At the outset, our task must be to draw von Balthasar’s ideas back to a few fundamental ideas that can be taken as foundational for everything else. This requires an examination of the basic metaphysical questions in order to discern where von Balthasar’s primary interest (the incarnate Christ) falls. What are the basic metaphysical questions?
Classically speaking, metaphysics must account for the basic ontological questions (“Why is there something rather than nothing?” “What accounts for the fact that there are many things and not just one thing?” “What types of things are there?” and so on), but also for more abstract questions about the types of relations that hold between those realities: causal, formal, ideal, or whatever else (how the list itself is populated is already internal to the frame of reference of some metaphysical system). A sacred metaphysic, or even just one that is involved in a non-polemical conversation with theology, starts with some of these questions already answered, or answered in certain directions. Such a system does not need to busy itself with the question of what the first principle is, or with proving its existence: the first principle is God, and the existence of this first principle is delivered to the system from outside. Now, as we have seen, for von Balthasar this first principle is specifically God in the incarnate Christ, which shows that it is still possible to further nuance this first principle. Such a possibility means that there is at least the possibility of multiple sacred metaphysics with different visions of the one starting point; and, as has been often noted, a small difference in the beginning becomes a large difference in the end.[1]
Nevertheless, the result of this is that von Balthasar’s metaphysics will begin in medias res, as it were. The first question that can profitably be asked is one that assumes the first principle in God and goes on to ask about the relation that obtains between that which is the source of all reality and those dependent realities themselves. The guiding question must therefore be: [Q] “What is the nature or character of the God-creature relation?” This question is of primary concern for us as we lay the foundations for the Balthasarian system.
Von Balthasar conceives of three ways to answer the question of the nature of the God-creature relation [Q]. One may say that (1) they are totally different, with absolutely nothing in common, (2) they are totally the same, with no difference, or (3) the relationship is somehow in between these two extremes. I will call (1) the Pure Difference Thesis, (2) the Identity Thesis, and (3) the Analogy Thesis.
Here we might wish for more subtlety, expressed in the acknowledgement of more than three options. Isn’t it at least plausible to think a priori that to create two extremes and then lump everything else in as a via media is very likely to caricature the range of possibilities that lie between the two extremes? Put another way, what reason is there to believe that there is only one real way to be neither totally different nor totally the same?
In some sense, von Balthasar could allow the objection, but respond in the following way: even granted that there may be a bewildering panoply of options that fall under the third category, that is a question which must be settled at a later stage of intellectual reflection. In these early moments, the choice is really between genres: what will the general character of the metaphysical system be? We will in fact see that it is not only the Analogy Thesis, but also the Pure Difference and Identity Theses that have a vast variety of possible interpretations.
What is gained by such an abstract consideration? It allows one to claim a priori but not without evidence that if the Pure Difference Thesis is ruled out as a fitting type of Christian system, then every system that is an example of the Pure Difference Thesis will face the same objections to admission as a sacred metaphysic. But at least as important for von Balthasar is that this schema, to his mind, accurately describes the actual historical options: every attempt to think the problem, whether along with or apart from the question of religion (and there are many fewer of the latter attempts than we might think, according to von Balthasar), must give an answer which may be seen to fall under one of these three types. In other words, he thinks that every historical answer to Q reduces to one of these three types of answers.
No explicit argument is given for this: in some sense, the onus is on the objector to come up with a counter-example. However, throughout von Balthasar’s life we see him consistently reducing every possible system to fall under one of these three categories. It is worth mentioning that these three categories line up with the linguistic analysis given by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa, where he says that words may be used equivocally (1), univocally (2), or analogically (3).[2] Von Balthasar, like Aquinas, will think that his linguistic analysis correctly cuts reality at its joints, and so these are not just the linguistic possibilities, but also the metaphysical ones. Thus, there is a significant historical precedent for this way of dividing the options.
Returning then to the three options that are answers to Q, we may make a further comment about this preliminary stage of questioning. At this early stage the specifics of von Balthasar’s claims about the first principle may be safely bracketed. For while it will ultimately make all the difference that the first principle is not the divine essence or God the Father but Jesus Christ,[3] this first move has more to do with classifying the type of system we will be dealing with, and is still patient of many different sorts of content. It will become clear later that only one answer can make sense for the particular conception of Christ that von Balthasar has, and it is in fact that conception which is more fundamental: it decides Q, it is not decided by the choice made in response to Q. Nevertheless, once that choice has been made, it becomes the logically (though not causally) prior moment of explanation of the metaphysical system.
Such a bracketing of the specificity of Christ should not cause us concern. von Balthasar himself was willing to follow this very same method in his own constructive work. The first volume of Theologic is in fact controlled by the bracketing of the question of the necessary ground of worldly truth in divine truth. Likewise, the third volume of Theologic brackets the question of the personhood of the Holy Spirit until its second section. This latter bracketing is very analogous to the type of bracketing our analysis requires here.
Thus, we return to Q, and may say that von Balthasar consistently and emphatically rejects the Pure Difference and Identity Theses and chooses the Analogy Thesis. Over the following chapters I will examine in detail the way he argues historically against each of these, as well as his logical reasons for and against each of these. This will clarify both what von Balthasar wants to safeguard and what he wishes to rule out in the articulation of his metaphysics. The negative shades (those things that are ruled out) are important to the full vision of the depth and nature of the positive claims about analogy.
The task of articulating this vision within the confines of the Triptych fell necessarily to The Glory of the Lord, which, as the first statement in this monumental work, had to lay the groundwork for the whole in addition to revitalizing the theological discourse about beauty. In the first volume, von Balthasar was concerned to argue that divine revelation must be considered not only as true and good, but also as beautiful. He argued that everything in the world is beautiful, and therefore bears a relationship of analogy to the self-revelation of God in history. Thus, the very project of restoring the dimension of the beautiful is to some extent also an apologetic for the choice of the Analogy Thesis over either the Pure Difference or Identity Theses. The entire purpose of The Glory of the Lord was to set the stage for an understanding of what precisely the character of the likeness and unlikeness that holds between God and creature is.
Therefore it is from this project that we will draw von Balthasar’s historical rejection of the Pure Difference and Identity Theses and his acceptance of the Analogy Thesis. But where in these seven volumes to look? In the first volume, von Balthasar attempts to sketch the abstract propositions that would guide the entire project, that in fact form the kernel of the vision of the entire project. His next task was to fill these abstract propositions out with historical garb.[4] He intends to present various theologies that “having been marked at [their] centre by the glory of God’s revelation, [have] sought to give the impact of this glory a central place in [their] vision” (GL II.13). Each of the theologies examined is therefore representative, is a historical instance of the abstract principles developed in the first volume. These principles therefore form at best a fundamental theology large enough to embrace the others within itself; at the very least, they form the ground required for such theologies. In either case, von Balthasar is not simply offering a summary of prior theological visions, and then offering his as another in the long line—he is in fact explicating through the earlier theologies the conditions necessary for their existence as the sort of theologies von Balthasar’s project can approve.
The second volume of TheGlory of the Lord therefore forms an excellent starting place for our examinations of the roots of the Balthasarian metaphysic. Nevertheless, even so fitting an entry point requires that a few comments be made about scope, for after the theologies of the second volume, there follows a volume on the history of metaphysics proper, and then a volume on the Biblical witness to divine glory. All of this may be taken as various evidence in the historical realm of what was presented abstractly in the first volume. The evidence is massive, and it is a matter of individual judgment whether the sheer volume of it adds in any way to its compellingness. However, as our task here is to trace the systematic outlines and not to recapitulate the mass of Balthasarian evidences, we need only take so much of it as material as will serve to make clear the heart of the system.
The question which then presents itself is this: Which of these three types of evidences—theological, philosophical, or Biblical—ought we to take as central for our study? Since our goal is the illumination of the midpoint of the metaphysics, it might seem that it is the volumes on the history of metaphysics that should interest us. Yet because that midpoint is asserted to be Christ, the history of metaphysics can only approach it obliquely, under the codename being. Again, it may seem that the Biblical witness, where Christ is revealed to us, presents a strong case. Yet here we have the events presented in such a way that reflection on their relationship to the whole meaning of reality is only incipient—the metaphysics is too far in the background to be properly examined here.[5]
Therefore it is to the theological survey that we must turn. The English edition splits this volume into two volumes after the chapter on Bonaventure, following a distinction von Balthasar himself makes between theologies developed by “official” church theologians and those developed by lay theologians like Dante. The former were preferenced, because they “were able to treat the radiant power of the revelation of Christ both influentially and originally, without any trace of decadence” (GL II.15). He goes on to note that “after Thomas Aquinas, theologians of such stature are rare.” At that point, the vision is to be found chiefly in the works of lay writers who, though enriched by theological culture, are not engaged in theology as such. von Balthasar points out that this “dividing-line” is not intended to be polemical; “it simply corresponds to an unfortunate but incontestable fact” (ibid.). There is, therefore, such a dividing line in his thought, and a distinction may be made between the theologies that precede it and the theologically informed creative writings that follow it. No more than von Balthasar do I wish to denigrate the achievements and usefulness of the literary works that follow in the succeeding volume; however, for our purposes, theological discourse remains the best suited to the task of illuminating the character of the metaphysic and its influence on the theological system.
These chapters will therefore concern themselves with the first half of the second volume of Herrlichkeit, or what is published as the second volume of the English The Glory of the Lord, which begins with Irenaeus and goes through Bonaventure. This is not an attempt to read this volume exhaustively; rather, we are after the conceptual high points that bear on the development of the metaphysic. Along the way we will not be concerned with the accuracy of von Balthasar’s readings of the figures discussed, but rather with the way he uses his theological material in building his own vision.
It is worth stating that it is precisely the question of the God-creature relationship [Q] that the second volume of The Glory of the Lord is ultimately trying to address. The “high points” of the volume are concentrated around statements about the relationship between Creator and creature, a relationship that is ultimately thought to rest in a certain suitability that exists between God and the creature. This key insight, of which all of the theologies represented are worthy instances in von Balthasar’s judgment, must be developed through his readings of Irenaeus, Augustine, Denys[6] and Anselm, all to be ultimately surpassed by Bonaventure.
We will not, however, be able to follow von Balthasar’s order of presentation. At the end of the day, von Balthasar’s understanding of these theologies is not that they all say the same thing, but that they all witness to the same reality. He is after a synthesis arising from them, in which the best insights of each theology may find itself welcomed and even transformed into a higher meaning. But because these insights are derived from an original glimpse of the divine glory, rather than from discursive reflection on fundamentally propositional data, the temporal order of their appearing will not necessarily indicate their logical order. Thus, though Irenaeus wrote before Augustine, the Irenaean insight von Balthasar is interested in requires as a logical prerequisite part of the Augustinian insight.
The Pure Difference Thesis, as has been stated, is the claim that the relationship between the Creator and creatures is best described in terms of pure difference. This may be expressed in various ways: a common one is Derrida’s tout âutre,[7] “wholly other,” but one may also arrive at this notion by means of a Heideggerian critique of onto-theology[8] or the type of radical transcendence asserted by most negative theology.[9] What is the common claim is that God is so different from creatures that it is not appropriate to look for any similarity between them. Even when we think we have noticed some similarity, it is in fact only condescension to the feebleness of human understanding. The best theological practice therefore proceeds by negation, and if it must say something positive, it is careful to immediately “unsay” it by qualifying or (in some cases) directly contradicting it.
As mentioned, the Pure Difference Thesis is one that von Balthasar wishes to reject. What this looks like in the form of a historical argument is a deduction of a relationship of exemplarity between God and creatures. Given that there is such a relationship, the Pure Difference Thesis is ruled out. We will follow this deduction in detail before returning to ask what von Balthasar’s logical concerns with the Pure Difference Thesis are.
We are at the beginning of von Balthasar’s analysis in a historical key of the question with which we opened this chapter, namely: “What is the nature or character of the God-creature relation?” Two methodological paths open themselves to us in this analysis: the path of ana-logy, which is a bottom up approach that begins from created realities and argues from them upward to the divine reality, and the path of kata-logy, which begins with the divine being and then makes deductions about creatures here below. It is clear from the centrality of Christ in the thinking of von Balthasar that the last of these, the katalogical, is to be preferred. Nevertheless, to start there would be to jump straight to the conclusion, and much of what is fitting and consonant about the steps in the argument that lead to that conclusion would be lost. At this early stage, therefore, our approach must be analogical.[10]
It is therefore fitting that we begin with Augustine, whose path, von Balthasar says, is “from a lower to a higher aesthetics” (GL II.95). Augustine follows an obviously analogical path at times, moving from the beauty of the world to eternal beauty; more often, he prefers to “see in the light of God’s beauty the beauty of the world revealing itself to the person who loves God” (GL II.100).[11] Yet this latter is not yet katalogical; it is not to see first the light of God, and then by means of it to see all other things. Rather, it is to recognize in the seeing of worldly things that it is God’s light by which one is able to see at all. The starting point remains here below, and the direction of inference remains from inferior to superior, and so it is still an analogical approach in the final analysis.
If we are to follow this approach, we too must first bring created realities into view. It is true that contemplation of the beauty of created things ought not to rest in itself, dwelling on inner-worldly beauty; rather, the mind is intended to use these created realities as a means to go beyond them to their uncreated ground, as a “flight to the immortal and eternal.”[12] But the first step in that journey to the infinite remains the contemplation of created realities.
Von Balthasar spends little time on setting up the nature of this contemplation, assuming a strong familiarity with the strategies and theories of Plato and Plotinus alike in his readers.[13] To motivate and explicate the nature of this “flight to the eternal,” and indeed to pick up the theme that will resound most impressively through the various authors considered here (which will turn out to be the way in which the nature of created being declares its own createdness), it is necessary to spell out more fully than von Balthasar has the logic he sees underlying Augustine’s conception here. This will be to offer as an explication for the passage cited from Augustine above an examination of the moment in which the contemplation of creation first turns to that which is above it. In this contemplation of creation, it becomes clear that creaturely being is not self-caused, but rather is externally caused. This is in fact, as it seems, a species of an argument for first cause, and the logic of it is the following.
For any created reality x, it is a condition of the possibility of x that there be a cause of x. Were this not so, x would not be a created reality.[14] That it has a cause is further confirmed if x is a being that is a) not the sufficient cause of anything like itself and b) is prone to pass out of existence, for the following reasons.
(a) If x is not the sufficient cause of anything like itself, then it seems unlikely that x could be the cause of itself; at the very least, we would have no reason for believing x to be capable of such causal activity. The term “sufficient” is decisive here; an animal causes something like itself in procreation, but most animals are not sufficient to cause something like themselves: They require a host of cooperating causes, not least an animal of the opposite sex.
Here we may object that there are creaturely instances of something that is the sufficient cause of something like itself, namely cell division and other analogous asexual methods of reproduction. Perhaps in these cases, we might entertain the notion that the cell is the cause of itself, because it has shown itself capable of causing a reality that is of its own sort and nobility?
But that which is created is not the cause of itself for the simple reason that before it was created it was nothing, and nothing has no causal power (it is, in fact, non-existent). Thus, while that which is not the sufficient cause of something like itself shows that it is likely also not the author of its own being, even that which is the sufficient cause of something like itself still does not seem likely to be its own cause. Therefore it is likely that it was created, and therefore caused, by another.
In the latter case, the conclusion could be avoided by supposing the entity in question (a cell) was eternal. In that case, it might be thought to be the cause of itself. And that is where the second criterion comes in.
(b) If x is a being that is prone to pass out of existence (speaking here of a natural end to its being and bracketing the possibility that its existence be ended by violence), this would seem to be an indication that it is not truly self-sustaining. For if x is self-sustaining, what would cause it to cease the activity of sustaining itself? It cannot be any change in an external factor, for this would mean that x was not fully self-sustained, but rather sustained by itself and by another in such a way that without the external help it could not continue in existence. If x ceases its activity of self-sustenance due to some internal change, then this change must have been either voluntary or involuntary. If this internal change was involuntary, then x is shown to be not fully self-sustaining, for something has been able to constrain its sustaining activity. If it is something voluntary, what could convince a being to cease its own existence? And if it is voluntary, then it does not necessarily happen, and so we would expect (at least statistically if for no other reason) to see some x that has chosen not to allow or suffer a natural end to its existence. x is not capable of sustaining itself indefinitely, and therefore x is not self-sustaining simpliciter, but only up to a point. Such a being, it seems, obeys a law outside of itself, and by that fact demonstrates the likelihood that it was caused.
These two confirming reasons, which do not issue in a necessary deduction, but rather in a likelihood, serve to underscore what may be considered the principal point here: The creature, insofar as it is a creature (which is to say, insofar as it is not self-caused and not self-sustaining) declares by its ontological status that it is not the absolute, that it is in fact only a creature. It is a matter of no small importance that when the intellect questions a creature, asking what it is, the creature responds necessarily “I am a creature”; this response is coded into it from the very beginning, and thus the possibility of the recognition of something higher than it in the causal order is also coded into it. It may be, to be sure, only the possibility of recognition, for the reasons followed earlier do not lead to necessary conclusions. If they did, then the creature could be said to not just declare its creatureliness, but to scream it. As it is, even in the mysteriousness of the non-disclosure allowed by the space of doubt left open in the earlier arguments, creatureliness still offers itself to the intellect precisely as likely to be creaturely, and thus brings in the likelihood of something like a Creator.
Thus, we have a version of an argument for a first cause, and one that is both familiar within the Greek philosophical milieu and modulated by its encounter with Christian theology. This is the situation von Balthasar celebrates in Augustine, the mutual conditioning of philosophy and Christian theology. “These two things,” he says, “come into his field of vision simultaneously, philosophical form and the content it frames and structures, Christian teaching” (GL II.96). But the insight von Balthasar wants to pick up here does not rest at the level of a demonstration of a first cause; it goes on to describe the first cause as being a cause of a certain sort, namely, as archetype. Von Balthasar’s analysis of Augustine develops this as an inference, with reference to the difference between the Augustinian and Cartesian versions of the cogito argument.[15] This is to some extent allowed by the fact that von Balthasar has already given a more necessary argument in his analysis of Irenaeus. It is to this Irenaean argument that we now turn.
Irenaeus begins with the logic of creation, offering us the following choice: either God used Godself as the original upon which all created reality would be based, or God must have used some other original.[16]
Built into this choice is the assumption that there must have been some model according to which God created. This is a perfectly natural Platonic assumption—however, for Irenaeus it is not established through the Platonic tradition, but rather through the Incarnation. In the Incarnation the revelation of God comes to human nature epistemologically and ontologically; but this can only happen if the nature that is to receive this weight is strong enough to bear it. Von Balthasar presents what he considers to be the Irenaean notion of Deum portare, to carry or bear God. His interpretation is that the God-bearing individual is one who has been prepared for this very task of carrying God, who is characterized by an ability to withstand the great burden. While it is true that this titanic task is one to which creaturely being is gradually acclimated, were creaturely being before this gracious help such as to be incapable of enduring this burden, no progress could be made toward making it capable. In other words, only that which has been crafted to be capable of enduring the divine presence can ever be made suitable and able to actually endure it. Von Balthasar refers to this as a “fundamental power” of creaturely being, and asserts that it could not have this power were there not a likeness.[17]
Here we could note that Barth, at least at a certain stage of his life, would disagree.[18] Barth’s objection would be that the ability to bear the Creator is not a created potency of the creature, but is a grace conferred after creation which is in fact more like a new creation than the activation of something latent in the original creation: The creative act of redemption makes that which was formerly impossible possible.
Von Balthasar can only disagree with this. He doesn’t think that it makes sense for God not to create in God’s image. That is, imago Dei theology grounds portare theology as a prior, Biblically given commitment. But in fact imago Dei theology is not enough to separate the two: only an imago of a certain sort gives von Balthasar what he wants, namely an imago Dei that cannot see God creating in the way the Barthian position requires. This Barthian position in fact reduces, in von Balthasar view, to a version of the Pure Difference Thesis.
Returning to Irenaeus, we see that the historical fact of the Incarnation, where a human nature was made the vessel for a person who was God, requires that there be a likeness, and therefore an original (archetype). Further, since no creature would be capable of bearing the divine person if there were no likeness between God and creatures, the archetype must be like God in a significant sense, such that to be like the archetype is to be like God.
This requirement of likeness itself rests upon a Platonic causal scheme wherein causality is an action of like on like—this is the notion of mediation we have already encountered. But here there has been a subtle addition—we have seen that a mediator must partake of both realities in some way if it is to be capable of mediation; now we see that this is only possible if a gulf of infinite distance does not exist between the two terms to be mediated, for no mediator (even, apparently, a divine person) could bridge such a gap. Therefore it is on the basis of a prior rapprochement, determined by God in the moment of creation, that the union of God and humanity in the person of Christ is possible.
All this was intended to show the necessity of a likeness, which entails a relationship of archetypality—for every likeness is a likeness of something, which means there must be an original it is being compared to. But it seems to remain possible to ask whether this original need necessarily have been God, or whether some intermediary could have served as this original. After all, if the intermediary original were like God, those things that are patterned after it will be to some degree like God, and perhaps that will be enough to allow the portare von Balthasar sees in Irenaeus.
This brings us back to the original choice we were offered, whether God used Godself as the original upon which all created reality is based, or some other original. The argument that it must be God is based on the avoidance of an infinite regress. For the original is either identical with God, or not identical with God. If it is not identical with God, then it must either be co-eternal with God, or created by God. It can’t be co-eternal with God, for nothing can be such. Therefore, it must have been created by God. But it is then asked, “what was the original on which that original was based?” and an infinite regress ensues. Therefore, the archetype cannot be other than God.[19]
Thus, the likeness required for Incarnation is a likeness to God directly. Although von Balthasar does not specify the likeness further at this point, it will be clear that it must be an ontological likeness (and not merely moral or epistemological) if it is to be strong enough to ground the Incarnation and the ensuing Christological claims. Further, the famous Irenaean recapitulatio, which lies at the heart of his Christology and metaphysics, is only possible on the basis of this original relationship of archetypality between the Creator and the highest of physical creatures, human nature.
At this point, having established that von Balthasar sees the relation between Creator and creatures in terms of archetypality, the next task is to ask in more detail about how this works. How is the claim that the Creator is the archetype of creaturely beings to be understood? Is there a deistic overtone here, such that while creaturely being is made to image uncreated being, there was a final break (at the moment of creation or later) that leaves creaturely being stranded, as it were, cut off from its original? Or is there still some connection between the two, and if so, of what type?
To answer these questions, we turn back to von Balthasar’s reading of Augustine. The starting point is one that is fundamental for the frame of von Balthasar’s own project, the unity of being. This unity, which is an aspect of Platonism that von Balthasar feels has been too often overlooked, unites the transcendentals beauty, truth and goodness such that they may truly be inter-penetrating transcendentals and not merely properties which remain extrinsic to one another. Methodologically, it is why TheGlory of the Lord, Theodrama, and Theologic form a triptych rather than a trilogy, for trilogy implies a separation among the three parts that would deny the type of unity von Balthasar wishes to champion; rather, the dramatics is already both an aesthetics and a logic, and so on.
Thus, he says that Augustine has the two-pronged belief that “the highest existing being is understood in a Platonic sense as absolute unity, and contingency and createdness are therefore sufficiently expressed by the unity of things that is only striven for, never attained” (H II.117).[20] Von Balthasar has here effected a subtle shift from what we might have expected, given the general Platonic background notion of being: the claim is not that Being as such is absolute unity, but rather that the “highest existing being” is absolute unity. This specification serves to block a univocal predication of absolute unity of both uncreated being and creaturely being on the basis of the fact that they are both types of being. If absolute unity is not predicated of being in general, but of a particular instance of being, the highest existing being, and if we understand that it only has this absolute unity by virtue of being the highest existent, then it follows that creaturely being will not express absolute unity, but only a sort of relative unity. Absolute unity will therefore stand over and against all creaturely being as that norm by which they are judged, even while remaining a limit they can never reach. This striving is properly termed a “sufficient expression” for created things, because absolute unity is something they are naturally intended to lack.
From this, von Balthasar draws the conclusion that “if being consists in unity, then creaturely participation in being also consists in a graduated participation in unity” (ibid.).[21] It cannot be doubted that creatures participate in being, for they have being, they are created beings. But the subtle shift effected a moment ago has not been maintained—now we are once again speaking as if unity is a quality of being as such, and not a quality of the highest existing being. As previously indicated, this would seem to lead to the conclusion that creatures would only lack from unity to the extent that their participation in being is deficient.[22]
Which of these statements are we to privilege? Is it Being as such that is absolute unity, or the concrete, highest existing being? It is ultimately the question of the relationship of God to Being—are they identical, or is there some separation to be noted between them?
Either way we answer the question involves difficulties: If God and Being are not in every way the same, then Being is a class which contains within it both God and creatures, and would therefore seem to be metaphysically prior to God. It would, in fact, convert all metaphysics into ontology, and it could only be with reference to this center that Christ could be understood. This is classical metaphysics, exemplified by Plato (for whom the form of the Good was above even the Demiurge).[23]
On the other hand, if God and Being are entirely the same, how is one to block the inference to pantheism? In other words, if God is Being, and creatures are beings and therefore have their proper share in being, why is the whole totality of beings, taken as one whole, not the unity that God is?
As will become evident shortly, von Balthasar opts for the second set of difficulties, those involved with identifying God and Being. The key to the solution of the difficulties lies precisely in the notion of participation we are in the process of examining, and how it is applied to this relationship of the original unity of Being and its subsequent multiplication.
However, the fact that God and Being are to be identified renders further questioning as to whether it is Being itself or a highest existing being that is the absolute unity moot, for Being exists only as the highest existing being. The identification of God and Being will mean that there is no abstract concept of Being in the metaphysical system, but rather a concrete existent that is the source and plenitude of being. That is to say, where before he secured this by the assertion that only the highest being can have absolute unity, now he has done so by the assertion of something like Unity-itself. But in the identification of Unity-itself and Being-itself with the highest existent, he has also preserved the earlier way of securing this conclusion.
Returning then to von Balthasar’s claim that all creaturely being is a graduated participation in unity, the claim can be seen to be more plausible. For if unity in an absolute sense is the being that God is, creaturely being can only be said to have unity to the extent that it approximates the being of the Creator, and different beings will do this to varying degrees (lowest will be those things that merely are, then those things that live, and highest are those things that understand). If that is granted, it remains to be seen how one gets from creaturely being “approximating” divine being to the notion of creaturely being participating in the divine being. Von Balthasar’s only answer is to insist that the answer lies in the notion of unity: “Thus Augustine explains the Biblical creation with the categories of Platonic participation: that anything is able to exist outside the complete, absolute unity is only thinkable if out of the quasi-nothing of matter, ‘out of which God made everything’, through a creative irradiation of the essences and forms that are in the mind of God and are identical with him, the finite existing essences are formed” (H 117).[24] But unity alone does not seem to be enough to motivate the claim that only that which participates in unity is able to exist outside of that unity. The mention of forms only adds a presupposition about the first mode of existence of the unity—it does not explain why existence outside that unity must be read in terms of participation. Only if unity is taken to mean not just a continuity and perfectly attuned harmony of substance, not even just a simplicity of substance, but also as fullness of substance, can this claim be motivated. To say that God is the absolute unity must mean not only that God is absolutely unified in himself, but is the fullness of unity; it is to say that God is not just the One, but the One and Only.
The essences of creatures, therefore, are formed from the forms that are in the mind of God in such a way that these forms are not other than God. This dynamic is called participation, based upon the very etymology of the word: both the Latin participatio and the German mitteilung contain the notion of something that is shared, something imparted. The image is not of two things meeting in a third thing, but rather of one thing opening itself to another to give to that other something of what it is in itself. Yet the question remains, what is the relationship of the created forms to the original on which they were based? If participation is not to collapse into identity, what is to secure the difference?
Nothing less than the fact of the unity of the divine essence and the multiplicity of created essence will do here for von Balthasar’s reading of Augustine. This reading, which recovers an emphasis on the importance of the De Musica (and therefore of the entire Pythagorean component of Platonism) for Augustine’s thought, understands form in a way that is closely allied with number: “Form and beauty, taken immanently, can no longer be anything other than number, for number is the multiplication of unity, which springs out of it and can only be explained through it and in it” (H II.118).[25]
Von Balthasar thus sees Augustine setting up an analogy between unity and its multiplication (number) on the one hand, and the divine being and its multiplication in created being on the other. Without that unity that is the Law of Identity, there can be no multiplication, for the recognition of plural identities rests upon the possibility of distinguishing one entity from another. Because we know that a is a and not b, we are able to take that first step without which no math is possible, the postulation of the number 1. From this, the whole of mathematics will follow. Nevertheless, the rule that a is a and not b is not imperiled or altered by the addition of the whole sequence of numbers that follow upon it.
In like fashion, the divine being sits at the root of the possibility of other beings, at every moment enabling their existence and conditioning their potentialities, but it is no one of those beings, and is not altered even as it is participated in by the created realities. Von Balthasar is careful to note that this is merely an analogy, however; a pure translation of being into the realm of mathematics is not possible.[26] This can be interpreted to mean that the measure of the distance between the original Unity and the many that depend upon it cannot be described merely in terms of degree, but must also be described with reference to kind. Created being, for all that it bears a relation to the divine that involves similarity at a fundamental level, is nevertheless also a fundamentally different type of reality than the divine original on which it is based. Von Balthasar does not fail to remind us that it is the failure to pay attention to precisely this point that lands the Plotinian system in pantheism.[27]
The character of participation can be specified by turning to von Balthasar’s reading of Anselm of Canterbury. With the analysis of Anselm, von Balthasar begins the desired turn away from an analogical (or bottom-up) approach to a katalogical (top-down) approach.[28] Accordingly, the relationship between creatures and Creator is no longer to be thought from the perspective of creaturely requirements, but rather from the character of the Creator, specifically from divine freedom. This emphasis on freedom, which von Balthasar attributes to Anselm’s Benedictine heritage, is also that which gives Anselm’s theology its distinctive stamp.[29] Anselm stands in the privileged place historically, where theology is seen to be the consummation of that ancient philosophy which was always truly theology because it was always concerned with the eternal and with being.[30] It is no wonder therefore that it is here that von Balthasar sees the heretofore philosophical reflection on the Creator beginning to take on its properly theological overtones.
In interpreting the Monologion, von Balthasar sees the first moment for Anselm as a personalization of the original causality. “What comes from God is also created by him” (H II.233);[31] the divine action that results in a something is creation, and therefore we will not be speaking of a generic “first cause” but of an intentional action of a being endowed with rationality. This is, he claims, the change from philosophical vision to theological vision. He characterizes the change as happening “as unremarkably as possible,”[32] no doubt driven by his thesis that there is in fact very little distance between the classical philosophical act and the Christian theological act in the first place. The entire weight is placed upon an equation of ex Deo with per ipsum, that what comes “from God” is also made “through him.” What is involved in this choice?
What von Balthasar claims here is that every movement of the divine ad extra is creative. This seemingly unremarkable thesis has two very specific effects: the first is that it reduces creation, at this early moment in the philosophical reflection, to something without a specific structure to be examined. In systems where creation is seen early in the development of the system to have a specific structure, to be of this sort specifically, we tend to go on to question the conditions of the possibility of it being of this sort, and the process of analogical induction begins. By reducing this structure to the point where it is not visible, by in essence defining creation as that which is not God (but in such a way as to be derived from God), the investigation is firmly planted in the Creator: What must this Creator be like to be able to call something out of non-being, on the basis of nothing more than pure creative ideas?
The second effect of this thesis is a radical difference between God and everything else. That any movement outside of God whatsoever is creative emphasizes that there is no neutral, uncreated ground in which God and the creature can meet. There is only God and not-God, and so the creature, if it is to encounter God at all, will either encounter God in the multiplicity of created things, or within the divine life itself. The fact that nothing stands outside of God except that which is not God also grounds a strong identification of God with the divine perfections. No longer standing over God as conditioning categories, the infinite perfections of God take on a personal character and are found to arise from rather than condition the divine life.[33]
This principle, that every movement of the divine ad extra is creative, thus serves both as a safeguard against analogical approaches (by placing the center of concern on that being who is the cause of all others) and as an emphasis on the personal character of that cause. But if the way of shifting from philosophy to theology was by personalizing the first cause, it remains to ask what unique stamp personhood as such puts on the causal relationship of archetype.
Creatures are made either out of nothing or out of a creative idea.[34] The disjunct signaled by the word or seems to me to be a small one—Anselm, like Augustine, clearly allows the creative idea as a source for creaturely being. Still, in so doing, he is not denying the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo; but adding to it. Thus, on the one hand, creatures come from nothing, which means there is no antecedent explanation for the existence of the creature. No argument or logic could be found that would compel the creation of the creature, which comes onto the stage out of nowhere. This pure spontaneity underscores the freedom of the act of creation.
On the other hand, that creatures spring from a creative idea is taken to be an indicator of the character (Personalität) of the Creator. If we take this in a banal sense, we are left with the notion that we learn that the Creator is the kind of person who creates using creative ideas. Personalität, however, is offered as the middle step between our recognition of divine freedom and our recognition of God as spiritual word. There must be more to this idea if it is to take us from the one to the other; it must be the case that we are learning from the creative ideas something about who God is, which could only happen if the creative ideas in some way express who God is. Forefront here is not what we learn about the divine essence, but that the fact that we could learn anything at all in this way means that the creative ideas are to some extent expressive.
The importance of the creative ideas is immediately underscored by von Balthasar: “For that reason one of the standing titles of God now becomes creative essence (substance, nature)” (H II.233-4).[35] What all this amounts to is Anselm’s affirmation of the archetypal relationship. Like Augustine and Irenaeus, it is wrapped in ontological terms, but the transposition von Balthasar has been tracking, from philosophy to theology, is evident here. Naked philosophical being has been dressed in the language of Christian ontological categories, an ontology that has been adjusted to account for Trinitarian and Christological claims (signaled by the reference to nature and substance), which is the necessary move for seeing the person of Christ as the central figure metaphysically.
What von Balthasar finds most interesting about Anselm’s version of archetypality, however, is the fact that the divine ideas are no longer deduced analogically, but on the basis of divine freedom itself. God is free, and therefore creation is contingent; and because God creates in accordance with God’s being not on account of any necessity (internal or external), but only by free choice, the fact of resemblance between Creator and creatures may be called an act of divine self-expression.[36] This idea of expression, which is other and superior to Augustine’s conception for von Balthasar precisely because it begins with the freedom of God, becomes the entry into the theology of Bonaventure, which so closely approximates von Balthasar’s own theology.
In Bonaventure, the metaphysical relation between the Creator and creatures undergoes a transformation. Bonaventure establishes exemplarity as the ground for an ana-logical move from the contemplation of the creature to the contemplation of the Creator.[37] As it was such an analogical move that landed Irenaeus at likeness and Augustine at archetype, Bonaventure’s deduction may be seen as specifying the nature of the archetype by means of his idea of exemplarity. That von Balthasar sees this as a development of all the theologies discussed so far is clear.[38] What remains is to see the way in which this development is carried out, and what conclusions von Balthasar himself draws from it for his own system.
For von Balthasar, the starting point in Bonaventure must be reason, which is the ground of the communicability of God in the Word: “But reason is first of all the prerequisite for the communicability of God in his Word: objectively as verbum incarnatum, innerly-subjective as verbum inspiratum, and the fontal source of both as verbum increatum, which expresses the inner essence of God and thereby also the whole world” (H II.285).[39]
The notion of communicability is distinct from the notion of impartation—it references not just the ability to give something, but also the subsequent reception of what is offered. If there is not reception, then something has not been communicated, merely offered. The use of communicability rather than mere impartation to parse the meaning of participation is therefore a development that keeps in view both the active and passive dynamics involved.
The passage cited above thus argues that this communication happens objectively in the incarnate Word, and “innerly-subjective” in the in-breathed Word. In both of these cases, the active and passive sides of communication are not difficult to see: On the one hand, the flow of grace from God into creation by means of God’s hypostatically uniting Godself to creation calls to mind Irenaeus’s conception of a communication that is best described as portare Deum; on the other hand, the Word of Truth dwelling in us richly may be related to the turning of the mind from creaturely realities to the uncreated original. Both, we are told, have their roots in a fontal source, which is the uncreated Word, that Word that expresses the divine essence. At this point, the notion of expression, which is to be the key category in von Balthasar’s read of Bonaventure, is offered as the prerequisite for communication, which might more literally be translated as participation.
Further, it is not only the case that expression grounds participation; the Word is said to express the divine essence “and thereby also the whole world.” The “thereby” (damit) of this last statement must be examined more closely. What must the relationship of God and the world be like such that the Word that expresses the inner being of God by virtue of that fact also expresses the whole world? This claim requires the claim that the inner essence of God has a non-trivial relationship to the whole world, such that by expressing the former one could also express the latter. At the same time, however, the very ability to share oneself points to distinction; for a to be able to share itself with b, a must be other than b.[40]
At least part of what is at stake here is motivating a non-trivial likeness between God and creation. This is the participation of creation in God, grounded on this peculiar notion of expression first introduced in Anselm and now blossoming in Bonaventure. At the same time, however, it is necessary to guard against allowing all of creation to collapse, in a Plotinian way, into identity with the one (pantheism).[41]
In order to explicate Bonaventure’s doctrine of expression in a way that will not lead to such theological inconveniences, von Balthasar will draw upon nothing less than the very notion of archetypality he has been at such pains to develop in this volume. He begins with an analysis of the Bonaventurean terminology.
Under discussion here is the nature of that Word which is the divine reason and communicability. This Word is called a similitudo expressa et expressiva.[42] Von Balthasar focuses on the fact that expressus is distinguished from expressivus. Where expressus (“express”) indicates exactness, expressivus (roughly “expressing”), emphasizes the relationship of expression.[43] Thus, when “Word” is called a similitudo expressa et expressiva, von Balthasar understands this to mean that it is both an exact likeness and a likeness which expresses, or, to combine the two notions, that it is a perfect and complete expression. Thus, while expressio may be understood in an active sense as “that which expresses” (the original or archetype) or in a passive sense as that which results from this process (the copy), expressus is always subordinated to the expressive relationship (expressivus).[44] Exactness, or the perfection of the image, is judged with reference to that original on which it is based. Its fundamental character is not its perfection of representation (expressus), but that it is an expression or imitation of this original (expressivus).
If the similitudo expressa et expressiva is grounded first and foremost in the likeness which expresses and is only able to be judged exact when it has been first judged to be an expression of something else, then von Balthasar’s conclusion follows: The copy is bound to the original, for the copy will first be recognized to be a copy and then be assessed with regard to how exact a copy it is. What is more immediate for our purposes is that this subordination of expressus to expressivus also protects the distinction between the original and the copy. In the Trinity, this means that the Son is not the Father, and so a collapse into a monistic modalism is not possible; in the God-creature relationship, it means that even the whole world taken as a totality is not the divine on which it is fashioned, and a Plotinian collapse into the One is not ultimately possible.
With this demonstration of the way in which the archetype binds the copies, protecting a space of distinction that is irreducible, the Word has been brought into view as that which is expression (expressio in both the active and passive sense) within the Godhead. The distinction that is a prerequisite for expression finds its first fulfillment in the procession of the Son within the Trinity. In this sense, the Son is the expressio expressa, the complete expression, but also the expressio expressiva, the expressive expression. Here von Balthasar gives us a hint of the Bonaventurean bottom line: “This means nothing less than the founding of the act of Creation on the act of generation within the Godhead” (H II.296).[45]
Let us first focus on the generation, in which the Father gives all that he is to the Son.[46] This means that everything the Father is and can do is fully expressed in the Son. He is the expressio expressa because the Father held nothing back. In the Son, all possibilia have taken on reality, though a reality that is still embraced by identity with the divine nature, and is not yet that external, creaturely existence we might wish to call “objective.”[47] The Son has become the locus of the reality of all created possibilities, and therefore if any of those possibilities are to be actualized in an existence defined by distinction from the Godhead, in extra-divine reality, it can only be through the Son that this can happen.[48] Indeed, the act of creation appears to be more an externalizing and objectifying of the subset of possibilia contained in the Son. Thus, while the Son contains all possibilities, his role as archetype is deduced not primarily from the richness of his content, but rather from the Father’s complete expression in the Son.
This is the Bonaventurean revolution, to von Balthasar’s eyes: that he grounds the Son’s role as archetype, idea and exemplar (three ways of saying the same thing for von Balthasar) not in the fact that the Son contains all possibilities, but in the fact that the Son is absolute expression.[49] This may seem like a small distinction, but to von Balthasar it is a pure theological insight of the highest order. For if the Son’s role as archetype is grounded on the richness of possibilities contained within the archetype, then the question will be asked: On the basis of what is the Son archetype? The answer will have to be that it is because he contains all possibilia; but this is to say that the Son is the archetype for creaturely realities on the basis of something other than the divine nature. Followed through to its conclusion, it is to claim that the Son may count as the exemplar because he satisfies the job title—this ultimately posits some standard outside of God by which God is measured. However, if it is as the expression of the complete divine power that the Son is the archetype, then it is not through some external standard, but through the being of God that the Son stands at the head of creation.
If therefore the full creative power of the Father was poured into the Son such that all creation is to be accomplished through and in the Son, the Son could rightly be described as the means by which the Father carried out creation, or as the medium of the Father’s expression of himself outside the Godhead. Here von Balthasar arrives at an idea in Bonaventure that will be of enormous importance, the idea that it is the generation of the Logos that enables all other generations.[50] Just as there can be no Holy Spirit without the Son, there can be no creation without the Son. The full work this idea does in the Balthasarian system will not be examined until chapter 6; for the moment, we will only mark its first appearance.
This leads von Balthasar to note that the Word of God is the “archetypal world” in three ways: (1) as the complete expression of the origin (the Father), (2) as the Father’s medium of expression, and (3) as expressing in the Incarnation that which was originally intended for creation.[51] There is, therefore, a first image (this is what it means to be the complete expression of the Father), and this image is the means of expression. If the Son is the means of expression, then the Son is not the one expressing, but only that through which expression is made (just as the language by which I express myself is not the one expressing—rather it is I who express, using the language as a medium). That which is expressed, creatures, will therefore be an image of the one expressing, the Father. But because the Father expresses himself in the “language” of the Son, the creaturely expressions will be modulated by this mode of expression. The creature will therefore be an image of the first image.
Furthermore, it is necessary that the creaturely imitation of God be multiple, for creatures lack that highest perfection which is required to express in themselves the divine perfection in singularity of number. For creatures, the highest perfection they can hope to attain to is to express through a harmonious hierarchy the undifferentiated unity of the original image.[52] This is what motivates Bonaventure’s famous hierarchy of created being, which ascends from traces to images and thence to likenesses, in which he sees the Trinity imaged.[53]
This trinitarian image in humanity becomes the vehicle for the proper interpretation of everything else: the human spirit can only understand its fundamental image character as trinitarian when it has been elevated to a likeness by grace, and this elevation to likeness is required for the human spirit to be able to truly understand the meaning of the fact that even the least of created things are a trace.[54] The meaning of the trace-character of all created being is that all created being points to the archetype; or, to say the same thing differently, that the self-realization of creaturely being is to become an inner-worldly sign of the indwelling of the archetype.[55]
This referential character of created being, in which it points beyond itself to the archetype both by pointing outside of itself and by pointing within itself (in such a way that a denial of the beauty and dignity of creaturely being is not possible), is nothing other than the expression of the possibility and even necessity of an analogical move from created being to uncreated being. Along with Augustine, Bonaventure can speak of a “flight to the immortal and eternal;”[56] however, Augustine fails to motivate the one-sided necessity of creaturely reference to uncreated being:[57] for him, the necessity to turn creation into a path to the eternal is an ethical, not a metaphysical necessity. Like Anselm, Bonaventure can speak of a divine self-expression which is evident in and through the resemblances of created things and their archetype. However, while Anselm could only motivate the category of expression on the basis of the divine freedom such that it rests almost at the level of implication and remains a paradox (necessity founded in freedom), Bonaventure has motivated it on the basis of the trinitarian processions, binding the copies to the original with the necessity of the trinitarian first being.[58]
The union of the archetype and the notion of expression results in a characteristically Bonaventurean outlook on the God-world relationship. Bonaventure’s own idea for noting this unique understanding is the notion of exemplarity, with which he is able to signal the archetypal character of the relationship as well as its expressive dimension. This expressive dimension brings with it a notion of causality, which then becomes the basis for a re-thinking of the Aristotelian categories of causality in Bonaventure’s academic works.[59]
With the notion of exemplarity, we have arrived at the height of the theological reflections on the relation between the first principle and every dependent reality. It has been established through von Balthasar’s historical researches that God and the world have a profound relationship to one another in their being. It is clear that the relationship between God and world is not best described in terms of pure difference for von Balthasar, but rather by means of the notions of archetypality and participation. It remains to face this assertion of likeness directly, to question in what ways it is able to be understood and in what ways it must not be understood. This will be the task of the next chapter.
These historical researches leave no doubt that von Balthasar thinks that major theologians of the Christian tradition have rejected the Pure Difference Thesis, and that he approves of theologies that do. However, questions remain as to the exact reasons why von Balthasar feels this is so important. The arguments developed through the figures considered in The Glory of the Lord volume II are certainly reasonable, but hardly force us to necessarily concede their conclusion. At several key moments in the exposition it is clear that what is involved is not so much rational demonstration as aesthetic preference: that is, the consonance of the ideas in their place within a larger framework. While such aesthetic considerations are a necessary and even salutary part of theological reasoning, their presence is worth noting because they themselves indicate that we are in the presence of a preference which perhaps has more to do with what von Balthasar would call “theological style” than with what could be properly said to be a logical conclusion.
The concern is heightened by the fact that it would be just as easy to construct a different theological story that made the Pure Difference Thesis appear as central to the development of Christian doctrine. Indeed, not only could theologians of equal reputation be named, but in fact many of the same theologians could be named. Augustine’s flight to the immortal could be interpreted in a strongly apophatic direction, in which created things are the occasion for our contemplation of the uncreated not because of any resemblance, but because of their inherent deficiency; Denys above all could be and usually is interpreted in a much more apophatic way than von Balthasar here allows. Even Bonaventure is often read, in light of the closing passages of the Itinerarium, as a theologian of the negative tradition who believes all intellectual activity must cease when it arrives at its goal of union with God.[60]
The possibility of such an alternate reading of even the theologies von Balthasar makes central to his own historical argument brings to focus the importance of the prior commitments von Balthasar utilizes in interpreting these texts. I do not intend to claim that von Balthasar has, at the end of the day, misinterpreted these texts; but if he has interpreted them properly, he has done so against a counter tradition of interpretation, and has done so with the help of an understanding of the right path for a Christian notion of the Creator-creature relationship whose evidence must be deeper than these texts.
It is therefore worth considering what the desiderata are which are for von Balthasar touchstones of whether a theology correctly answers Q (our question about the relation of Creator and creation). In effect, there is here something von Balthasar wants to affirm, which as a consequence excludes the Pure Difference Thesis, and there is something he feels that any theology based on the Pure Difference Thesis would itself not be able to account for, and this serves as a second reason against such an understanding of the Creator-creature relation.
The first reason, the affirmation that rules out the Pure Difference Thesis, is von Balthasar’s claim that God must be manifest in any world that God creates. This is a bold idea, but one which von Balthasar is able to affirm with surprising seriousness. Consider the following text: “the manifestness of God’s being is immediately traced back to his primordial freedom to manifest himself (which is only a hypothetical necessity: assuming, that is, that God has in fact willed to create a world)” (TL I. 230). What, in this passage, is “hypothetically necessary,” and what would it mean for necessity to be hypothetical? It is the manifestness of the divine being that is necessary: given any world created by God, it is necessary that God be manifest in that world. What makes this necessity only hypothetical is precisely the presence of that word given. Because God does not have to create, God is not necessarily manifest; but on the hypothesis that God creates, it is necessary that God be manifest. Thus God is necessarily manifest, but the necessity is itself contingent upon a prior free decision to create; and this is what von Balthasar calls a “hypothetical necessity.”
Now, this does not prove that it is the case that for God to be manifest there must be imago. But if the requirement for God to be manifest were able to be satisfied apart from imago, then the Pure Difference Thesis could still be a live theological option. A separate argument is required, or else it must simply be assumed that the only proper form of the manifestness of God is through imaging.
Von Balthasar has obviously already approved of the Irenaean logic that asks us to consider what sort of original God could use in creating: Godself or something else. However, this will hardly do as an actual argument that the manifestation of God in any created world must be in the mode of imaging. For why should we concede that God must “use” an original or model to create at all? There is a certain force to Irenaeus’s claim (shared by Bonaventure) that to act without a model is to act without a plan, and this is to act inordinately and randomly, like a bad artisan. However, it wouldn’t take too much imagination to suppose that this seems so compelling to us because of the particular nature of our reasoning faculties, which are such that they must work in such and such a way. A Balthasarian might reply that it is because our reason is in the image of God that they work this way, and therefore God’s way of thinking would be somehow analogous. But this is not to prove imago theology; it is to assume it. And I think it is in fact true that the Irenaean argument must assume imago theology to get off the ground, and so it cannot be offered as proof of it.
There is a deeper and better argument, one that does rise to the level of an argument, which is also to be found in the discussion of Irenaeus we have cited. It is in fact the second reason against the Pure Difference Thesis, the need to be able to ground the possibility of Incarnation. We will discuss that argument in the next section. It is sufficient to say at this juncture that the current argument seems to require the second argument to complete it.
Before leaving this question of the relation of the manifestness of God and the necessity of imago, let us look at it one more time from a different angle. If God is manifest, God is manifest either in Godself or in another. If in another, it seems that von Balthasar will be able to have what he needs for imago. Therefore if the premise of the hypothetically necessary manifestation of God is not to automatically issue in the establishment of a concomitant necessity of imago, we would have to be able to give an account for how God could be manifest in the requisite way through Godself.
Fortunately that “in the requisite way” causes little problem, because the range of possibilities for what would count as sufficient manifestness has not been specified.[61] Nevertheless, the possibility of God being manifest in or through Godself is still a challenge. A vast variety of considerations could be brought in here that would send any possible discussion down numerous, divergent pathways. But all we need to do is to remember that we are considering this position insofar as it is a positive claim that rules out the Pure Difference Thesis. That means that any account of how God could be manifest in or through Godself that is not itself compatible with the Pure Difference Thesis can be eliminated from discussion out of hand: such accounts may produce challenges to which von Balthasar will need to respond when considering the Identity Thesis, but they do not help the attempt to motivate the Pure Difference Thesis, because in effect they already deny it.
Given this provision, it becomes very difficult to see what kind of answer could be given. For if the Pure Difference Thesis is correct, the very otherness of the divine being would shroud it in inaccessible light, or the depths of darkness, or a cloud of unknowing, or a supersubstantial more that would make it exceed not only our words but also our concepts. But how is that which exceeds our concepts to be clear in itself? The majority of the apophatic tradition encourages some sort of engagement with creaturely realities and concepts, in spite of the fact that they are woefully and decisively inadequate to the divine reality, because without them we could have no thoughts of God at all. My concept of God may be idolatrous, and certainly does not make God clear: but it at least makes clear that there is something that is not clear, and therefore it is useful. The claim is that God cannot be known adequately or clearly, and for this reason we can only begin to approximate knowledge of God by a (very careful) reflection focused by creaturely reality. If God were knowable in Godself, such theology would typically be happy to do away with creatures in reflecting on God.
Thus it seems that the history of the use of the Pure Difference Thesis in theology contains a claim, implicit or explicit (varying from case to case), that radical transcendence rules out the possibility of God being manifest in Godself. But if that is true, then the only way for God to be manifest that would not destroy the Pure Difference Thesis would be through some reality that was not God.
Perhaps a step still remains before von Balthasar wins imago. For while it is undoubted that an image represents that of which it is an image, and therefore counts as a form of manifestation, we may perhaps still question whether it would be possible for x to make y known without having to be the image of y. It seems that a positive answer could be given: for something can be made clear through that which resembles it, but also through that which in no way resembles it, that is, its opposite. It is at least logically possible that the clear vision of x may be such that it leads one to conclude that not-x is what must be desired, is what is in fact true.
This situation would cause von Balthasar little trouble. For y is not known as y in the affirmation of not-x. Thus, if this were how God were made known through the creature, we would not know “God,” but “the uncreated, the infinite,” and so on. This is, in fact, a favorite claim of proponents of the Pure Difference Thesis, namely that all we can know about God is the negation of created concepts. But all von Balthasar need do is deny that any such compilation of negations of creaturely concepts could count as an adequate concept of God to be able to deny that such a strategy could satisfy the requirement of the manifestation of God in any created world. He will in fact make just such an argument when detailing his disagreements with the classical understanding of the doctrine of God and progressing his own account of the Trinity.[62]
Thus, at worst, von Balthasar can fill out this concern with the one to follow. But even apart from that possibility, there seems to be a decent argument here for the denial of the Pure Difference Thesis: that is, assuming one grants von Balthasar his rather unusual starting point in the claim that God must be manifest in any possible created world.[63] While the latter is a big concession for many, our discussion underscores the depth of von Balthasar’s commitment to imago theology.
The second reason von Balthasar has for rejecting the Pure Difference Thesis is, as I have already mentioned, contained in the same passage of Irenaeus that was examined earlier. Irenaeus’s understanding of portare, as von Balthasar reads it, means that a likeness between Creator and creature is the necessary presupposition for Incarnation. Thus, if this likeness is denied as it is in the Pure Difference Thesis, then Incarnation becomes logically impossible, and Christology is destroyed.
This is, significantly, the exact criticism von Balthasar had of his mentor and friend, Erich Przywara, the great twentieth-century champion of the analogy of being. Nicholas Healy makes this point nicely: “It is here that Balthasar notes his reservation regarding Przywara’s doctrine of analogy. By emphasizing the ‘in tanta similitudine maior dissimilitudo’ to the ‘point of exaggeration,’ Przywara’s account of analogy undermines the possibility of a Christological union that is able to bridge the distance between man and God without abrogating the abiding distance. ‘It is no accident,’ suggests Balthasar, ‘that Przywara never produced a Christology,’ TD III.220-1 n.51.”[64] Steffen Lösel, who has much to say about analogy in relation to Protestantism, further underscores the point: “With this distinctive negative theology of revelation Balthasar distinguishes himself from those radical interpretations of the analogy of being that extend the maior dissimilitudo between God and the world beyond the created order to the hypostatic union. Balthasar is well aware of the pitfalls that Eberhard Jüngel identified in the theologia negativa. In an important footnote in the second volume of his Theologik he concedes to Jüngel that the tradition of negative theology creates severe problems for a theology of revelation based on the Christ event. He is even more candid a few pages earlier, when he criticizes his former teacher Erich Przywara. According to the latter’s Aristotelian interpretation of the formulation of the Fourth Lateran council, Balthasar claims, God and humankind relate to one another allo pros allo [different against different]. In Balthasar’s view, such an interpretation falsely applies the proviso of the ever-greater dissimilarity of Creator and creation toward the supernatural similarity between God and humankind in the hypostatic union. As Balthasar comments, ‘It seems difficult to comprehend, how it should be possible to come up with a Christology given such an understanding of analogy.’”[65]
This is von Balthasar’s abiding and continual critique against the Pure Difference Thesis, that it cannot provide an adequate grounding for the Incarnation. What he means is that it is incapable of explaining how Incarnation is logically possible. Thus, his worry is that a consistent adherence to the Pure Difference Thesis would require us to claim that Incarnation is a priori impossible. In response to this, it must be said that, as for Barth, the fact of the Incarnation is not a commitment von Balthasar is interested in revisiting: it is a given and not questionable. Therefore, if the Pure Difference Thesis says that Incarnation is impossible, then the fact of Incarnation disproves the Pure Difference Thesis.
The challenge we might pose to von Balthasar here is whether it is necessary to accept that a likeness is a necessary condition for Incarnation. Why could we not say that the divine omnipotence is able to take even the total otherness of the creature and make use of it as the vehicle of the divine expression, precisely because, as omnipotent, no barrier exists to its will? This would not require us to revisit the question whether Incarnation is logically possible, because von Balthasar has resources to answer the charge that God cannot do the logically impossible, both as a voluntarist of sorts and given his understanding of the relation of logic to divine freedom (two sides of the same coin).
Von Balthasar will respond with a theological intuition which is absolutely foundational to his thought. That intuition is expressed repeatedly in the words of Thomas Aquinas: “grace perfects rather than destroys nature.” This marks out a characteristic mode of divine action toward the creature that is a point not to be transgressed.
Now, if it were true that the divine omnipotence took that which was in no way like unto itself and made it the vehicle of its self-revelation, this would entail violence: the creature is being put to a use to which it is, by supposition, in no way suitable, in no way directed, and which is necessarily foreign to its nature. (The denial of any of these ways of describing the creature’s usability would also constitute the denial of the Pure Difference Thesis.) Such a violent use of the creature could in no way be seen as perfecting its nature, precisely because the concept of perfection requires that there be something present, minimally in a latent form, which is to be brought to completion or fulfillment. But the presence of any such thing is also the denial of the Pure Difference Thesis.
Thus, while it may be possible for divine omnipotence to act in this way, it would not be fitting, and is ruled out by supposition of the necessary mode of interaction between grace and nature.[66] So it seems that von Balthasar would say that to accept the Pure Difference Thesis he would have to deny the Thomistic understanding of the relation of nature and grace. Pure difference would be conceived dualistically, as an ongoing standing over against one another of God and all that is not-God. A Creator who was entirely and radically other than the creation in this way could only fling it into being, could only address it from the outside as a foreigner. The ongoing works of such a Creator would perhaps rightly be seen as meddling, and any advent would be interpreted as an invasion, as a violation of the fundamental and self-contained principles of the creation as such.
This is a scenario von Balthasar finds contradicted by every moment of the Christian revelation. Further, it is likely he would find it to be logically contradictory: for how could a universe be entirely for itself if it were not entirely from itself? If its origin lies in God, if only in a first moment in which it is “thrown,” it cannot have the necessary self-sufficiency to stand apart from God in pure difference.[67]
There is a concern that motivates Jean-Luc Marion and to which one might still think von Balthasar owes a response. That concern is that God’s sufficiency and transcendence are imperiled if the distance between God and the world are measurable.[68] If God and the world are alike (in the fact that they are beings, or in any other way), then does it not follow that the difference between them is one of degree and not kind? But transcendence requires a qualitative and not merely quantitative distance.
von Balthasar is disallowing the mechanism by which Marion and others are attempting to safeguard the qualitative difference between God and creatures, which is sometimes referred to as the “ontological gap.”[69] He has, however, another possible response to the type of concern that motivates Marion (and, before him, Heidegger), expressed in the following lines written about Barth: “this mention of the concept of God is crucial, because it highlights that God does not possess his absoluteness primarily in his relation with the world but first and actually in himself. This absoluteness and freedom, therefore, cannot be at all threatened by the existence of a world” (Barth 111). In other words, God possesses absoluteness in actuality (and not merely potency) before the creation of the world, and if God creates in freedom, then God’s absoluteness can in no way be thought to be imperiled by the addition of a world.
This is a difficult concept, but I think von Balthasar is thinking that what Marion is conceiving is a potential absoluteness in God. God could be the absolute, but the jury is out because all the data isn’t in yet. One piece of that data is the existence of other things. So God runs the risk in creating of giving up the chance to be the absolute, the self-sufficient, the all-in-all. At one level, this seems very commonsensical: if God does not create, then the set of all beings contains one member (or three-in-one): God. But once God creates, that set contains God and all the other created beings, so God is hardly the sole and all-encompassing definition of the set any longer. Marion’s solution is to remove God from the set, such that the set is empty before creation, and populated by only created things afterward.
Von Balthasar’s solution is different: he will point out that the analogy is flawed because it assumes that the set (Being) and God are something different to begin with. In that case, God would be the only being, but not absolute being. Solitariness is not absoluteness. If God is being, then creation does not entail shunting God aside to make room for fellow members of the class of being; rather, it means that God makes room within Godself for the existence of other beings.
This of course raises the question about the distinction between God and these other beings: we could become suspicious that they are not going to be really different at the end of the day, and that the system will collapse into some kind of pantheism. That is of course the question of the Identity Thesis, and it will be considered in detail in the next chapter.
Before leaving our analysis of the Pure Difference Thesis, there are three objections that are worth considering, derived from texts in the Balthasarian corpus. Each of these objections derive from a moment when it could seem that von Balthasar is not denying the Pure Difference Thesis, but in fact endorsing it. Each of these texts can be explained from within their own contexts as in fact not constitutive of such an endorsement. To explain them from their immediate context is important, because it shows that von Balthasar is to some extent aware that he must give an account of what he means with these cryptic sayings. It is perhaps too characteristic of von Balthasar that this awareness of our need for help isn’t exactly commensurate with the depth of our need.
In Cosmic Liturgy, von Balthasar is generally kinder to negative theology than he will be later in his life (in Theologic II). He even uses the phrase tout autre approvingly. Is this not an acceptance of the Pure Difference Thesis, or does it not at least imply that it is possible to make room for this thesis?
Everything hangs on what von Balthasar means by tout autre. If we read carefully, we see that he actually interprets it in a way that makes it more like analogy than is customary. For example: “The point of all this dialectic is first and foremost to make clear that no neutral, common ‘concept’ of being can span the realities of both God and creature; the analogy of an ever-greater dissimilarity stands in the way, preventing all conceptualization of the fact and the way they are” (CL 89). On the face of it, this is the denial of any common concept, which for von Balthasar is going to mean the denial of any commonality at all. What is this if not a clear statement of the Pure Difference Thesis? But note what follows: he interprets this not as totally other, but as “ever-greater dissimilarity.” The comparative of “ever-greater” prompts us to ask than what this dissimilarity is ever-greater, and the only answer can be a similarity which is in fact affirmed. Lest we think that we are importing the Lateran IV conception of analogy into what might merely be an infelicitous turn of phrase, von Balthasar in fact uses the word “analogy.” What is meant here is not a dissimilarity that does not also include some similarity. And with the assertion of similarity we have the denial of Pure Difference.
It is in fact only this analogical interpretation of negative theology that accounts for his seeming praise of Maximus’s removal of God from the realm of being here and his disdain of Marion’s similar project. Otherwise, we would have to leave these two judgments as irresolvable contradictories, perhaps the result of a development in his mature thought whereby he realized that he had been too easy on Maximus, or worse, flat out wrong about him. It is true that ultimately von Balthasar decides not to speak as Maximus does, and the Triptych has much less room for a positive appraisal of negative theology (the most von Balthasar can manage is to say that it is a necessary corrective).[70] Perhaps this is precisely because the idea, still only a nugget in Cosmic Liturgy, of what the greater difference between God and creation is explodes into something finally and ultimately inimitable in the later period. This is, to anticipate, the divine aseity.[71]
But surely the fact that von Balthasar ultimately eschews this way of speaking has at least as much to do with the fact that the radical negative nature of Maximus’s thought cannot ground Christology in the way von Balthasar needs. I suspect that he feels that Maximus can at best provide a structural account of the meaning of Incarnation (as the analogical transposition of the Chalcedonian themes of existence [hypostasis] and essence [ousia] into metaphysics), and is unable to ground the concrete Christocentrism of von Balthasar’s Theology of History.[72]
There is a lengthy discussion in Theologic volume 1 about the relations of subject to object and vice versa. Drawing upon phenomenology (and especially Heidegger), von Balthasar attempts to motivate a mutual interdependence of subject and object. Both need each other to be what they are, and both have responsibilities and opportunities relative to the other.[73]
Now if this discussion were to be applied to God as divine subject, with creation as the object, the consequences could be theologically disastrous. Most notably, it would seem to imply that God is in need of the world in order to be God, an idea that von Balthasar consistently condemns (often in the person of Hegel, with whom von Balthasar has such a complicated relationship).
This conclusion (and others like it) is blocked by the section in this volume on the object: God’s subjectivity stands to objects as causing their existence rather than caused by them.[74] This means that God’s subjectivity has a different relationship, not only to objects, but to the whole subject-object scheme as presented in this text. God’s subjectivity is the grounding condition of this scheme, and therefore it is no part of it.[75] Is this not a statement of the Pure Difference Thesis in the key of Marion?
Once again, everything hinges on what von Balthasar means by God’s subjectivity being “no part” of the subject-object scheme. Where this “no part” differs from projects like Marion’s is that such projects believe they must secure the “no part” by means of a tout autre; von Balthasar does not share this intuition. In fact, the language of tout autre, which we saw that he could use so comfortably when speaking of Maximus, has dropped out by Theologic, and is not appealed to here at all. Rather, God is not inherently part of the dynamic by virtue of the maior dissimilitudo of aseity.
The advantage of the Balthasarian position is that, unlike in Pure Difference systems, God is not forbidden to enter into certain kinds of relational dynamics with creatures. Should God wish it, God could in fact enter into these dynamics and expose Godself to their vicissitudes. von Balthasar’s claim will be that God in fact wills to do this because of love.
Although we have dealt with the use of tout autre in the Cosmic Liturgy, it remains the case that the use of this concept survives fairly late into the Balthasarian corpus. Most notably, it plays an important role in Love Alone Is Credible, where the “wholly other” shows up early and often. If it does not mean what it would mean in the Pure Difference Thesis, how are we to understand this?
The “wholly other” for von Balthasar in this text is not that which is ontologically totally different, but rather that which is surprising. This surprise is expressed by the important word unvordenkbar, that which cannot be anticipated or foreseen. The “wholly other,” which is the farthest distance of God in the dynamics of love (the subject of Love Alone), is not that which communes in no likeness with us but that which so far surpasses our expectations and imagination that we could never see it coming. In this way, it is best expressed by the same gloss von Balthasar gave on tout autre in the Cosmic Liturgy: ever-greater dissimilarity.
One could add here a discussion of Theologic II.68ff, where Jesus is paradoxically presented as possessing “a human nature that is complete in every respect, and yet he appears before his fellowmen as wholly other” (TL 68). After some discussion (and some reference to Maximus), von Balthasar concludes: “We see, then, that the total otherness of the man Jesus with respect to all other human beings (whom he calls brothers only on the day of Easter [Jn 20:17]) must be interpreted as a total otherness within a perfect equality of human nature [. . .] The most obvious point here is that the Jesus of the Gospels does not simply absorb the total otherness of God, whom he exposits in truth, into the difference between divinity and humanity within himself. Rather, this very difference has in truth passed entirely into the ‘language’ of his humanity. This difference does not at all make him into a human monster or a superman. He reveals that he is wholly other precisely in his abasement, his humility, his service of all” (TL II.70). The wholly other is not ultimately referenced here to the divine nature, but to the human nature: it begins as a way of describing not the ontological relation of divinity to humanity in Christ, but as the distinction between the one who in his person is the fullness of both natures, and so distinct from us. But in the end, it is the acts of love (abasement, humility, service) that are the locus of the wholly other, and in this way they also can be imitated.
This shows how deeply rooted von Balthasar is in the theology of image: the furthest he can imagine difference going is the radical freedom of divine sovereignty, which surprises us by doing that which we could never have anticipated: “In the Old Testament, this glory (kabod) is the presence of Yahweh’s radiant majesty in his Covenant (and through this Covenant it is communicated to the rest of the world); in the New Testament, this sublime glory presents itself as the love of God that descends ‘to the end’ of the night of death in Christ. This extremity (the true the true eschato-logy)—which could never have been anticipated from what we know of the world or man—can be welcomed and perceived in its truth only as the ‘Wholly-Other’ (LA 10-11).”