Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988)

"Perhaps the most learned man of his time"

The phrase comes from Cardinal Henri de Lubac, his master and friend, who saw in Balthasar "perhaps the most learned man of his time".^[5] It is no empty compliment. Balthasar read Greek, Latin, German, French, English, Italian and Spanish; he knew music (he first hesitated between theology and a career in musicology), European literature from Dante to Claudel, patristics in the original texts, German philosophy from Kant to Heidegger. His doctoral thesis, defended at Zurich in 1928, was not on theology but on the history of the eschatological problem in modern German literature — a summa that would become the Apocalypse of the German Soul (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, 3 vols., 1937-1939).^[6][7]

This learning was no ornament. It is the very matter of his theology: Balthasar wanted to show that the beauty of the world, the greatness of poets and philosophers, the splendor of the Fathers of the Church all converge toward a single Figure, that of Christ. Few theologians have known, as he did, how to bring Saint Irenaeus and Goethe, Origen and Hölderlin, Maximus the Confessor and Nietzsche into dialogue.

The theologian of beauty

His great intuition, the one that governs his entire work, is a provocation in a century that had relegated beauty to the rank of subjective ornament. For Balthasar, the Beautiful (in Greek, the kalon) is a transcendental: like the True and the Good, it belongs to being itself; it is a property of all that is. But the modern age, by evacuating beauty from serious thought, condemned itself to understanding nothing more of either the True or the Good.

For Balthasar, man does not merely stand before the beautiful: he is seized within the beautiful itself, and this emotion is the certainty of being touched by a ray of God's glory. — synthesis of the thesis of Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit, I)^[8]

That is why his great work opens with a theological aesthetics: not a theology of art, but a theology that takes seriously the fact that God has shown himself, that he has a form, a Gestalt, and that this form — Christ — radiates a glory that seduces and converts. Faith begins with a wondering gaze before it is a reasoned assent.^[9]

"Theology on its knees"

Balthasar reproached university theology for having become a "seated theology" (sitzende Theologie), cut off from holiness and prayer. Against this theology of professors, he set a "theology on its knees" (kniende Theologie): that of the Fathers and the great doctors, who were saints first. For him, God cannot be known the way an object is known; he is known only by loving him, by praying, by obeying.

For Balthasar, the theologian who stops praying and living the sacraments is reduced to a sophist, a mere technician of the divine, cut off from his object. — synthesis of the thesis of Hans Urs von Balthasar in Prayer (Das betrachtende Gebet, 1955)^[10]

This conviction illuminates his most misunderstood act: having built an immense part of his theology on the mystical writings of Adrienne von Speyr. For Balthasar, mysticism is no sentimental supplement: it is a theological source on a par with speculation, because the saints touch depths of the mystery that the concept alone cannot reach.

Biographical landmarks

A Swiss childhood, an immense culture

Hans Urs von Balthasar is born on August 12, 1905, in Lucerne, into a family of the city's old patrician nobility.^[11] His father, Oscar Ludwig Carl Alois von Balthasar, is the cantonal architect; his mother, Gabrielle Pietzcker, is cofounder and first secretary general of the Swiss League of Catholic Women. One of his ancestors, a Carthusian, had been a prior; his sister Renée would become superior general of the Franciscans.

The child is first a musician. He plays Mozart and Schubert, knows entire scores by heart, and for a time considers becoming a musicologist. This musical formation is no anecdote: his whole theology would be traversed by the sense of form, of harmony, of the "symphony" of voices — one of his late short books would even be entitled Truth Is Symphonic (Die Wahrheit ist symphonisch, 1972).^[12]

He does his secondary schooling with the Benedictines of Engelberg, then with the Jesuits of Feldkirch, before devouring philosophy and literature at Vienna, Berlin and Zurich. At twenty-three, he is already a doctor — not in theology, but in German letters.

The lightning vocation (1927)

Nothing destined this brilliant young scholar, promised a university career, to become a priest. But in the summer of 1927, while making a retreat according to the Exercises of Saint Ignatius in the Black Forest, at Wildberg, he is seized. He would speak of it as a thunderbolt, always refusing to say more:

Balthasar describes a vocation received like a thunderbolt: to leave everything and follow, without choosing a profession, in total stripping, waiting for what God would want to make of him. — account reported and summarized by the author of this article^[13]

This refusal to "choose" — this active passivity, this total availability to whatever God will decide — would become one of the hearts of his spirituality: Ignatian indifference, the Marian availability of the fiat.

Jesuit: Fourvière, de Lubac and the Fathers

He enters the novitiate of the Society of Jesus on November 18, 1929.^[14] The years of formation first take him to the neo-scholastic philosophy of Pullach, near Munich — an intellectual regime he finds stifling, saying of it that he "languished in the desert of neo-scholasticism". Yet there he meets a decisive master, the Jesuit Erich Przywara, thinker of the analogy of being.

It is above all at Lyon-Fourvière, where he studies theology from 1933 to 1937, that his true intellectual birth takes place. There he befriends Henri de Lubac, soul of the future nouvelle théologie, who opens the Fathers of the Church to him. From this frequentation are born his great patristic works:

• an anthology of Origen, Origenes: Geist und Feuer (1938; Eng. trans. Spirit and Fire, Washington, Catholic University of America Press), which helped rehabilitate the most brilliant and most suspect of the Greek Fathers;
• a study on Maximus the Confessor, Kosmische Liturgie (1941; Eng. trans. Cosmic Liturgy, San Francisco, Ignatius Press);
• a study on Gregory of Nyssa, Présence et pensée (Paris, Beauchesne, 1942).^[15]

There his method takes root: to return to the living sources of Tradition, beyond the dryness of the manuals, to recover a contemplative, biblical and patristic theology. It is the program of a whole generation — de Lubac, Daniélou, Congar — which Roman neo-scholasticism, with Garrigou-Lagrange at its head, would long regard with suspicion.

Chaplain in Basel and the meeting with Adrienne von Speyr

In 1936, he is ordained priest in Munich by Cardinal Faulhaber. He is offered a chair at the Gregorian University in Rome; he refuses it. He is sent to the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit in Munich, until the Nazi regime expels him in 1939. In 1940, he becomes chaplain to students at the University of Basel — a modest post that will decide his whole life.

For at Basel, he meets two people who will orient him forever. The first is the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth, with whom he forms a demanding and friendly dialogue; in 1951 he will devote a major book to him, Karl Barth: Presentation and Interpretation of His Theology — one of the best books ever written on Barth, which Barth himself acknowledged.^[16]

The second, decisive one is a Basel physician, a Protestant convert, a mother and a mystic: Adrienne von Speyr. He receives her into the Catholic Church on November 1, 1940. There begins a spiritual collaboration unique in the history of theology, of which Balthasar will say that it forms, with his own work, one and the same block, impossible to separate.

The sacrifice: leaving the Society (1950)

Adrienne von Speyr receives, from 1941 on, extraordinary mystical graces, notably during Holy Weeks. Balthasar, her confessor and director, is convinced that God entrusts them together with a mission: to found a secular institute, the Community of St. John (Johannesgemeinschaft), in which lay people would live the evangelical counsels in the heart of the world.

But his Jesuit superiors ask him to choose: the Society or this new work. After a long interior struggle, Balthasar makes the most painful decision of his life. On February 11, 1950, he leaves the Society of Jesus, to which he had given everything, convinced he is obeying a will higher than his own.

The price is terrible. A priest without a diocese for several years, suspected, kept aside, he lives in almost total marginalization. It is this shadow that partly explains his absence from the Council.

Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) is not, for Balthasar, a mere penitent he directed. He always presented her as the source of an essential part of his theology, to the point of writing a whole book to defend the authenticity of her mission: Our Task (Unser Auftrag, 1984).

An inseparable collaboration

Under Balthasar's guidance, Adrienne von Speyr dictates or writes some sixty works — biblical commentaries, mystical treatises, meditations. Balthasar publishes them in his own house, Johannes Verlag. All his life, he will refuse to let his work be separated from hers:

In it, Balthasar refuses to let his work be separated from that of Adrienne von Speyr: the theological labor and the mystical foundation form, he says, the two inseparable halves of one and the same reality. — synthesis of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Our Task (Unser Auftrag, 1984)^[17]

This insistence disconcerted many theologians, and it remains one of the most discussed points of his legacy (see below, "A controversial theologian"). But it is consistent with his deep conviction: true theology is born on its knees, in the experience of the saints, and not only in libraries.

Holy Saturday and the descent into hell

The most famous — and most contested — fruit of this collaboration is the theology of Holy Saturday. From the mystical experiences of Adrienne von Speyr, lived each year during the Easter Triduum, Balthasar develops a daring reading of Christ's descent into hell (Descensus ad inferos).

For him, Holy Saturday is not merely a passive interval between death and Resurrection. It is the moment when the dead Christ descends into the most extreme solidarity with the damned: he experiences "the second death", total abandonment, being-separated-from-God, so that no hell, no depth of sin, is henceforth without Christ. It is the heart of his book Mysterium Paschale (1969).^[18]

According to this theology of Holy Saturday, the dead Christ took upon himself not only death but hell itself — the absolute solitude of the sinner who has said no to God — so as to be there, even there, the silent presence of love. — synthesis of the thesis of Hans Urs von Balthasar in Mysterium Paschale (1969)^[19]

This intuition, as we shall see, provoked lively objections. But it also governs his most debated thesis on the hope of salvation.

A summa for our time

Balthasar's central work is a trilogy of fifteen large volumes, published between 1961 and 1987: the vastest Catholic theological summa of the 20th century. Its structure is no accident: it follows the three transcendentals — the universal properties of being — in reverse of the customary order. Where scholasticism spoke first of the True (metaphysics) and the Good (morals), Balthasar deliberately begins with the Beautiful.

This order expresses a conviction: one does not enter faith through demonstration (the True) nor through morals (the Good), but through wonder before the glory of God (the Beautiful). First see, then be seized, then understand.^[20]

Herrlichkeit — theological aesthetics

The first part, Herrlichkeit (literally "Glory", published in English as The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics), is a theological aesthetics. Not a theology of art, but the study of how the glory of God (the Hebrew kabôd, the Greek doxa) radiates in Revelation, and culminates — supreme paradox — in the apparent ugliness of the Cross. The Crucified is the highest beauty, because he is love pushed to the extreme.

In it, Balthasar surveys the whole tradition: the clerical "styles" (Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys, Anselm, Bonaventure) and the lay "styles" (Dante, John of the Cross, Pascal, Péguy, Hopkins), then ancient and modern metaphysics, and finally the biblical glory of the Old and New Testaments. It is a cathedral.

Theodramatik — the divine drama

The second part, Theodramatik (published in English as Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory), starts from the observation that Revelation is not first a doctrine but a drama: God and man are actors engaged in a free action, whose stage is the world and whose summit is the Cross. Balthasar borrows from the theater its categories — author, actor, role, play — to think the encounter of the two freedoms, divine and human, without God's freedom crushing man's.

It is in this part that his theology of kenosis (God's self-abasement), of Holy Saturday and of hell unfolds — the "denouement" (Das Endspiel) of the drama.

Theologik — the logic of truth

The third part, Theologik (published in English as Theo-Logic), completes the summa by thinking truth: how the truth of the world (first volume) can receive the truth of God (second volume), and how the Spirit of truth (third volume) introduces man into the mystery. The loop is closed: Beauty has led to Goodness, Goodness to Truth, and Truth refers back to the Spirit who gives understanding of all.

The whole ends with a brief Epilogue (Epilog, 1987), a sort of reverse vestibule for those who would not enter the cathedral by the great door.

"Love alone is credible"

If Balthasar had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be the title of his short manifesto-book of 1963: Glaubhaft ist nur Liebe, "Love Alone Is Credible".^[21] Against an apologetics that claimed to prove faith by reasoning (the "cosmological" way) or by man's aspirations (the "anthropological" way), Balthasar affirms that there is only one proof of Christianity: God's love manifested in Christ, a love so gratuitous, so excessive, that it can only come from God.

According to Balthasar, what God says to man in Jesus Christ can only be believed as love: a love that gives itself freely, beyond all demand and all merit. — synthesis of the thesis of Hans Urs von Balthasar in Love Alone Is Credible^[22]

Faith is therefore not first the acceptance of abstract truths: it is the answer of a dazzled heart to a love that preceded it. Here we rejoin his aesthetic intuition: the beauty that seizes is the beauty of crucified love.

"Dare to hope that all may be saved"

Balthasar's most famous — and most discussed — thesis concerns the hope of salvation. In two short works from the end of his life, What may we hope for? (Was dürfen wir hoffen?, 1986) and Short Discourse on Hell (Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle, 1987), he defends a position he sums up thus: the Christian has the right and the duty to hope that all men may be saved — without ever affirming it as a certainty.^[23]

The distinction is capital, and Balthasar insists on it forcefully:

Balthasar distinguishes hoping from knowing: to hope, he says in substance, is not to know — no more than hoping for a sick friend's recovery means knowing it. — synthesis of the argument of Hans Urs von Balthasar in The Universal Hope of Salvation^[24]

Balthasar does not deny hell: he maintains that it is a real possibility, that human freedom can be lost. But he refuses to affirm that anyone is actually there, and he holds that it is permitted — in the very name of charity and of God's desire that "all men be saved" (1 Tim 2:4) — to hope that hell remains empty. His adversaries see in this a disguised universalism, a door opened to indifference; his defenders see in it the very logic of Christian hope. The debate is still not closed.

The debate with Rahner: Cordula and the "anonymous Christian"

Balthasar's other great confrontation is intellectual: his opposition to Karl Rahner (1904-1984), the other giant of Catholic theology in the century. The two men esteemed each other, but everything separated them. Rahner started from man, from his transcendental structure, and forged the concept of the "anonymous Christian": the man of good will, even an atheist, would already be secretly saved by Christ without knowing it. Balthasar saw in this a dissolution of Christianity into the world, a way of removing faith's cutting edge.

He replied in 1966 with an incisive book, Cordula, or the Decisive Test (Cordula oder der Ernstfall), in which he opposes to the "anonymous Christian" the figure of the martyr: the true Christian is not he who is Christian "without knowing it", but he who, put to the test (the Ernstfall, the "serious case"), gives his life out of love for a Christ he knows and confesses.^[25]

This debate is no quarrel of schools: it engages the question of whether Christianity must adapt to the modern world or convert it. Balthasar chose the second way — the one which, from the Council to today, joins the sensibility of Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) and of Communio.

The absentee of the Council

A cruel paradox: at the moment when the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) opens, partly consecrating the intuitions of the "new theology", Balthasar is absent from it. His friends de Lubac, Daniélou, Congar sit there as periti (experts) and weigh on the texts; he, marginalized since leaving the Society, is not invited.^[26]

He drew no displayed bitterness from it, but his relation to the Council was complex. He approved its deep inspiration — the return to the sources, the liturgical and biblical renewal — of which he had been one of the pioneers as early as 1952 with his manifesto Razing the Bastions (Schleifung der Bastionen), which called the Church to tear down the defensive ramparts inherited from the Counter-Reformation in order to radiate toward the world.^[27]

From Concilium to Communio

But in the post-Council years, Balthasar took fright. He saw in a certain "progressive" interpretation of Vatican II a capitulation: the Church tearing down its ramparts not to radiate, but to dissolve into the world. In 1966, in Cordula, he already denounces this drift.

That is why he engaged, in the early 1970s, in an intellectual counter-offensive. The progressive journal Concilium, founded in 1965 (with Rahner, Küng, Schillebeeckx), carried the voice of the reformist wing. In 1972, Balthasar cofounds, with Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and a few others, the journal Communio — to embody the other reading of the Council: that of continuity, of ressourcement in Tradition, of Christocentrism. Two journals, two hermeneutics of Vatican II that still structure Catholic theology.^[28]

Ratzinger, de Lubac and theological friendship

Balthasar was never alone. With Henri de Lubac his master and Joseph Ratzinger his junior, he formed a triangle of theological friendship that would weigh heavily on the pontificate of John Paul II and then on that of Benedict XVI. Ratzinger held Balthasar for a master; become pope, he never ceased quoting him. In 1969, Paul VI had named Balthasar a member of the first International Theological Commission; in 1984, he awarded him the prestigious international Paul VI Prize.^[29] The rehabilitation of the former outcast was accomplished.

The announced cardinalate

On May 29, 1988, John Paul II announces that he will make Balthasar a cardinal at the consistory of June 28. It is the supreme recognition: the Church raises to its highest dignity, outside the episcopate, one of the greatest theologians of its time. Balthasar, a humble man weary of honors, accepts out of obedience.

Death (June 26, 1988)

But on June 26, 1988, two days before the consistory, Hans Urs von Balthasar is found dead in his Basel house, in the morning, as he was preparing to celebrate Mass. He was eighty-two. He will never wear the purple — as if God had wanted, one last time, to spare him an earthly honor in order to give him only His own.

His funeral is celebrated at the Hofkirche in Lucerne. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Benedict XVI — preaches the homily. In it he takes up de Lubac's phrase about "perhaps the most learned man of his time", and ventures a statement rarely heard from a future pope about a theologian:

According to Ratzinger, what the pope had meant to signify by this distinction remains valid: no longer only private individuals, but the Church herself, in her official responsibility, recognizes the rightness of his teaching of the faith and the path he shows toward the sources of living water. — synthesis of the homily of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at Balthasar's funeral, 1988^[30]

Balthasar is no consensual author, and it would be dishonest to make him a saint without shadows. His thought raises genuine objections, which the Church herself has not all settled. Ignispedia presents them loyally.

The theology of Holy Saturday

The most serious objection concerns the descent into hell. Leading theologians — such as Alyssa Pitstick, in a much-discussed study — reproach Balthasar with having broken with Tradition: according to the classical doctrine (taken up by the Catechism, § 632-635), Christ descends to sheol to free the just of the Old Covenant, as victor, not to suffer the pains of the damned. Making Christ suffer hell's "dereliction", they say, contradicts the beatific vision his soul enjoyed and verges on a form of despair in God.^[31]

Answer: Balthasar's defenders reply that it is not a suffering identical to that of the damned (who hate God), but a solidarity of love with sinners, pushed to the extreme. The debate remains open: the Church has neither condemned nor canonized this thesis. A Catholic reader may find it fruitful or excessive; he is not bound to adopt it.

The hope of universal salvation

Balthasar is reproached that his daring to hope that all may be saved weakens the fear of judgment and the seriousness of sin, and contradicts Christ's many warnings about "Gehenna". Answer: Balthasar explicitly maintains the real possibility of hell and the seriousness of freedom; he only refuses to affirm that men are there. His position remains, formally, within the limits permitted by the Church — but it is still debated, and many faithful theologians judge it imprudent.

The Adrienne von Speyr question

Finally, the fact of having founded part of his theology on the private revelations of Adrienne von Speyr has fed suspicions: can a theology lean to such an extent on an uncanonized mystic? Answer: Balthasar always distinguished what belongs to the faith of the Church from what belongs to Speyr's experience; and the Church, without pronouncing on her graces, never condemned their collaboration. Prudence remains in order, but the charge of illuminism does not hold: Balthasar was anything but credulous.

What the Church retains of it

None of these theses has been condemned. Conversely, Balthasar received from the Church the highest marks of esteem: the International Theological Commission, the Paul VI Prize, the cardinalate. Two popes — John Paul II and Benedict XVI — held him for a master. The right position is therefore neither rejection nor blind assent: it is the attentive and critical reading of a giant who sometimes dared to go to the limits of the sayable.

More than thirty years after his death, Balthasar is one of the most read and studied Catholic theologians in the world. His influence is immense: on the pontificate of Benedict XVI, which made crucified beauty and love central themes; on a whole generation of Communio theologians; on French philosophy, where Jean-Luc Marion prolongs in his own way the intuition of "givenness" and glory; on the renewal of a contemplative, biblical and patristic theology.

What remains of him? First a method: entering faith through beauty, thinking Revelation as a drama of love, refusing to separate theology from holiness. Then a cathedral-work, the trilogy, from which generations will draw. Finally a witness: that of an immensely learned man who sacrificed everything — his career, his order, his reputation — out of obedience to a mission, and who died on the threshold of Mass, two days before a glory he had not wanted.

Faced with polemicists and scholars, Hans Urs von Balthasar stands as a genial contemplative: the one who reminded a disenchanted century that God is beautiful, that his beauty is that of a crucified love, and that only love is believable. Ignispedia receives him for what he was: not a master to be followed blindly, but a master to be read on one's knees, with as much admiration as discernment.

• Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) — the Basel mystic, "the other half" of Balthasar's work: the theology of Holy Saturday and the Community of St. John are born of their inseparable collaboration.
• Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) — his master at Fourvière, who opened the Fathers to him and called him "perhaps the most learned man of his time": the cofounder of Communio.
• Benedict XVI (1927-2022) — Joseph Ratzinger, his junior and friend, cofounder of Communio, who preached the homily at his funeral and held him for a master.
• Jean Daniélou (1905-1974) — companion of the nouvelle théologie and of the patristic ressourcement, an expert at the Council from which Balthasar was absent.
• Yves Congar (1904-1995) — another great theologian of ressourcement and of Vatican II, another trajectory of the same generation.
• Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) — the great Roman Thomist, adversary of the "new theology": the scholastic counterpoint to Balthasar's venture.
• Origen (c. 185-c. 253) — the Greek Father whom Balthasar rehabilitated in his anthology Spirit and Fire, one of his major sources.
• Jean-Luc Marion (born 1946) — the philosopher of "givenness" and the saturated phenomenon, the French heir of the Balthasarian intuition of glory.
• Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) — the novelist of grace and the supernatural, to whom Balthasar devoted a study, Le Chrétien Bernanos.