THE ROOT OF THE MATTER
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Dr. Robert A. Herrara
Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Razing of the Catholic Church
Orestes Brownson, Catholic convert and apologist of the past century, once called Ballou's On the Atonement the book most full of heresies ever published in the United States. In spite of Brownson's talent for the dramatic, it very well may have been. But it was limited in scope both geographically and religiously. Moreover, Ballou was not a Catholic nor a hard-line New England Calvinist. Today, in a culture that is called global and within the confines of Catholicism, a case can be made that Hans Urs von Balthasar's small volume, Schleifung der Bastionem: Von der Kirche in Dieser Zeit, published in 1952, though scarcely the most heretical book of its era, can be considered on of the most noxious. Translated as Razing the Bastions, [1] it did much to prepare the way for the radical trends that led up to Vatican II and helped to create a polluted atmosphere from which Catholicism has not yet escaped.
Oddly, Balthasar, because of his later works, became a favorite in conservative circles, perhaps because, as Bishop Schonborn, who authored the foreword (written in 1988) notes that this "programmatic little book" has often been set against his later, more theologically conservative works. He adds that the author himself, in 1985, believed that the views expounded there had been adopted, with reservations and second thoughts, by Vatican II, which deepened and taught it.2 The good Bishop, clearly forbearing by nature, urges, in spite of the depredations of the past three decades, that one should hear afresh the summons to raze the bastions, and to meet today the claim articulated in the small volume.3
Written some 45 years ago, this small volume captured a heady blend of naive optimism regarding the future and bleak pessimism concerning the past that is characteristic of the present era, in fact, of all eras infatuated with Utopia. It is a theme that bombards us even now: the media, the educationalists, and the pulpit conspire to spread the euphoria. Von Balthasar skillfully conveys the inebriating vision of a new world coming into being, a world that for the first time is fully conscious of the unity of the planet and of the imperative of stewarding itself.4 Echoes of Teilhard, Buckminster Fuller, and other worthies are heard. The youth, designated as the prophets of the new age, are left cold by the "ancient Church," which evokes only a "sense of unreality." Their principal task is to act as a "springboard" for what is to come.5
Von Balthasar speaks of "youthful holiness," of their "holy audacity," and so on. This lionizing of youth, coupled with enthusiasm for the "new" and near-idolatry for the present, is no less bizarre, especially when he waxes eloquent over the present-day revelation of God, the deepening of Christian consciousness in modern man, and proposes the "shift in Christian awareness" as the dominating idea of our age.6 A new Pentecost is at hand, a rather surprising possibility less than a decade removed from the horrors of Auschwitz and a period in which the Gulags were flourishing, when the youth had demonstrated their exceptional spiritual afflatus by filling the ranks of youth organizations such as Hitler Jugend and Komsomol.
For the author of Razing the Bastions old is bad and the Church is undoubtedly old, the oldest of the old. The most striking mark of her dotage is "the fact that Christianity has dissolved in the course of centuries like a crumbling rock into even more churches, sects, and confessions."7 A chilling exaggeration (as well as a bit old hat) to be brought up in 1952. His solution is simply preposterous: reduce the Catholic Church to simply another sect in the mosaic of religions. This from the highest and most spiritual motives based on the discovery of "human solidarity" and the subsequent elimination of the barrier between sacred and profane, the civitas Dei and civitas tenena.8 The traditional Church has outgrown its usefulness and now represents the forces of inertia struggling against real holiness.9
This entails a frank devaluation of history that cannot provide solutions for today, an epoch grounded on the new awareness of "ultimate solidarity and fellowship in destiny." The very distance that separates it chronologically from Christ, indicates Balthasar, allows us to come more directly in contact with the source–the revelation of Christ.10This may be true in a Kierkegaardian sense, but to devalue the past while claiming authority from a historical revelation is counterproductive, if not absurd. Kant, it is known, woke from his "dogmatic slumber" by reading Hume. Von Balthasar suggests that the Church must wake from its "historical sleep" by interpreting, understanding, and responding to the signs of the times,11 that convenient catch-phrase for everything and nothing. The age of the laity is fast approaching and will be evidenced by radical changes. For example, architecture should be modified to enable the liturgy to be performed as a "community celebration."12The swarm of bare, ugly meeting houses and trivial, uninspired liturgies with which we are today afflicted comes immediately to mind. Von Balthasar is convinced that the Church is living at a privileged moment. She perhaps has never been "so open, so full of promise, and so pregnant with the future at any time since the first three centuries."13 An "irresistible process" has been advancing since the Middle Ages and is now arriving at fruition. Clergy and religious orders no longer suffice for the needs of the Church: worker-priests and consecrated laymen are the "radiant signs of the times."14 This rank utopianism, almost hallucinatory enthusiasm, romanticism at its least attractive, is hard to digest. But the proposal that "the historical consciousness of Christians" be shattered touches the demonic:
from the perspective of the philosophy of history, the Church is superannuated15... in terms of the history of religion, each year the Church spends on the earth is another proof she will the sooner die.16
Although the truth of the Church is always the same, the "onward march" of the world allows something new to become visible even in the Truth itself.
Two great changes have taken place since the Middle Ages: the Western division of the Church and an altered awareness of the non-Christian world. They serve to accelerate the march of humanity into a unity that now can be seen in its totality.17 It is now urgent to interpret the plans of Providence for the Church in today's world.18
One wonders what happened to the notion of the Church as a sign of contradiction, especially as the "signs of the times" are culled from the secular world, probably through the distorted prisms of church groups, classrooms and lecture halls. The author's contempt for history issues into a rank confusion of realms: St. Augustine and the Enlightenment are appealed to as equals. Von Balthasar suggests that the axiom "extra ecclesiam nulla salus" be rethought from the perspective of the Enlightenment's rejection of dualism, which transforms the axiom into–"outside the Church there is every possibility of salvation."19 A further modification. The function of the Church as yeast of the world is now grounded on "an indissoluble solidarity with the separated brethren and through them with the world." This proclaims the advent of "a new form of 'osmosis' between the Church and the world."20
This agenda, accompanied by bursts of esoteric language verging on the mystagogical (probably taken from the Kabbalah), adds an indefinable sense of mystery to the theses that are expounded. The "invisible fragrances of the beloved" are scattered in the most worldly parts of the world. The "outer shells" are falling away, the "shells of error" break open and release the captive kernels of truth.21This is hardly normative Christian speculation but corresponds to a process known to the Kabbalists as the "gathering of the sparks" which has ancient roots in Gnosticism and more recent ones in the Zohar, specifically the Lurianic Kabbalah.22 In any case, it is out of place in the present work and had an uncomfortable reception in Judaism because of its tilt toward pantheism.
This "new stage of awareness" produces a turnabout in the Christian from "possessor to giver, from usufructuary23 to apostle, from privileged person to responsible person."24 Small wonder that the author remarks "for when did God not cast pearls before the swine."25 The point Balthasar is making is that throughout the ages the Church has been transmitting truths to the world that eventually became the common property of humanity.26 He insists that the time has arrived for the Church to reclaim these truths by means of "a deeper and more serious incarnation" in the world.27 To accomplish this the Church must imitate the Lord's kenosis (emptying) and become merely "one religion among others...one doctrine and truth among others" just as Christ became one man among others.28 This, we are told, is the "good path" devised by Providence.29
Was the sublime drama of Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection enacted simply to establish a Church without a unique vocation, content to share the world with Buddhism, Stoicism, Christian Science, and what-not-on the basis of equality–Balthasar is emphatic on this point. The Christian should experience worldly truths and endure the alien character of this truth. This will cause the return home of all truth to the Una Catholica, "the truth of Goethe...of Nietzsche...of Luther, and of all who took up a fragment of the infinite mirror," the "great return" of the heresies, the religions, and the philosophers.30 In a burst of utopianism, the author contends that the more mankind becomes one, and is dependent on the honesty of all, the more will deceit, falsehood, and other negativities be rejected.31 This is amazingly naive and runs counter to the Christian notion of original sin, individual responsibility, and even most views dealing with the End Times.
A further result of this new situation generated by the discovery of solidarity is the abandonment of "monastic spirituality" and its replacement by the "new religious life in the world."32 No longer can a Christian aspire to a private existence. The Augustinian path of interiority that separates sacred interior space from the profane exterior is now faced by tremendous difficulties as the person searching for God in the "inner room" ineluctably encounters the exterior, the profane. Only together, with "all the brethren" and "all the creatures," can man come before the One God.33 The collapse of the final wall, that between God and the world, signifies that even in eternal beatitude, our vision will not be worldless.34
Behind the façade presented by its theology, a conflation of the traditional, the radical, and the outrageous, one can discern its real force: a wild enthusiasm engendered by the myth of a new Pentecost. This, above all other factors, accounts for the theological unsettlement, liturgical perversity, and banality of Catholic existence now become commonplace. Von Balthasar's perverse infatuation with the present, youth, the future, and his cavalier dismissal of the past, when joined to a constellation of other factors, generated the expectation of the advent of a New Order. The phenomenon was similar to the long-lasting Joachite35 fantasies of the Middle Ages, which enjoyed a subterranean existence and came to influence personalities of the stature of Christopher Columbus. However, in the Joachite version contemplative spirituality becomes the common inheritance of humanity, while in Balthasar contemplative spirituality is discarded and Christianity finds itself absorbed in a monolithic secularism.
It is not surprising that the Marxism and incipient globalism of the 1950's influenced to some extent a clerical intellectual like Balthasar These views were absorbed in a theological cocoon and attached to the doctrine of solidarity based on a nominalistic interpretation of the Church. Under the cover of a mock piety it makes the suicide of Christianity an obligation, a duty that Christianity owes to the world. It obliterates its unique, salvific character, extends salvation indiscriminately, undermines authority to the vanishing point, and transforms the Catholic Church from a light shining in the darkness to another patch of darkness within a sunless universe. Piety and salvation are displaced from the individual to the collectivity. A social Catholicism is concocted which adheres to the glorification of the ant-heap as well as the implicit denial of the Mystical Body of Christ. Melded with a sickly humanism, it strives for a united world of "love" and "caring" in which all antagonisms and individualities are eliminated. A world of convenient arrangements, lacking seriousness, where good and evil meld into an attractive neutrality, a world of entertainment, very much like the world that is presently forming in the crucible–theologically, what we find in Razing the Bastions is a monumental trivialization of the Incarnation.36
Perhaps the most noxious proposal found in Razing is that of shattering the historical consciousness of Catholics so as to disengage Catholics from a Church considered empty and superannuated. It ignores the truth that the past illuminates the present and makes the future a real possibility.
It sets the course of the fragile barque towards an uncertain, indeed, a perilous future. The muted sounds of simian37 chattering is beginning to be heard.
1. Razing the Bastions, translated by Brian McNeil, CRV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).
2.Ibid., pp.1; 10-11.
3.Ibid., p.7.
4. Ibid., p.7.
5. Ibid., pp. 18-19.
6.Ibid., pp. 25-26; 61; 68-69, et al.
7.Ibid., p.21.
8.Ibid., p.84.
9.Ibid., p.24.
10. Ibid., pp.27,31.
11.Ibid., p.37.
12.Ibid., p.39.
13.Ibid., p.41.
14. Ibid., pp.42-43.
15. Superannuated. 1. Retired or ineffective because of advanced age. 2. Out-moded; obsolete: superannuated laws.-Ed.
16. Ibid., p.44.
17. Ibid., pp.47-49.
18. Ibid., p.51.
19. Ibid., p.53.
20.Ibid., p.57.
21. Ibid., pp.56, 61, 88.
22. Though there are many excellent works on the subject, for a clear and succinct presentation, refer to Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle, 1974), especially pp. 165-68.
23. Usufructuary. One that holds property by usufruct; the right to use and enjoy the profits and advantages of something belonging to another as long as the property is not damaged or altered in any way.-Ed.
24. Razing, p.58.
25. Ibid., p.92.
26. Ibid., p.63.
27. Ibid., p.71.
28. Ibid., p.77.
29. Ibid., pp.99-100.
30. Ibid., pp.87-88.
31. Ibid., p.74.
32. Ibid., p. 100.
33. Ibid., pp. 101-102.
34.Ibid., p. 103.
35. Cistercian Abbot Joachim of Fiore (12th century) developed an outline of the history of mankind in three ages. The first two ages were guided by the Father and the Son, respectively. The Third Age of history, that of the Holy Spirit, he foresaw as a period of peace and harmony in which a renewed Church would encompass a reformed people devoted to the contemplative life. His extensive writings inspired a wide body of pseudo literature by generations of Joachites after his death, and a vast modern secondary literature of diverse opinion.–Ed.
36. In stark contrast read St. Athanasios, On the Incarnation, translated and edited by a Religious of CSMV (Westwood: St. Vladimir's, 1993).
37. Simian. Relating to, characteristic of, or resembling an ape or a monkey. –Ed.