41735, 1517159, Foucault, Michel, 23, 3392203 1932168, 202, 205, 226 (epigraph), Foundation: of truth, 256—57, 294, 308, 2352-233, 277, 354n20

539, 342-43, 349 Givord, Robert, 99n8

Frank, Manfred, 119271, 144-145, Gnosticism, 243

245n184, 292n85 God: and being, 43-44, 47-50; identity Freedom, 32—35, 43-45, 48, 73, 97, 118, and difference in, 67-74; as Trinity,

125, 127, 194-206, 234, 236, 70-71, 421; implicit knowledge of, 236n165, 237, 255, 267, 267n28, 309, 57, 133, 133n115, 143; as different 325, 325n174, 331-33, 368; as nature from the world, 67, 244, 412; as vs. as choice, 198—99; and certitude, knowing things into being, 245, 249;

389-90, 392 as drama, 421

Fruitfulness, 7, 69, 120774, 121, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 13, 1607183, 178, 185, 186, 191, 226-27, 14, 112, 113, 168, 172, 173, 176, 247,

231, 233n153, 235, 246, 254, 331, 3598 338, 369-70, 410, 425; of death, Goodness: as transcendental property,

264-65, 366; of truth, 347 124, 234, 354, 357, 361-66, 368-70; as the Idea of the Good, 173,

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 812151 304-307; in relation to intelligibility, Gadient, Lorenz, 112752, 151158, 210; as principle of drama, 316,

1612184 518-22; as “more transcendental”

Gardner, Lucy, 2469, 35221, 1527160, than being or truth, 398, 414-15

264n21 Gratzel, Stephan, 8719

Getstmetaphystk, 131, 168710, 208 Gregory of Nyssa, 13729, 68, 361

Gentile, Giovanni, 74 (epigraph) Greisch, Jean, 99n8 German Idealism, 29, 37, 42, 101-109, Guardini, Romano, 279, 282-83 1547167, 156, 229, 294, 362746 Guerriero, Elio, 12223 Gestalt, 10, 12-27, 51-52, 100, 124,

163-254 pavsim, 255-56, 266, 279, Haas, Alois, 13730 285, 324, 365, 400; as unity of form Hamann, Johann Georg, 169215 and content, 187-88; as primal form, Hammer, A. E., 123785 526-27, 331, 337, 426; as Lebens- Heart, 125, 127, 263, 288-94, 394-95,

gestalt, 334, 341, 343; and motion, 400 163-67, 174—75; characteristics of, Hebbel, F., 74 (epigraph)

167-75; as revelatory, 169; and Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 11, being, 236; and spherically-curved 22, 23, 28, 29, 54-55, 70, 93n190, space, 247, 247n190; and drama, 9875, 99n9, 106, 108, 119271,

523-24, 343 120n74, 121, 135, 143, 147, 166, 176,

Gift: of being, 29, 71, 82, 86, 94, 114, 180, 184, 186756, 198, 205, 221, 229, 116, 118, 120, 129, 155, 211, 231, 227, 237, 238n167, 239, 241, 242, 450 wa Index

243, 252, 258, 287n75, 312, 323, Inauthenticity, 235-36, 300

340-41, 343, 357n33 Inspiration, 98, 9874, 155, 290 Heidegger, Martin, 4—6, 10, 11, 28, 29, Intellect, 116, 124, 158-59, 199-200,

31, 33-36, 37, 38n27, 39, 43, 45-46, 231-32, 265n23, 272; and senses, 52, 58, 61n89, 68, 772141, 79n 142, 273-85 passim, 403-404, 424; and 81, 84-85, 99n8, 114257, 125n92, will 360741, 376-411, 424 127, 144, 146, 166, 176-77, 199, Intellectual: dynamism, 34, 6, 151, 207,

200786, 2107108, 223n135, 234, 387, 395; intuition, 105, 137 245-46, 263, 272, 278, 283n66, Intentionality, 96, 112, 118, 126, 150, 287n75, 296-307, 310, 316-17, 2107108, 2112110, 231, 247, 272, 3207165, 322, 325, 328, 335, 348, 333, 358 552n11, 357n33, 4062158, 4132167, Interiority, 60-62, 94, 9875, 16879, 232,

418, 420, 426, 427 282, 294

Henrich, Dieter, 103219, 116765 Intersubjectivity, 72, 131, 350 Henrici, Peter, 87219, 13, 16241, 2873, Irrationalism, 2, 108, 386, 388, 406 93n190, 257n3, 362

Heracleitus, 47, 702113, 176, 253, 342 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 175 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 16810 Jaeger, Werner, 3487216 History, 30, 52, 74, 88-89, 93n190, 156, John of the Cross, Saint, 9978

254, 282, 335, 342, 421 Jordan, Mark, 354, 379n91, 3847110, Holderlin, Friedrich, 106, 10840 394n1354, 396

Holzer, Vincent, 15-16 Joy, 118, 126-27, 374, 407, 427 Homer, 25875, 348, 353 Judgment, 2, 194-206, 224-26,

Humility, 419-20 2262140, 233n153, 290, 290279, 306, Husserl, Edmund, 1, 11, 29, 46, 96, 112, 319, 388, 419, 424; of spectators, 323 137n125, 145, 146, 147, 156-59, 166, = Jungmann, J., 405 184752, 198, 2112110, 231, 235,

283n68, 352n11, 4132167 Katros, 84, 87-88, 246 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 85, 957194, 99n8,

Ide, Pascal, 7, 99, 159280, 177135, 100-106, 108, 113, 116, 125, 134,

400n144 135, 136, 138, 144, 150, 1547167,

Ideality: and reality, 56279 227, 237, 156, 1597180, 168279,10, 169715, 241, 243, 252-53, 273, 311, 338, 342 190, 196, 198, 207, 218, 245, 252,

Identitarianism, 1, 225, 252, 279 258n7, 279, 285, 290279, 293, 340, Identity, 1, 2, 345, 379; and difference, 352, 356, 362, 413

5-6, 221, 238-39, 313, 410; as Kebre, 4 divine, 67-69; of child and mother, Kennen and erkennen, 212n111, 248

119, 121; between thought and Kierkegaard, Seren, 2, 30-31, 55n76, 96 being, 122, 131-34, 140, 142, 148; of (epigraph), 14849, 154, 260, 264, divine and human intelligence, 149;, 288176, 296n91 of subject and object, 211; of good- Kitto, H. D. F, 17245

ness and truth, 382-83 Klemm, David E., 1052n30-31

Imperatori, Mario, 2873, 3017108, Kneller, Jane, 106735

317n153 Knoepffler, Nikolaus, 352272810

Image, 1312106, 1312107, 173n27, Knowledge: as union, 206, 212; as 179-88, 190, 209, 228, 282-83, 311 requiring difference, 208, 212; as Imagination, 125, 191, 263, 289-90, 395 life-giving exchange, 206—26

Imago Det, 62, 63n95 Kobusch, Theo, 367765

Index a 45/

Kockelmans, Joseph J., 352nn9,11 Mathests untwersale, 147, 246n189

Kovach, Francis, 35174, 35424, Mauriac, Francois, 311 (epigraph), 324 374n84, 376n86, 3832106, 394, Maximus the Confessor, 59783, 261713,

402n146, 403-405, 408, 4097163 361

Kuhn, Thomas, 99 Maxsein, Anton, 290n81, 290 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 226 (epi-

Language, 110, 231, 2342157, 235-37, graph), 265 254, 309, 347, 367; as doxological, 3n3 Mediation, 105-06, 149, 250196; and

Lebenswelt, \58n178 immediacy, 108, 114, 119, 137,

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1547167, 142-44, 153-54, 196, 208, 216,

406n158 220-22, 227, 333, 373, 379; of senses

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 218, 400 and intellect to each other, 274—77

Liberum arbitriuium, 198 Meinong, Alexius, 24272 Liturgy, 2362164, 295, 3017109, 339 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2302149 Logic, 20-21, 21752, 121, 167, 18656, Meta-anthropology, 257, 25773, 186; as triadic, 237-39; as quadratic, 258-60, 294, 308, 325, 337, 339, 241-42; of love, 242; of fruitfulness, 5346-47, 425 242; and principle of non-contradic- Metaphysics of presence, 1, 33, 81-82,

tion, 242-43 812153, 148, 178

Lotz, J. B., 355225 Millbank, John, 817153 Love, 71, 73, 366, 424; parental, 111, Mimests, 254n203 114-19, 121; as ultimate human act, Mind. See Intellect

158; and knowledge, 1597180, Modo, Aldo, 792142 159n181, 207n103, 214, 392, 395; as Monism (or monologicism), 3, 6, 10, 79,

co-extensive with Being, 209; 122, 129, 145, 182, 185, 239, 248, 340 between sexes, 330; and beauty, 409, © Monophorism, 138-39, 13872126, 152

409163; as ground of language, 231 Moss, David, 24769, 35n21, 1527160,

Lubac, Henri de, 288776 264n21

Lull, Raymond, 147 Mother's smile, 37, 101, 110-17, 129, 135, Lyric poetry, 21, 23267 141, 143, 152, 198, 211, 231, 283768, 287, 293n86, 303, 333, 344, 397

MacDonald, George, 251 (epigraph) Mounce, H. O., 33215

MacKinnon, Donald, 95n194 Mozart, Wolfgang, 92, 187, 188 Maimon, Salomon, 1542167 Mystery, 31-36, 72; of consciousness, Malebranche, Nicolas de, 1547167 96-97; of being, 6, 13731, 28, 58, 97, Manifestation, 75, 96n1, 169, 176-77, 128, 421; and truth, 176734, 177, 179, 181, 185, 191, 216-17, 249, 253; 188, 219-20, 343 as desire, 208-209; and beauty, 364-65

Marcel, Gabriel, 3027113 Nebel, Gerhard, 311 (epigraph) Maréchal, Joseph, 3, 149, 150-51, 1542167 Necessity, 32, 34, 43

Marion, Jean-Luc, 687109, 156—57, Neoplatonism, 40, 42, 61789, 148,

246n187, 413-14 173-74, 211, 354n24

Maritain, Jacques, 212, 3942134 Notto entts, 153n162, 416-17 Marriage, 291, 327-31, 333-38, 342, Neuhouser, Frederick, 105228, 116762

344, 347-48, 409 Newman, John Henry, 2162122

Martyrdom, 263, 304, 306, 308-11, 327, | Newton, Isaac, 1689

532, 335-36, 347-48 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 149, 215-216,

Marx, Karl, 147, 252 235, 236, 313n142, 322, 427 452 w= Index

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 524, 326, 329, 333, 346, 356, 364-65,

106, 108740 371; as dramatic, 262

Poltner, Giinther, 355228, 357n33,

Objectivity, 4, 112-13, 12382, 127-30, 584n109, 394, 396, 4022145, 210, 213, 227, 235-36, 244, 246-47, 405n157, 417n173 252, 297, 306, 308, 332, 334, 336, Ponticus, Evagrius, 295 (epigraph) 348, 409; and creativity, 409 Positivity, 33, 38-39, 39229, 44, 48, 54-55,

O’Hanlon, Gerard F., 742128 71, 73, 86, 97, 114-15, 239, 244, 399 Onians, Richard, 872175, 281260 Potworowski, Christophe, 112753

Ontotheology, 46755, 56, 68 Poverty: of divine being, 48-49

Origen, 361 Pouillon, H., 355227

Ouellet, Marc, 907182 Presence 81, 95, 128, 157, 161, 248-49, 297; and absence, 128, 254. See alvo

Paradigm shift, 99, 99n9 Metaphysics of presence Parmenides, 148, 2517199 Proclus, 40233 Participation, 89-93, 139 Prufer, Thomas, 677107, 121275, Pascal, Blaise, 174-75, 2162122, 294 189n61, 229 “Pathos of distance,” 215-16 Przywara, Erich, 7, 29, 49263, 782142,

Paul, Saint, 2537200 80, 9875, 116, 216, 361 Péguy, Charles, 130, 3412207

Pérez-Haro, Eliecar, 7, 13231, 36223, Quash, Ben, 8719, 13232, 21-24, 25n74, 78n142, 882177, 114257, 122n79, 259n9 58n26, 812153, 2262140, 343 Perl, Eric, 173227, 206298, 336n197 Person: as mission, 90; Persons in God, Rahner, Karl, 37225, 151, 1537162,

71-72; as mediating being, 57-58 363n47, 381, 384, 4027145

Personality, 14 Rapture, 194-95, 196, 198, 200286, 201,

Personalism, 9979 208, 246, 290, 332, 408409 Philosopher, 427-28 Rationalism, 386, 388, 406

Pickstock, Catherine, 373, 24nn69,71, Realism, 122n82, 212, 215, 215n119. See

812153, 147, 1567168, 2367164, 295, also Idealism

3012109, 310, 3392203 Real distinction, 52, 84, 267 Pieper, Josef, 40232, 762136, 113755, Reason: as identical to love, 206, 393; as

199, 200n86, 2112109, 244-245, open to mystery, 3-4, 26

315n147 Receptivity, 114-18, 125-26, 137,

Plato, 3, 11, 68, 702113, 73n124, 92, 95, 144-45, 153n161, 160, 190-91, 208,

98n4, 115258, 117, 146, 148, 152, 247, 279, 289 154, 1602183, 166, 168710, 175, 198, | Reciprocal causality, 11, 657102, 185,

206, 210, 212, 225, 226n140, 227, 188, 214, 351, 375, 380-94 paveim,

235n161, 258n5, 263, 266, 287, 396, 417, 424, 426; and transcen503-10, 312, 316, 317, 3207165, 323, dence, 246; of temporality, 248 325, 327, 328, 329-31, 332, 335, 346, Reciprocal mediation, 276-77

553, 426, 427-28 Reciprocity, 126, 129, 152, 182, 192, Plessner, Helmut, 272 208, 211, 221, 254, 374n82, 381; of Plotinus, 42, 702113, 138, 173, 174, unity and difference, 4

272n39, 553 Recollection, 146, 148, 154, 420-21

Polanyi, Michael, 28262 Reditio completa, 38, 280 Polarity, 10, 15, 66-69, 201-202, 255, Relation: rational vs. real, 358-60, 411; 261, 264, 285, 287, 293, 308, 310-11, as transcendental, 360, 400 Index mu 753

Repetition, 148-49 Schrijver, Georges de, 7, 49263,

Res: as fruit, 227, 229 247n190

Richardson, William J., 296795, 296 Scola, Angelo, 58783, 257n3, 259n9

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 197 Seifert, Josef, 3022112 Rioux, Bertrand, 2347157 Sertillanges, 2112109 Rosenzweig, Franz, 9979 Shakespeare, William, 334 Rousselot, Pierre, 3, 97n3, 124, 1592181, Sicari, Antonio, 120273

183751, 207-208, 210, 211, 214, Sidney, Phillip, 2547203 218-219, 229, 233, 375, 380, Siewerth, Gustav, 7, 29, 34220, 3827, 386-390, 391-394, 3952135, 396, 397 39, 40232, 44246, 52-54, 56, 67107,

Russell, Bertrand, 145 70-72, 78n142, 89nn178,180,

121275, 1312106, 153, 279, 282, 284,

Saba, Umberto, 163 (epigraph) 290, 291, 357n33, 398, 413-14

Saint, 427 Slade, Francis, 22764

Saint-Pierre, Mario, 7, 361—362, 363, Socrates, 304—308, 323, 326

419n176 315n147

5364n51, 369, 599, 4047152, 418, Sokolowski, Robert, 96n2, 2585,

Salto mortale, 175 Solipsism, 150, 155, 302-303, 347 Saptentia, 281, 281n60 Sophocles, 3142144 Sara, Juan Manuel, 6, 2975, 49263, Soul, 109-10, 154, 160, 262-63, 265-72 71n115, 79n142, 259n9, 327n180 passum, 310, 329, 334—35, 337, 361,

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 19750, 144 376, 380, 382, 384, 422

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 236 Spinoza, Benedict de, 68, 1542167 Secondary causality, 2502196, 360 Spirit, 65, 262-63, 265223, 267-68,

Seinsvergessenhett, 420, 422 291-92, 367

Self-movement, 108—10, 116-17, Spiritual senses, 279 128-29, 137, 164, 199, 208, 287 Splett, Jorg, 7, 195274, 3432209 Self-possession, 107, 111-12, 293, 339; Spontaneity, 114-18, 125-26, 144-45,

as self-expropriation, 160 1532161, 155, 181, 190-91, 193, 208, Senses: and intellect, 125, 230-31, 262, 217, 247, 279, 289 273-85 passim, 291-92; and world of | Stambaugh, Joan, 297n97

images, 179-80 State of the counsels 327, 330, 337n198

Separatio, AQ, 52 Steiner, J., 8720

Scheler, Max, 314 Stilpo, 197

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Structuralism, 237 von, 55, 702113, 73n124, 105-106, 108740, 111, 119271, 126, 147, 176, “Subjectification,” 2457184

239, 340 Subjectivism, 122282, 157, 200286, 372

Schiller, Friedrich von, 176, 324 Subjectivity, 1, 96, 98-99, 113, 123-27, Schindler, David L. (Sr.), 282262 127n98, 139, 213, 245, 297, 308, 332, Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 105, 119771, 556, 409 123, 124n87, 125, 126, 136 System, 147-48, 155, 157, 251, 256, Schmid, Carl Christian Erhard, 1342119 289, 343 Schmitz, Kenneth, 47758, 4861,

55nn76,77, 81n152, 98n5, 108n40, Tauler, Johann, 50

193768, 3412207 Temporality, 24, 78, 84-88, 248-49, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 2 299, 335; of Gestalt, 169-70 454 wa Index

Tensions, 203, 212, 260-61, 390-91, 116, of subject and object, 379, 400; 398; of drama, 23, 23n66, 312-13, as a priori, 138, of Gestalt, 170-71, 313n142; of Gestalt, 167-68, 17122, 222; in diversity, 37, 172, 240; and

255-57 difference, 256; of soul and body,

Thérése of Lisieux, 427 270, 280, 285; of senses and intellect, “Third,” 34, 57, 80, 118-21, 124, 275-76; of person, 285-95. See Tran124n88, 133, 165-66, 178, 183-84, scendental unity of apperception 188, 205, 209, 214-15, 220-21, 226-31, 234—35, 240, 285, 288, 292, Van de Wiele, J., 358735

534, 337, 392-94, 401, 410, 423 Velkley, Richard, 106 Thomism, 7, 11, 40, 52, 55276, 113-14, Verbum mentis, 140, 142, 229, 233 171, 175, 180, 198, 203, 207, 234, Verendlichungsbewegung, 53, 53n70 249, 3412207, 352n10, 367; existen- Via negativa, 56, 399, 399n142

tial Thomism, 151n159; transcen- Virgil, 353 dental Thomism, 149, 1517158, 352 Vision, 194—95, 196, 198, 20086, 201,

Thrownness, 114757 332, 408-409

Tourpe, Emmanuel, 2873, 44746, Voegelin, Eric, 3n3, 3042115

70-72, 93n190, 413 Vows, 11, 327-28, 3302187, 334-35,

Transcendental: method, 15; unity of 537-38, 341-42, 344, 345n211, 347 apperception, 65, 100, 101-108, 135-37, 141-42, 154n167, 190, 205, Waldstein, Michael, 12723, 16-17,

217, 18, 293, 327, 339; ego, 46-47, 24n73, 168n9, 169, 170-71, 17324, 104, 325, 35211; vs. empirical ego, 183751, 184752 104; imagination, 85, 857164, 125292 Waxman, Wayne, 10214 ; ideas, 102, categories, 102; subjec- Wilder, Thornton, 119769 tivity, 111, 113, 137; center of the Wilhelmsen, Frederick, 41235, 233153

Gestalt, 170 Will, 2, 93, 116, 124, 128, 158-59,

Transcendentals 11; history of, 351-56; 199-200, 375-411, 424. See also

and categories, 353-54, 356, 356232 Intellect

Trinity, 362-63, 363747, 421 Williams, Rowan, 34220, 37225, 4035, Truth: as transcendental property, 124, 151n158 128, 354-55, 357, 361-64, 366-70; Wippel, John, 40735, 358735 as concordance or adequatio, 5, 164, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 33715, 79,

210-11, 216, 223n135, 358-59; as 137n125, 1952175 dramatic, 6-8, 226, 422, 423; as dis- Wonder, 32—33, 57-58, 97, 162, 297,

closure or revealedness, 5, 169, 176; 299-300, 306, 342, 370, 373-74,

as ontological, 244-45, 350, 358-60, 406407, 414 415, 425; as “beyond being,” 414-15 Word, 230-37, 344 Work, 90, 254

Ulrich, Ferdinand, 7, 29, 40732, 44746, World stage, 2267140, 317 45n48, 47, 48, 53-54, 59n83, 64100, 782142, 87nnl72,174, 95n192, 123284, Yeago, David Stuart, 8719, 19748,

1547166, 2122111, 2297145, 248, 341 20-21, 23, 320 Unity: as transcendental property, 354,

361-64, 368-74; of consciousness, Zeits, James V., 49263, 79n142

100, 129, 131-45, 164, 424; and Zeno, 164-165, 197, 275 being, 286, 232; of self and other, Zoller, Giinter, 105

Index a 455

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy John D. Caputo, verted editor

1. John D. Caputo, ed. Deconstruction tna Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.

2 Michael Strawser Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard — From Trony to Eoeftcation.

3. Michael D. Barber Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality tn Enrique Dussels Philosophy of Iaberation.

4 James H. Olthuis, ed. Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Sptritualtty.

5 James Swindal Reflection Revisited: Jiirgen Habermas 3 Discursive Theory of Truth.

6 Richard Kearney Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition.

7 Thomas W. Busch Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation — Essays on Late Extstentialtsm.

8 Edith Wyschogrod Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphystcs.

Second edition.

9 Francis J. Ambrosio, ed. The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.

10 Jeffrey Bloechl, ed. The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

11. = Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds. Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.

12. = Trish Glazebrook Hetoeggers Philosophy of Science.

13. Kevin Hart The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy.

14 Mark C. Taylor Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition.

15 Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Francois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricceur Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate.

16 Karl Jaspers The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

17. Jean-Luc Marion The Idol ano Distance: Five Studtes. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson.

18 Jeffrey Dudiak The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse tn the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

19 Robyn Horner Rethinking Good As Gift: Marton, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology.

20. Mark Dooley The Politics of Exodus: Soren Ketrkegaards Ethics of Responstbtty.

21 Merold Westphal Toward a Postmodern Christian Fatth: Overcoming Onto-Theology.

22. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds. The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice.

23 Stanislas Breton The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter.

24 Jean-Luc Marion Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

25 Peter H. Spader Schelers Ethical Personalism: Its Logtc, Development, and Promise.

26 Jean-Louis Chrétien The Unforgettable and the Unhopeo For Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl.

27. Don Cupitt Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realtst Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays.

28 Jean-Luc Marion In Excedd: Studtes of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner

and Vincent Berraud.

29 = Phillip Goodchild Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy.

30 #§=William J. Richardson, S.J. FHletoegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought.

31. Jeffrey Andrew Barash Martin Hewoegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning.

32. Jean-Louis Chrétien Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis.

33. Jean-Louis Chrétien The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne

Davenport.