God's Glory Appears: Christ is in my Neighbor

VON BALTHASAR STRUGGLES to reconcile the ethical validity of the created order with the Christian particularism that comes from the dramatic or aesthetic encounter with Christ. The effort is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the manner that he handles the issue of the love of neighbor.  In handling the issue of love of neighbor, von Balthasar has both the horizontal I-Thou relationship (man/man) and the vertical I-Thou (man/God) relationship working together.  Universalism may be found in the former; Christian particularism may be found in the latter.  The particular and the universal therefore work together.  "Because the interpersonal encounter among human persons is refashioned in Christ's light, it represents a boundary test case for the claim that creation preserves its relative autonomy within von Balthasar's Christian particularism."  Steck, 112.

In addressing the issue of love of neighbor, von Balthasar identifies six indicia (what Steck calls "aspects") of how love of neighbor ought to be reflected in the Christian.  These indicia or aspects define the "moral space" within which the Christian must act.  They appear analagous to the Barthian "formed refdrences."  Steck, 112.

We might enumerate them first, and then elaborate upon them:

1. In the new order that Christ ushers in, the neighbor is the mediator of God's call to us;
2. The love of neighbor to which the Christian is enjoined is at the same time a loving response to the person call of God;
3. Christian love is responsive: it is a grateful answer to what it has received.  The Christian response is therefore to be seen not as a naked moral act, but always  as answer to God's address;
4. Christian love is influenced or moved by christological hope for neighbor;
5. Christian love of neighbor is eucharistic love; and
6. Christian love seeks communion with one's neighbor.

These six features or aspects of Christian ethics as it relates to love of neighbor provide little guidance; but they might be seen as more of the spirit or animus that ought to drive the Christian in his day-to-day activities in his efforts to apply the love of God through love of neighbor.

For von Balthasar, the Christian encounters Christ in his neighbor.  This arises from the Word's assumption of human nature, an assumption which puts the Word in solidarity with mankind.  The solidarity is complete, total, without limit.  In a manner of speaking, since mankind has been assumed by the Word into the Godhead, our neighbor is in solidarity with God.  There is no man, woman, or child that remains unaffected by Christ's incarnation. 

We are therefore called to reject any sort of attitude or behavior which puts up walls, which isolates us from the other.  Anything that compromises solidarity might be seen as against God's will.  If the Lord Jesus is in solidarity with all mankind, how is it that we might act differently and be in solidarity with a portion of mankind?

There is definitely a two-way dynamic.  Christ's presents humanity in solidarity to the Godhead. Christ presents the Godhead in solidarity with humanity.  There is therefore a movement up and a movement down.  A de arriba and a de abajo.  We are called to see God as Jesus the God-Man saw God.  We are called to see man as Jesus the God-Man sees man.

 Are Saul Alinsky and Dorothy Day really doing the same thing?

The Incarnation is revolutionary, not only in terms of man's relationship to God, but also in terms of man's relationship with man:

[The incarnation] changes everything, for from now one, one's fellow man--whether friend or for--is the brother for whom Christ died . . . each individual who can be addressed humanly as "Thou" is raised to the status of a "Thou" for God, because God's true "Thou," his "chosen" and "beloved" "only Son" has borne the guilt of this human "Thou" and has died for him, and therefore can identify himself with every individual at the last judgment.

Steck, 113 (quoting GL7.439)  This is Christian particularism: how could it not be?  The Christian is given a vision of the love of God for man which is the impetus for the love of neighbor.  To reject the insight of the Incarnation in pursuit of a sort of universalism would be actually to work against the solidarity with all mankind.  An ethical universalism without Christ would be a seriously limiting vision of mankind's calling.  It would be a rejection of Christ and all he has wrought.

But something seems wrong in von Balthasar's formula.  He seems to have universalized the particular, to have naturalized the supernatural, to have conflated grace and nature, to have collapsed things when he says such things as: "whoever endeavors to struggle against injustice and to bring about justice in the world in a quite direct way with the God of revelation and of love and grace, whether he knows it or not."  (Steck, 114, quoting "Secular Piety?" in Creator Spirit, 360).  Or when he says things such as: "It follows that everything that human endeavour achieves in respect of the commission given at creation--the struggle against injustice, hunger, sickness, need and depravity, and the struggle for better conditions of life, education, wages, etc.--acquires a positive significance in view of what God has done in Christ and of the help of the Holy Spirit, and that nothing of this will be lost ultimately."  (GL7.519)

If all human effort at a better world is done "in Christ" willy nilly, then why preach Christ?  Is Mother Theresa really doing the same thing as Karl Marx?  Is Dorothy Day really doing the same thing as Saul Alinsky?  Is St. Katharine Drexel really doing the same thing as the Reverend Jesse Jackson?

No.  Despite some of the deeply satisfying portions of von Balthasar's thought, there are parts of it that simply seem dissatisfying. 

God's Glory Appears: Vestiges of Grace in the Created Order

THE CREATED ORDER (as distinguished from the order of grace) receives some attention by von Balthasar. However, von Balthasar's attention to the order of nature does not recognize, even ex hypothesi, a natura pura, or pure nature. As Noel Dermot O'Donoghue sees it "Balthasar . . . rejects the traditional concept of 'pure nature.'"* (quoted in Steck, 190, n. 30)   Von Balthasar--along with the rest of la nouvelle théologie crowd--steps out of the natura pura paradigm.

The created order, however, does contribute three significant things to the ethical life in von Balthasar's view.  First, there is a real creaturely agency, a real creaturely activity.  It remains creaturely even when it is taken up into a relationship with the Absolute.  God has seen it to be so, as there is a "divinely willed counterpart to God," a "center of activity outside of God."  Steck, 104 (quoting von Balthasars's Theology of Karl Barth, 91, 105)  This creaturely agency or activity is not effaced when it is taken up to God, but is ennobled.  Our identity does not disappear into the Absolute, as if we get absorbed into the divine substance, or as if we suffer some sort of Buddhist or Hindu nirvana.

To be effaced by getting absorbed into good and losing one's creaturely separateness would be to banish love, as love--the Trinity teaches us--requires distinction of persons.  Here is the wonderful formula: "distance for the sake of nearness, autonomy for the sake of exchange and love, irreducible otherness for the sake of genuine union."  Steck, 105 (quoting von Balthasar's Theology of Karl Barth, 126)  Grace preserves this natural separateness which is part of the created nature of man.

The second area where von Balthasar preserves a created order is in the concept that the person has been "created and equipped as a creature of nature to encounter and find God in all things."  Steck, 106 (quoting von Balthasar's Theology of Karl Barth, 153).  Of course, here we have the classic Ignatian formula:  Encontrando Dios en todas las cosas.  God can be encountered in created nature.  Indeed, in most situations this is the principal way in which we encounter God--mediately in His works, deeds, and ordinances--and not immediately, "face-to-face" as it were.  There is, at least as long as we live in this temporal world, a distance between us and the Isaiahan "hidden God."

Significantly, however, von Balthasar seems resistance to give any significance to this encounter in God in nature in a fully created order (reason); rather, this encounter with God in nature is also necessarily the result of supernatural grace.

There is a true revelation of the personal God in our surrounding world, however much the revelation comes about for the Christian only in and through its being illuminated by the particular light of the Christian narrative. As one creature, graced body and spirit, the person does not encounter God's address as something hovering over creation, as if this revelation within creation was given to human reason super-naturally, and not also given precisely within the dynamism of creation and the events of human history. . . . Here von Balthasar emphasizes the subjective side to this, that creaturely eyes and ears have in grace been made perceptive of God's glory and address within creation . . . . Even the nonbeliever is not excluded from this address within creation: insofar as every person 'looks out upon a cosmos that is noetically and ontically [by knowledge and by being] saturated with moments of the supernatural, he will also be, at the very least--without knowing it--a crptyo-theologian.

Steck, 106 (quoting von Balthasars's Theology of Karl Barth, 280).  Again, supernatural grace is always in the mix, even in the unbeliever.  This appears to be consistent with von Balthasar's rejection of the notion of pure nature.  Even hypothetically, he seems to reject a notion of pure reason, of pure nature.  Grace is always found, even if it is only in the interstices of an unbelieving soul.

The third significant component of creation in the ethical life in von Balthasar's thinking is the notion that the created order has a "sphere of meaning" that is not neither isolated from, nor abolished by, the order of grace.  Von Balthasar strives mightily to keep grace always in the picture, while yet struggling mightily to make sure that nature somehow survives intact.  But as a result there is always a confusion, a blending.  For this reason, at least from our vantage point we are unable "with any absolute confidence [to] categorize the ethical horizon in which the Christian acts in terms of what belongs to the order of creation and what to the order of grace."  Steck, 106.

So the natural law--as something separate and apart from the life of Grace--is not something found in von Balthasar's moral theology (which means he has no real moral philosophy).  We can, at best, have "some confidence and hope . . . that the particularist view of the Christian can often find common cause with the outlooks of those guided and shaped by other [religious or secular] narratives."  Steck, 106-07.  This "common cause" is found in the "sphere of meaning," whatever exactly that is.  But this "common cause," is "perhaps less than found in some natural law approaches," which von Balthasar seems to forgo.  Steck, 106-07.

Von Balthasar suggests that the the "sphere of meaning" found in the created order displays a vestige as it were of the supernatural life of grace.  There is a sort of redolence of the entire nature/supernature plan which existed before the Fall that is left in the "sphere of meaning" of the created order.  The supernatural order therefore remains intelligible, though perhaps darkly so, to the created order.  The "sphere of meaning" in created nature is an "interior meaning," and it is a vestige of the original plan of God as well as the "economy of salvation" which seeks to repair that original plan.  God's grace--His supernatural presence in the created order--"will be gentle, even if sinful hearts find it bitter."  Steck, 107. 

Steck concludes this section with a quite beautiful statement:

Not even the natural human yearning for wholeness--that is, humanity's "'pre-understanding' of what God's 'redemption' might be"--is simply overturned but rather refashioned and transcended in God's revelation.

Steck, 107 (quoting TD5.33)

Von Balthasar is Catholic enough not to dump the entire grace/nature distinction; the question perhaps is: does he retain enough of it to remain comfortably within the tradition?
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*O'Donoghue continues: "[T]his attitude has been disastrous.  In the first place it made any real dialogue between the Christian and his millions of non-Christian fellows . . . impossible."  Noel Dermot O'Donoghue, "Do We Get Beyond Plato?" in Bede McGregor and Thomas Norris, eds., The Beauty of Christ (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 258, n.2.

God's Glory Appears: Command and Fulfilment

THE COVENANTAL UNDERSTANDING of morality poses some problems for theologians. Perhaps the most significant is that it risks confusing the transcendent and the immanent. How can anyone say "no," or perhaps better, how can one say anything but "yes" to the sovereign God who created heaven and earth? There is something of a difficulty in supposing that contingent being can be an equal partner in a covenant with Being Himself.  When we pray, like St. Francis did, Deus meus et omnia, my God and my all, doesn't the "all" crowd out the "my"?  How does the "my" survive at all?

To put the issue another way, how does one preserve the integrity of nature, of natura pura, once the supernatural element is superimposed as the ultimate ground of action?   How can the natural order mean anything when the supernatural order intervenes through a covenant, a one-on-one agreement, a postitive command?  Doesn't this one-on-one agreement supplant the earlier order?  Isn't all then to be governed by the terms of the covenant, and none by the pre-existing order?  Don't we run the risk of a divine positivism?

In fact, those who stress the covenantal view of God and ethics, such as Karl Barth and Jaques Ellul,* How dare we speak of an order separate and apart from God, an order that is quasi-independent of him?  If God is sovereign, so is his will, and to posit some sort of order with its own rationality offends against this sovereignty.  For this reason, both Barth and Ellul rejected any notion of the natural law.  "They go so far as to characterize the kind of human control over ethics advocated in natural law approaches as instances of sinful human pride."  Steck, 63.**

 Abraham Sacrifices Isaac by Marc Chagall

By stressing the covenantal aspect of our relationship to God, von Balthasar also tends to posit a discontinuity between the "immanent operations of reason and moral discernment."  In other words, sometimes--perhaps the best example is Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac--God may require something unreasonable of his lesser partner. 

[God's personal address] represents an ethical claim that is not grounded in the horizontal (creaturely) order or discovered by the immanent operation of human reason. It transcends these and thus can only be received through some form of obedience (e.g., submission, assent, consent).

Steck, at 63.  In tension with this, von Balthasar also argues that such discontinuity between the transcendent God who commands and the immanent man who obeys the command (and therefore potentially if not actually turns back on the immanent order of nature) does not reduce the creature's integrity; rather, it serves to promote it and to fulfill it.  In this manner, von Balthsar tries to put a cushion between God and man so as to preserve human autonomy and creative freedom.  Man must be more than a slave who has no will but God's will, who has no reality of his own but God alone.  Even if his will is subordinate to God's he has something freely to subordinate.  Some question whether von Balthsars effectively does and remains with the Catholic ethical tradition.

How does von Balthasar, who focuses on a covenantal ethic (which works on a person-to-person command, and not a universal law basis) preserve the integrity of the human order?  Specifically, how does the requirement of man's obedience to the covenantal command preserve man's freedom and integrity?

To answer this question, we must look at von Balthasar's notion of command, notion of obedience, and see how he puts the two together so that obedience-to-command (what von Balthasar understands as mission) preserves and fulfills the lesser partner to the covenant.  We may wonder whether von Balthasar is successful, or whether his form of the divine command theory goes astray from the Catholic tradition.
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*Of course, neither of these two men wrote within the Catholic tradition.  Barth was more or less Calvinist and wrote clearly within the Reformed tradition; Ellul was rather idiosyncratic and is frequently characterized as a Christian anarchist.
**All is grace for them.  But if all his grace, what is grace saving?  Isn't there a nature (and hence an order) that grace (and its order) is saving?  Grace isn't saving nothing!

Pura Natura Persona Non Grata Est: Unwanted Nature

BOTH BALTHASAR AND DE LUBAC display an intolerance with the notion of nature in the abstract, preferring to emphasize "concrete nature" or nature as it is found de facto, joined with grace. To them, the fact that God conjoined grace onto nature concretely, de facto, makes any reference to a nature prescinded from grace a sort of will-o'-the-wisp or ignis fatuus. When nature was joined to grace before the Fall, nature was "so comprehensive and irradiating" that it seems almost senseless to talk about nature without grace. After the Fall and the loss of grace, the nature that was left was so impoverished so as to seem senseless to talk about as well. It's ever more senseless to talk about nature in a hypothetical state. So the upshot is its always pretty much useless to talk of pure nature. Nature alone was never to be found; it is at best a hypothetical half-a-chimera, a soulless monster, a mythical stump. So if we are to talk of nature, we must talk about it conjoined to grace since it so overwhelmed nature as to make it nothing separately of it. We may talk of grace: sola gratia. We may talk of nature-and-grace: natura cum gratia. We may not talk of nature alone: sola natura. Sola natura is something whispered in the dark corners, sort of like one may say sotto voce to one's friends of the mad man in the room, "he's a little weak in the head." Alone, nature is a persona non grata. Nature, it is true, is invited to the La Nouvelle Théologie Ball, but only on account of his pretty wife, Grace, and only if he comes with her, and only if he never leaves her side.

St. Thomas Aquinas and his followers were less uppity, more inclusive, and much more hospitable with their invitees. Nature was invited to the theological party alone. True, he appeared with his wife, Grace, but he was able to be talked to without her. Nature would have been invited even if--hypothetically--he had never been married to Grace. But Nature, though married to Grace, was still his own person. Thomists love Nature. Thomists love Grace. Thomists love Nature-and-Grace. Thomists loved the man, the wife, and the man-and-wife married.

The difference in attitude with respect to human nature between the proponents of la nouvelle théologie and classical Thomists is significant. How did this come about? Steven A. Long speculates that it may stem from a distrust toward abstraction and a fascination with the concrete which was prevalent in the 1950s (e.g., Gabriel Marcel?) and which informed the leaders of that movement. Regardless of how it came about, it seems to be against the flow of traditional Catholic theology. As Long notes, the fact that a Christian has the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity does not alienate himself from being human. A Christian--like Adam before the Fall, like Abraham after the covenant, like Moses after the Law, can say along with the pagan Terentius: "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto!" I am human, nothing human is alien to me! Grace--whether that grace be the original grace or the healing grace of Christ obtained in baptism--does not alienate us from our human nature. Nor does it transmute it into something substantially other than it was before.* It certainly does not destroy--rather it repairs, perfects, lifts up--the human nature that was there before. And this principle "quite simply and absolutely requires that human nature receive its species from the hierarchy of its connatural proportionate ends." Long, 85.

Long uses an interesting example to prove his point that human nature is not transmuted by grace, and even when human nature is "full of grace" it remains human nature, it has some content that remains "neutral" to the existence of grace or the lack of it. (One says "neutral" meaning in reference to supernatural life of grace, not "neutral" as to God, since both nature and grace are ordered, in their different ways, to God.) Consequently, we may say that Christ had a human nature every bit as much as "Fred the bookie," or, for that matter, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.

Echoing the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews (4:15), the Fourth Eucharistic Prayer in the current Mass states that Christ was in nostra condicionis forma est conversatus per omnia absque peccato. Christ was like "a man like us in all things but sin." It is de fide that Christ was fully man, as he was fully God. Was Christ's human nature less because it was conjoined hypostically to the nature of God? Similarly, Mary was, according to the Angel Gabriel, κεχαριτωμένη (kecharitōmenē), gratia plena, "full of grace." (Luke 1:28) Was Mary's nature any less human on that account?

Any Catholic would know the answer to these questions. Yet the point seems to have eluded the indisputable great minds of de Lubac and Balthasar and those who came after them and followed them, so preoccupied were they with an "overweening exigency to avert the dangers of naturalism" that the danger apparently blinded them. It was as if scared of a bugbear they ended up backing up into a murderous psychopath. It is plain that the human nature we shared with Christ, which nature was hypostatically united with God the Son, the human nature we shared with the Blessed Virgin Mary, who was full of grace and the first of the redeemed and indeed the Co-Redemptrix, is something much more than the Balthasarian "createdness as such." And while the mode of being of human nature may differ between Christ, Mary, Adam before the Fall and after the Fall, St. Peter, Fred the Bookie, and Hitler and Pol Pot, "the definition of human nature as such" does not.

Indeed, we must be able to know that human nature exists, that it is more that mere "createdness as such," and it must be something intelligible, and meaningful, and ontologically significant even if speculatively abstracted from grace. If human nature is not something meaningful--even apart from grace--then the very foundation of the Christian faith is imperiled. Human nature was assumed by God in the Incarnation, and if "human nature" is a figment of thought, a posit, an insignificant point in an infinite line, a will-o'-the-wisp in the theologian's mind, then the entire doctrine of the Incarnation, from Nicea, through Chalcedon, through Vatican II, becomes unintelligible. "[A]nything that impedes or contradicts this" doctrine, such as the advocates of la nouvelle théologie including de Lubac and Balthasar seem to do in this area, "impedes and contradicts the most foundational truth of Christianity." Long, 87.

It must be possible for us to know what "human nature" as assumable by God designates. When we say that Christ had everything that we have by nature, but not sin, we close in on the datum that there is content of human nature that is neither simply a function of grace nor of sin. That the content of human nature is not merely "createdness as such" is manifest in the fact that we can identify that which must be true of Christ owing to the formulation in question that Christ has everything in our nature save sin and what it implies.

Long, 87. Abstraction, then, is not the horrendous evil it is thought to be. Indeed it is "a sign of the ordering of the human intellect to the universe of truth." Long, 88. And though the knowledge gained from abstraction alone (abstractio totius) is not the whole truth and requires also focus on the concrete instantiations of the abstract, it is not knowledge to be shunned. In other words, we must never think concrete alone. We must not think abstract alone. We must think both abstractly and concretely, someway far away from the nominalism of Ockham and the idealism of Plato, somewhere in the moderate realism of Thomas. In man, we have both universal and particular, and both universally and particularly ought we think of man to gain the entire picture of him.

It is in fact the case that man has been bequeathed by God both nature and grace, both silver and gold. It does not do God any justice to shun his gifts. We do not become more appreciative to our benefactor, nor are we more rich, because we disclaim one bequest in favor of another bequest, disclaim the silver and accept the gold. "If someone wishes to say that the bequeathal of nature is part of a wider story," the Thomist would agree. But the "wider story does not annul but presupposes" the story within the story, "the proportionate ordering of nature," a nature with its own proportionate end which defines man as man, and reveals us important truths about him, and, indeed, allows us to access truths about God using analogical reasoning.**

In the realm of the natural law, the error of Balthasar and de Lubac is threatening indeed since "there are truly essential elements in moral theology that cannot be cognized without reference to the hierarchy of proportionate natural ends," that is, human nature. The price for denying human nature is high. We lose the ability to engage in "profound theological treatment of the role of natural virtue and natural law within the life of grace--a natural virtue and law presupposed by the Gospel itself." Long, 97. In the end, we may be unfaithful to the Gospel if we eviscerate nature.

The point is we cannot have a moral theology without human nature, a human nature with its proportionate end. Morality does not relate to "mere relations of the 'zero point' of a natural vacuole to the beatific good, but rather involve[s] the essential mediation of subordinated teleologies." This of course requires us to recognize that "in the given order," in the de facto reality in which man finds himself--originally created in grace, but fallen, and yet redeemed--"there is indeed a natural end that is proportion to human nature," human nature alone.

So we need a robust notion of human nature. Without it, moral theology becomes impossible. "For how should a geometric point dictate to people anything with respect to their ethical lives . . . [a]nd if . . . moral norms cannot be derived from a geometric point, even less can they be understood in their human meaning merely by referring to scriptural teachings, because these teachings themselves presuppose a prior natural frame of reference." If we reject such a thing as human nature, we will be left with neither natural law or divine law, and we will be left with no means to speak to those outside the household of faith, or even those within the household of faith, about what is right and what is wrong. The Church's moral teachings if not based upon human nature would appear to be "a violent intrusion of arbitrary power," a "raw assertion of ecclesial power," a product of ecclesiastical or magisterial fiat. Long, 100. Pure positivism. While no one would accuse that de Lubac or Balthasar were morally base or of advocating such extreme positions--indeed they led exemplary, virtuous lives, and were faithful disciples of the Church--that does not relieve their doctrine of its natural implications:

[T]hey never observed that denial of the ontological density of natura in its own right could hardly imply anything other than an antinomian rejection of all moral objectives and precepts defined by natural ends subordinate to the final end of supernatural beatific vision. . . . We are not perched before utter nonbeing and God as though no created order encompassed us and demanded our regard, appreciation, and fidelity. Rather, the grammar of our assent to God weaves into its fundament all those subordinate natural teleologies that are further ordered in and by grace, and in such fashion that the whole sublunary order of proportionate natural teleology is thereby affirmed as well.

Long, 100.

The insights of de Lubac and Balthasar into scripture and the Fathers of the Church and a whole slew of other topics ought not to be jettisoned, but their doctrine on nature and grace needs to be corrected. The error is not a matter of no import, an error of which it may be said de minimis non curat doctrina, but is an essential one for life within the Church and without it. Nature must be recaptured. Nature must not be abandoned to the materialist scientist who looks at it as matter to be played with, something to be tortured on a rack like a sadistic boy might do with a lizard, with utterly no reference to God as Creator or God as its end. Nature must not be neglected in favor of Grace alone. It is time for a new synthesis, which is really nothing more than a deepening of the old. When Christ restored all things in him (Cf. Eph. 1:10), all things did not become nothing, all things remained things, albeit things restored. It's time to recapture nature and restore it to Christ and correct both the error of the materialists and the new theologians.

To do so, however, will require something preliminary to the Gospel, something preliminary to Grace. To recapture Nature, we have to use natural means which perhaps shall then, through grace, leads to supernatural aids. To get purchase onto the cliffs of the praembula fidei, however, we need to use the climbing shoes and climbing gear of reason. And here we enter into the realms of philosophy, where our tools are those of reason. And to make progress, we shall have to shed our analytical philosophies and get back on a regime of rigorous training and monitored diet of a realistic philosophy. As Virgil guided Dante through the realm of Hell, in this venture St. Thomas should be our guide.
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*Grace was traditionally viewed as a superadditum or a particularly penetrating and profound accident superadded to nature. For all its transforming power, it did not essentially or substantially change nature. One must understand the term "accident" in the way the scholastics understood it. Something that is "accidental" is not by that fact alone unimportant. As Long defines it, an accident, especially one such as grace and the infused theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, "is a further articulation of substance [in this case human nature] . . . and . . . a new an higher principle of action participating in the eternal law more profoundly than does the natural law (without, for all that, replacing the natural law)." Long, 85, 248 n. 44. Since both nature and grace participate in the eternal law, it follows that true nature and true grace, like reason and faith, do not contradict it each other, but complement each other. It is a lie of fundamental proportions to suggest that the lex naturalis is opposed to the lex gratiae, since they both participate in the lex eterna.
**Indeed, the refusal to concede to human nature any ontological density and to treat it as "createdness as such" has an effect upon our knowledge of God. "Both at the level of the being common to substance and the categories, and at the level of the analogy of creature to God, the negation of the ontological density of nature is thus liable to introduce dialectical distortions into our contemplation of God." Long, 95. Worse, as Long suggests it eviscerates natural theology and even the doctrine of creation. Long, 100-03. It also implicates apologetics and thaumaturgical thought. Long, 104-05. Even history is affected by the deprecation of naure. Long, 105-06. "[N]ot only will there be great deprivation internal to theological contemplation and within the Catholic life when natura is treated as a mere Cartesian coordinate, but there will also be a corresponding deprivation in every area of the Church's engagement with the world." Long, 106.

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 5

BALTHASAR RANKS HIMSELF WITHIN the historical range of prior efforts at defining the relationship between nature and grace. He views himself as a within the moderate wing, but what is really telling is that he puts the traditional Thomistic teaching at the extreme.

VON BALTHASAR

The range of views stretch all the way from Ripalda to Billot: at one extreme is Ripalda's version, according to which every act, no matter how remote from or misdirected toward it is with respect to our supernatural goal, is borne up by grace (entitative). The middle ground is occupied by those systems (with varying emphases) in which a nature that functions at first purely naturally is "intercepted" at some point by grace and directed to its supernatural end. Finally there is the other extreme--and extreme it is, as it has hardly any adherents, or even could have, for that matter--which leaves room for a full-blown (if subordinate) finality of pure nature in the de facto world order (as in Billot).

It is remarkable that Balthasar should rank Billot's Thomistic views as "extreme" and without "any adherents," in that Billot's rendition of the relationship between nature and grace was traditionally Thomistic. More than being Billot's "extreme" view, it was "as a matter of prosaic fact the reading of most of the Dominican commentators--and the preponderant number of Jesuit commentators [including Billot]--of Aquinas." Long, 80. It is, in fact, not Billot's view that is in the minority, but, at least when a historical and doctrinal perspective is taken into consideration, the view of de Lubac and Balthasar which decidedly is the odd man out. Long, 80. It is almost axiomatic Catholicism to maintain that "[n]ature and natural ends, do not suddenly vanish upon the promulgation of the lex nova, because grace does not destroy, but perfects nature (i.e., nature and the hierarchy of natural ends actually exist)." Long, 80.

Louis Cardinal Billot
Extremist in Nature and Grace?

Balthasar persists in his attack on the concept of pure nature:

VON BALTHASAR

It only confuses things when we try to equate fallen human nature with some "pure nature" that stands outside the order of grace, quite apart from the fact that this hypothetical concept of pure nature cannot be given any content and thus is unsuited to serve as a model for a condition of nature that actually does obtain.

It is true that human nature is fallen, at least in the light of Revelation we recognized it, although we see its consequences about us every day. But Balthasar here confuses two related, but distinct senses of "pure nature." Pure nature--natura pura--can be used in a narrow sense to refer to human nature in a state or in a condition that lacks supernatural grace, that is nature as fallen. But pure nature--natura pura--can also be used to refer more broadly to human nature as human nature "in precision [abstracted from] from supernatural grace but is then affirmed in all the varying states in which it may be found." Long, 81. In other words, pure nature may be understood in a manner other than mere hypothetical. Pure nature in this more general sense, then, can include prelapsarian human nature, post-lapsarian human nature, both before Christ's coming and after Christ's redemptive death. It includes the nature that, following Christ's redemptive death, is restored to sanctifying grace in baptism. It would include the hypothetical human nature as it would have existed if God not joined it de facto with grace, and includes the de facto human nature, human nature as it in fact exists, which has both its natural order and its supernatural order. The term nature has myriad senses since human nature is found in a variety of historical (or hypothetical) conditions: "The condition of pure nature is only a hypothesis; but human nature simpliciter--pure nature in the sense of all that defines human nature as such--is found in all who have the nature, irrespective [of] the condition in which they have it, regardless of the with what impairment or blessings they enjoy it." Long, 81. That understanding of human nature, though Balthasar seeks to distance himself from it and mark it extreme, is behind the authentic teaching of St. Thomas.

After his extensive treatment of Hans Urs von Balthasar's tendentious treatment of the Catholic position on nature and grace, Long concludes:

In Balthasar's theology, nature, it appears is to remain a geometric point fit only to terminate the line of grace but having no magnitude of its own. This is a position that is not properly speaking the error of fideism, but is nonetheless perhaps more serious precisely because it is so distortive of the categories in terms of which fideism is identified. For the incredibly powerful and soaring elements of Balthasar's theology, it is this Achilles' heel that most imperils his achievement, by way of causing the subtle and profound dislocation of its foundational elements.

Long, 83. Balthasar's deficient view of human nature may explain why, despite his monumental output, he "never intensively and extensively develops moral theology." Long, 83. How could he? He stripped human nature of any and all of its content, leaving an empty shell, nay, not even an empty shell, a shadow, no, not even a shadow, a small, insignificant point, a dot, a pinprick. And you can have more luck figuring out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, than figuring out how to build a natural moral law from the point of a pin.

________________________________________
*By Ripalda, Balthasar is referring to the Spanish Jesuit theologian Juan Martínez de Ripalda (1594-1648). Ripalda joined the Jesuits in 1609, taught philosophy at Monforte and theology at Salamanca. From Salamanca he was called to Madrid where he taught moral theology at the Imperial College. Eventually, he was named censor to the Inquisition and became the confessor for the famous Conde de Olivares, minister of King Philip IV. He was an opponent of Baius.
**By Billot, Balthasar means the French Jesuit Louis Cardinal Billot (1846-1931). Between 1879 through 1882, Billot taught at the Catholic University of Angers. He took his final vows as a Jesuit in 1883, while at the Jesuit Scholasticate of the Isle of Jersey where he taught. In 1885, Billot became a professor of dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1909, he was named a consultor to the Holy Office. Billot was an advocate of Thomistic scholasticism, and was a moving force in drafting the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis of Pope St. Pius X. Billot was created Cardinal in 1991 by Pope St. Pius X. In 1923, he was appointed a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Eventually, his strong support for the conservative movement Action Française led to disagreements between him and Pius XI who condemned the movement. It led to his resignation of the cardinalate in 1927. Billot therefore died at age 85, a simple priest at the Jesuit Novitiate of Galloro, near Ariccia, at the age of 85.

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 4

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR APPEARS to have been convinced that the concept of pure nature had to be abandoned as an inadequate theological concept. In his book on the theology of Karl Barth, he sets forth his understanding of the Catholic position on the nature/supernature complex, but his understanding of it appears to deviate from the inherited Thomistic synthesis.

VON BALTHASAR

[T]he concept of a pure nature cannot be exactly specified. Based on the belief that it is possible to give a clear exposition of interwordly structures in their eidos, at least up to a certain point, some people then think they have discovered purely natural and purely isolable relationships. Then they feel justified in continuing this construction and likewise in drawing conclusive boundary lines, even going so far as to specify the relationship of this hypothetical "being" to God and its ultimate fate! But it is obvious how questionable the results of this are. For were do we get the right to understand these interwordly structures as if they were disengaged from transcendence? How can you drain marriage, for example, or the whole of mortality of its concrete relation to God and the Last Things? The only end we know in our de facto world is our supernatural one. So how can we so blithely maintain that the world possesses a self-sufficient definitive ground of fulfillment apart from this end? Only God, God alone, can have the final word. The fact that grace is free in its relation to nature does not suffice for making pure nature so governing a concept.

In this excerpt, Balthasar correctly states that the concept of nature cannot be exactly specified. But, then, what can? There is nothing it seems that can ever be exactly comprehended if for no other reason that we don't know God's mind on the matter. But that's not the point. With that sort of standard, we would be relegated to agnosticism in knowledge. There is even a little "irrationalism" in Balthasar in taking this view. Long, 72.

Creation of Man and Woman
Fresco by Giusto di Giovanni Menabuoi (ca. 1390)
Baptistry of the Cathedral, Padua, Italy.

The point is that the concept of pure nature can be sufficiently specified to be intelligible, that it can be recognized as an ontological reality. While we will never know pure nature since God saw fit to order nature from the beginning by raising it up with supernatural grace to another order, God did not by all that terminate the internal integrity of the natural order. Nor does it mean that nature is now meaningless, as it retains its own order and its own end separate and apart from the end with which it has been endowed through grace. Nature was not destroyed when God joined with it sanctifying grace. "To be further ordered," Long notes, "is not not to be, nor is is to be naturally unknowable." Long, 73.

Interesting is Balthasar's challenge to the reader: "For where do we get the right to understand these interwordly structures as if they were disengaged from transcendence?" It is interesting because of what is implied or what is assumed. It assumes that "pure nature" is "disengaged from transcendence," that man, in his nature, is not ordered toward the transcendent. But this materialist atheonomic notion of human nature is foreign to Catholic tradition. Pure nature has its own order, an order that has a relative albeit not absolute ordering to God; after all, pure nature retains its spiritual (rational) character which reaches upwards as well as outward. Through reason alone, that is as part of a specific part of his nature, man can know God as First Cause, and he can recognize that this God-as-First-Cause is worthy of veneration, to be prayed to, and even adored. More, even the free will of man--a natural faculty--achieves its freedom while being acted upon by God. Therefore, both in his intellect and in his will, natural man--though, granted, it is a hypothetical or abstracted concept since in the concrete or de facto world we do not see it alone--is ordered toward God. It is this denuded notion of human nature--a notion which is wrong--which lies at the heart of the Balthasarian discomfiture with the notion of pure nature. "Balthasar possesses a non-theonomic concept of nature, and so to overcome this one must hotwire nature to grace." Long, 75. Had he comprehended the theonomic aspect of man's nature--theonomic even without sanctifying grace--he might have been less defensive and more open to traditional thought on the matter. The problem was that Balthasar did not, and in his anxiety or "overweening exigency to avert the dangers of naturalism" he ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Balthasar's defensiveness shows itself in hyperbole (or, as Long puts it, it "surpasses hyperbole"): "The only end we know in our de facto world is our supernatural one," Balthasar says. The "only end"? Taken literally, of course, this is untrue. We know many ends that are not the final end, the finis ultimus. When we wake up in the early morning and stumble toward our kitchen to get a cup of coffee we must certainly know, even through our fog, that we have the intent of pouring ourselves a cup of coffee. From this most mundane of ends to the end of knowing God as First Cause, many knows myriad ends that are other than the supernatural one.

Balthasar's statement is more than hyperbolical. It is also inaccurate in a theological sense since we do not know de facto our end, for we shall only know our end when we achieve the beatific vision. What is de facto known, and this through Revelation, is that God created our nature with its specific order and end, and that he conjoined with it at the time of our creation, a supernatural destiny, one of predicated on unmerited grace, a sanctifying grace that included with it the promise of Heaven of the beatific vision of God. Moreover, man's natural end must be known, for if it is not, then man cannot know who he is and what he has received by being given the gift of sanctifying grace. It is man's natural end which defines who he is as a species. Additionally, as Long shows, to suggest that there is no such thing as human nature throws a potential wrench in the works of the entire Nicean and Chalcedonian Christological construct. How can we say that there are two natures--man and God--in the person of the Christ when we don't know what the nature of man is? It would seem that the analogia fidei would have warned Balthasar that he ought not to have taken the extreme position that it was impossible to know what human nature is.

The Balthasarian dismissal of pure nature has more than doctrinal ramifications. It has some serious effects upon morality, which is particularly our focus. As Long observes:

To hold that human nature is not intelligible in its species in distinction from grace . . . is also to imply that no definitive distinction can be made between our natural rational participation in the eternal law that is know as the natural law and that essentially higher participation of the eternal law which is that of the lex nova [new law] and gratia [grace].

Long, 74.

Such an empty concept of nature has two undesired effects. First, it empties nature out of any ontological thickness and seems to make it more a "remainder of dialectics," a leftover of theological arguments of days of yore. A hangover from too much drinking of the wine of scholasticism, from which la nouvelle théologie was supposed to be the much-needed Alka-Seltzer. Plop. Plop. Fizz. Fizz. Oh what a relief it is!

But this eagerness to escape the clutches of neo-scholasticism, this effort at relief, if careless or hurriedly done so that essential truths are neglected or denied, has serious consequences for the notion of analogical thinking, so central to Sts. Augustine and Thomas:

[I]f there is no distinct ratio or nature, there is nothing to be treated analogously in any traditional sense of the term, and the resultant construction is a dialectical orchestration perhaps closer to Hegel than to Augustine or Aquinas.

Long, 74.

Worse, the Balthasarian dismissal of pure nature as a pipe dream actually works against what he is trying to do: protect the supernatural end of man. "[T]he effect of the unilateral suppression of nature in behalf of grace is the implicit reductio of grace to the natural level." Long, 74. In the long run, it serves to naturalize grace, which means to cheapen it.

In case someone were to accuse Long of being unfair to Balthasar, we can just let Balthasar keep talking. It is unquestionable that, as Long puts it, "Balthasar undertakes the decisive and final rejection of natura as primordial revelation in preference for a more controllable variable of natura as merely the minimum prerequisite to grace, 'createdness as such' and the 'antechamber that is not of itself the grace of participation.'" Long calls these the "capstone" paragraphs in Balthasar's formulation of the Catholic position on nature and grace in his Theology of Karl Barth.

VON BALTHASAR

While we do not need to describe it in great detail, this image of the servant who has been simultaneously clothed in the grace of friendship captures the contrast between nature and grace. Nature is to be sought in that minimum that must be present in every possible situation where God wants to reveal himself to a creature. And that minimum is expressed by the term analogia entis. If there is to be revelation, then it can only proceed from God to the creature--to a creature that precisely as a creature does not include revelation in its conceptual range. The "nature" that grace presupposes is createdness as such. We shall call this concept of nature the formal concept of nature. This minimum is therefore the presupposition of all grace because its necessity must be prior to the facticity of any and all revelation. As revelation takes place, nature is set off from it as the antechamber that is not, of itself, the grace of participation. When the inconceivably free event of grace occurs, it becomes simultaneously clear how truly gratuitous this frees of all gifts really is and how much it does not have to be.

This notion of Balthasarian scarequote "nature" is thin indeed. It is a concept where nature is a "mere dialectical limit concept or posit." Long, 79. But one has to ask, is human "nature" nothing but "createdness" as such? So the nature of man which allows him to enjoy the gift of grace is "createdness as such," the same createdness of a rock, a scarecrow, a carrot, and a dog? How is man's nature capax Dei, capable of God, if it just "createdness as such"? Balaam's ass enjoyed the same, and surely it isn't in heaven?

So [for Balthasar] nature is merely a negation of the participation of grace, an empty place for grace, generically [not specifically] necessary prior to the gift of revelation and yet vacuous: blank Newtonian space for the reception of the revelata.

Long, 77.

Manifestly, we have here no concept of human nature as something integral in itself, an ontologically positive object, with its own relative, proportionate end. But there has to be something more to human nature than "createdness as such" to be a meaningful repository or recipient of that grace. In man, God wrought more than "createdness as such," God wrought man, man with a specific nature.

What that specific nature is is what Balthasar appears to have decided not to divine. No, not even not divine. It appears that nature is something Balthasar decided not even to understand.

(continued)

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 3

THERE IS A TENDENCY TOWARD REDUCTIONISM of nature in Hans Urs von Balthasar's understanding of nature within the greater question the nature/supernature complex.

VON BALTHASAR

The theological concept of nature is primarily a negative one: it draws a boundary line. It can only be distilled into a pure state through a process of subtraction, because God's initial creation was already supernatural to begin with and continued to remain so after the Fall.

The greater of what Balthasar states here is unobjectionable. It is true that, in the light of Revelation, we know our nature both prelapsarian and postlapsarian was created with the supernatural life already bound with it by God's own plan. But these comments suggest almost as if everything is taken up into the supernatural sort of as if the natural salt dissolves into a supernatural sea. This is precisely the sort of monophysitistic image that is provided by the notion of distilling. You have to boil out the alcohol of the supernatural life, and the dregs that you are left with after subtracting out the supernatural is what nature is. It is a residue.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

There seems to be a conceptual disorder here. It is as if for Balthasar nature is not "first" in being, but the admixture of natural life and the supernatural life of man are together "first" in being. However, as Long states, it appears essential to maintain that "created nature is ontologically prior to the reception of grace even if the two are temporally simultaneous, because it requires a created receiver of grace to receive grace." Long, 67. Long's greatest grievance in the paragraph about is the image of "subtraction." He insists that a proper conceptual feel of nature would view the process of visualizing nature prescinded from grace would be a process of "abstraction," and not one of "subtraction." For Balthasar, it seems that nature is nature only when combined with grace, but nature is nature whether it had been combined with grace or not.

VON BALTHASAR

Now common sense claims to know what nature is. But the more exactly it tries to grasp it, the more difficult--nay impossible--it becomes to isolate it neatly from the other dimension: supernatural grace. But it is equally difficult to espy the negative effects on the realm of nature of the loss of grace. The question, for example, how far "ignorance and hardship belong to natural existence," how much concupiscence, disease, death (and the forms that death takes) are the result of sin or are part of the definition of being human and animal; but also questions about marriage, community, the State, our relation to a God who might not have revealed himself in in his personal, interior life, the necessity for prayer in a natural state (which many people deny, for good reasons), the eschatological fate of the soul, resurrection of the body, Last Judgment, eternal bliss: all such questions addressed to pure nature are simply unanswerable.

There are four great grievances against this paragraph. First, is the suggestion that distinguishing nature from grace is more than just difficult, but "impossible." To suggest that there is no understanding of nature apart from grace, that it is "impossible," is simply an untenable proposition. This theological despair at knowing nature apart from grace simply does not accord with Catholic tradition which has always felt itself able to abstract a notion of pure nature, a nature that hypothetically could have existed without the gift of sanctifying grace in which it was actually in history bound. The Catholic tradition also has seen nature has having its own integrality and end, even apart from grace, albeit subordinate to the grace and the supernatural end to which it is lifted up. There is in nature a capax Dei, a specific sort of potentiality of obedience (potentia obedentialis),* one which reason is able to distinguish and to grasp as something intelligible. Certainly, there is no real question of "impossibility."

The fault is apparent when Balthasar suggests that nature-apart-from-grace knows no necessity of prayer, that reason would not alone compel nature to worship God as First Cause. But this denial is given harsh treatment by Long:

[T]his denial is utterly contrary to right reason. As Aguinas shows with masterful orthodoxy, public worship and prayer is owed to the Creator from whom every public and private benefit is derived, and the virtue of religion falls under the natural good of justice . . . . Balthasar . . . has somehow missed the presence of the natural knowability of God as Creator . . . and the datum that from this natural knowledge devolve natural duties in justice to God.

Long, 69.

This agnosticism of nature-apart-from-grace that Balthasar seems to advocate has significant practical results, especially in the area of natural law. Granted, some of the questions are unknown to and unknowable to nature: the Fall, Redemption, the Resurrection, Eternal Life. These are matters that are part of the revelata, that are revealed and are mysteries beyond nature's reason of which nature is ignorant. But certainly not all of these areas is nature or nature's reason ignorant. Insofar as nature is unknown, then the natural law is unknown, and this is exactly what Balthasar seems to be saying: "[Q]uestions about marriage, community, the State . . . addressed to pure nature are simply unanswerable." The difficulty of some of these questions--especially the further one gets from fundamentals--is acknowledged by all in the field, but the impossibility? What this position suggests is there is a complete inability of Christians to speak with non-Christians on the matter of the practical life. Dialogue on the moral life basis of reason is in vain. We are forever caught in the shoals of a moral fideism. This is contrary to the practice of the Church and her understanding of herself as custodian of the natural moral law, a law that is founded upon the nature of man.

[A]ll such questions [about marriage, community, the State, etc.] will be unanswerable for someone who has jettisoned the doctrine of the adequatio of mind and thing in behalf of a modal supernaturalization of nature so complete as to suggest that, apart from its ordering to grace, there is nothing in the real order present to be known.

Long, 70. This is a radical error, an one which seems to have infected the great Balthasar.

VON BALTHASAR

To be sure, there are any number of theologians who do not hesitate to come forth with a ready-made answer to all these questions. One should once more bear in mind, however, that it would only occur to theologians in their work as theologians to pose such a question. But as soon as they come up with something remotely pertinent to this questions, they inevitably give us a "system of pure nature," that is, merely a pale, phantasmagoric double image, a hollow phantom of the real, existing world order. The success with which this pale film was lade over the real order has only meant "the loss of feeling for the infinite qualitative different between grace and nature."

One senses here a bit of the chauvinism of the agnostic in this paragraph, a chauvinism where the agnostic holds himself superior for his ability to grasp that he knows nothing certainly. The chauvinism of the agnostic seems unbecoming in a Catholic. It is a different virtue than the humility of the man who knows that there is truth, that he has got a little bit of it, although he is never fully the master of it. Is the man who says that all men are bound by the natural moral law never intentionally to take the life of an innocent man regardless of the gain an ignoramus with "ready-made" facile answers? Is the man who insists that marriage is, by natural law, an exclusive union between one man and one woman someone who can be brushed off as one with "ready-made" answers?

The language here is hostile. Those who claim to prescind an order of nature from the complex of nature and grace wherein God has put nature simply come out with a "hollow phantom," a "pale phantasmagorical double image." Granted, it may be that Balthasar is concerned with assuring the preeminence of the supernatural life of man, but the best way to preserve the preeminence of the supernatural life is not by deprecating the natural life of man, as it is the natural life of man which is taken up, raised, lifted up and made to bloom, in the life of supernatural grace which God, in his infinite largess, has deigned to give to man. To acknowledge a natural life in man does not mean the supernatural life is demoted or seen as "only a kind of Doppelgänger." Long, 71. These are non sequuntur. There is no reason that a balanced, articulated view of nature and supernature cannot be maintained, one that fully respects the integrity of the natural order and the preeminence and marvel of the supernatural calling which draws the nature into the very bosom of the Trinitarian life of God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

(continued)

______________________________
*For the concept of obediential potency, see our blog postings Natura Pura: Human Nature Unaided, Natura Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part 1, Natural Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part 2, and Balaam's Ass and Stained Glass: The Concept of Specific Obediential Potency.

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 2

CONTINUING FROM OUR LAST POSTING with Steve A. Long's critical analysis of the Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar's misconstruction of nature and grace and their relationship in the latter's work The Theology of Karl Barth, we initially focus on a text that seems to have a grasps of the two different orders along traditional lines. In this context, Balthasar is speaking about St. Augustine's contribution to the nature-and-grace issue:

VON BALTHASAR

But he [St. Augustine] was quite well aware, as were all the Fathers, that this unity [between the natural life and supernatural life] that was the foundation of Adam's existence was itself no necessary synthesis but a de facto one. It belongs to the very essence of the creature that it must indeed be a creature, but not a creature who has been exalted to a new order by grace; by nature a creature is the "servant" but not the "friend" of God.

These sorts of comments are clearly within Catholic orthodoxy, and, though inconsistent with some of his other statements, indicate for Long Balthasar's "rectitude and orthodoxy of intention." Long, 61. There is no suggestion whatsoever that Balthasar sees that nature requires of God grace by the necessity of justice in such a manner that it would be unjust for God to have withheld sanctifying grace speculatively from man at his origin. In fact, elsewhere he touches upon the problem of such a concept. If nature without grace led to beatitude, "then we could conceive of a creature to whom God would have to be gracious. And that would mean that it would no longer be a creature." The "necessity" of grace to nature is a de facto and not de jure one, a "necessity" that God imposed upon himself by the sheer gratuity of supernatural life given to man above and beyond his natural life at his origins. Whatever fault with find with Balthasar's doctrine the area of nature and grace, that fault is unintentional.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Similar statements suggest the same conclusion. Witness, for example, the following unimpeachable understanding of the Thomistic concept:

VON BALTHASAR

God's real world order is the de facto unity of two materially distinguishable and distinct orders that can be differentiated in analysis but are still not separate in reality.

So it is clear that Balthasar sees sanctifying grace not as a natural endowment, but as a free gift of God to man. But the proposition that sanctifying grace is a gift of God and not a natural endowment does not quite reach the essential point in the relationship between nature and grace. This position could allow for grace and supernatural beatitude to be the only natural end of man. And therefore it does not exclude the implication that God may be under the necessity of justice to provide sanctifying grace and the beatific vision, a position that would appear to have been condemned by Pius V in his Bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567) against Baius. The only way to assure that one does not fall into the condemned proposition that sanctifying grace is something owed us in strict justice and without which nature would be penalized is to maintain, in addition to the principles that grace is gratuitous and not a natural endowment, that nature has a end distinct from the end of supernatural grace. There must be a natural end and a supernatural end or else we would seem to lapse willy nilly into Baianism.

In the absence of the affirmation of the existence and intelligibility of a proportionate natural end distinct from supernatural beatitude, it appears that a necessity of justice comes to pertain to the need of man for grace, even if this derivative-implied consequence is not desired. And it is necessitation in justice, and not merely as contrary to free and personal act, that is rejected in the Church's anathematization of the error of Baius.

Long, 62. Though it is true that as God willed it, we are in fact created with nature and sanctifying grace jointly, and so unrepented sin leads to punishment in the form of loss of the beatific vision, this was not necessarily so, but so only because God determined at the inception of man's creation to join the two. Had God decided not to link sanctifying grace and the beatific vision in man at his creation, there would have been no punishment therein.

Unfortunately, Balthasar it seems disdains or is at least highly distrustful of any abstraction of pure nature from the "complex in which it will be found, and from its mode of existence." Long, 63.

VON BALTHASAR

Above all, it is quite obvious, and it is becoming ever more striking, that when we use this concept [of pure nature]--which expresses the essence of what it means to be a creature--it cannot be neutral in either its philosophical or theological usage.

It is true that "nature" understood theologically (in the light of revelation) will be understood in a manner differently than when understood philosophically (in the light of reason alone), and so we are not dealing with a "neutral" term "hovering" over both theology and philosophy. "There are," after all, "more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in . . . philosophy." No one in the orthodox Christian patrimony would have thought otherwise.

But this philosophical understanding of nature is not to be given short shrift. Indeed, the supernatural end of man cannot be known without the natural end of man. Why? Because the very distinction of supernatural presupposes knowledge of the natural. Something is "super" nature. "One cannot contrast two things where only one is to be found." It takes two to tango, and these two dancers in the life of man as God in fact created him, are his nature as known by reason (philosophy) and his "supernature," the sanctifying grace which will afford man beatific vision and the knowledge and union with God, as known by faith (theology). Nature, then is not "the theologian's posit; it is God's effect," which is to say, it is not something merely assumed, postulated, contrived, or figmental, but something altogether real, something with "ontological density." Long, 64.

It is a mistake of tremendous proportions to reject the notion of man's "pure nature" as being something real, albeit something that in God's dispensation, is ordered by gift to a supernatural destiny. The result is to define nature negatively, as "not grace." Nature is something more than "not grace."

It is also an error to use "Hegelian" dialectic to suggest through fuzzy reasoning that nature has not its own end separate, albeit subordinate to, man's supernatural end, but is in some way already on the way to the supernatural as if it is intrinsic to it. The fog in this sort of thinking is visible: nature is not grace, but nature is "not grace," and so we may define nature in relation to grace; consequently, we may say that nature is on the way to be grace. Cf. Long, 66. This dissolution of being and nature, which are substantive concepts, into relational terms is erroneous.

Nature as such is not on the way to grace save insofar as under the actual ordering causality of grace itself--which is true of man's creation in grace! But this does not negate but affirms the distinct and intelligible divine gift of nature.

Long, 66.

VON BALTHASAR

The positive definition of grace can only be given through grace itself. God must himself reveal what he is within himself. The creature cannot delimit itself in relation to this Unknown reality. Nor can the creature, as a theologically understood "pure" nature, ever know wherein it specifically is different from God. Only the light of revelation can draw this distinction and make this clear--not a philosophy that ascends from the world to God, or even (especially!) the mysticism of a Plotinus.

While it is true that "(sanctifying) grace can only be given through grace (of revelation) itself," Balthasar seems to elide the equally necessary truth that there is, in addition to the grace revealed by grace, an "aboriginal gift," namely, "created nature," a nature that has an ontological density, an intelligibility graspable by reason alone without although not to the exclusion of grace. In the order of creation, it is possible to "delimit" oneself in relation to God the unknown. We can obviously distinguish between creature and Creator, even though we may have no positive knowledge of the Creator as something other than that He is First Cause, pure Act, and we are not. This is a delimitation.

(continued)

Balthasar's Theological Vacuoule, Part 1

EVEN THE REDOUBTABLE Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar,* unquestionably one of the great Catholic theologians of the 20th century, shared in de Lubac's error on the distinction between nature and grace. De Lubac was not alone in his conflation of the orders of grace and of nature with the resulting deprecation of the order of nature. In his book Pura Natura, Steven A. Long shows convincingly that Balthasar's famous analysis of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth contains a deficient ("deeply flawed"), if at times, inconsistent notion of nature and grace, one that has abandoned the Thomist doctrine that accords both human nature and divine grace a separate, real order, with real separate ends, and attempts to reconcile them by subordinating, or perhaps better, superordinating, the natural to the supernatural. Steven A. Long's critique of Balthasar's work is respectful, even apologetic, but withering. It is perhaps this error in Balthasar's work, and the similar error in de Lubac's work, that explains, until rescued by John Paul II's encyclical Veritatas splendor, the weakness of Catholic moral theology over the last generation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar

Long focuses on Balthasar's work The Theology of Karl Barth.** Since the Protestant theologian Karl Barth was so uniquely hostile to the doctrine of the natural law, Balthasar's treatment of Barth would be an opportune condition for investigating Balthasar's own viewpoint, particularly the second chapter of section three of that work, entitled "The Concept of Nature in Catholic Theology." Long calls it the "mother load of Balthasar's rich reflections on nature and grace." Long, 54. In Long's view, nature for Balthasar is merely a "postscript," indeed, maybe not so much as that, perhaps more like "the equivalent of a theological vacuoule or empty Newtonian space, a placeholder for grace." Long, 55.

The best approach for synopsizing Long's critique is to identify those portions of Balthasar's work that are criticized, identify those portions with which Long is critical by number, and then summarize Long's observations of those portions.

VON BALTHASAR

[A]s a created being of nature, man has no other goal than the supernatural vision of God. It is essential to realize that Thomas does not regard this as a hypothetical goal. Indeed he knows of a finis naturalis, meaning a fulfillment corresponding to the immanent structure of human powers. But he sees this fulfillment either as a goal for this life as opposed to the next, in the Aristotelian tradition, the ideal of the seeker after wisdom. Or he sees it as the cognition verpertina [evening knowledge] [sic] [should be vespertina] as opposed to a cognitio matutina [morning knowledge], in the Augustinian tradition where this distinction first arose. Or finally, he might have meant it in the sense of a distinction between the praemium essentiale [essential reward] and praemium accidentale [accidental reward] internal to a supernatural glory. But Thomas never entertains, even hypothetically, a final goal that could be unmoored from the supernatural vision of God. According to his medieval presuppositions, it would have been impossible for him even to make the conceptual distinction implied by this problem.

"But Thomas never entertains, even hypothetically, a final goal that could be unmoored from the supernatural vision of God." This, of course, is a conspicuous error. St. Thomas explicitly "entertains . . . hypothetically" precisely this. In his Quodlibetal questions (I, q. 4, a. 3, resp.), St. Thomas says in no uncertain terms: *** "But because it was possible for God to have made man in a state of pure nature, it is useful to consider how far natural love could be extended." There are other examples which Long cites to and quotes. Long, 57. On this "strategic point" it appears Balthasar has "accepted an erroneous reading" of St. Thomas. Long, 57.

More generally, the three various interpretations of what St. Thomas may have meant by positing a natural end of man do not do justice to the Thomistic teaching, though they are not inconsistent with it. They just do not seem to go far enough to touch what St. Thomas intended. St. Thomas plainly sees the natural order as have a final end that specifies who man is, and and end that is wholly valid, entire, ontologically thick, and integral in itself, even though, by God's free gift, it is raised into the supernatural life. This rich understanding of what St. Thomas envisioned for the nature of man, particularly its theonomic nature, seems to be lacking or at least not entirely embraced by Balthasar. There is already a discomfiture with a theonomic order in nature. Whatever ordering or end is in nature is immanent, which suggests no natural ordering with the transcendent without recourse to supernatural grace.

VON BALTHASAR

To pose such a hypothesis, to maintain that a graceless order of nature or creation is at least possible, only became urgent for theology when a heretic wanted to make the fluid bond between nature and the supernatural a forced and juridic one.(1) This happened when Baius chose to derive a de jure compulsory right to grace understood as a strict requirement (debitum) from nature based on the de facto configuration of both orders, which were linked because of free grace, not necessity.(2) This conclusion gave birth to 'natural theology' in the modern sense of the term, that is, to a theology of "natura pura."(1)

(1) If Balthasar suggests that the first time the hypothetical notion of nature prescinded from a supernatural order came in response to Baius in the 16th century, he is clearly wrong. As Long observes and prior postings on this subject have made amply clear, St. Thomas entertained the concept of pure nature, a natura pura, in distinguishing between the natural orders and the supernatural orders which, at his creation, were joined in man. Therefore, this hypothetical conception is at least as old as the 13th century.

(2) Having erred on the position of St. Thomas, Balthasar appears to suggest that the notion of a hypothetical possibility of a "graceless order of nature or creation" first came to pass in opposition to the heresy of the Franciscan theologian Baius or Michel de Bay (1513-1589), a heresy called Baianism. Some of Baius's false propositions were condemned in the papal bull issued by Pope St. Pius V, Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567), which condemnation was reaffirmed by Pope Gregory XIII in his bull Provisionis nostrae (1579). Baianism, whose critical errors stem from the relationship between nature and grace within the contexts of man's Creation, Fall, and Redemption, seems to be a confused and unacceptable amalgam of unreconciled Pelagianism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Socinianism, which, of course is defining one ism with four isms and is not very helpful. But the topic of Baianism is for another day, since it is Balthasar we look at in this post.

Though Balthasar is correct enough when he states that grace cannot be considered a necessity of nature, but a free gift to nature, that may not be enough fully to quench the Baian flame. That the gift of grace may be free and not a necessity of nature, does not quite fully answer the question of, as Long puts it, "there is a necessity of justice that it [grace and supernatural life] be given." Long, 58. Is grace like oxygen, a free gift and yet an evident necessity to our nature? Withholding oxygen from a man would seem a punishment, perhaps even an injustice. Similarly, is withholding grace from man a punishment, or even an injustice? This would seem to be the conclusion if supernatural beatitude is man's natural end.

(continued)
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*I call Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) "redoubtable" because he is a formidable Catholic theologian and was deeply loyal to the Magisterium if at times, as may befit a speculative theologian, on edge, perhaps even with a foot over the boundary [I refer here to his controversial and "apocatastastical" Was dürfen wir hoffen (What Dare We Hope?) and Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle (A Little Discourse on Hell)]. Balthasar was Swiss, having been born in Lucerne, and grew up in a Catholic family. He was a brilliant, cultured man, steeped in European classics, with a great love for music ("my youth was defined by music," he wrote), had a passion for Mozart, and had perfect musical pitch. (At one point in his life, he gave away his record player and entire works of Mozart because he had memorized the entire corpus and could picture both the scores and hear the music in his mind with completely fidelity.) He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1928, and, dissatisfied with the state of Thomistic scholasticism ("languishing in the desert of neo-scholasticism," as he put it) ventured, through the influence of de Lubac, "beyond the scholastic stuff to the Fathers of the Church," and into the nouvelle théologie. Balthasar was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936. His ventures in the at first distrusted nouvelle théologie, his support of the mystic Adriene von Speyr (for whom he was confessor), and his other activities found disfavor with his Jesuit superiors, and he postponed his annual vows to the Jesuits and later left the order in 1950. His post-Jesuit career met with practical difficulties which he eventually overcame. He devoted himself to teaching and to writing. His writings were prolific and immense in scope and in subject matter. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his fifteen-volume trilogy, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik (The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics). He was a peritus for the second Vatican Council, was a member of the papal International Theological Commission from its establishment in 1969, and was the founder of the St. John's Community (Johannes Gemeinschaft) and its publishing house. He also was a founder of the international Catholic journal Communio. In 1988, Balthasar was chosen by John Paul II to be a cardinal, but, two days before his elevation, on June 26, 1988, he died.
**Karl Barth was inveterately hostile to the concept of natural law. We have written about this in our postings, Karl Barth's Response to Natural Law: Nein!, Karl Barth's Tin Ear: Notes, But No Melody (which drew the ire of Barthian George Hunsinger), and Karl Barth: Rubbing Out the Image of God in Man.
***Sed quia possibile fuit Deo ut hominem faceret in puris naturalibus, utile est considerare ad quantum se dilectio naturalis extendere possit. Quod., I, q. 4, a. 3, resp.